It didn’t begin with Trump, but it helped create him
The MAGA movement is a convergence of Trump’s personality and long-seething conservative resentment. The malignancy started with the upheavals of the 1960s, and developed gradually until it bloomed with Donald Trump’s political career.
The warning sign
A contrast of two consecutive Republican presidential defeats is instructive. In 2008, Obama beat McCain. Republicans accepted defeat gracefully. Recall how different they took Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012. Convinced they couldn’t lose an honest election, they claimed the election was fixed. States were threatening secession. Petitions for it were circulated, and for some states, tens of thousands of signatures were gathered. Romney was a weak candidate. They couldn’t have expected a great showing. Conservatives hated him, but he was better than an African American in the White House.
The difference in acceptance shows a worrisome growing resentment that would manifest with the horror of Donald Trump.
The festering history
Conservatives have always resented the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War protests, and Watergate. The reactionary policies of the first two are the continuous attack on primary and secondary education, leading to school choice and the homeschooling movements. Also, Republicans changed higher education from a grant-based to a loan-based system. I witnessed this firsthand. Facing a lifetime of debt that made career success essential, college students became cowed. Campus protests since the switch have been muted compared to other democracies.
“How dare you punish our crimes”
Watergate: There’s a myth among conservatives that Nixon got a raw deal because he did nothing worse than any other president. They believed investigators and the press targeted him and kept digging until they hit pay dirt. Roger Stone, a fanboy of Nixon, shows the connection between Watergate and Trump’s election.
Successive conservative scandals like Iran-Contra added infection to the wounds, but scandals with Republicans kept happening. Maybe their ideology is intrinsically corrupt?
Naturally concluding that good, moral, conservative people couldn’t be worse than those degenerate liberals, Republicans investigated Democrats incessantly, with or without determining crimes first. GOP politicians made a mockery of “probable cause.” People old enough will recall Kenneth Starr’s five-year fishing expedition into Bill Clinton that started by looking for fraud and finally uncovered a blow job.
Bill Clinton’s impeachment was supposed to even the score for Watergate and Iran-Contra. The right wing really thought they had him. The fact that they failed to remove Clinton from office after he lied to Starr made them livid. Never mind that Starr’s investigation was mission creep from the very get-go. Never mind that there were no appeals for an impeachment, so Congress has to get it right the first time.
New target acquired
After Clinton’s acquittal, Republicans resentfully turned up the smears against Hillary Clinton for decades. They turned her into a criminal mastermind, a mass murderer, and a secret leader of the deep state. Even otherwise reasonable non-conservatives began to believe it. The Democratic National Committee made a huge mistake underestimating the damage to her candidacy.
Conservative theory was everyone had some crime in their history, right? Conservatives likely believe it because they all had crime in their history. By 2015, conservatives were so convinced they could find Hillary’s corruption if they just kept investigating and getting the press to focus on her that they could never clear her.
When they kept on finding nothing, they concluded that her conspiracy was so clever and had infiltrated the government with “the deep state.” They made no evidence sound even more guilty.
Enter the Orange Rot
In 2015, when Donald Trump slithered onto the political scene, he brought two personality traits to the field: 1) A well-documented, lifetime use of revenge. This wasn’t just part of his personality but a life-long power strategy; 2) a pathological determination to never accept defeat. (I knew about these dispositions and predicted he would be trouble when he was decisively defeated in an election. Boy, was I right.)
I don’t have to source his proud use of revenge because he’s boasted about it and has sworn by it as part of his business strategy for decades. Examples on YouTube are low-hanging fruit. His quote, “When someone hits you, hit them back ten times harder.” Of course, since it’s a power strategy, he’s carried it into his political career.
His stubborn determination to always win and never accept defeat means he’ll stay on the field and demand extra innings when he’s behind by ten runs. He might covet the presidency now because he fears prosecution, but Trump would be doing essentially the same thing even if he weren’t facing scores of charges.
Both a pathology and a strategy
Ambition for revenge for some wrong done to you is typical, if shameful. However, when it’s central to a power strategy, a person must constantly take names and settle scores without end. Why? Because when you take excessive, insane revenge, people then fear you. The more power you mint from fear, the scarier you have to be.
So, Trump’s personality perfectly fits the resentment that has festered in the political right for fifty years. Now, it’s virtually the only policy he has and the only one MAGAs demand. He convinced his followers through magical thinking that revenge would make the economy thrive and make other nations our colonies. It’s called Making America Great Again.
What does Trump propose besides a fascist penchant for metamorphic anger toward immigrants, other races, liberals, and our allies? High-flush toilets? Incandescent light bulbs? What freedom!