I was working at Stack Overflow, a tech company, during the 2016 election. Every winter we’d have an event for our community in which people could earn virtual “hats” to put on their avatars. One idea for the 2015 event (before Donald Trump had won the Republican primary) was “Trump hair”. I’m pretty sure we had a mockup of the idea, but we didn’t end up using the concept.
Around the same time, I used Trump as the punchline for a joke about internet trolls in a talk I gave to the company. (It got a few chuckles.) At that point, it was impossible to take him seriously. As he started to win primary elections, it was more like the joke was on the Republican Party. I wrote a blog post about election systems that was relevant to the company and I was asked to republish it on the company’s website. Again, Trump was this befuddling figure and easily dismissed.
But as the spring turned to summer and it became clear Trump was going to get a lot of votes the mood started to shift. Most of the company was to my left and people just couldn’t understand why anyone would be reluctant to vote for Hillary Clinton. It must have been a pretty hostile place to work for people who supported Trump, so I never heard from anyone who did. (I know some people who left the company since then are Trump supporters now.)
A few days before the election, the CEO announced US employees could take as much time as they needed to vote since the lines were going to be long that year. He also asked people not to schedule meetings that day. I was not alone in refreshing 538 continuously.
As Election Day wound down and it became more clear Trump was going to win, the mood in chat got worse and I decided to stop reading. When I came back to the chat the next day a funny thing had happened. People were sharing pictures of their pets and children and people they loved. That became the pattern for bad news (from a left-leaning perspective) in the future. In the wake of the Muslim travel ban, Brexit, Supreme Court nominations, and so on, we’d see a flood of feel-good photos in chat.
Trump was a lousy president and he’ll likely be even worse if he wins the coin flip this time around. But the odd thing is that his main impact on my co-workers was largely to bring people closer together and support each other. (While further alienating people who didn’t buy the Democratic Party line, I suppose.)