Pop culture that defined the Trump years: from Jordan Peele’s films to teenage social media stars to Kanye West for US president

Peele’s films Get Out and Us brought a novel approach to racial issues in the Trump era, while The Conners is the best kind of populist TV series

The Renegade dance became a cultural phenomenon as Kanye proved how interchangeable US politics and pop culture truly are

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Rapper Kanye West makes his first US presidential campaign appearance in North Charleston, South Carolina, the US, in July last year. His quixotic 2020 presidential campaign made him one of the pop culture figures that defined the Trump years. Photo: AP

Published: 10:15pm, 7 Jan 2021Updated: 1:32am, 8 Jan 2021

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Derek Robertson on politico.com on January 2, 2021.

Certain cultural figures loom so large that they eventually serve as shorthand for the spirit of their times. There’s Michael Jackson, the personification of the smiley-face maximalism of Reagan’s 1980s; Lucille Ball and the aspirational domesticity of the Eisenhower era; even Homer Simpson, a postmodern joke of a patriarch befitting the irony-soaked Clinton 1990s.

As America’s Trump years come to an end, there is only one pop culture figure who fits that era-defining mould: Donald Trump himself.

But unlike those figures, Trump does not represent any single, unifying truth about our character; rather, he is a symbol of how fragmented it has become. That is partially thanks to his waging a relentless, cable news-fuelled culture war, but it’s also the result of long-developing trends in media.

For decades, cultural Jeremiahs have prophesied the death of the monoculture – a shared, unifying cultural experience that spans race, class and regional difference. With the decline of broadcasting, social platforms cannibalising traditional news, and YouTube and personalised streaming services serving up an endless buffet of new content “based on your viewing history”, the long, slow death of that phenomenon accelerated wildly just as Trump rose to power.

The film Get Out’s viral trailer debuted amid the racial inflammation of the 2016 presidential campaign. It took a novel approach to racial issues and horror films. Photo: Universal Pictures

There is no single story that the books, films and pop cultural miscellany of the Trump presidency can tell us about its character. So, instead of trying to impose a narrative on the cultural chaos of the past five years, we’ve decided to let it speak for itself.