a politics of losing

A couple of weeks ago, I headed out to southern Pennsylvania for a live taping of Tucker Carlson's streaming show. The live show, which took place at a 7,000-seat stadium in Reading, Pennsylvania was just one of over a dozen stops across the country on Carlson's tour. This time, Carlson would be joined on stage with Alex Jones and Jack Posobiec.

By the time I got there in the late afternoon, downtown Reading was mostly deserted. The venue had closed off a few blocks on each side of the venue, Santander Stadium, and throngs of ticket holders wearing pro-Trump paraphernalia and Infowars shirts stood around waiting to pass through security. It was quiet, all things considered. There were no counterprotests as far as I could see. If naysayers were in the audience, they were keeping quiet. Yet even amid a series of poor parodies from Jason Hewlett, an entertainer traveling with Carlson, the speakers depicted the crowd as besieged.

“We’re going to talk about family values. Something that the people outside don’t want us to talk about,” Hewlett said after a rendition of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine” that incorporated impressions of Marge Simpson. As Hewlett continued to serenade the crowd with a dinosaur-themed parody of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and a rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” I sat in my seat wondering if, and how, I could've missed "the people outside" who posed such a grave challenge. But, as the night wore on, it became increasingly apparent that they just didn't exist.

I bring this up because it exemplifies how normal the miasma of paranoia and anger that is hanging over every aspect of the right at this moment has become. 2024 is a nail-biter of an election, and Trump is arguably outperforming given that he's a convicted felon who staged an attempted coup less than four years prior. From Trump's rage-filled rants about the "enemies from within" to his, and his supporters', insistence that the United States will disappear if Kamala Harris wins, each passing day the right finds a new manner in which to portray itself as the victim. The MAGA movement has established itself, laying deeper and deeper roots, around a politics not just immersed in grievance and resentment, but in losing. The problem is that, on Tuesday, they'll take the rest of us with it regardless of the outcome.

Since Trump announced his presidency in 2015 in a vicious anti-immigrant rant, his movement of supporters have expanded their list of enemies to include an array of ever-growing, and increasingly nebulous, categories of people.

Trump and his acolytes have been far from subtle in this shift. Throughout the 2024 campaign, the former president has repeatedly referenced the supposed phantasmagoria of horrors that face his supporters in increasingly vague ways.

"We're running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala, and far more powerful than them. It is a massive, vicious, crooked radical-left machine that runs today's Democrat party. They're just vessels," Trump said during a rally in Madison Square Garden in downtown New York City.

"I know many of them. It's just this amorphous group of people. But they're smart and they're vicious, and we have to defeat them. And when I say 'the enemy from within,' the other side goes crazy. Becomes a sound — oh, how can he say. No, they've done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within," he continued.

Not all of Trump's enemies are "amorphous." They include current and former lawmakers, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as various media outlets, supporters of the liberation of Palestine, election workers, and critics of the reactionary Supreme Court that his administration granted us. The Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation has funded a project that intended to investigate civil servants whom they believe are insufficiently loyal to the president in anticipation of firing or reassigning them, according to an AP report from June. Others border on the fantastical. After authorities arrested a man named Ryan Routh near Trump's golf club in Florida earlier this year, in what Routh had described as "an assassination attempt," the pro-Trump media blamed Ukraine. Routh had spent some time there, according to multiple news reports, as have hundreds of thousands of Americans, including myself. But objective reporting is irrelevant to conspiracy theorists, of course.

Some of these crusades have already begun to play out. This week, Trump filed a suit against CBS News, arguing that the network had interfered with the election in its "60 Minutes" interview with Harris. In a similarly ridiculous move, the campaign also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, in which it claimed that promoting stories that covered Trump critically amounted to an illegal donation to the Harris campaign.

Others enemies operate on a deeper, demonic level. In a clip released this week featuring former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Trump-aligned talkshow host describes a farcical nightmare where he was attacked by a demon. "I had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they're bleeding," Carlson told Scooter Downey, a film producer who helped with Carlson's insane Jan. 6 documentary. In the clip, Carlson never shows his wounds. Downey, as far as the viewer can tell, never asks.

It's not my place to dictate the veracity of a spiritual experience. But when one's triumph over evil heeds so closely to a set worldview, lacking the expansive vision that Christian theology ought to dictate, it's safe to call bullshit.

In their 2019 book The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment, Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep describe white nationalism as a recurrent and consistent problem within American politics. Through an exploration of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and the emergence of Trump as a political figure, they seek to find a means through which one can predict the violent, chaotic manifestations of white grievance that bolstered both.

"In every rise of the Ku Klux Klan—and in the emergence of Trump—white nationalist challenges were potent because they linked lost power to collective identities. This gave supporters a target to scapegoat and a sense of solidarity among the losers. But it would have been impossible if socially constructed categories of race and religion did not correlate so strongly with positions in the American hierarchy," McVeigh and Estep write.

If Trump's administration served as an apt expression of this "lost power" being tied into collective identities, then the progress of his movement after the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, deepened it even further. Over the course of four years, the MAGA movement has shifted oddly seamlessly between celebrating the riot through Jan. 6-themed pinball machines at CPAC and vigils, to depicting it as an artificial operation concocted by a ghostly cadre of federal agents. Even though it may appear logically inconsistent, these two visions of Jan. 6 can co-exist within the rightwing imagination.

In a way, there is no winning this election, whatever the outcome. A second Trump administration would be more chaotic than the first, emboldened by years of festering authoritarian currents and an expanding array of unhinged loyalists. In the case of Trump loss, I'm referring, in part, to the extensive reporting detailing his allies plans to challenge the election at every turn. But there's another, perhaps even more, difficult aspect to overcome.

If Trump loses — and that's a big if — he may step aside, perhaps unwillingly but eventually. Yet the "sense of solidarity among the losers," to borrow McVeigh and Estep's phrase, remains strong. Too much dark money has been poured into causes and organizations important to those dedicated to portraying the right as perpetual victims.