Friends, thank you for your patience as I have spent a few weeks processing the election results. A question people have been asking me a lot is “How did this happen? What are they thinking? How could so many people vote for him?”
I am not in the business of policy analysis or campaign critiques (and, for what it’s worth, I don’t buy any arguments that Harris/Walz could have done anything differently to impact these results). I am in the business of telling you what and how the MAGA faithful think.
And I have some insights coming from the rallies in the last weeks of the campaign and from what’s happening on Trump forums now. This is the first post in a series on some key things that inspired Trump voters.
One event I keep coming back to is the Tucker Carlson speech in Duluth, Georgia, a couple weeks before the election. The only thing that really matters from it is the 90 second clip included here. I can’t fully describe how disturbing it was to witness this moment in person. It was so overtly sexual, which is weird on its own, and orders of magnitude creepier because he’s talking about giving a hard spanking to his (hypothetical) 15-year-old daughter. The audience ate. this. up. You can pick up on some of this after his initial “daddy’s home” line, but they were enthralled the whole time. Tucker closed with “Daddy’s Home - and he’s pissed!” When Trump eventually took the stage, the crowd chanted “Daddy” at him.
It encapsulates a couple themes that emerged after months of talking to people at rallies and reading the forums. First, they cannot get enough of the offensive, crass, boundary pushing. They do this themselves on their forums and it’s also one of the main reasons they come to rallies. The vulgarity of the comments is itself attractive, but even more so because it will upset outsiders. For example, consider this tweet about Tucker’s comments:
And then this MAGA reply:
MAGA finds a real glee in upsetting others by violating social norms. It is a rejection of communal responsibility and a flex of power; that’s a too-fancy way of saying what they really mean, which is , “Screw you, I’ll do what I want!”
The second aspect of this is everyday sadism, a personality trait that describes people who enjoy causing or watching other people suffer. This idea of punishing anyone they deem out-of-line feeds that, and the appeal of Tucker’s sexualization of it is, quite clearly, part of the appeal as well. These are the same men who spent time spitting the line, “Your body, my choice” after the election.
Trump himself panders to all of this, and taking it further and further as the campaign wore on. I think a key for people who are policy voters or principle voters is to realize that there are others, and many MAGAs fall into this group, who vote based on who tells them that their worst impulses are ok and that they are right. To find a candidate and a community who celebrates that, as MAGA provides, will be irresistible for a lot of people.
Of course, these aren’t the reasons everyone voted for Trump, but they are common among his most ardent supporters. Their reaction to Tucker’s creepy speech in this clip really illustrates it.
I’ll be looking deeper at some of these traits in the coming weeks, especially digging into the everyday sadism.
Oh and if you’re interested in joining the resistance and comfortable using a VPN and private browsing mode, please drop me an email at jengolbeck@gmail.com.
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