Flashback 2016/17: Donald Trump’s election as the 45th President of the United States plunged large swathes of the public political sphere into a state of shock. Hardly anyone had seriously expected the populist real estate mogul and TV entertainer to prevail against an accomplished politician such as Hillary Clinton (former First Lady, Secretary of State, and Senator for the state of New York). Moreover, it soon became clear that Trump’s hyperbolic campaign rhetoric would have to be taken seriously and that his administration would act even more ruthlessly than expected, attacking the political opposition and critical media, state institutions and the judiciary, international agreements and alliances, as well as the general customs, norms, and traditions of political discourse. Since Trumpism continues to set the agenda in US politics (and beyond), the aim of this chapter is to analyze the above-described state of shock from two perspectives: on the one hand, with regard to Trump’s politics of shock and disruption, its techniques and tactics, prerequisites and procedures; on the other hand, with regard to the shocked (liberal) public and what, in reference to Wolfgang Hagen, can be described as its ‘forgetfulness of the present’ (Gegenwartsvergessenheit). If Trump is here to be understood as a symptom, then it is necessary to go beyond Trump’s personality and consider the economic, political, cultural, media, and affective-ideological conditions and transformations—in short, the constellation of factors—that made his rise to power possible in the first place.