Many of his voters can’t accept what’s happened over the past several years, and they blame other Americans.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee, and he has vowed revenge on his political enemies. His voters want revenge as well—on their fellow citizens.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Years of Humiliation
Last night’s Iowa caucus results confirm that Donald Trump is almost certainly headed for the GOP presidential nomination. So much for the hopes of establishment Republicans (the handful who remain, anyway) and other conservatives that voters would refuse to join Trump’s personal crusade for vengeance against the American system of government.
Such hopes were always the thinnest of reeds: The Republican base actively embraces Trump’s grievances; it emulates his pettiness; it supports his childlike inability to accept responsibility. These voters are not sighing in resignation and voting for the lesser of two or three or four evils. They are getting what they want—because they, too, are set on revenge.
These voters are not settling a political score. Rather, they want to get even with other Americans, their own neighbors, for a simmering (and likely unexpected) humiliation that many of them seem to have felt ever since swearing loyalty to Trump.
A lot of people, especially in the media, have a hard time accepting this simple truth. Millions of Americans, stung by the electoral rebukes of their fellow citizens, have become so resentful and detached from reality that they have plunged into a moral void, a vortex that disintegrates questions of politics or policies and replaces them with heroic fantasies of redeeming a supposedly fallen nation.
Poll numbers on this issue are dispiriting. A third of Republicans—and four in 10 voters who have a favorable view of Trump—agree with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” But violence against whom? We are not under foreign occupation. When people talk about “resorting to violence” they are, by default, talking about violence against their fellow citizens, some of whom have already been threatened merely for working in their communities as election volunteers.
But perhaps such views are merely overheated samplings from super-red MAGA pockets, and the heartland voters are more sensible. No such luck. In Iowa, 19 percent of 502 likely GOP caucus attendees said Trump’s statement that he might have “no choice” but to lock up his political opponents made them more inclined to vote for him. One out of five might not seem like a lot, but another 43 percent said they didn’t care one way or another. Trump’s ranting about “terminating” parts of the Constitution made only 14 percent more likely to vote for him, but again, 36 percent didn’t care. What a triumph: Only one in eight Iowa GOP caucus voters supports trashing the Constitution.
The words of actual Trump supporters are even more unnerving than looking at raw poll numbers. My friend, the writer David French, lives deep in MAGA country. “You can go to social gatherings here in the South,” he wrote last week, and hear people whisper to friends, “Don’t talk about politics in front of Dad. He’s out of control.” David is also a lawyer, and he notes:
I know that rage and conspiracies aren’t unique to the right. During my litigation career, I frequently faced off against the worst excesses of the radical left. But never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.
Meanwhile, much farther north, my colleague McKay Coppins attended a Trump rally in Iowa earlier this month, where he spoke with a nice lady named Kris, “a 71-year-old retired nurse in orthopedic sneakers” who watches Trump rallies on Rumble or FrankSpeech (a platform launched by the MyPillow founder, Mike Lindell) and believes that the 2020 election was “most definitely” stolen.
“You think Trump should still be president?” I asked.
“By all means,” she said. “And I think behind the scenes he maybe is doing a little more than what we know about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Military-wise,” she said. “The military is supposed to be for the people, against tyrannical governments,” she went on to explain. “I hope he’s guiding the military to be able to step in and do what they need to do. Because right now, I’d say government’s very tyrannical.” If the Democrats try to steal the election again in 2024, she told me, the Trump-sympathetic elements of the military might need to seize control.
What can turn an ordinary person—a father, the pleasant older lady who lives down the street—into the family powder keg, or even a deluded seditionist who hopes the U.S. military will seize control of the country?
The usual answer, when Trump ran the first time, was that these were “forgotten” voters, people “left behind” by globalization and a leftist political culture, who were hurling out a giant primal yawp of opposition. These were never empirically sustainable explanations, but empathetic reporters and deeply concerned politicians went on listening tours to diners and gas stations anyway. When ordinary Americans would say shocking, indecent, and un-American things, their flummoxed interlocutors remained steadfast in the belief that more listening and more empathetic nodding would put things right in a few years.
And yet, nothing worked. Trump and his right-wing media courtiers—who tend to the anger of the older, white middle class the way florists lovingly raise orchids—fed the GOP base a continual stream of rage, especially as Trump started to pile up electoral defeats. These voters now want to get even with their fellow citizens not for what’s been done to Trump but for what they feel has been done to them. They were certain that 2016 would finally bring them the recognition and respect they craved. Instead, Trump set them up for a steady diet of ego-bruising rebukes from other voters.
Much like Trump himself, these voters are unable to accept what’s happened over the past several years. Trump, in so many ways, quickly made fools of them; his various inanities, failures, and possible crimes sent them scrambling for ever more bizarre rationalizations, defenses of the indefensible that separated them from family and friends. If in 2016 they suspected, rightly or wrongly, that many Americans looked down on them for any number of reasons, they now know with certainty that millions of people look down on them—not for who they are but for what they’ve supported so vocally.
Strings of losses, including the 2018 Democratic-wave election, Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and the “red wave” that never happened in 2022, forced MAGA voters to construct an alternate reality in which the patriotic, hardworking majority has been repeatedly thwarted by schemes so complicated that SPECTRE would have struggled to execute them. Worse, a culture (especially in the media) that for a time was desperate to understand their views now either ignores them or treats them as dangerous curiosities.
The only good thing that came out of Iowa last night is that we are now spared further public performances from Vivek Ramaswamy. And it is a hopeful sign that nearly half of the caucus-goers chose someone besides Trump. But we are fooling ourselves if we think that the coming year will be just another peaceful competition between two political parties. Trump wants payback; so do millions of voters who have no one to blame for their sense of humiliation but themselves.
Related:
Today’s News
Evening Read
Pets Really Can Be Like Human Family
By Katherine J. Wu
For the 10 years they were together, Kristen de Marco and her terrier Gracie were inseparable. De Marco brought her dog to work each day, and routinely left dinners and parties early to rush home to her; she skipped her 20th high-school reunion because Gracie was sick and none of the available hotels could accommodate a dog. De Marco’s dedication sometimes struck friends, family, and colleagues as odd. When they heard that de Marco would pay to bring Gracie on every single plane ride she took, “people were like, It’s just a dog, put her in the boarding facility,” de Marco told me. “But she was so attached to me, and I to her.” To her, Gracie was family—“my first child.”
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Pause. To game the algorithm, people are posting longer videos, Caroline Mimbs Nyce writes. It’s bloating the internet with junk.
Listen. In the latest episode of our podcast How to Keep Time, the diarist and author Sarah Manguso and the psychology professor Charan Ranganath discuss the science of memories.
Play our daily crossword.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
