One thing I am curious to see but have not yet found are good models or studies which draw connections between declining COVID case counts and the progress of vaccination. For what I assume are obvious reasons I follow the data in New York State most closely. New York’s numbers were coming down quickly early in 2021 but then plateaued and even ticked up somewhat. This was seemingly an interaction between rising vaccination rates, aggressive reopening and the spread of more contagious variants. Over recent weeks those numbers have resumed their rapid decline.
From TPM Reader HL …
JoinI feel I’ve weathered the transition fairly well. After many years of watching evening MSNBC, I essentially stopped watching the night after Ruth Bader Ginzburg died, and shifted all my newsgathering to the written form from Twitter to actual newspapers. I felt less harried and no less informed, and paved the way for a presidency I don’t have to worry about.
From TPM Reader IG …
JoinThis moment has me thinking about the feeling that we’ve been robbed of time. People like to talk about the odd way in which 2020 feels as if it was both endless and just didn’t happen at all. I’ve only recently stopped saying “last summer” when I really mean the summer of 2019. But, the truth is, the whole of the last five years of Trumpism feel this way. If this really is the end of the Trump era then it is still like we just gave away half a decade of our lives to this all-consuming negativity.
From TPM Reader PJ …
JoinI’m with a lot of your readers. While I think the day to day is less punctuated by evental feelings of panic and worry, things are bad and not sure to get worse. We have a very undemocratic political system. The more democratic elements of our system carry most of their potential in how a judiciary might find them to be very expansive, but that judiciary is owned by the right. I think in 2009 the GOP triggered the Doomsday Machine. The rabid anti-Obama partisanship, the debt ceiling debacles in the years that followed, right-wing enthusiasm for racist police killings, GamerGate, Trump’s rise, the final removal of the mask of respectability of the Republican Party…the white masculine death machine is on the march. Just consider the judiciary….even if we got the Fantasyland Biden of our dreams, how much of what he does will hold up to right-wing judicial review? We’re talking about a court system that might take us back to a pre-Lochner territory, eliminate the governmental ability to delegate regulatory authority to executive agencies…this is return to Medieval stuff.
In this on-going series of posts on ‘Making Sense of the Post-Trump Era’ I should be clear that I don’t mean this to prejudge the question. I mean ‘post-Trump’ only in the very narrow sense of the period after Trump left the White House. I think it’s very much an open question – one implicit or explicit in almost all your emails – whether we’re really “post” at all.
For my part, I increasingly think that we are ‘post-Trump’ in terms of the man himself. I think defeat just gutted him. The GOP remains in his thrall but much more as a placeholder or symbol than as someone actively engaged in national politics. But it’s not really about the man himself, at least not mainly. It’s about the civic degeneracy that created him and which galvanized, brought into light of day and made aware of itself.
As Republicans — led by former President Trump — peddled lies about a stolen election and rampant voter fraud post-November, Georgia still had two runoff elections to conduct. And there was much speculation at the time about whether the Big Lie might actually harm Republican chances in the state.
Join
From TPM Reader MG …
JoinYou asked, “What Sense Are You Making of the Post-Trump Era?”
Well, there is simply a mixture of relief and apprehension.
The relief is for the obvious things: The relatively smooth deployments of the Covid vaccines, a steady hand at the helm of state, government doing what the federal government should do, no more intentional twitter eruptions and all of that. Considering where we were on January 20th, it is immensely comforting to be where we are right now.
From TPM Reader JE, a rather different take on the question, less political outlook than deeply personal, inter-personal experience …
JoinSo, by far the biggest outcome for me from the “Post Trump Era” (and to some extent I need to move the date back to November 2016 to describe this fully) is the realization that a lot of middle class white Americans (I’m in that group) are still racist as hell. Prior to that the racism was couched in careful language, was eased out with a nod and a wink that indicated that maybe someone still wasn’t on board with the modern state of the world.
From TPM Reader KG …
JoinI’ve enjoyed reading the replies to your question, but I have a somewhat different take. As a 79-year old white female I’ve seen remarkable changes in the country. Change being the operative word. My first brush with politics came on a train carrying Harry Truman, who I watched speak while sitting on my father’s shoulders. I’ve been a political junky ever since.
One of the many things I do at TPM is occasionally write emails to inspire people to become TPM members, re-up if they’ve lapsed or just thank them for being members already. I wrote one of these this morning and I thought I’d share it. I do so in part because it would be great if you could join up if you’re not currently a member but even more because writing one of these out gives me an opportunity to — forces me to — place TPM in the current moment and say why I think it matters.
Take a look.