If there’s one thing that President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA movement stand for, it’s the fetishization of their own perceived victimhood.
Whether it’s the “Deep State,” migrants, the “woke mind virus,” “globalist elites,” legacy media, prosecutors attempting to hold Trump accountable for his attempted self-coup, Republicans who refused to go along with the big lie — in MAGA minds, something or someone has always been keeping them down.
But after Trump’s stunning victory this week, we can say goodbye to all that. There’s nothing above MAGA to keep MAGA down.
If there’s one thing that Trump and MAGA stand for, it’s the fetishization of their own perceived victimhood.
They’ve got the White House. The Senate. The Supreme Court. Quite possibly, the House, too. They’ve got the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and other right-wing Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires ready to remake the federal government — including stripping regulations on the businesses they own and putting loyal acolytes in top positions of power. And they’ve got the country’s most prominent anti-vaxx zealot and science ignoramus Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ready to “make America healthy again.”
As Musk triumphantly remarked to Trump supporters on X, parroting a popular QAnon catchphrase, “You are the media now.”
But it’s more than that: MAGA is the establishment now. They’ve got the keys to the country, it’s their ship to sail majestically on the open seas or run aground.
If you blamed Democrats for inflation, then you now get to see how Trumponomics will work in action. Sure, inflation is a global crisis created in large part by the Covid pandemic and the years it’s taken for supply chains to get back up to speed. And, yeah, the U.S. weathered the inflation storm better than most advanced economies, the Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates, and the country somehow managed to avoid a recession — but the vibes were bad. And that’s the main reason every governing party — left- or right-wing — that faced election in a developed country this year went down in defeat.
Trump, as is his wont, avoided many policy specifics on the campaign trail, but he did promise numerous tax cuts (which will pump yet more air into the balloon that is our national debt) and severe tariffs that economic experts say will exacerbate inflation, explode prices for everyday goods and lead to higher interest rates. His promised mass deportations would also bring about economic calamity, to say nothing of untold social unrest. But flipping the bird to experts is as much a part of the MAGA ethos as is its victim mentality. So enjoy the ride, MAGA. You are the economy now.
If you believe Trump kept us out of wars — despite his expansion of the global drone war, manic saber-rattling and undermining of U.S. alliances that contributed to global conflict — then now’s your chance to watch Trump fulfill his promise to “end all wars” around the world.
That could very well mean the weakening of NATO, the abandonments of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin or Taiwan to China, and it could worsen a situation that the left-leaning Israeli news outlet Ha’aretz characterizes as “ethnic cleansing” in northern Gaza, or lead to the annexation of the West Bank — which Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir called for in the wake of Trump’s victory. I personally don’t think the world will look more “peaceful” if any of those came to pass, but MAGA’s got a mandate — you are America’s foreign policy now.
Trump handily won an election that he was fully prepared to falsely claim was rigged if he lost. Irony’s dead. If you believe a second Trump administration will be less “divisive” than the Biden administration, X marks the spot. Musk bought the company formerly known as Twitter in 2022 because he incorrectly believed conservative voices were being targeted and censored — even enlisting sympathetic journalists to spin this narrative through cherry-picked emails that they completely misunderstood into the infamous “Twitter Files.” And while Musk’s renamed X has its siloed left-wing echo chambers, X regularly throttles Musk’s critics and political opponents while boosting the reach of his MAGA allies. Though hemorrhaging money and users, Trump’s victory solidifies X as the MAGA movement’s echo chamber — larded with racism, misinformation and ponderous, essay-length posts from Trump-supporting civility cops. Blame the legacy news to your heart’s content — you are indeed the MAGA media now. And if you’re committed to the idea that President Trump 2.0 will bring “freedom” back, for all his “free speech” bluster, Trump has always been hostile to free expression — threatening and enacting government action on his opponents, filing financially-crippling bogus lawsuits against news organizations and literally calling for his political opponents to be imprisoned. Think the left’s “wokeness” or “P.C. culture” represent censorious tyranny? Now you control the institutions — you’re the speech police now. It is, of course, ironic that a right-wing populist movement so animated by its opposition to left-wing “snowflake culture” is itself a collective of self-avowed victims. But that contradiction is of little import now. Trump won big. He’s likely going to escape accountability for trying to steal the 2020 election and — allegedly — top secret national security documents. He’s purged the Republican Party of dissenters. He handily won an election that he was fully prepared to falsely claim was rigged if he lost. Irony’s dead. It’s your country, now, MAGA. No more crybaby whining about the establishment. You’re in charge and the success or failure of Trump’s second administration will be yours to own. We’ll check back in on your progress in four years.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. 
