Unfortunately, I Have a New Theory About How Gilmore Girls Explains Trump

Luke and Taylor’s bitter rivalry is almost as central to the show as Lorelai and Rory’s friendship. The CW

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I started watching Gilmore Girls because I needed an anesthetic—and a way to get my 10-year-old ready for bed. For years, books have been our thing: Anne of Green Gables, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, enough Percy Jackson that I’d come to regret it.

But I host a daily news podcast. When Donald Trump got reelected, I craved a break. My daughter was already heavily invested in Doctor Who with her dad and weekend rebroadcasts of SNL with the rest of us. So starting in January, the two of us checked into the Independence Inn together, Monday through Friday.

I imagined Gilmore Girls as a way to unlock my naive “innie.” As soon as the nostalgic strains of Carole King’s “Where You Lead” kicked off, I felt like Mark S. in the elevator at Lumon, shrugging off the news of the day and plunging down the sanitized corridors of Stars Hollow.

But this didn’t work out so great in Severance, and it didn’t work out so great for me, either. Soon I realized: Stars Hollow would never be my escape from 2025 America. Instead, it offers the road map for how we got here.

For the uninitiated, the premise of Gilmore Girls: Thirtysomething Lorelai Gilmore lives in small-town Connecticut with her daughter, Rory, and manages a small hotel. Lorelai’s all but cut off ties with her own (very wealthy) parents, who remain deeply ashamed that their only kid wound up pregnant at 16. When young Rory, who has dreams of Harvard, is admitted to the tony Chilton School, Lorelai swallows her pride and asks her parents to foot the bill. The weekly dinners Lorelai’s mother extracts as repayment form the backbone of each episode.

Lorelai and Rory are the beating heart of the series, a mother-daughter pair who call themselves best friends. They navigate the world like a Disney reboot of Thelma & Louise.

The show premiered in 2000, when Destiny’s Child was on the radio and Hillary Clinton was about to be elected to the Senate. Watching those early episodes now feels a little like cueing up some Sarah McLachlan and watching a soggy slideshow at a graduation: Were we ever so young? In particular, there’s a stark uncanny valley effect in watching a single mom and her teenage daughter navigate the world utterly unconcerned with abortion bans or the cost of living (everyone in Stars Hollow, it seems, owns a house). In turn-of-the-century Connecticut, Donald Trump is still just a real-estate mogul—a punch line, not a politician.

A lot of the modern-day criticism of GG is about race—and it’s true, Stars Hollow embraced Christian Girl Autumn’s aesthetic before that phrase even existed. There are nonwhite characters, like Rory’s best friend, Lane, who is Korean, and the unfortunately named Gypsy, who runs the local auto body shop. As many have pointed out, though—there’s not a lot of depth to these people. That said: There’s not a lot of depth to any characters in the Gilmore universe, beyond the Gilmores themselves.

And the longer I watched, the more the show’s whiteness became a feature, not a bug. A whole lot of white people put Donald Trump into office. If I was looking at 2025’s Rosetta Stone, after all, it was not likely to be highly melanated.

The question I kept returning to was: Where would these characters be now? Because I suspect the lovable white archetypes of the early 2000s would have evolved into pretty different people today. Lorelai’s wacky neighbor, Babette? I’m pretty sure she’d think RFK Jr. was making a few good points (and is kinda cute?). Local eccentric Kirk? Would be really into Elon Musk. And Luke, the hunky diner guy? As my colleague Sam pointed out: That guy totally listens to Rogan.

Once I started seeing this stuff, I couldn’t stop. Small-town politics is threaded throughout the series, and once every couple of episodes the girls end up at a “town meeting” where the gang decides various nonsense, like “who really is the ‘town troubadour’?” The conversations are infused with nascent Trumpism (never mind the constant obsession with the town’s role in the American revolution). Take Taylor, the town dictator. A whole episode is dedicated to his efforts to prevent the “Stars Hollow loner” from staging a protest. (About what? We never learn.) Taylor could be Stephen Miller’s grandpa.

I know the show is called Gilmore Girls. But I wound up spending a lot of time thinking about the Gilmore Boys. Because, honestly? They are not OK. They’re angry. They’re aimless. The teenagers, Dean and Jess, are smart but largely uninterested in school (Rory’s the only one considering an elite college). The men have petty resentments and are deeply suspicious of the changing world around them: Taylor, the town selectman, rails against skateboarders; Luke, the diner owner, almost kicks a woman out of his restaurant for breastfeeding.

Taylor and Luke’s bitter rivalry is almost as central to the show as Lorelai and Rory’s friendship. The two men constantly circle each other, two clicks away from West Side Story–style fisticuffs. Luke, for instance, owns an empty storefront in town. It becomes Taylor’s Greenland, the place he simply must possess. As selectman, he threatens to co-opt it using eminent domain.

Luke vs. Taylor is played for laughs, but these guys are familiar, right? In one corner, you have a classic Project 2025 guy: fussy as hell, concerned with minutiae in the rulebook, harboring a real boner for authority (Taylor). Then you have a baseball cap–wearing dude bro who just wants to get through the day. He believes in climate change, sure, but he mostly wants everyone to please calm down; his authority is performatively passive (Luke).

The more I watched, the more I realized that what’s changed in the past 20-odd years is that in Trump’s world, these two wouldn’t beef at all—and that might be the secret to how we landed here. Trumpism has convinced the Taylors of the world (the entire Heritage Foundation, Marco Rubio) to get behind the authoritarian project. And they are standing alongside the Lukes (Joe Rogan, the Nelk Boys, RFK Jr.). In 2025, it’s the Gilmore Boys’ world, the rest of us are just living in it.

God, that’s a depressing take, isn’t it? My next question was: Where does it leave the eponymous girls?

I’ll tell you where I imagine Lorelai and Rory would be now. I imagine that, like Luke back in the early 2000s, today, they’d feel pretty uncomfortable with the world around them. Only, it’s not a breastfeeding mom they’d want to kick out of their diner; it’s a guy in a MAGA hat.

The question is what the Lorelais and the Rorys of the world are going to do with that energy. Because Rory and Lorelai were never particularly good allies to anyone but each other. Being judgy as hell was part of what made the girls so fun to hang out with. Lorelai’s spunk is presented as a secret to her success: Having been a teen mom, she drips with “up by your bootstraps” energy.

But the fundamental lie at the heart of all that is in the show’s premise: A key reason Lorelai and Rory succeed is because they can rely on their loaded family when they really need to. The more I watch the show—I’m still only midway through! There are 157 episodes!—the more I want Rory and Lorelai to show up for anyone but themselves.

What’s funny is that there is a character who shows up for other people, people very unlike her, again and again. It’s the third Gilmore Girl. Lorelai’s mom, Emily.

Emily’s political perspective is less progressive than that of her daughter or granddaughter. She’s rich, she rolls her eyes when Lorelai criticizes George W. Bush, she’s a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 2025, would she be horrified by Trump’s manners? Probably. Would she also be deeply judgy about trans kids? Well, ugh, maybe. But I can also imagine a Very Special Episode where Rory and Lorelai change grandma’s ideas about gender over a roast lamb one Friday night.

Because Emily adapts. Sure, she uses her money like a cudgel to force her daughter to have dinner with her once a week. But that’s largely because she wants three generations of her family all in one room. In the end, she’s a pretty good listener.

Maybe the most valuable thing about watching the Gilmore Girls at this moment in time is looking at a mixed-up bunch of weirdos and seeing them continually trying to connect, even when they seem to low-key hate each other. They do it at town meetings. They do it at family dinners, too.

America is a little like an estranged family right now, and half of us are horrified at what the other half is up to. We’d be lucky to find a way to get all of us around a table once a week to actually talk. For a few brief years in the early 2000s—it seemed possible. In Stars Hollow, at least.