Trump's changes and the mother of all vibe shifts
The test of a leader's policy changes is whether they endure
On July 26, 1945, Royal Navy Captain Richard Kim went to see Winston Churchill with some bad news: the first returns in the general election showed the Labour Party winning 10 seats from the Conservatives.
“The Prime Minister was in his bath and certainly appeared surprised, if not shocked,” recalled Kim, an aide to Churchill. “He asked me to get him a towel and in a few minutes, clad in his blue siren suit and with a cigar he was in his chair in the Map Room—where he remained all day.”
Churchill soon learned that the Labour Party was triumphing in the election, putting an end to his prime ministership just two months after he led the nation to victory in the war against Nazi Germany.
Churchill’s wife Clementine tried to make the best of it: “It may well be a blessing in disguise,” she said, according to his biographer Martin Gilbert.
He replied, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.”
After the flurry of sweeping changes promulgated in the first week of President Donald Trump’s second term, people are remarking on the national vibe shift triggered by the election and the move from progressive to conservative policies. How deep will the changes go? And how lasting will they be?
Some lessons might be learned from Britain’s experience after Churchill’s stunning ouster — even though that shift was away from conservatism rather than toward it.
Champagne and water
The new prime minister would be Clement Attlee, who had served in Churchill’s coalition government during the war. In personality, the reserved Attlee was Churchill’s opposite.
Martin Gilbert quotes Marian Holmes, a secretary at No. 10 Downing Street, who wrote in her diary, “Working for the new PM is very different…No conversation or pleasantries, wit or capricious behavior. Just staccato orders. Perfectly polite, and I’m sure he is a good Christian gentleman. But the difference is between champagne and water.”
In policy, Attlee and the Labour Party carried out a nonviolent revolution: they nationalized a fifth of the British economy, including railways, coal mines and utilities. The new government provided free medical care to everyone by creating the National Health Service, along with other “welfare state” benefits, even though the war had left Britain’s finances in dire shape.
When Churchill’s party took back the government in 1951, virtually all of Attlee’s reforms survived, with the exception of reversing the nationalization of the iron and steel and trucking industries. Even though conservatives retained their grip on power until 1964, the UK’s welfare state endured — and continues to this day.
FDR
The same could be said of the massive vibe shift in the US in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt greatly increased the role of the federal government in providing social welfare benefits to cushion the effects of the Depression on people. Social Security, which is now the largest item in the federal budget and consumes 22.6% of spending, is only the leading example of FDR’s surviving reforms.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson was able to add Medicare and Medicaid to the list of benefits Americans expect. In 2009, President Barack Obama extended health care insurance to millions with the Affordable Care Act.
Will Trump’s changes be equally enduring? It’s so early in his term that definitive judgments are impossible to make, but the first Trump term didn’t leave a lasting imprint.
This time could be different, since Trump is armed with a victory in the popular as well as the electoral vote, and he was very specific about the agenda he would enact if elected in 2024.
Border crackdown
Trump’s border crackdown could stem a 50-year trend of increased immigration to the U.S., although his assault on birthright citizenship has already been paused by a judge who called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” (Here’s a look at how the courts decide if a president is exceeding his authority.)
There doesn’t seem to be any clear path to fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise to bring down prices. He’s taken to ordering his agency heads to lower costs for Americans, and he said he would ask OPEC to cut energy prices while also trying to increase oil production in the US. He cancelled a swath of Biden-era environmental policies and ordered a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, already seems to have reined in its ambitions to slash trillions from the federal budget. But the incoming head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, is a zealous cost-cutter.
Trump clearly intends to raise at least some tariffs, but so far he is preserving room for negotiation with China, Mexico, Canada and Europe. His goal of using tariffs to replace income taxes as the main source of government funding doesn’t seem likely. This would be another area in which he would have to reverse a decades-long trend toward lower tariffs to really have a lasting impact.
On cultural issues, Trump ordered an end to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts by federal agencies and declared that there are only two sexes, in the opening volley of a rollback of rights for transgender students and others. Some policy changes on DEI by private industry, universities and local governments were already in the works before Trump took office, as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
Revenge and retribution — what the Financial Times has labeled “the vendetta agenda” — may be one area where Trump could also leave a lasting mark, though not in any positive sense: This week he pardoned the January 6 rioters, stripped his perceived enemies of security clearances and Secret Service protection and ordered agencies to investigate “the weaponization of law enforcement and…the intelligence community” against him and his supporters.
In the New York Times, Ezra Klein pointed out that Trump’s victory margin in the election was very small. He added:
If you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift.
And yet they’ve felt like one. Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory. The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout. This is partly because he’s surrounded by some of America’s most influential futurists. Silicon Valley and crypto culture’s embrace of Trump has changed his cultural meaning more than Democrats have recognized. In 2016, Trump felt like an emissary of the past; in 2025, he’s being greeted as a harbinger of the future.
Does all of this add up to a fundamental shift in America’s direction? It’s only in hindsight that we will be able to tell.
For thoughts on Trump’s “golden age” and a certain Roman emperor, click here.