The Republic of Sore Winners

How an outpouring of post-election MAGA venom helps us understand our brave, new Trumpworld

Image credit: mikeledray/Shutterstock

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Last week, in the hours and days after it became clear that, up and down the ticket, the Democratic Party had been thoroughly steamrolled in the 2024 election, it wasn’t surprising that Democrats were distraught, or that they turned some of that distress on each other.

Suddenly the joy and hope of the Harris campaign lay in ruins around our feet like yesterday’s birthday party: who wouldn’t be pointing fingers? While some experts seemed to believe that something as small as an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast held the key to the kingdom, others compiled a more various, and sometimes contradictory, checklist. It included phenomena as different as not ending the War in Gaza, not “connecting” with White working class voters (whoever they are), not understanding the (endless) needs of white men, and eggs that cost $4.00 a dozen (slightly less expensive than the Starbucks many working and middle class people start the day with.)

If you have been around politics for as long as I have, this was predictable. What Democrats call “the circular firing squad” isn’t new. But it has been intensified and amplified by social media’s ability to platform opinionated people, accelerate the process of assigning blame, and push catfights into the mainstream media.

What was less predictable is the nastiness of Donald Trump’s partisans in the aftermath of what seemed at least a week ago to be a smashing victory. Currently, Trump is ahead by about 2.4 points in the popular vote, not the landslide that was initially imagined, and likely to shrink as the count is completed in states like California. Nevertheless, it is the first time a Republican has won the popular vote since 2004, and it upended many assumptions, particularly that the criminalization of abortion around the country would wake the sleeping giant of White women’s votes.

Another assumption was that Americans would remember that Trump was a terrible president, who amassed a record-breaking national debt, contributed to the death of a great many people, and is in general unsuited to being President. Now a funny-looking, portly old man, in an election cycle when age was a major issue, Trump’s thoughts wander from odd to odder to oddest. He often breaks off in mid-sentence, and his stemwinders seemed to be boring his rally goers, who frequently left mid-speech. A criminal, well-known fraudster, adulterer, and traveling rape show, Trump tells obvious lies that you don’t have to have gone to college to uncover. An extremist, he never attempted to connect with the moderate voters all the experts believed he needed to win the election—and those folks voted for him anyway.

And yet—Trump won the election! So why are so many of his supporters so vindictive? What moves them to sneer at Democrats, to provoke arguments by circulating insulting videos, openly insult Americans who did not vote for Trump, and threaten their personal safety?

Instead, some operatives—possibly foreign entities who support him, possibly domestic ones—decided to celebrate by metaphorically punching Harris voters in the face. Waves of hatred and mean-spirited mockery on X are sending users to other platforms. Although data shows that X accounts were already declining well before the election, Bluesky has added 700,000 since the election (media journalist Kara Swisher has speculated that X and Trump’s money-pit, Truth Social, might merge, accelerating a social media realignment.)

The petty mockery on social media is not, however, the biggest story. In possibly the most bizarre incident to occur after an American election, the Justice Department is investigating a mass texting incident in which Black students were informed that they had been “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation,” and that “Executive Slaves” would pick them up in vans.

We do not know who sent this message, or how they identified the recipients, but we do know that neither Trump or anyone in his circle has disassociated the campaign from an attack intended to frighten and shame young people. But equally threatening messages are coming from known actors. For example, there have been threats to dismantle, loot, and remake institutions of higher education (Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump, November 11, 2024); Speaker Mike Johnson has rushed a bill to the floor that would allow the administration to pull the the 501c3 status of any organization that, in its judgment, “supports terrorism;” and Vice President-designate JD Vance has signaled that, even without signing a federal abortion ban, the administration will move on further limiting reproductive care in all 50 states.

This provokes a second question: is this a level of aggression elevated from what we experienced in Trump I? Yes and no.

Let’s go to the video tape. In 2016, Trump’s unexpected victory unleashed waves of public cruelty in New York City. Students of mine reported being harassed on the street with racial, anti-semitic, and homophobic epithets. Spray-painted swastikas appeared on the student center overnight, and cars full of White finance bros draped in Trump campaign gear raced around Greenwich Village screaming at people who they presumed were liberal because they lived in the Village. 

I had never seen anything like this after an election. Yet, it was not unexpected. Public shaming of, and physical threats to, defeated voters was consistent with the unusually nasty way Trump had conducted his campaign. It was also consistent with the broader online culture Trump drew on and mimicked as he refined his political persona—right-wing sites like Parler, Reddit, gamer sites, Facebook, and the platform formerly known as Twitter.

But we grew used to the ugliness over time. Trumpism moved abusive political rhetoric and behavior more typical of the political fringe to the center of the Republican Party. That abusiveness then fed back into Trump’s policymaking apparatus, such as it was. Acts of terror masqueraded as immigration policy: for example, the so-called “Muslim Ban,” or the family separations that first incarcerated migrant children in appalling conditions and then literally disappeared many of them into foster and adoption networks. Trump’s verbal threats to those who opposed him became physical threats, outsourced to fringe crazies who acted on his behalf.

In 2020, sore winning gave way to sore losing. Led out by the Sore Loser in Chief, thousands of people within and beyond his staff spread conspiracy theories, doxxed election workers, and ultimately marched on Congress to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate victory. The January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, in which some enraged MAGA activists beat and tortured Capitol police (one officer had his arm repeatedly slammed by a heavy, 19th century door as he screamed in agony); others contented themselves with stealing things and defecating in the halls of Congress. 

Now, in 2024, we are back to sore winning, and I think we can expect the ugliness to grow more intense over the next four yearsDuring Trump I, Adam Serwer wrote a book about the MAGA movement, The Cruelty is the Point (One World, 2021), in which he argued that Trump did not create the ugly aggression that took root in MAGA, only harnessed it.

Yes, but—there are similarities and differences in this round. For example, the incessant online needling and preening, particularly on X and to some extent on TikTok, is a feature of the old “cry, libs” strategy: in other words, we are bullying you and we will not stop until you are completely demoralized. The cruelty, as Serwer says, is the point. White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes’s November 5 post on X—“Your body, my choice. Forever”—is an excellent example of this, as is the spike in online harassment of women. Again, no one from the Trump transition team, or Trump himself, has disavowed the tweet, which is particularly odd since Fuentes, who courted Trump in 2022,  withdrew his support in late summer, 2024.

But this contradiction leads us back to an important difference. In Trump II, there will be a clear boundary between the internal influencers, who will look borderline normal, policy-oriented, and institutional (let’s call it the A team); and the external influencers (let’s call this the B team)—the weirdos, online personalities, and rabid hate mongers who create the atmosphere for extremism. The B team’s function was to get Trump into the White House, where the A team could take over; if they have a continuing function now, it is to distract from the A team’s main job, reshaping American government to diminish democracy and reduce checks on presidential power.

So, your job, readers, is to not be distracted: not by the live bros hurling abuse, not by the memes and disinformation, and not by fake policy conversations (like the ones promoted about gender and race over the last four years) that keep you uncertain and off balance even as the Republican Party dismantles health care and education for all of us. 

Your second job is to begin to understand, or to understand more deeply, how these manipulative and abusive conversations are structured, how to defuse them in your day-to-day interactions, and how to plan your resistance accordingly. For example, when I look at the Fuentes post, four things that I know about American history seem relevant:

• White supremacy requires misogyny;

• Misogyny does not require white supremacy;

• Men benefit from both misogyny and white supremacy, whether they agree to it or not;

• Women may embrace, or agree to, misogyny, to benefit from white supremacy, because women do not have access to power by virtue of being women. But no women, in the end, benefit from misogyny.

Knowing these things doesn’t help you flip a precinct from red to blue. However, it does help all of us think about how verbal abuse experienced in daily life facilitates political policy: we can then see openings for changing the discourse and fighting back.

It’s going to be a long four years: pace yourselves.

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Questions that are on my mind:

• Now that Florida Senator Marco Rubio is Secretary of State-Designate, will Governor Ron DeSantis appoint himself as the Sunshine State’s other Senator? I would put money on it, Although DeSantis can be elected Governor a third time, the Florida state constitution requires him to sit out for a term in between. As far as I can tell, the Senate is becoming an assisted living facility for former Republican governors, and also—who else would have DeSantis?

• Will RFK, Jr. really be appointed to Trump’s cabinet in some healthcare-adjacent capacity? I am betting no. He is too B team, too weird, too unpredictable for the people around Trump to find him anything but a burden. Ditto Tulsi Gabbard: way too B team. I think the evil, racist, but obviously intelligent Stephen Miller would explode if he had to be in the room with either one of them.

• Will all the Bad Things Trump has promised happen in their most extreme forms? We don’t know, but probably not. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant had a good piece in the New York Times today about how imagining the worst is a way of coping with present anxiety. The Republican Party is a very bad institution right now: however, in some ways, the party itself feels like less of a cult of personality than it has in the past, perhaps because (no matter what you hear about him wiping his ample behind with the Constitution), Trump cannot run again. In addition, Trump’s stated policies, in their most explicit forms, do not align with the interests of party leaders or donors, so we can look forward to a lot of colorful, internal GOP conflict. Keep your eye on the contest for Senate majority leader: if one of the Johns (Thune or Cornyn) prevails, that body will retain its conventional constitutional purpose as a bulwark from extremism and autocracy.

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Expanding my media empire:

A change you are going to see here is that when I recommend or link to books, I will send you to Bookshop.org rather than Amazon. Why? Because this encourages you to support local businesses, and also fuck Jeff Bezos.

In addition, I am contemplating a strategic retreat from X, because I am not clear that it serves me or my readers anymore. So:

• You can find me on Bluesky at:

• Forty percent of young people learn much of what they know about American politics from TikTok; many others simply don’t read and only listen or watch. So, in the spirit of meeting audiences where they are, I am posting there 2-3 times a week. You can follow me:

• Also as tenured_radical, I am on:

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I don’t want to alarm you (further) about reproductive rights, but do arm yourself:

Plan B, otherwise known as levonorgestrel or “the morning after pill,” is available without a prescription from Amazon for as little as $9.99, and Walmart for as little as $8.99. The morning after pill is not abortion, it is contraception, preventing the need for an abortion in the event of unwanted/coerced sex or a birth control fail. If you live in one of the 34 states where ER staff do not have to supply Plan B on request, 12 states where a pharmacist can refuse to fill a prescription; one of the 42 states where pharmacists may ask for a prescription before supplying the medication, or Louisiana (go here to learn your status), order 5-10 doses to help yourself and others if necessary. Here’s what you, or someone you love, wants to know about Plan B.

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Short takes:

• It’s possible that some American voters simply do not understand why it matters who is president. As Eli Hager and Jeremy Schwartz report at ProPublica, “In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky,” they write. “In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to repeal an existing voucher program; even its reddest county, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters defeated an effort to add a “right to school choice” to the state constitution, language that might have allowed parents to send their kids to private schools on the public dime.” In fact, “have never won when put to voters. Instead, they lose by margins not often seen in such a polarized country.” (November 9, 2024)

• Back when the first open AI models were released, experts feared that deepfakes would sway voters. As it turns out, the real news was alarming and peculiar enough; AI’s effect has been to amplify people’s feelings and, simultaneously, erode their sense of reality. “The new tool of partisan propaganda amplified satire, false political narratives and hate speech to entrench partisan beliefs rather than change minds, according to interviews and data from misinformation analysts and AI experts,” Pranshu Verma, Will Oremus and Cat Zakrzewski write at The Washington Post. “As Trump prepares to enter office, experts said that AI, especially on X, may provide his supporters with a creative medium to foster community and an acceptance of controversial policy positions, such as mass deportations or abortion bans. AI-generated fakes, they said, will probably help influencers spread false narratives on loosely regulated social media platforms and bolster the partisan beliefs of millions of people.” (November 9, 2024)

• At UserMag, Taylor Lorenz tackles the “Harris should have gone on Joe Rogan” canard, arguing that the Democrats cannot, at this point, hope to challenge the GOP on the alternative media front because of “massive structural disadvantages in funding, promotion, and institutional support” accumulated on the rate over several decades. “The conservative media landscape in the United States is exceptionally well-funded, meticulously constructed, and highly coordinated,” Lorenz continues. “This creates a well oiled pipeline for conservative influencers: young TikTokers, YouTubers, livestreamers, or podcasters are discovered, developed, and pushed to larger platforms, often with the financial backing of conservative billionaires or organizations on the right who have long recognized the content creator industry a valuable means of shaping public opinion and policy.” The whole essay is worth reading—and in fact, I just signed up for a paid subscription. (November 7, 2024)