Victimhood Nationalism - MAGAReport 4/20/25

How the MAGA victimhood identity is limiting conversation on pro-Trump social media

There has been an interesting and subtle transformation happening over on the MAGA boards I monitor. For years, and through the first month of this Trump administration, the users were on top of every piece of news. Yes, they had an unbalanced focus on the stories that the far-right outrage machine was pushing - anti-trans stuff, anti-immigrant stories, Hunter Biden’s laptop - but they chatted about most of the big stories of the day. But now, most of the big news is entirely absent.

I wrote last month about how there was no discussion of tariffs after they were introduced and markets dropped. Since then, it has become a pattern. The top articles on the forums are almost exclusively stories of Trump’s “wins” or stories that make his enemies look bad. There are long discussions about any immigrant arrested for any crime, wild bad-faith interpretations of comments from Democrats, and poorly informed anti-institutional legal takes*.

The trend to ignore anything negative about Trump is so obvious that even some people within the community are noticing. On a popular thread titled “Not much talk about tariffs anymore. I guess the sky isn’t falling.”, we can see this exchange (bolding from me):

• didn't Trump cave on all the tariffs? -cptKloss2

  • He did and the world has been increasing trade with each other as the economic aftershocks are being weathered. Even the 90 day flat 10% has injected so much chaos many are looking to more stabled and trusted alternatives to the US since this has already screwed the markets; this place has stopped talking about it because unless its “winning” folks dont want to hear it. -Klaus73

    • "chaos" is the preferred word choice to attack Trump. It has been since 2016. -Cacciali_Via

  • Well, no, it's a negotiation tactic. He initiated a flat tariff that appears to be permanent going forward. Any country that doesn't negotiate new terms by the end of the 90 day pause will have the previous reciprocal tariffs applied again. Most countries throughout the world have called to renegotiate. - nakedjay

  • No. -mullethawk

On one hand, these boards were never a place that critically discussed Trump’s strategies or policies. However, when Trump was not in power, they were engaged with the news of the day. In the last couple months, the distribution of topics has shifted glaringly to avoid anything that looks bad for Trump.

One interesting theory that I think explains part of what’s happening is a concept called “victimhood nationalism”, which researchers define as an identity narrative “that is constructed through narrations of perceived or collective trauma and often leads to grievances being projected onto international actors who may or may not have been actually involved with the grievance.” Think blaming China for covid. Think blaming other countries for sending “bad people” into the U.S. to commit crimes. Think creating tariffs to punish other countries for making our economy weak. The MAGA victimhood narrative has been strong since 2016. It was easy to lean into when Trump was out of power. Now that he is in office, there are negative things happening that he is clearly responsible for. In those cases, these MAGA followers collectively ignore the stories.

I do not think MAGA is a cult in the formal definition of the term, but man does it feel more cult-like over there than ever before.

* like this one on the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Alien Enemies Act: “In the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order”.