Will Trump Trigger a Second Great Awokening?

What will happen to American culture if Donald Trump wins in the fall? There has been plenty of reporting on the kind of policy Trump might implement in a second term, but scant attention paid to how he might alter, again, the cultural landscape—what will Trump 2.0 mean for the arts, academia, and the tenor of politics that is inevitably downstream from all of that? Traditional news outlets don’t speculate because there are so few data points to grasp at and there’s still an unwillingness to fully account for the cultural hothouse of the 2010s. There was a time, four years ago this month, when employees at the New York Times revolted over the publication of an opinion piece by a sitting U.S. senator and a top editor there—once thought to be in the running to lead the entire newspaper—was forced to resign. There was a time when writing one anti-Trump opinion piece in Teen Vogue could make you into a major internet celebrity. There was a time when a Supreme Court nominee’s high school yearbook was the subject of great national interest. There was the profound oddity of the Nicolas Sandmann affair, the sordid oddity of Milo Yiannopoulos, and the dizzying oddity of Game Theory Twitter. There were female-only screenings of Wonder Woman. And there were people—many thousands of them—buying votive candles in the likeness of a Republican former FBI director.