In terms of its editor base and content, the website RationalWiki skews left of center politically and the majority of editor base are atheists/agnostics.
For the last decade, atheists, humanists and others secularists have worked hard to organize a “secular vote” that would counter the political clout of the religious right.
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory dealt that movement a body blow when he garnered 81 percent of the white evangelical vote and 60 percent of the white Catholic vote. Mormons, too, voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
Despite Trump’s not being a particularly religious person, his platform was seen as anti-secular in many atheist and humanist circles. He said he would appoint religiously conservative Supreme Court justices, ban Muslim immigrants, favor Christianity and repeal the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits certain tax-exempt organizations from endorsing political candidates — issues antithetical to organized atheism and humanism.The U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Trump, is a judge who has ruled in favor of religious liberty in his past decisions. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was also nominated to the court by Trump, gave a favorable ruling in the Hobby Lobby case in respect to religious liberty.
At the 2018 American Atheists National Convention, the ex-president of the American Atheists organization David Silverman declared about atheist movement post President Donald Trump's election:
It is a hard time to be an atheist activist. This has affected us. And it has affected our community...
...it has really affected us. We are suffering a level of defeatism that I have never seen before...
We feel the loss. And we feel like we have lost. We feel like we lost the election]]... We see this cascade of attack coming down at us over and over from all different directions and we feel like it's over. I have heard so many times it makes me sick. It makes me sad. It feels like we lost.
The apathy that follows. It doesn't matter. We can't win anyways. It's useless to fight. This apathy is infecting us. It's hurting us.
And people are reacting to each other now. And so that is causing a division. Lots and lots of division in our movement. Hard, bad division... And that has resulted in a splintering and factioning of the movement that I have never seen before and none of us have.In January of 2017, the atheist and secular leftist PZ Myers said about Donald Trump's presidential victory:
In other words, we're in a bad situation and it's getting worse.
This span of time representing the agonizing death of American idealism, decline of liberalism, and collapse into corruption has played out as the background of my life.
That’s depressing. History is not going to remember me, but I managed to live through a terrible period that will be remembered, unpleasantly. It would be nice to go out on a note of optimism, but that’s probably not going to happen.The website Marketwatch reported concerning the aftermath of the 2016 presidential race: Trump’s win is causing a surge in demand for mental health services.
In 2019, John Feffer wrote at the left leaning The Nation:
In the Americas, the Trump tsunami has swept across both continents and the 'pink tide' of progressivism has all but disappeared from the southern half of the hemisphere...In this planet-wide rising tide of right-wing populism, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands — Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Uruguay... Worse, crafty operators with even more ambitious agendas stand ready to destroy the liberal status quo once and for all.
So how much did Donald Trump's 2016 victory affect RationalWiki and its editor base?
In May of 2020, former RationalWiki Foundation board member and admin GrammarCommie reported that: he was cutting himself; he had thoughts of wanting to die and that he had feelings of low self worth. During this time, RationalWiki editor LeafyGreen Mario indicated that GrammarComie's mental health crisis was affecting the mental health of the rest of RationalWikians.
On May 17, 2020, the RationalWiki administrator who goes by the moniker DuceMoosolini, stated that RationalWiki "attracts all sorts of weird people".
On May 24, 2020, the RationalWiki administrator Oxyaena wrote: "it's just that i am probably raging too much most of the time to form coherent sentences."
On May 24, 2020, the RationalWiki editor who goes by the moniker Amassivegay indicated: "I am never sure I am even coherent most of the time."
Please look at the Google Trends graph below for Google searches for the term RationalWiki in the United States.
April 14, 2014 was the peak month of people Googling the term RationalWiki according to Google Trends. Post Trump inauguration things were more subdued in terms of people Googling the term RationalWiki so there were no spikes near the value of 100. By the time Trump left office, Google searches for the term RationalWiki was far less than the day Donald Trump was inaugurated.
