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So, the other day, I was almost run off the road. This massive Ford F-150 was careening down the street, riding my ass so hard that I almost wanted to demand a dinner out of it. I swerved, the truck pushed past me, honking his horn aggressively and flipping me off.
Now, I could say that this was Jersey tradition, but it’s not usually the case. I saw the sticker on his truck: a Trump sticker. I sighed. This was far from the first time I’ve noticed painfully aggressive driving from Trumpists.
With Trump’s win, I assumed that Trumpists would kinda mellow out. The opposite seemed to happen. Despite the win they were clamoring for, they still seem, well, angry.
There’s no smiling during this time that they got what they asked for. It’s just a low boil of rage simmering beneath the surface. So, uh, what’s the deal here?
Like many leftists, I started off being puzzled.
I mean, GOP voters got what they wanted. What more do they need? Why aren’t they happy? If this was a Harris win, I know I’d be jumping for joy, crying tears of elation, and probably hosting a Kamala party with a nice charcuterie board.
For a group of people that just got the entire government to turn red, MAGAts don’t seem joyful. They just seem a bit off — in that alarming, unsettling way you’d expect a school shooter to act.
I believe part of this deals with the fact that MAGA is an anger-based movement.
It’s no secret that the GOP has been running on a platform of anger, fear, and hate. The GOP does not see Democrats as neighbors. They don’t see immigrants as friends. And they don’t see transpeople as regular people trying to make ends meet.
The men of the modern GOP also don’t even view women as their partners in crime. They view them as appliances and sex toys, which is why they’re passing laws to make it impossible for women to leave once they’re married or pregnant.
In other words, their propaganda hit hard. They see us as the enemy, not as fellow countrymen. The people who voted for Trump internalized those messages to the point where many of them have become rage addicts.
Rage addiction gives people a dopamine rush. They want to fight. They want to rant, scream, and shout at someone. They’re not happy if they don’t have a target to rail against.
In a weird way, a lot of people in MAGA seem to have low-key wanted a Harris win. It’d at least give them a person to blame when their lives didn’t turn out the way they wanted to. Now, they don’t even have that.
So, they’re stuck being angry for anger’s sake, with no one to blame aside from the new “hate du jour” on the TV screen.
The other big part of the anger might deal with them actually facing social consequences.
The second time Trump ran, I knew a lot of people who stopped talking to their MAGA family members. It’s not a new thing. Now that Trump won a second term, a lot more people have decided to ghost the MAGAs in their lives.
You can see entire forum posts (and even forums) dealing with the estrangement waves across the country. MAGA parents can’t grasp why their LGBT kids don’t want to talk to them. MAGA exes can’t figure out why their girlfriends ghosted.
It’s almost as if people suddenly just got cold on them! It couldn’t possibly be the consequences of their voting choices, could it? (I mean, yes, it absolutely is that, but they’re not going to cop to it.)
Even if they didn’t face full estrangement, it’s hard to deny how many people will openly glare at Trumpers after the outcome of the election. They made themselves pariahs among decent people and it’s all on them.
This means MAGAts and Qs get to enjoy each other’s company…and only each other’s company. Considering how popular X, Truth Social, and Parler are, I can’t imagine why this would be upsetting to them.
Some also feel emboldened by Trump’s reelection.
A large portion of America judges acceptable behavior by who’s in power. Part of the rage we’re seeing isn’t new. It’s always been there. It’s just that racists/misogynists/
They see President Cheeto in office, they assume it’s okay to start slinging slurs. To them, it’s open season! Their hate has been legitimized, right alongside the insurrection of January 6th.
AI also has something to do with it.
Did you notice that AI bots tend to flood social media before elections? Most of those bots are conservative-learning AI-based trolls. In other words, they’re not real people.
If you’re getting a lot more harassment online from conservatives, chances are that a large portion of that is from a bot farm. Bots make up almost half of all internet traffic these days, meaning it might not be a human hate thing.
Of course, there’s also a flipside to this. Bots can also embolden and encourage actual humans to leave angry, harassing messages online. So, it’s a double-whammy.
Finally, I like to think a large part of it deals with fear of much more real consequences.
One thing I’ve noticed with “macho Alpha” men is that they tend to refuse to show fear. Instead of fear, they make a huge song and dance in order to seem irate.
They beat their chest, bellow, insult, and threaten others because they are so not scared. It’s almost a primal thing. They figure that if they can intimidate others, they won’t have to deal with consequences.
I also noticed that a lot of people voted for Trump because they wanted to make a statement about America or just to do some weird identity performance thing.
People who did this didn’t actually care about what Harris said. Nothing she could have done would have swayed them because they voted with their emotions, not their brains.
They didn’t actually like Trump and they basically voted for him hoping that he wouldn’t follow through on his promises. They heard others warn them about Project 2025 and more. These fuckers just didn’t want to believe it.
They thought, “I’ll vote for him to be edgy/part of the group, but nothing will really change that bad, right? He might hurt others, but not me! Right? RIGHT?!”
Well, they are now starting to see the writing on the wall. In pursuit of being part of the “in-crowd” or to try to make a stupid statement, they completely fucked up their lives. The US government is being dismantled because of them and many have already lost their jobs because of it too.
For these folks, their “anger” is not really anger.
It’s a mix of fear, shame, and a weird effort to try to cover up the fact that they’re upset that they fucked up their lives. It’s no different than seeing a toddler throw a tantrum because they broke a toy. It’s an emotionally stunted cry for help.
Unfortunately for them, there’s not much they can do to better their lot. They shit their beds. They can now sleep in it.
