Starting slowly in the 1990s with the impeachment of Bill Clinton and accelerating dramatically in the 2010s with the response to the Wall Street bailouts and the election of Donald Trump, the establishment’s waning ability to confine public discourse has led to real political change.

The 2016 nomination and subsequent election of a candidate that the political establishment had clearly deemed unserious and later unacceptable was a major wake-up call to those in power. They spent Trump’s first term doubling down on their confinement strategy.

A mix of censorship and demonization was deployed to silence Trump supporters and anti-establishment voices. And, while working to scrub pro-Trump perspectives from the public discourse, the establishment also tried to remove Trump from power, first weighing the use of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and later, by trying to tie him to Russian intelligence.

When Trump left office after being impeached twice and overseeing the chaos of 2020, it almost seemed at the time like the strategy had worked.

As Trump momentarily retreated to his limited platform on Truth Social and his followers fixed their attention on the Biden administration, four criminal cases were brought against the former president. But Biden’s inability to lull the country back to a pre-2016 sleep and Trump’s return to the campaign trail set 2024 up as the ultimate test of the establishment’s confinement strategy.