Cultural Commentary – Singing about Cooking

The Shape of This Thing: Workshopping the Trump Second Term Nickname

Posted on July 11, 2026 by singingaboutcooking

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

$A dark plum-toned illustration of a cracked glass pane with two separate fracture points, beside the title "Twice Cursed" and subtitle "with Glass Child Syndrome," marked with the years 1986 and 2006.$

Twice Cursed with Glass Child Syndrome

Posted on February 2, 2025July 11, 2026 by singingaboutcooking

At T-minus nine months to turning fifty, I finally have a name for my trauma: Glass Child Syndrome.

And I’m twice cursed.

Let me set the stage. I am the oldest daughter of an oldest daughter and a middle son. That is not a throwaway detail. That is the whole architecture of what happened to me, twice.

What Glass Child Syndrome Actually Is

The term was coined to describe the siblings of children with chronic illness, disability, or significant behavioral and medical needs — kids who become see-through in their own families because all available light is bent toward the sibling in crisis. The name comes from the idea that these children are treated as though they don’t break. No one checks on the glass. Glass just sits there, transparent and load-bearing, until it doesn’t.

The research on this is not exotic. Family systems theory has documented for decades what happens when a household reorganizes itself entirely around one child’s needs: the other children absorb the household’s stress without receiving any of its resources. They become hyper-independent early. They stop registering their own needs as legitimate, because there is no bandwidth left to meet them. They often become high-achieving, hyper-competent adults who cannot ask for help, because the lesson was never “someone will help you.” The lesson was “there is no one available, so figure it out.”

Glass children are not neglected in the classic sense. Their parents are present, often exhausted, often loving. That’s part of what makes it so disorienting. The neglect is structural, not personal. It doesn’t look like abandonment. It looks like a mother who is simply, completely, somewhere else.

The First Curse: The Eldest Daughter Script

Before any of this happened to me, I was already cast. Oldest daughter of an oldest daughter. My mother inherited a role before she ever had children — the eldest-daughter job description: manage the household’s emotional weather, absorb what nobody else will carry, be capable so no one has to ask twice. She didn’t invent that script. She was handed it, the way eldest daughters are handed it, and she handed it to me the same way, without either of us voting on it.

So when the second curse arrived, it landed on ground that had already been prepared. I wasn’t just a glass child. I was a glass child who had already been trained to believe that being useful was the price of being loved, and that my own needs were, at best, an inconvenient rounding error.

1986

I was in sixth grade when my brother, in third grade, was diagnosed with ADHD. This was 1986 — early days for that diagnosis, which made my mother’s response even more totalizing. She put him into individual counseling. She put herself and my father into family counseling. She rebuilt the pantry around elimination diets, chasing the theory that the right foods could out-behave the wrong ones.

I got none of it. No counseling, no dietary consideration, no discussion. I also got no praise and no punishment — which sounds like freedom and is actually its opposite. A child who is punished is still being watched. I wasn’t being watched at all.

I became anorexic. It took three years for anyone to notice.

I want to be precise about what that timeline means. Three years is not a lapse in attention. Three years is a fully organized household in which one child’s body was quietly disappearing and no one was positioned to see it, because every eye in the house was pointed at a different child’s diagnosis.

2006

Twenty years later, my brother suffered a brain aneurysm. My mother did what she had always done, at full volume: she turned over her money, her time, her identity. She constructed a private mythology of blame, convinced some invisible failure during her pregnancy had caused this. Guilt, in her hands, became another form of devotion to him.

I was living in Brooklyn at the time, in the final pre-tenure stretch of an academic career I had spent a decade building. She didn’t ask once. She spent six months laying the case at my feet, a phone call at a time. How much everything cost. How hard it was to run a business and manage my brother’s care in the same day. How my father taught all day and commuted for hours on top of it, which meant he wasn’t available for any of it. Every call was a new signal, in slightly different language, that she could not do this alone and could not do it without more money. She never said “come home.” She built an eighteen-month case for why I would have to conclude that myself.

I gave up the tenure track and moved home to manage their care and their finances, because she had already spent everything she had on him and there was nothing left to spend on the crisis itself. That wasn’t a season. It was thirteen years. From 2006 to 2019, I lived in their house, paid their bills, and did whatever else the moment required, because the moment never stopped requiring it.

I did not get talked into this in a direct or obvious way but with systemic hints and little guilts over eighteen months. I did it the way glass children do everything — automatically, because the alternative required a version of myself that had never been allowed to develop: one that says no.

Now

I’ve lived out of their house again for seven years. I am invisible in the exact same way I was in 1986, just with better production values. I surface in their world when there’s something to buy, something to fix, something only money or competence can solve. That is still, apparently, the whole of what I’m for.

The Gen X Layer

There’s a generational version of this too, and it’s not incidental. I am Gen X — the latchkey cohort, the ones who let ourselves in after school and were praised for our independence as though it had been a choice rather than an absence. Gen X was collectively trained to read “no one is coming” as a virtue. We call it resilience. It was supervision that never arrived.

My brother is two and a half years younger than me and is, in every way that matters, barely Gen X. He is a millennial in temperament, in expectation, in his relationship to being taken care of. Two and a half years, and an entire generational contract shifted underneath us — inside the same house, under the same roof, from the same parents. He got the version of parenting that shows up. I got the version that watches from a distance and calls it trust.

That’s the second curse, really. Not just being the glass child. Being the glass child who was also handed the eldest-daughter job description and the Gen X survival manual, all three telling me the same thing in three different vocabularies: don’t need anything, and you’ll be fine.

I wasn’t fine. I was just quiet about it, for a very long time.

Not Quiet Anymore

I’m not quiet anymore. And I’m not the same person who spent thirteen years in that house without ever being directly asked to stay. That version of me didn’t know how to say no. She thought silence was the price of being loved, and being needed was as close to it as she was going to get. I rescued her in 2019, when I finally left that house behind and moved away to build my own life and my own career again — to go chase what made me happy instead of what kept everyone else afloat.

What that means going forward is simple, and I want to say it plainly instead of letting it sit as subtext: I am not going to be the daughter who steps in to manage aging parents or a disabled adult brother a third time. Not because I’ve stopped caring what happens to them. I have just been excluded from being family for so long, and so consistently, that I no longer qualify for the role I’d be stepping into. You cannot be structurally invisible for thirty-five years and then get handed the job that only exists for people who were seen. That job was never going to be mine. I’m done applying for it.

Category: Cultural Commentary