Late Tuesday night I was in my 12th hour of staring at social media and digesting Election Day news when I realized that in the midst of one of the most shocking election results of my lifetime (second only to the most shocking result), I’d forgotten about an anniversary: it’s been four years since Elon Musk bought Twitter.
I will come back to the election, but for anyone else who forgot to reminisce, it was October 26, 2022, when Musk ushered in a new era of media with this tweet and groan-inducing joke. Back then, he promised to clean up the bots (whoops), there was talk of an “everything app” (that one failed to launch), blue checks were removed and then sold (very controversial at the time), and Musk proceeded to lay off thousands of staffers, betting that the core product would not suffer (a bet that has mostly worked). This entire ridiculous sequence (and I’m leaving out a bunch of chapters) was in fact one of the most important shifts in American culture this century, but of course the most ridiculous detail of all was that Musk spent months before the sale trying to back out of the deal and undo the transaction altogether. The company sued to enforce the transaction, and now here we are.
Twitter had always been both less successful than any of its tech company peers and arguably more influential than any of them. It was where everyone in the media congregated, and over time it acquired something like an agenda-setting function for cultural gatekeepers in not only the media, but also the entertainment world and national politics. Liberals enjoyed unchallenged cultural hegemony from about 1992 to 2024, and for the final ten years of that run, Twitter is where the cultural rules were invented, debated, and enforced. Centrist thinkers were often ostracized (or met with professional consequences, or both) and the echo chamber became a little more radical and unforgiving with each passing year. All of this is obvious to anyone who lived through that period, but it’s important context for what came next.
First, the Musk purchase in 2022. Almost as soon as he took over, the platform that had suppressed conservative viewpoints and banned the New York Post began amplifying those same voices and outlets to infuse the platform with more viewpoint diversity. Liberals and leftists were not suppressed under the new regime, but they encountered far more challenges than ever before, while conservatives seeking confirmation of their own worldviews could suddenly find it with ease. Woke 1 was crazy, and indeed, it died in this new environment. What emerged instead was an ecosystem that tilled the soil for Donald Trump to resurrect his political career after leaving office in disgrace in 2021. I don’t know if that recovery would’ve been possible without Twitter (X, by then) steadily amplifying Trump-friendly content on one hand, and inconvenient clips from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the other.
It all culminated with the 2024 election, where Republicans won the Senate, House, and presidency, and gained share among almost every demographic imaginable. In retrospect that election was maybe a little bit about Trump and his agenda’s appeal, but primarily an expression of exhaustion and disgust with what the Democratic Party had become. They lied about Biden’s infirmities, nominated Kamala in brazenly undemocratic fashion, allowed immigration and inflation to spiral out of control while denying either one was a problem, and they’d spent the previous four years institutionalizing a variety of cultural norms that had been incubated online and were alienating to millions of people who don’t spend all day on Twitter.
Which brings me back to Tuesday night: America rejected Democrats en masse in 2024, and lo and behold, that’s precisely what happened to the Republicans this week. And didn’t the Trump White House deserve it every bit as much as Biden and Harris did?
Mind you, two of the issues that cost Republicans their support from 2024 are areas where I’m broadly sympathetic to President Trump’s instincts. Tariffs may not spur re-industrialization, but their inflationary impact is overstated, they have real value as a geopolitical tool, and they are particularly important to pressuring and countering China. Meanwhile the war in Iran hasn’t been executed to anyone’s satisfaction (and its inflationary impact is not overstated), so at this point no one will ever call it a success. That noted, I remain open to the possibility that five years from now we’ll look back on this effort and find that it wasn’t quite the senseless strategic disaster it appeared to be. We’ll see.
Strategic logic aside, though, what’s relevant to the discussion at hand is that the Trump administration has offered very few credible, coherent explanations for either of its most controversial policies. That’s what reminds me of the Biden and Harris administration lost in the sauce a few years ago. I think feeling the pressure of an adversarial media environment is probably healthy for political movements; the alternative is Biden and Trump regimes that felt no urgency to explain themselves to critics or even engage with the consequences of their policies.
Indeed, Trump’s cabinet members and staffers are all addicted to X, and in the midst of inscrutable blackpill memes and pwning Elizabeth Warren and florid lectures to the world about Western Civilization, they were evidently oblivious to how normal people were interpreting the President’s policies and behavior. As for Trump himself, after spending his entire first term obsessed with whatever the New York Times was writing about him on any given day, he’s governed in his second term seemingly indifferent to any constraints, anywhere. On tariffs and the war specifically: instead of making a real, mature effort at winning over skeptics in his own party or shoring up institutional support, Trump chose to ignore Congress altogether, randomly declaring victory in Iran every three weeks, while repeatedly promising tariff checks that have never materialized.
And to be clear, tariffs and Iran were just the tip of the iceberg. Almost every single day for the past two years I have been mortified as an American by something the White House has said or done and then inevitably posted on social media. For example, Trump closed the border (which most of America supported), but then the administration set about making a spectacle of deporting immigrants in cruel, sociopathic (and possibly illegal) fashion, constantly broadcasting that behavior from official White House accounts on X. Want to know why Texas turned blue as Hispanic turnout surged across the state? Start there.
Elsewhere in the U.S., a sample of 80,000 voters this week found that government corruption was a crucial factor for 90% of them. Apparently Americans noticed that Donald Trump Jr. appears to be on the board of 75 different companies (a strategic adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi, good for him), while Trump Sr. goes around D.C. renaming buildings, agitating for a 250-foot triumphal arch, and bragging about his ballroom. There have also been crypto scandals, a very sketchy TikTok deal, DOGE sadism, Canada pissing matches, an MMA fighter making jokes about Michelle Obama on the White House lawn, reflecting pool conspiracy theories, and a few weeks ago, a call to rename New Mexico. That’s an incomplete list, but you get the point.
Just as Kamala’s closing message in 2024 was all about fascism and the end of democracy, by the time the election arrived this fall, Republicans didn’t even bother defending the administration’s record on the merits and seemed to spend about six weeks straight warning voters about communism and trans kids playing girls’ sports—content that, in their defense, plays well with the online base!
Normal Americans, it turns out, are happy to call bullshit on either side. That’s good, and I imagine we’ll have to lean on that skill again in the near future. It’s not yet clear to me that Democrats have learned their lesson from the beginning of the decade, just as it’s unclear that Republicans will learn from this week’s results. Both parties have fierce factional fights ahead as they seek to define themselves for the next generation. For now, all that’s certain is the perfect symmetry of election night shock ten years ago with the shock of 2026, and a naive hope that we might potentially bring an end to what one writer called “the long 2016.”
There are of course race-specific issues and decisions that drove American politics toward the blue tsunami, but I think the broader story here was remarkably familiar: a whole bunch of people who spend a lot of time talking to each other online forgot that they also have to talk to normal people to win elections. Trump seemed indifferent and delusional, and no one in his orbit could pierce that bubble until finally the voters themselves delivered the message.
In 2024, when it seemed the pendulum had swung a bit and Republicans actually had a decent amount of rhetorical and cultural power, there was a brief period when it was genuinely interesting to wonder how they might use it. Two years later, the answer turned out to be: exactly like the Democrats did.
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