Stop Calling It the Trump Era

Opinion|Stop Calling It the Trump Era

It’s the automatic tagline of the age, the default shorthand for our moment in history, so much so that keyboards and phones should just auto-populate the phrase for us.

“In the Trump Era, the Economic Elite Find Themselves in the Wilderness,” Axios reports. “Democratic Party Struggles to Stay Relevant in the Trump Era,” MSNBC laments. “In the Trump Era, Flying Green Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” The Wall Street Journal points out. “How the Trump Era Changed Trump,” The Times explains.

These headlines all appeared this year, but they capture the past decade just as well. “The Trump era” has become the prism through which everything we do or think or say is done or thought or said. I’ve contributed to the genre, too, including with a book titled “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of” — well, you can guess what goes at the end there.

No doubt, President Trump is the dominant political and cultural figure of this time. We expend enormous mental energy interpreting his impulses, pondering his policy preferences and charting his attention span; we psychoanalyze his mind, parse his musings, zoom in on his bruises. It’s simple, if stressful, to view so many of our national controversies as the work or fault of a singular personality.

It’s also how Trump likes it. The man who has stamped his name on towers, planes, wine, steaks, cologne and board games must naturally see it on the era as well; if public servants are “my generals” or “my judges,” why shouldn’t history itself be rendered in the possessive, too? This is his era, and we’re just living in it.

Like most ubiquitous notions, however, “the Trump era” risks becoming useless with overuse. The more time passes, the more this era must be understood by how it has changed the country, and those of us in it, and not simply whom we blame or thank for it. The compulsion to zero in on Trump alone keeps us from understanding the era fully, and from glimpsing what it might become.