Donald Trump’s second term as president has taken the concept of “rugged individualism” to its logical endpoint: Trump has consolidated the executive power of the United States in order to primarily meet the needs and desires of Donald John Trump.
This is a departure from his first term in form, if not substance. Then, he was hemmed in by the other branches of government and by an apparent insecurity in crossing even informal boundaries that he didn’t always understand. After losing in 2020 and facing both admonishment and investigation from the political establishment, though, he returned to Washington committed to doing what he wanted and with an understanding that he could. Many in his base have embraced this self-serving approach to “making America great.”
We can lay a lot of blame for this change on the internet.
Donald Trump’s expansion of executive power in his second term has met with less resistance than might be expected because of a shift that has unfolded over the past 20 years. For most of history, people existed within a shared reality. For generations in American society, ignorance was seen as a drawback and conspiracy theories were relegated to the fringes. In recent decades, however, those who rejected or were inconvenienced by that shared reality have banded together, building a new shared understanding of the world. In that alternate universe, ignorance and rejection of reality serve as validators, indicators of trust. Those within that circle of trust are granted wide latitude to do what they want.
We can lay a lot of blame for this change on the internet. The interconnection of the world’s knowledge was expected to democratize education. Instead, and particularly with the advent of social media, it has democratized cherry-picking. The internet universalized subjectivity instead of objectivity.
This is broadly the issue: We have reverted from acting on what we know to acting on what we think.
In the wake of the creation of right-wing informational bubbles where reality was subject to debate, the first widely noticed eruption of this alternate universe was the Tea Party movement that sprang up during Barack Obama’s first term in office. The movement included no shortage of catalysts, but foremost among them was the idea that elites and the establishment were working against the interests of average Americans. This was driven more by the economic crisis that began in 2007 than by the internet, but it created a center of anti-elite energy and a rejection of authority that both the internet and Trump would stoke and reinforce.
By now, that anti-elite, anti-expert sentiment is dominant.
By now, that anti-elite, anti-expert sentiment is dominant. The Covid-19 pandemic aided that growth, creating enormous fissures and uncertainties in American society that were (and still are) easy to use to demagogue doctors and those in power. But so did the flood of claims and representations that are never more than one thumb-swipe away.
For example: Who needs college when we can learn about the world on Instagram or X? In 2013, Gallup found that 70% of Americans thought that having a college education was “very important.” By September 2025, that share had dropped by half, to only 35%, with even college graduates generally downplaying the utility of a degree.
The sharpest divide, though, was partisan. In 2013, independents were the political group least likely to say that there was great importance in being college educated. This year, they were about twice as likely to say so as were Republicans, only 1 in 5 of whom indicated that having a college education was very important.
“We’re the smart ones, remember. I say it all the time,” Donald Trump told his supporters in 2018 (including those he once embraced as the “poorly educated”). “You hear ‘the elite.’ They’re not elite, we’re elite. You are the elite.”
There’s a useful proxy for trust and confidence in objective information: holding a college degree. It is certainly not the case that no one with a degree is immune to constructing a subjective worldview or that those without a degree reject authority or expertise. However, the correlation between shifting politics by education level and increased hostility to expertise is obvious.
It was about 20 years ago when, according to the biannual General Social Survey, Americans with a college degree began increasingly identifying as liberals, diverging from the heavier conservative identity of Americans without degrees.
Both groups shifted to become more conservative in the wake of the pandemic. Recent academic analysis showed that both conservatives and moderates grew more distrustful of science after 2020. The initial divergence, though, was primarily driven by a strong shift to the ideological left by young people with a college degree. (Young Americans are more likely to have a college degree than are older Americans, given the increase in college attendance and the perceived importance of having a degree.) In recent years (again according to the General Social Survey), older Americans with a college degree were for the first time more liberal than younger Americans without one. This divergence is also measured in partisan identity. Beginning around the time of Obama’s election, those without college degrees began shifting toward the GOP as those with degrees continued to shift toward the Democrats. Recent Bloomberg analysis found that, while Democrats represented 50% of congressional districts with more college-educated Whites than the national average in 2005, they now represent 75% of them. One way of narrating the shift in American politics, then, is this: Cultural changes, including the internet, and the failures of the establishment allowed those excluded from heavily technocratic power structures to more rapidly dismiss expertise in favor of their own subjective view of the world. A lack of understanding was no longer a barrier to asserting an opinion; it was, instead, presented as outside-of-the-box thinking. And that individualized thinking was easy to validate either through selective information gathering or collective agreement. This brought Donald Trump to power in 2017 and again in 2025. And Trump, mostly for self-serving reasons, has leaned into the idea. If you reject authority and the establishment — if you reject reality itself — you are loyal and trustworthy. Trump has been burned by this, as on the Jeffrey Epstein files. But the creation and expansion of a universe of Americans who see expertise as a negative rather than a positive has been an enormous boon for Trump and for his politics. It has not been good for America.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor. 
