In the decades before 2016, Trump's hot mic incident would have been lethal to any politician. It doesn't seem like much in hindsight because he ended up winning, but the Republican party was panicking and scrambling for an alternate candidate.

In a way, it ended up creating a lot of the political climate in the United States today. Republicans realized doubling down often was a viable strategy and have done it ever since. It also added to Trump's mystique, that he could buck the established norms to such a degree, that it convinced many chuds that anything was possible if they were a big enough asshole.

It was probably a major source of my radicalization, because the fact that he won in spite of it lead me to believe that optics were not the only thing going on with politics. It made me pay attention and figure out why this would happen and why it didn't matter.