More Than Anything Else, Trump Wants Payback

So Do Millions Of Voters Who Have No One To Blame For Their Sense Of Humiliation But Themselves

Generally speaking, Trump doesn’t have a policy agenda in mind— just winning for the sake of winning (and for staying out of prison) and… just for revenge. His congressional MAGAts look like they may lose on Trump’s top short-term priority: shutting down the government tomorrow. MAGA Mike seems determined to go around the MAGA hold on the Rules Committee by putting a continuing resolution on the suspension calendar and accepting Democratic votes to keep the government funded. Extremist members of the Shut-It-Down Caucus like Matt Rosendale (R-MT), Bob Good (R-VA), Eric Burlison (R-MO) and Andrew Clyde (R-GA) might not be happy about it but they realize there’s nothing they can do about it.

Ohio Republican Max Miller lashed out at Freedom Caucus members who continue to gum up the legislative works “to elevate their platform and raise money.”

“What kills me is when I have to look at my colleagues who continuously put themselves before the country. And they know what they're doing is wrong,” the freshman lawmaker told reporters, adding, “We need better people to come here on the Republican side.”

Miller blamed the current dysfunction on the dozen-or-so Freedom Caucus members he said are always seeking to extract concessions from leadership— with no fear of reprisals. 

“It’s going to sow division,” Miller said of the deferential treatment shown to the biggest rabble-rousers. He urged House GOP leaders to clamp down on all that by “removing committee assignments, cutting off access to fundraising… and actually making them pay for their actions.”

“Because the majority of this body does not agree with the minority of it. And that should not continue to happen,” Miller said.

After World War I, Germans wanted revenge against the imaginary "stab in the back" from their fellow citizens-- and their anger and fury led to the widespread embrace of Hitler and Naziism. Their country was ruined and Hitler gave them between 6.6 and 8.8 million deaths, something like 11% of the population. They showed them! (Imagine 36.52 million Americans; just sayin'.)

Yesterday, Tom Nichols dealt with the revenge part of the equation, noting that Trump’s deplorable supporters want to same thing— revenge against the rest of us. “The Republican base,” he wrote, “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… 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.’”

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.