There was so much music being created during those sessions that one song just sort of melded into the other, and it was tough to keep track of who played what and when. “That’s how in sync that whole crew was through TPAB,” Terrace Martin continues “We started walking alike, talking alike, playing alike, eating alike. We were like Voltron: one thing, one force. That’s one thing you hear on this record—how much of a brotherhood we did have. I had forgotten about all this shit, it was just a blur of good music with my brothers.” For Kendrick, Martin, and the players, they hadn’t heard these tracks in almost two years. They were evolving so quickly that once Butterfly came out, they were already on to the next sound, searching for something new. So to hear the songs on untitled was to travel back in time, to an era in which they were all in the studio at once, before they changed the world. In that way, untitled was a bittersweet reminder that To Pimp a Butterfly was a specific moment in time that couldn’t be replicated. Of course there would be imitators, but those songs—on that album, with those players, and that cover, it was lightning captured in a bottle. They were all still friends, invested in each other’s lives and their respective well-being, but for the next project—whenever it would land—they needed different personnel and a new vision.
To Pimp a Butterfly and untitled unmastered. helped Black America soundtrack its way to a higher state of consciousness, and, if only for a little while, it helped make sense of the country’s present gloom. But as the hype of those records began to fade, a bigger, scarier threat began to emerge. And this wasn’t just a threat to black people in the United States, it was a danger to humanity at large.
On June 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump announced that he was running for president of the United States, ending some twenty years of speculation. “We are going to make our country great again,” he told a crowd of supporters in his native New York City. Announcing his run at the fifty-eight-story Trump Tower in Midtown, the businessman positioned himself as the anti-Obama, even taking shots at the president in his forty-five-minute address. “He’s actually a negative force,” Trump claimed in his announcement. “We need somebody that literally will take this country and make it great again. We can do that.” The term, Make America Great Again, echoed that tone of another entertainer-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan, who in 1979 had made it the hallmark of his presidential run. They both borrowed the phrase from Adolf Hitler, who in the 1930s said he wanted to “make Germany great again” and blamed Jews, socialists, and communists for what he thought was the country’s deterioration. Because some didn’t know the history, the phrase seemed to be innocuous, a push to return the United States to a panacea of peace and prosperity. Much like saying “All Lives Matter,” the term “Make America Great Again” felt like a push from conservatives to shun the cultural progress the country had made over the past eight years, when a black man was president and his cabinet was diverse. Trump appealed to workers in Middle America who felt their jobs were evaporating and were worried about making ends meet. He spoke in broad generalizations, offering so-called tidbits on the job market that he really couldn’t prove. And when he wasn’t doing that, he said things that simply weren’t true.
Trump had never served in Congress, on a city council, or even a school board. He simply didn’t have the gravitas to build relationships strong enough to handle being president of the United States. Trump was vulgar, far different from Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or any of the men who served as president before. He thumbed his nose at political correctness, claimed that America had gotten too soft and needed someone in charge who knew how to talk unsympathetically. Trump was a caricature, and media outlets covered his antics, perhaps thinking he had no shot at the job he sought. The thinking went like this: Once Hillary Clinton won the U.S. presidency, in a landslide, we’d all look at Trump’s candidacy with a laugh, as a blip on the radar. That was the media’s mistake; in its push for content, Trump was a slam dunk for news outlets who sought clicks and ratings bumps. He just kept hanging around, and in November 2015, Trump hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live, the long-running NBC sketch comedy show, much to the dismay of protesters who lamented his appearance. “Trump is a Yuuuge Racist,” read one sign. “NBC Repent,” read another.
It’s too easy to say that Trump’s appearance helped him become president, but between his outlandish Twitter persona and opportunities like this, he quickly became part of the narrative, and then it became usual to see him and to hear his rhetoric. It sent the wrong message at a time when activists were protesting his candidacy and many late-night hosts were taking the threat of a Trump presidency more soberly. Online, viewers were furious with media pundits for helping humanize such a person.
Indeed, Trump was a lightning rod, and to fawn over his persona was to be guilty by association. Try as we might, it was impossible to tune him out, and his ascendance was all the more puzzling. For one, he was racist: In 1973, Trump, as head of the Trump Management Corporation in New York City,
