Politics Mother Jones
The Post-Election Vibe Shift Is Real
If you’ve forgotten what the world felt like after the 2024 election, I don’t blame you. That was like a decade ago, and a lot has happened since. But here’s what I remember most clearly: a succession
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If you’ve forgotten what the world felt like after the 2024 election, I don’t blame you. That was like a decade ago, and a lot has happened since. But here’s what I remember most clearly: a succession of billionaires, corporations, celebrities, and institutions slowly (or quite rapidly) bending the knee. Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan we needed to celebrate “masculine energy.” The NFL took the words “End Racism” out of the end zone. Corporations backed away from their commitments to diversity with the urgency and alacrity with which you always wished teens in a horror movie would back away from the door. The story was that the Great American Middle had spoken, we were in the midst of a historic realignment, and we all had to figure out what a Nelk Boy was or get left behind. A Republican finally won the popular vote—must be a vibe shift!
The vibe shift was never a particularly fact-based proposition, and the eagerness of all of these institutions and elites to fall in line with an aspirationally fascist government really said a lot more about those people than it did about the country as a whole. But in the days since the Trump administration’s historic midterm repudiation, change is afoot. Some of these changes were in the works well before, some of them may be unrelated, but taken together, I think it’s fair to say something’s up. It’s time for Zuck to sit down with Heather Cox Richardson and welcome his Woke 2 overlords.
LIV Golf, the Trump-backed Saudi venture that advertised itself as “golf, but louder,” officially folded. Russell Brand, who was recently featured at a “Make America Healthy Again” conference alongside JD Vance, was convicted of rape and sentenced to more than 10 years in prison. Elon Musk announced that the Cybertruck was being discontinued. Susie Wiles, Harmeet Dhillon, and a significant percentage of the Department of Justice almost immediately left. Alina Habba Mildon was fired by the company that was set to pay her $50 million. Laura Loomer and Vivek Ramaswamy both logged off. Kalshi, which joined forces with Donald Trump Jr. just before the inauguration last year, parted ways with Donald Trump Jr. one week after the midterms. Ken Paxton finally got divorced and then dropped his years-long harassment campaigns against immigrant aid organizations in El Paso and Houston. Calley Means accused the administration he just left of trading health policy concessions for campaign donations. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who has spent the last however many months sounding like someone who builds a machine to kill Spider-Man, told Politico he’s “been a Democrat my whole life” and that he’s “been saying in private” that the administration’s immigration agenda has gone “too far.” OpenAI announced a new slate of data center-policies designed to placate policymakers and the public. The NYPD’s notorious Strategic Response Group—ostensibly an anti-terror squad that has been used for crowd control and sweeps of homeless encampments—is finally getting disbanded. Former NFL coach and Trump surrogate Rex Ryan getting arrested for allegedly running over someone’s foot in Nashville? You may not call it a vibe shift, but I’m banging the gavel.
Even the Trump administration is trying to distance itself from the Trump administration—witness JD Vance running away from the war he helped start, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent throwing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick under the bus.
Maybe the ur-vibe-shift story right now is Jensen Huang, who was forced to resign from Nvidia last week after three alleged affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy who was also a business partner and two with employees at his company. Nvidia was one of Trump’s second-term darlings and he and Huang appeared to become fast friends. The US government took a cut of Nvidia’s chip sales in China, and Huang gave the president $25 million to build a stately pleasure dome. When Trump was briefed on Huang’s connection to a possible spy, he took no action and later urged Huang to stay on as CEO amid the scandal. And in October, that might have been enough. But Nvidia, and the rest of Big Tech, can no longer afford to just keep Donald Trump happy.
And that, really, captures the essence of the post-election vibe shift. Unlike the last one, it’s rooted in a basic recognition of how American democracy works and what checks and balances really mean. Companies like Nvidia acted in 2025 as if they’d reached the conservative End of History. Now they have to come to terms with the fact that they haven’t. They are about to be dealing with a Democratic Congress that has warned everyone in close contact with the president to be ready to explain themselves next year—and maybe, just maybe, that leather jacket wouldn’t look so good in a hearing room right now.