President Trump was sworn into his non-consecutive second term on 20 January 2025. Rewind the timeline to 2016, and you see all serious, mainstream political pundits giggling about the possibility of him ever becoming President—a first, let alone a second Trump term is really not something that was supposed to happen.

In fact, a lot of things that were never supposed to happen have happened thanks to President Trump.

In my opinion, Donald Trump would not have even made it through the Republican primaries had he decided to run in 2012. That is not an indictment of his abilities—in fact, I think he was very apt in assessing his chances when he chose to start his campaign in 2015 and not four years earlier. His unorthodox, brutish way of communicating would not have gone over well with the more traditionally, socially conservative voting base then, with people like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and the eventual winner Mitt Romney garnering most of the votes.

So, what changed in the four-year period between 2012 and 2016? The woke ideology started to eat its way into the mainstream.

Interestingly, even public voices on the liberal side who are willing to call out the woke insanity, such as Sam Harris or Bill Maher, are not quite willing to admit how interconnected that phenomenon and the rise of Trump are.

There was a time when the University of California published a list of microaggressions, which included such phrases as ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘You speak so well.’ There was a time when the British mainstream news channel Sky News ran a segment on how air conditioning in office buildings is sexist. And there was a time when Rolling Stone Magazine ran an article on a mass rape on the campus of the University of Virginia, with the insinuation that it is indicative of a ‘rape culture’ in American colleges, which turned out to be a total fabrication.

In those times, content posted to social media in favour of the woke movement was on par in popularity with content promoting creationism.

It is unclear how aware Donald Trump was of what later became dubbed ‘a culture war’ brewing beneath the surface. However, in 2015, when he was the only candidate willing to disregard the absurd new language norms on the campaign trail, he garnered attention and support that he never could have in 2012.

Another major part of his success was his willingness to speak up against illegal immigration. After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, Republican leadership concluded in their analysis that courting Latino voters would be one of the keys to future electoral success. In accordance, they were trying to shy away from the subject of illegal immigration in order to avoid alienating Latinos. President Trump, however, based on little more than his instincts, wagered that a sufficient portion of Latino voters would also support stricter immigration enforcement. The result: not only did he win the crucial swing state of Florida, which has a high Latino population, in 2016, but by 2024 the state ended up voting for him by over 10 points.

The Exposure of ‘Intellectual Idiots’ and the Media Lying in Unison

President Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 also left pollsters and political pundits blushing. In fact, he was consistently under-polled in all three presidential elections he competed in. In 2020 Joe Biden was supposed to win a 2008 Obama-like landslide, yet it took five days to call the election; and in 2024 it was supposed to be a razor-thin election between him and Vice President Kamala Harris, yet he swept all seven swing states and won the popular vote by a decent margin as well, 1.48 points.

The highly educated people who run these polls—at times from inside major American universities—just could not figure out how to accurately gauge President Trump’s national support in eight years. You should keep that in mind when you are reading his approval numbers in his second term.

Pollsters were not the only part of the intelligentsia that were exposed by the Trump phenomenon.

It is quite scary how much the woke ideology infiltrated American academia. Ideas that do not stand up to the slightest scrutiny became dogmas in colleges across the nation. Cassie Jaye’s 2016 documentary The Red Pill is in large part about showcasing feminist professors’ inability to justify their claims and their opposition to the men’s rights movement at the time.

Suddenly, the public realized that people who have long careers in the highest levels of American academia may very well be not that well-versed in their respective subjects—they may just be loyal ideologues.

In January 2024 the President of perhaps the most prestigious university in the US, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned after a plagiarism scandal. Her plagiarism was brought to light by conservative activist Chris Rufo. Professor of history Allan Lichtman spent decades perfecting his ’13 keys’ model that predicted the winners of US presidential elections. Also, in 2024 he first vocally supported President Joe Biden staying on the Democratic ticket, vehemently arguing that his model predicted that he would easily win re-election. After Biden was replaced anyway, he picked Kamala Harris to win with by far enough true ‘keys’ to give her the victory according to his model. We all know how that went for the great professor.

American higher education is facing more systematic problems as well. The student debt crisis, which we often heard about during the Biden administration, would not be an issue if American colleges actually trained their students on how to obtain high-paying enough jobs to pay back the debt.

‘The student debt crisis would not be an issue if American colleges actually trained their students on how to obtain high-paying enough jobs to pay back the debt’

In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, trust in the mainstream media dropped to around 30 per cent, according to multiple polls. Again, the American people got to witness things that, by reasonable standards, should have never happened.

If all major media outlets agree that a candidate has no chance of winning, then that candidate really should never actually win. Yet this is exactly what happened to President Trump in 2016—the condescending tone in which many in the media covered him really lost its edge after such a series of events. When all major outlets come together to dispute The New York Post’s reporting and label the Hunter Biden laptop story as ‘Russian misinformation’, then it is understandably really damaging to the media if it turns out that the Post was actually right.

Just like how the Trump phenomenon is very damaging to the legacy media and academia in the United States, which were once thought to be the primary drivers of culture and public opinion in the country.

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