The Nickname Always Comes
Every presidency gets a nickname. It’s how history takes notes. And we are absolutely, already, in the middle of writing this one — even if we won’t admit that’s what we’re doing.
The New Deal. The Great Society. The War on Terror. Even the ones we’d rather forget get compressed into something portable — a phrase that does the work of a thousand policy papers in a single breath. The nickname isn’t assigned. It emerges. It’s the thing that survives when the news cycle finally exhausts itself and what’s left is just the shape of what happened. ([1], [2])
This One Is Different
Donald Trump’s second term — non-consecutive, which is its own historical oddity, the first since Grover Cleveland — presents a particular challenge to that process. Because you can’t entirely separate the second term from the first, and yet they aren’t the same thing either. The first term felt like an experiment. The second feels like a conclusion. And the nickname, whenever it solidifies, will have to account for both the man who showed us what he was and the country that, knowing exactly what he was, said yes again.
This one has a different problem. The shape keeps changing. Or rather — there are too many shapes, and they’re all accurate, and none of them are quite enough.
The Metaphors I Tried First
I started with the Homecoming King President. It’s the kind of framing that lands differently if you’re a Gen X woman — if you were there, watching from the bleachers, already fluent in the language of unearned social power. The performative popularity contest, the sash, the way the title confers status without requiring competence. For those of us who watched the football captain and the head cheerleader crowned on a gymnasium floor while the rest of us observed, the metaphor felt viscerally right. Social dominance dressed up as celebration. Power that was never really earned, just… confirmed.
But it didn’t hold. Partly because homecoming court has actually changed — younger generations have genuinely disrupted who gets crowned, and increasingly it’s queer kids, kids with disabilities, kids who would have been invisible in our era. The institution got reclaimed, at least partially. Using it as a stand-in for retrograde power feels like it insults the reclamation. And partly because the metaphor lives in the past. It explains where this came from. It doesn’t capture what it’s doing.
The Fraternity President came closer. White fraternities — and the whiteness matters here, because it’s doing specific work that Black fraternities, with their entirely different histories and purposes, are not — spent the 1990s hemorrhaging legitimacy through hazing scandals that exposed what the culture actually required to sustain itself. Conformity enforced through humiliation. Hierarchy maintained through ritual degradation. Brotherhood that was always conditional on your willingness to absorb harm and call it tradition. Sound familiar.
And they’ve been declining ever since. Chapters closing. Membership shrinking. Younger generations simply refusing to accept that this is who runs campus culture anymore. The Fraternity President metaphor works because it’s not just a description — it’s a trajectory. It captures the last gasp quality of this moment. The guy holding the paddle insisting this is still how things work, while the quad empties out around him.
But even that isn’t quite big enough. Because the quad isn’t just American anymore.
The Abdication
The nickname that keeps pulling at me is something in the register of The Abdication. Not because it’s the one that will stick — I’m not sure it’s culturally sticky enough — but because it names what the rest of the world is actually experiencing. The word has history. When Edward VIII abdicated the British throne in 1936, it was a single act by a single man that rewrote the trajectory of the monarchy, the country, and arguably the course of World War II — because the man who stepped into the void, George VI, was a different kind of leader entirely, and the alliances that held or fractured in those years turned on questions of character and commitment at the top. One abdication. Seismic consequences. The ripples are still visible if you know where to look.
The parallel isn’t perfect — it never is. But there’s something in the structure of it that fits. A voluntary relinquishment of responsibility dressed up as something else. In Edward’s case, love. In this case, grievance, nationalism, and the transactional worldview of someone who has never encountered a relationship he didn’t believe could be reduced to a deal. NATO allies quietly recalibrating. Long-standing trade relationships treated like inconveniences. Decades of diplomatic architecture dismantled with the energy of someone clearing out a storage unit. Other countries aren’t just watching America change. They’re building around American unreliability the way you’d build around a neighbor who stopped maintaining their property. You don’t wait for them to fix it. You put up your own fence.
The Other Side of the Workshop
There’s a version of this that his supporters would call long overdue. America finally stopped subsidizing the world’s problems. Stopped playing global hall monitor. Started putting its own interests first. The nickname from that vantage point might be something like The Correction. The Restoration. The Return. Something that frames this presidency not as destruction but as recalibration — a rebalancing of a system that had drifted so far from its original constituency that a wrecking ball wasn’t just inevitable, it was necessary. Those nicknames are being workshopped too, in different corners of the internet, with equal conviction and, it should be said, with genuine grievance underneath them. The people who feel that way aren’t wrong that something had stopped working for them. They’re just wrong about what broke it, and who broke it, and who’s going to pay for fixing it.
The Naming Problem
Which brings me to the naming problem that keeps me up at night more than any of the others.
MAGA will almost certainly make it into the final characterization. The movement is too dominant, too self-branded, too deliberately constructed for posterity to be left out of the historical shorthand entirely. But I hope — and I mean this as something more than preference — that it doesn’t end up inside the nickname itself. Because MAGA is a self-constructed brand, built for exactly this purpose: to colonize the historical record on its own terms, to be the thing that gets written in the margin forty years from now. If the nickname the culture lands on includes MAGA, the movement wins a kind of posterity it hasn’t earned. It gets to name itself. And that is not a neutral act.
And MAGA didn’t arrive alone. It arrived with a blueprint. Project 2025 — the 900-page governing document produced by the Heritage Foundation before a single vote was cast in 2024 — is the thing that separates this presidency from every chaotic, norm-busting moment that preceded it. Trump spent much of the campaign distancing himself from it, which is its own telling detail. But the fingerprints are everywhere: in the dismantling of federal agencies, in the restructuring of the civil service, in the systematic removal of institutional friction that used to slow the exercise of unchecked executive power. MAGA is the feeling. Project 2025 is the architecture. The nickname that history assigns to this era will have to reckon with the fact that what happened wasn’t improvised. It was written down. In advance. With footnotes.
What It Says About Us
The nickname that sticks will be the one that holds both registers at once — the absurdity and the damage, the spectacle and the harm. The one that makes people in 2040 immediately picture something. Not a policy. Not a party. A feeling. The specific feeling of watching something load-bearing get removed from a structure everyone was living inside, and realizing — too late or just in time, depending on where you stood — that nobody was going to put it back.
We – the public – are workshopping that nickname right now in real time. This piece is proof. And what that says about us — that we’re already reaching for the historical shorthand while the history is still happening — might be the most honest thing any of us have written about this moment.
Presidential Nicknames To Date
You can check out previous presidential era nicknames at these sources:
Wikipedia — List of Nicknames of Presidents of the United States — comprehensive, covers every president with sourced context for how each nickname originated
Fiveable — Presidential Nicknames to Know — more analytical; connects nicknames to their historical context and what each reveals about the era, not just the man
Singing about Cooking 