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A noted conservative author and former professor of national security affairs is laying waste to the media narrative that Donald Trump’s MAGA followers are America’s “forgotten” people, concluding instead that they, just like their leader, are in it for revenge.
“Trump wants payback,” writes The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, “so do millions of voters who have no one to blame for their sense of humiliation but themselves.”
“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,” writes Nichols, who has a PhD from Georgetown and taught for 25 years at the U.S. Naval War College. “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.”
Nichols also points to a piece by another writer at The Atlantic, McKay Coppins, who “attended a Trump rally in Iowa earlier this month, where he spoke with a nice lady named Kris.”
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Kris is “a 71-year-old retired nurse in orthopedic sneakers,” Coppins wrote. She “was smiley and spoke in a sweet, grandmotherly voice as she told me how she’d watched dozens of Trump rallies, streaming them on Rumble or FrankSpeech, a platform launched by the right-wing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell.”
Asked if Trump should still be president, Kris told Coppins, “By all means.”
“And I think behind the scenes he maybe is doing a little more than what we know about,” Kris said.
Asked, “What do you mean?” Kris said, “Military-wise.”
“The military is supposed to be for the people, against tyrannical governments,” she explained. “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.”
Coppins added: “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.”
Nichols asks, “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?”
He says, 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.”
Nichols blames the media and politicians for that false narrative that has driven so much of American politics since Trump came down the escalator in June of 2015.
“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.”
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He also chastises MAGA voters for the “alternate reality” they’ve constructed to explain the strings of losses they’ve had to endure, “including the 2018 Democratic-wave election, Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and the ‘red wave’ that never happened in 2022.”
Antiracism educator Tim Wise responded to Nichol’s piece, writing: “Exactly correct. The media refuses to admit it but the MAGA faithful are mean, vengeful people. Not decent, misunderstood, and ‘left behind’ people, but folks who are not decent.”
Condé Nast Legal Affairs Editor Luke Zaleski, unrelated to Nichol’s piece in The Atlantic, on Wednesday delivered a (possibly tongue-in-cheek) take on MAGA’s alternate reality.
“This is the actual story republicans are going with,” Zaleski wrote. “Trump built the wall and gave us world peace and then Democrats and China (Trump’s pal Xi) made up a phony virus that doesn’t make you sick—and trump caught it and made a beautiful vaccine that kills you and he saved us—before Joe stole the election and trump had to start an insurrection that didn’t happen that Nancy did just so they could make it look like trump did it even though he told the attackers he loved them and would pardon them and Obama secretly runs everything and the CIA and FBI do too and George soros and they started the war Putin started and are behind the Hamas attack as well and trump will stop it all in 24 hours.”
Read Nichols’ entire piece here.
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