Trump's Army of Social Vigilantes Are Coming for Payback

Our team spent the whole night there, anxiously watching the election results roll in. With each update — Republicans win a majority in the Senate, Trump wins North Carolina, then Georgia, then Pennsylvania — reality began setting in, hardening like concrete. Nervous optimism gave way to worry, worry gave way to disbelief, disbelief gave way to anger, anger gave way to fear — and then grief.

The race was still too close to call at the time, and as I got into my car, running through the remaining-but-rapidly-shrinking paths to victory that were still, for the time being, open to Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats, my phone dinged with a social media notification: “@maximillian.alvarez saved this post to laugh at you hahahaha hope you’re crying tonight. 2024 trump LFGGGG.”

The post this person was responding to was 32 weeks old — he’d been waiting a long time to get that dig in. Doing so clearly meant something to him, and former President Donald Trump’s triumphal return to power gave him the flashing green light he’d been hoping for.

A familiar feeling bubbled up as I read that message and as I’ve read through other notifications, posts and comments on TRNN’s YouTube channel the past few days, one I remember feeling constantly during Trump’s first term. The exhausted, on-edge feeling that comes from having to confront the worst parts of people on a regular basis, the parts that Trump gives his supporters bacchanalian permission to indulge and find strength in. The ugliness, the orgiastic meanness, the cackling vitriol for social norms, the dark glee found in flouting them and in trolling and bullying people; the lust for retribution and soft targets.

It’s all rushing back. It feels like it did eight years ago, but worse. First as farce, now as tragedy.

From 2015 to 2020, during the first stage of Trump’s political rise and the MAGA-morphosis of the Republican Party, an ungodly amount of ink was spilled and breath wasted by out-of-touch pundits fumbling to explain the Trump phenomenon and failing to understand the people who supported it. 

Yes, racism has always played a giant role, misogyny too. Yes, white working class people (and working people in general) have been feeling the brutal squeeze and daily pangs of ​“economic anxiety.” And yes, a lot of folks out there are ignorant, misinformed rubes who have been duped by one of the biggest con men in history. But one of the most important qualities of Trumpism that the pundit class never fully grasped is the sense of social power Trump instills in people — and how valuable that is to them.

Most of us have had some exposure to the nastiness of people trying to exercise that power online, and you’ll be seeing more of it again flaming up in social media comments, video live chats, direct messages, etc. Although, this is not the same media ecosystem we had in 2015-16. The Twitter and Facebook of that time are long gone, the power and visibility dynamics on these multiplying and changing platforms have rearranged dramatically since then, the ​“public sphere” is way more fractured, and our shared digital spaces (and physical spaces) are decreasing. So maybe you won’t see as much of the online projections of Trumpian bile from trolling strangers as before, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t currently heating back up to full boil as we speak, and you won’t be able to escape it entirely. None of us will. 

But that sense of vindictive empowerment extends well beyond the online world. You know what it looks like. It was on full display in Madison Square Garden two weeks ago, it was written on the faces of delegates cheerfully waving ​“Mass Deportation Now” signs at the Republican National Convention.

You can feel it simmering in the ether when you read lines like this, published last week inThe New York Times: ​“A wave of racist text messages summoning Black people to report for slavery showed up on phones across the United States, prompting the scrutiny of the F.B.I.” You could see it in the sinister smirk of Covington Catholic High School students surrounding Nathan Phillips, an Indigenous man, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in January of 2019. You could watch it transform regular-seeming people into monsters who shout things at families in restaurants like ​“Trump’s going to fuck you. … You fuckers need to leave … fucking Asian piece of shit.” You could hear it on the playgrounds, as Lucia Islas, president of the Comité Latino de Baltimore, recently reminded me: ​“Even in the schools … the American or other kids — they were making fun of the [Latino] kids like, ​‘Oh, the immigration is going to come for your family.’”

Here’s the thing: Leftists, progressives, community and labor organizers, social justice advocates, faith community leaders — we have all seen how beautiful of a thing it can be when regular people channel, build and exercise their power to effect change. And we all know how necessary that will be to fight back against what’s coming. But power is not a moral quantity on its own. It is a force to be harnessed — to achieve good and morally righteous ends, or dark and destructive ones. Right now, we are much, much closer to the latter scenario.

Trump gives people a tangible feeling of power to turn the tide of the ​“culture wars,” which is, in part, why MAGA-pilled people and MAGA pundits, politicians, podcasters and posters have spent years trying to turn virtually everything into a ​“woke” vs ​“anti-woke” culture war issue. In doing so, they’ve effectively taken issues of non-concern, as well as issues that could channel people’s genuine concerns towards a larger, systemic critique of capitalist economics and politics, and woven those issues into a vast cultural conspiracy. This has the dual effect of moving people farther away from identifying the capitalist pillage of our society — led by the very billionaires, profiteers and grifters Trump’s policies actually serve—as the real problem, while, at the same time, moving people closer to feeling like they are fighting for and winning something.

For MAGA, ​“the personal is political,” too, but for very different reasons than it is for Left-minded people who have invoked that phrase in the past. Personal grievances are elevated to the level of political struggles against a perceived evil that lives in other people who are ruining America — not in the political or economic systems hollowing our country out from the inside and cooking our planet — and interpersonal interactions become the always-available terrain upon which Trump supporters can feel deputized to ​“take the fight” to … someone.

When working people live in a society that has made them feel like they have so little decision-making and decision-affecting power — as workers, as political constituents, as consumers, as debtors and renters — and when the conditions that make people feel empowered to pursue and attain a good life continue to deteriorate, the desire and demand for any other kind of power increases dramatically. Trump and the MAGA movement encourage people to reclaim that lost sense of power by finding ways to exert power over people they know (neighbors, family members, coworkers, acquaintances they’re still connected to on social media) and people they don’t know, online and in public.

As a president, Trump’s oligarchy-serving style of gangster capitalist rule (now with a much stronger Christian nationalist identity) has only accelerated the deterioration of conditions that makes people feel this way — exacerbating the systematic squeezing and disempowering of working-class people and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the rich few — but he has always simultaneously met his base’s demand to feel powerful. 

It is a false, ugly, illusory kind of power, but it is power nonetheless. It is nothing compared to the power of, say, organizing and striking with your coworkers to get your boss to bend to your collective will, but it’s much easier to exert, opportunities to exercise it are in much greater supply, and it is much more immediately rewarding than any of the alternatives presented by liberals or the Left. Punching a person in the face is more instantly gratifying than scolding a faceless system. 

The visible discomfort one can prompt in others just by wearing the red MAGA hat in public. The despicable rage and terror cowardly men can generate by saying shit like ​“Your body, my choice.” The ​“liberal tears” one can suck out of strangers by trolling them online. The change in corporate course one can contribute to by boycotting ​“woke” companies. The pain and fear and panic one can extract from one’s perceived enemies in vulnerable, dehumanized and marginalized communities (immigrants, trans people, ​“radical Left lunatics,” etc). 

These are all tangible forms of social power that anyone in the MAGA movement can exercise anywhere to feel like they’re worth a damn and part of making change. And doing so bears localized but real results; it is a way for people who live in a world in which they have so little real power to experience firsthand the immediate, perversely intoxicating power of assaulting someone, affecting the feelings and actions of the people around you, disrupting their comfort, destroying their sense of safety, even violating their bodies.

Trump makes that possible for a lot of people, and it means something to them. What’s worse, it is a renewable resource, an infinite well of dark energy to draw from, because there will always be more people to attack, more scapegoats to throw on the pyre, as conditions fail to improve for the non-rich. And the twisted, naive hope of the disciples of MAGA is that their loyalty will always secure their spot on the side of the attackers, even if it won’t, and that they will be the beneficiaries of the promised prosperity supposedly waiting for them on the other side.

The desire for some kind of power, and the dark joy that comes from the Trumpian permissibility to exercise power over other people, is a mobilizing force. It does not cater to ​“the better angels of our nature,” but to the worst, cruelest and most antisocial parts of us. 

And the hard, terrifying truth from Election Day is that this force is strong enough to defeat a bankrupt Democratic Party, and it is certainly strong enough to crush and confound what exists of the Left in this country if we don’t take the threat seriously and mount a correspondingly serious, strategic and steadfast response.

But we can and must draw on the hard-won lessons we learned throughout the first Trump administration. One of the most crucial lessons, I think, is that fascism doesn’t just come from executive orders alone; the fascist creep comes from below, when a critical mass of people come to desire fascist solutions over the existing political alternatives, and when they feel empowered to play a role in bringing those ​“solutions” to fruition. For my entire life, establishment Democrats and Republicans have worked in their own shared and distinctly stupid ways to diminish people’s faith in the existing political options. ​“The Left” has not managed to provide a credible and viable political alternative, and that has enabled Trump to fill the void, channeling the naturally resulting malaise and unrest into fascistic desire.

A lot of people out there are ghoulishly delighted that the results of the election have given them that green light to shamelessly return to their worst selves. You are going to run into them more and more, and so will I. They may even make a point to seek you out. They have been waiting for this moment, all while their need for retribution has festered and the targets of that retribution have become more specific.

The most essential lessons I learned about how to confront this during the first Trump administration didn’t come from any pundit or media organization. They came from explicitly antifascist political and coalitional organizing.

1. Don’t let your enemy dictate the terms of your fear. Just because there are more people in the world telling you to fear them right now doesn’t mean you should fear everyone — many are as scared as you are, they feel just as distrustful of strangers in this moment, but most don’t want to see hate win either.
2. Working people, together, organized, are our own best protection against bullies and fascist violence.
3. A lot of regular folks out there who have succumbed to the MAGA soul rot can still be brought back, especially if they are compelled to struggle together with other working people, face to face, outside of their small social circles, and if that struggle provides them with real-world alternatives to addressing their problems, not just conceptual or moral arguments for why the path they’ve chosen is bad. That can counter these forces at the heart of Trump’s dark appeal — I’ve seen it. But we won’t be able to reach everyone, some are way too far gone. The bloodlust has consumed them. We risk the safety of all and any chance of political success by failing to recognize the difference and protect ourselves.
4. Out of darkness, when all seems lost and emergency is our reality, when we are forced to struggle together for survival, we find the ties that truly bind us, and the artificial walls that divide us start to come down. And once we learn to keep building and fighting from that starting point, moving upward and outward from there, a portal to a better world opens up.

Until and unless people stop fighting, hope for that world is never lost. 

If you ask me if there is hope now, my answer is the same as it always was: that depends on us and what we all do next.

Views expressed are those of the writer. As a 501©3 nonprofit, In These Times does not support or oppose any candidate for public office.