Much like the Gulf War, Trump's presidency never happened. Yes, there were soldiers in Kuwait, and there was a man named Donald Trump in the white house, but there was never a war, and there was never a presidency.

Trumpism was a bubble, and on Wednesday, it popped. In 2016, it felt like the beginning of a new American nationalism. Without Trump, that "movement" dies. Will those embers merely fade, or can the fire be rekindled?

If you want to transform the world, or your country, you cannot fuel your movement on discontent, nor on reasonableness. No, transformation can only be built on a foundation of extravagant hope

Gold toilets aside, Trump never had extravagance, in fact he had no content at all. He was the first fully post-modern president; what he did was so filtered through media that there's no effective difference between what happened and what the media says happened

We projected our dreams onto Donald Trump. A successful mass movement requires belief in an infallible leader or an irresistible doctrine. There is no mass movement without a little delusion (we call it a little delusion) "Reasonable" people can't effect big change

If a small child scrapes her knee, her parent might "kiss it better". This does nothing, but both parties appreciate the ritual. Hanson finds that empirically, many medical interventions do nothing, but we pay for them, because they are an adult version of "kiss the boo boo"

Our institutions are prodigiously wasteful. Under the feel-good veneer of win-win cooperation—teaching kids, healing the sick, celebrating creativity—our institutions harbor giant, silent furnaces of intra-group competitive signaling

trillions of dollars of wealth, resources, and human effort are being burned to ash every year, largely for the purpose of showing off... institutions do end up achieving many of their official goals [but] they’re simultaneously serving purposes no one is eager to acknowledge

People are judging us all the time. They want to know if we’ll make good friends, allies, lovers, or leaders. And one of the important things they’re judging is our motives. Why do we behave the way we do? Do we have others’ best interests at heart, or are we entirely selfish?

Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest.