‘The West Wing’ Is Suddenly Relevant Again as Trump Era Fades

A nostalgia-packed Emmys reunited cast members from one of the most beloved TV dramas of all time, The West Wing. On stage to present one of the final awards of the evening, several of the show’s cast members reflected on its influence, and what’s changed in the 25 years since it debuted. Turns out it’s quite a lot.

Janel Moloney remarked that “our political landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years,” Allison Janney joked about West Wing writers having to actually “use their imaginations to create interesting plot lines” for the show’s political operators, and Richard Schiff argued that today’s headlines would have been seen as “far-fetched” and “ridiculous” on their series that celebrated civic duty, workplace camaraderie, and political idealism.

Such earnestness came to be a hallmark of Aaron Sorkin’s much-heralded D.C. drama that premiered 25 years ago this week on NBC. To say the series had an impactful run when it aired would be putting it mildly. It won 26 Emmys and frequently appears high up in rankings of the greatest television series of all time. On Friday, members of the cast will reunite once more at a White House event hosted by first lady Jill Biden.

So moved and influenced were some fans that they even went into or returned to politics after being inspired by the show. Vanity Fair coined them “West Wing babies” in 2012, folks like New York State Director of Policy (and current state assembly candidate) Micah Lasher and even President Joe Biden’s former press secretary and now MSNBC host Jen Psaki. Janney, who won four Emmys playing press secretary CJ Cregg on the show, feels similarly. She told Entertainment Weekly in 2020 that CJ is still “someone that I aspire to. I wish I could be CJ.”

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Rewatching the series over the years, I was always moved by its sincerity and sense of optimism about how American government actually functions. But more recently, I found that a lot rang hollow, almost like watching a show from another planet.

There’s a scene, for example, near the end of the first episode that for a while now has beggared belief. Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) has been in hot water over a snide remark he made on a political talk show, so he’s meeting with conservative religious leaders to apologize and save his job. He’s been hesitant, smug even, about taking the meeting, but his co-workers get through to him, and when the sit-down happens, Lyman is genuinely apologetic and speaks movingly of the good faith required to “step up and debate ideas.”

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In West Wing world, there are players on far ends of the political spectrum who come together just for the sake of making amends and a president who stops in, like Sheen’s Jed Bartlet does at the end of the pilot, to remind everyone where the moral center is. In the real world, the old adage about not discussing politics in polite company seems to have exploded into intractably toxic public discourse. Plus, Americans have spent the better part of 10 years with a president, then former president, and now presidential candidate again who, in what is not actually dystopian fiction, solicits foreign interference in his campaign, foments an insurrection, mocks disabled people, calls immigrants “vermin” and “poison,” and shares his plan to assume the title of dictator, if only for one day, should he be re-elected.

Were any of the political events of recent years to have been scripted on The West Wing, it probably wouldn’t have lasted beyond a couple of episodes. As the cast quipped at the Emmy ceremony, the show would’ve been deemed too unbelievable, too outlandish. What constituted partisan vitriol back then seems quaint by present-day standards. Josh Lyman’s comment that caused all the controversy in that very first episode? “Lady, the god you pray to is too busy being indicted for tax fraud.”

The legacy of The West Wing, though, has endured and will continue to do so. It is, simply, good television. Yet the political messes of recent years pushed it more toward the realm of magical realism than a fictional time capsule of a noble political era. It’s doubtful such an era was ever real in the first place. Still, coming back to the show in recent weeks, particularly the first episode, I’m struck by how The West Wing feels for the first time in years not wholly implausible. There’s been a noticeable shift in one corner of real-life American politics in recent weeks. With the overt positivity and good vibes permeating through the Harris-Walz campaign, a series focused so much on possibility and promise seems all of a sudden less magical and more realistic.

Mitch Haddad/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Perhaps it’ll be lasting, perhaps not, but there have been some glimmers of an actual tonal change following the chaos, divisiveness, and institutional breakdowns of the Trump years and the somber rebuilding of Joe Biden’s term. Since President Biden announced in late July that he would not be seeking re-election, Vice President Kamala Harris and her now running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have been putting forth in their campaign an expressly optimistic vision for the future, an idea of a tomorrow built on opportunity and good neighborliness. In a word: joy.

It has all seemed quite a bit West Wing-y. It hasn’t even been two months since Biden’s announcement, but there’s a palpable “What’s next?” energy emanating from Harris and Walz that The West Wing carried through its seven-year run.

That optimistic question, of course, was President Bartlet’s signature mantra and frame for leadership in his fictional White House. The West Wing celebrated hard work for a greater national purpose, and the Sorkin drama never shied away from the pathos or humor in the lives of those striving toward those goals, whether it be the president accepting a congressional censure because it was the right thing to do or a staffer working late into the night to get a birthday message written just right, draft after draft after draft.

For fans who feared The West Wing may have become hopelessly dated and unfamiliar, it’s worth checking out again if only to appreciate how much has happened, and how quickly political moods can shift, in such a short time.

It remains to be seen whether joy and enthusiasm will translate to a sea change in American politics, but Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are tapping into a very real desire for just that—and throwing in some West Wing-esque sentiments along the way. As Harris said to a cheering crowd of supporters after her first presidential debate in early September, “Hard work is good work!”

But it’s neither Harris nor Walz who Sorkin thinks best encapsulates the idealistic ethos of his biggest hit, where a “West Wing moment” means “an unrealistically high expectation of character triumphing over selfishness.” As he put it to The New York Times this week, “I believe that the morning Biden stepped out of the race, that was a West Wing moment. That’s the kind of thing we write stories about.”