the new main characters

covering the New Trumpians

We’re less than two weeks into the second Trump administration, and the running theme in media at the moment is shaping up to be: Okay, So Who Are These People Now, Really?

By “these people,” we mean the “culturally ascendant” cohort of mostly young, very online New Trumpists who are distinguished by their ability to command attention (as Brock Colyar reminded us in this week’s New York mag cover story, “Attention is power.”) From a journalism perspective, you can see how media outlets are running a familiar playbook from the last decade spent explaining Gen Z-ers / explaining the influencer economy / explaining the Trump voter (way back when), only now the power of these three branches in culture have combined into a remarkably potent demographic to be gawked. Is it demystification or mainstreaming? Consider Bloomberg, for example, which did this huge infographic-heavy explainer on the nine biggest YouTubers who likely influenced the election. Or consider how much of Brock’s party deep dive focused on how inconsistent these New Trumpian belief systems were (and how obsessed with being “normal” they are).

So I guess the question that remains is..