When MAGA can’t muster the political power to project their hatred, they become angry. They don’t know why they hate and they don’t even realize that their angry stems from their inability to make use of their hate to make others feel bad. They’re prevented from becoming aware of this by their need to express their emotions. It’s not something that stems from them as individuals, but a collective emotion that they’ve been taught to feel and taught not to question. They’ve become incapable of questioning it entirely.
Donald Trump probably really thought he was an American his whole life. His MAGA supporters probably also thought they were Americans. They flew the U.S. flag and wore U.S.A. t-shirts and burned fireworks on Independence Day and said the pledge of allegiance and they thought they knew what it meant to be an American. They thought it was money, or arrogance, or simply being here and having a social security card or they thought it was having the world’s biggest military or having a decent track record of having won some wars. Their parents may not have known what it was to be an American, but probably most of them did. It was forgotten along the way and mixed-up with something simpler, something more selfish and easy to rationalize. It was a points system built into their heads that they imagined individually, but not dissimilarly. Most of the MAGA crowd has never traveled abroad or made close friends with someone from abroad. They don’t want to imagine that they’ve been used by wealthy media figures who broadcast to them every day and every night what to think. They don’t want to imagine that it’s all just a sham to destroy every part of their government that ever helped them and to do so under the guise of saving them money. They won’t be better off for having lived under a second Trump administration, as they weren’t better off for having lived under a first one. They may never acknowledge it. They may be too proud and too filled with displaced anger. Many of them didn’t make it through the first Trump administration, having died of a completely preventable communicable disease that their President told them wasn’t a problem. The longer they listen to him, the more they suffer. They try to make up for it by expressing anger at members of the other party, but they are only disguising their insecurities. Some of them tote guns to mask those same insecurities. They fantasize of using those guns to build self-esteem, the kind they didn’t find through relationships. They learned to threaten and express anger and their media reinforces it every day and every night.
They’ve been trained to feel and exhibit a pavlovian response to such terms as “death tax” — never questioning why they were paying health care premiums to companies that would never pay their claims. Never realizing that those health care premiums were the real death tax, but that’s not what the Republican party wants their voters to know. They need the death tax to be what is convenient for them to win votes, and so the dystopian application of the word came to be used as a synonym for the inheritance tax. The inheritance tax affects the billionaire-class more than anyone else and those are the people setting the policies in today’s Republican party. The little guy is just there to be programmed. If they can program their voters to hate the inheritance tax, there’s no chance of ever having a wealth tax, which would ensure that some of Elon Musk’s money makes its way back to those voters someday. They program their voters to hate education because it turns people into Democrats, never acknowledging that those educated people are better able to ask questions about policies, which is why they choose to become Democrats in the first place. It’s all very simple for them: hate anything that could be correlated to an election loss or to lower political contributions and love anything that could be correlated to an election win or higher political contributions. Policies don’t matter unless you’re rich and then they only need to help you more and more.
