Navigating the era of High Trumpism

It’s times like these that separate the Patriots from the Pisspants

Trump has made his play and won: He succeeded in ways that no one else could have succeeded while facing very long odds, delivering the Presidency, the House, and the Senate along with an unprecedented mandate to reshape the American government.

Despite this miraculous success (which very nearly turned into disaster several times), I see victory greeted with handwringing and indecision by the broader online right. Many rightwingers who publicly opposed Trump and tried to torpedo his candidacy during the 2024 campaign are now generating massive engagement with never-ending criticism of Trump’s transition and remarkable first month. “It’s over,” is confidently proclaimed by people who have been persistently wrong at nearly every twist and turn for months or even years, all long before Trump has had any chance at all to actually implement his promised agenda.

There are no consequences for being wrong on the American Right. Audiences have no standards and performers have no shame. Did Trump lose because he failed to do X or Y or Z? Was the election hopelessly rigged against us? Did a civil war (tm) break out? For years I heard many big people insisting that this was all sure to be the case.

It was all not real. People were either delusional or, worse, trying to create self-fulfilling prophecies: They hoped that by helping to engineer a Trump defeat through demoralization they might justify, excuse, or render irrelevant past missteps and counterproductive behavior.

That’s all fine, though, because most people online view this stuff like a television show: One plotline ends, another begins. The narrative of the day is reset and the characters can redefine themselves however they may please, with their past actions totally forgotten. As I articulated in my earlier essay, Project 2035: Building a Trump Movement to Last, the very well-earned collapse of trust in mainstream institutions has led to broad ignorance and nihilism among the general public.

People kind of go along with anything now. They accept ridiculous claims without any scrutiny at all, they tolerate intolerable behavior, they participate in personality feuds in which they don’t seem to understand their own arguments, leveled against people with whom they are clearly unfamiliar. Everything is only just content and noise.

The noise must stop. The content must stop. People must return to reality and get to work. It really is crazy to see the values that people display today. Again, in a totally non-moralizing way: What people find important or unimportant is fundamentally warped. All manner of sabotage is tolerated while concrete real world gains are dismissed as trivial and fleeting. American conservatives do cartwheels to find excuses to despair, do nothing, or help the enemy.

I’ve always found the tweet below to be one of Trump’s most prescient comments.

People literally don’t know how to win any more. They lash out and reject the gifts (and accompanying responsibilities) they’ve been given. After decades of defeat and decline, all conservatives can think in victory is: “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!”

Like the professional pro-life movement of 2022, the American Right of today is the dog that caught the car. It has achieved its longstanding and seemingly-impossible goal, and now must grapple with the difficult and unfamiliar task of sustaining victory over the long-term.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned by Trump’s judicial appointments in 2022, returning the abortion issue to the states (where it always belonged), the pro-life movement moved from its greatest victory to a string of seemingly uninterrupted defeats. Pro-life activists pushed ballot referendums to restrict abortion in 2022 that were soundly rejected in deep Red states. The professional pro-life movement, when forced to do something beyond theorizing or agreeing with itself, floundered.

Making matters worse, the pursuit of these measures, which were often confusing or out-of-step with what voters could be brought around to supporting, greatly galvanized the enemy. Abortion became a major talking point in national politics and organizing node for the Left, which contributed significantly (though there were certainly many other major issues) to the near-fatal outcome of the 2022 midterms for Republicans.

Faced with rejection at the ballot box, many major figures in the pro-life movement turned their attention to securing the future, their personal futures, that is. With the blessing of the doomed DeSantis campaign, these figures began a series of vicious attacks on President Trump—who was always going to be the 2024 Republican nominee—for his moderate (and popular) stance on abortion. They tried to force Trump into publicly adopting positions that would have harmed his candidacy in the general election. When that failed, they tried to discourage pro-life voters from participating in the election at all, claiming Trump was not worthy of their votes.

Abortion was one of the few cards Democrats had left to play and, although he came out strongly against inhuman late-term abortion procedures, Trump understood that it was generally just not a good issue to talk about on the national stage. If people are thinking about abortion, Republicans have a tendency to lose elections and if you want to reduce the number of abortions in America then Republicans need to win. If you’re a pro-life activist but you’re not trying to reduce the number of abortions in America, what are you here for?

At every turn, these activists tried to derail Trump’s efforts to neutralize the abortion issue. When times were bad, they joined in on leftist dogpiles. When times were good, they generated never-ending scare quotes designed to tie Trump to positions that he did not hold and which were radioactive in the minds of voters.

Trump overcame all of these internal obstacles and emerged stronger than ever. The insubordinate corners of the professional pro-life movement are now bracing themselves for the retaliation that is sure to (and must) follow. Having been bad coalition partners for so long, these saboteurs must now face not being coalition partners at all. It was a totally unnecessary and self-inflicted defeat for a political movement that by all logic should be enjoying its greatest level of success right now. Hopefully these failures are replaced by people who can think more tactically. Merely “being right” will not save us.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. As much has been written about the ideological unreliability of many of Trump’s new allies and recent converts (rest assured, I know), I am taken aback by just how unreliable in practice a lot of people who are nominally “better on the issues” have proven themselves to be.

They lie, they despair and panic, they snipe and seethe, they proudly proclaim that they have created a hostage situation and then, when their influence is proven to be far less than they pretended, they don’t even have the dignity to disappear. The tendency among the various strains of the anti-Trump Right is not to show that your particular bloc is useful by helping your side to win, but rather to threaten to either do nothing (already the status quo for most participants in these endless “debates”) or to help your side to lose. Who could work with such people? Who would want to?

Although I am certain that there is a well-funded and coordinated effort to torpedo Trump from the Right ongoing, I believe that the overwhelming majority of this sentiment during 2024 was organic: People could not understand how to build or maintain a political coalition. They did not have goals, but rather a generalized set of grievances which, valid or invalid, they had no ability to remedy or even to conceive of remedying. The complete and utter failure of the education system and media has deprived people of the mental models that might allow them to understand how positive change is actually achieved. They wage war to the knife over pointless internet arguments and regularly self-immolate for no reason at all.

A few years ago there was a very entertaining study that revealed that the biggest consumers of “news” programming ended up being the most ignorant on real-world subject matter. In essence, the more you “learned” from mainstream sources the less you actually knew.

A neat parallel of this phenomenon can be found in modern rightwing spaces: Things are bad, but learning about exactly how bad things are has the tendency to induce a kind of learned helplessness and passivity in rightwingers. The more you “know” (and such people usually have zero ability to sort between what is true or untrue) the more useless you become when it comes to actually achieving anything. I’ve heard this referred to as a “Redpill OD,” which I think describes the phenomenon nicely.

People will learn something that is generally true, but lack the background knowledge to put what they learned into context in a way that would render it useful. They will learn that we have lost in the past, and take from this that we will always lose in the future. They learn to view positive developments as a trap or trick, rather than opportunities.

Oftentimes it’s clear that people don’t even know what they’re talking about, they have just learned to express themselves by complaining. Before the election I saw the same refrain over and over again: “Nothing has been done to prevent the fraud we saw in 2020 from occurring again.” In fact, the opposite was true. The RNC under Lara Trump had build a veritable army of 100,000 election lawyers and poll watchers to prevent election fraud.

I remember a Twitter exchange I had with someone over this vividly. He claimed we were doomed during the 2024 election because nothing had been done to prevent election fraud. When I responded with a news article about anti-fraud efforts, he began acting as though I was claiming that election fraud was not real. In essence, he had internalized that a problem existed (this is a big hurdle for many people), but did not understand that the problem could (and must) be solved.

This failure to complete the circle had made what he learned effectively useless, or even harmful. Hearing that people were behaving proactively did not have any effect on him. In fact, he became defensive and lashed out because he thought that I was challenging a controversial view he held (election fraud is real), rather than pointing out that he was simply wrong about a different but related point (nothing is being done about election fraud in 2024). All he knew how to do was say that we were doomed and that voting did not matter. If he had simply believed that our election system was normal and fraud wasn’t a serious concern (not true), he probably would have been better off than how he was.

There are many instances of this kind of damaged thinking on the Right. Motivated reasoning is such a powerful force that once many have reached a conclusion on any topic or person, it is impossible to shake them of it even if nearly every point of evidence that they were relying to support their conclusion is proven totally false one at a time. The ignorance and nihilism that has followed the collapse of credibility among mainstream knowledge-granting institutions like schools, the media, academia, and the government causes many to “fill in the blanks” with information from alternate sources that is equally unreliable. People cannot be bothered to check their facts and would not know how to do so even if they were. Because of this, modern dissident spaces have generated few intellectual movements and an endless stream of fandoms, support groups, and Ponzi schemes.

America’s culture of narcissism (greatly commented upon but perhaps too bleak to truly examine), has generated widespread self-involvement. People have come to value the feeling of satisfaction or vindication that accompanies “being right” (and often such people are very wrong) far more than they value achieving any real-world objective.

In the basketcase social conditions that have produced this dysfunctional behavior, it is unsurprising that Trump is far more concerned with appointing proven loyalists and effective operators than he is with any kind of political purity. He has orders and he needs them followed. All the good ideas in the world do not matter if they remain merely ideas.

This is the Era of High Trumpism. Trump’s approval rating is staggering right now. It’s officially OK to like Trump at a level previously unimaginable. This popular buy-in is accompanied by unprecedented real-world political power. Trump controls the RNC, and (though there are already rumblings of internal dissent) Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. It’s Trump’s world, we’re all just living in it.

This is probably as good as it gets for us. Trump will never have more public support or political capital to spend than he does right now. The results of this election were all or nothing in a lot of ways. America would not have been salvageable if Kamala had been able to carry out her planned amnesty of the 30+ million illegal immigrants in our country, providing liberals with a permanent electoral majority to rubberstamp their agenda. Likewise, for Trump there was a binary choice between winning the election or spending the rest of his life in prison. The situation was unprecedented in American politics, and the strength of the mandate Trump has been handed in victory is unprecedented as well. This is what the high ground looks like, enjoy it while you can.

The next year and a half are critical in a lot of ways. Trump is perceived to be at the height of his power. He has enormous momentum from the election and nominal control of all branches of government. If he’s going to do big things, and he must to save our country, he needs to do them before the 2026 midterms—the outcome of which are by no means guaranteed.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to outline a few general operating principles for rightwingers during this critical time period.

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1. Support Trump

You must support Trump. This should be a given, and yet many find it hard to do. Trump won. Let him win. I acknowledge that the leftwing/rightwing divide is largely semantic these days (anything and everything can and will be supported for liberal or conservative reasons, widespread ignorance and nihilism etc.), but it is remarkable how many people online pretend to hold various ideologies that value hierarchy over egalitarianism and yet are constitutionally incapable of uniting under a single powerful leader in order to achieve their real world goals.

It really is amazing how easily modern rightwingers can be triggered. Every new twist of fate is responded to with complete hysterics. Large corners of Rightwing Twitter appear to have transformed into glorified support groups and crying circles for excitable 40-year-old men who want to feel heard and understood.

I am constantly taken aback by the sheer spinelessness displayed by “our side.” We need Donald Trump to succeed. Say that to yourself 1 million times. There is no scenario in which Donald Trump failing to achieve his goals produces a good outcome for us. Politicians rely on public support, or at least the perception of public support, in order to implement their agendas, particularly when these agenda items are controversial. As such, the perpetual over-reaction, panic, and despair you see in the face of every new development by the online Right (which increasingly is informing real life discussions) often creates problems where none existed before.

There is a total lack of messaging discipline and impulse control. I see popular posts all the time that are just “Oh geez, I’m trying not to blackpill but it’s really hard right now 😢.” If you have any doubts or reservations about the necessity of Trump’s success, you would be better off writing these in your diary instead of blasting them out online every 15 minutes. There are going to be many setbacks ahead, things so bad that we can’t even conceive of them yet, and yet you still must maintain the invincible mindset that tells you that, no matter what new problems emerge, you will be able to handle whatever comes your way.

When a leader makes a decision, in order for it to have weight it must be considered final. When people second guess or hand-wring over big decisions that it have already been made, they are not encouraging Trump to reevaluate his decision (a move that would make him appear weak and indecisive), they are merely encouraging people to attack Trump, and when people start attacking Trump, they often stop talking about this or that individual decision (or perceived decision), but rather begin unloading their unrelated grievances with the universe and encouraging others to do the same. The ultimate result of generalized negativity is the perception that Trump’s support is shaky and that it’s up in the air whether or not he needs to be listened to.

In general, Trump doing things is good and Trump not doing things bad. Trump is the most rightwing President in several decades, he is the only game in town when it comes to implementing rightwing policy at the federal level. Him successfully enacting policy in the present makes it more likely he will successfully enact policy in the future. The perception should be that Trump’s orders are carried out because Trump has a robust coalition behind him that will support nearly everything he does (and punish anyone who obstructs him). Without this perception, achieving anything becomes much more difficult.

Of course, there are caveats to this principle. For instance, a Trump appointee for a low-level law enforcement position was revealed to have harshly targeted Trump supporters during the COVID lockdown era, and was removed after this was loudly pointed out. However, grievances have to be expressed in productive, targeted, ways that are not just attacking Trump as hopelessly compromised or declaring that we’ve already lost. Our fates are connected to Trump’s and we must do everything in our power to help him succeed.

Another caveat is that people should not feel inclined to vocally support positions that Trump is obviously just staking out as a negotiating move, before any actual firm “decision” has been made. Trump’s recent mystifying statements on Gaza are a good example of this. I don’t know what prompted these, but I sincerely doubt that Trump actually plans for the US to occupy the Gaza Strip (which sounds like it would be terrible).

In the same way I can’t stand people saying that these statements prove Trump is over, compromised, etc., I also can’t stand people saying that this is a fantastic idea. People should not feel the need to vocally support bad ideas (that will not happen) just because Trump has temporarily staked out this or that position, or they feel that doing so will troll Trump’s critics. If you do this enough, eventually you’ll accumulate a large number of people who are not in on the joke and support stupid ideas, rather than simply supporting Trump. Trump says and does many things I don’t agree with or that don’t make sense to me, and normally I just don’t say anything because at the end of the day I support Trump and understand that him successfully implementing his agenda is our best and only hope.

You will never be too good to support Trump. You will never be too good to survive. Nothing that anyone who is supposedly more ideologically pure than Trump has accomplished comes close to the benefits that flowed from Trump winning the Presidency and Kamala losing. If positive change is to happen in America, it will be tied to the Trump administration and the Trump movement. There is no anti-Trump Right, only Trump and the enemy.

2. Oppose the Enemy

Liberals are bad. They want to do bad things to you. Liberals doing anything is bad. Helping liberals to do things is bad, as well. This should be obvious, but many have trouble accepting it at a deep and fundamental level.

Most people who “came around” and voted for Trump do not know why they did it beyond the generalized (and correct) perception that everything got rapidly worse in America after Trump left office. They can come up with reasons to support Trump if asked, and those reasons will probably be pretty good, but at the end of the day reasons don’t matter much. Liberals (the ones who are not just resentful foreigners) have reasoned themselves into destroying the country for quite a while. In a different time, all the new Trump converts could be reasoned into supporting bad things just as easily as they were briefly reasoned into doing something good.

A different time will come. When that happens, I think all the people celebrating the “vibe shift” among the general public will be shocked by how quickly their new friends turn on them. I meant what I said in my election night essay: Although we’re at the top, the situation has never been more precarious than it is right now. We can fall a lot farther, and a lot faster, than ever before.

You have to oppose liberals. You cannot think your way out of that fundamental principle. One of the most pathetic displays I ever saw came during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Every day of the Rittenhouse trial was marked by huge protests by BLM activists, who shouted slogans and condemned Rittenhouse as a racist murderer.

About halfway through the trial, supporters of Rittenhouse (who maintained a smaller, less organized, presence outside the courthouse) brought pizza and immediately offered to share it with the BLM activists. One of Rittenhouse’s supporters happily intoned that “we’re all Americans” at the end of the day, even though the people he was feeding were actively supporting Rittenhouse, a teenager, being thrown in jail for life over unambiguous self defense caught on video. Soon after, one of the BLM activists attacked a Rittenhouse supporter and the two groups broke apart again.

The platitudes people have today are not enough. Much has been made about the virtues of free speech and free association, rights that liberals want to strip from us and increasingly have succeeded in doing so. Conservatives today misunderstand these rights as a celebration of all manner of unacceptable and counterproductive behavior, in essence, that just because something is legal it should be endorsed or at least not objected to. The collapse of conservative spaces into ignorance and nihilism was a predictable outcome of this mindset.

Philosopher Jonathan Bowden spoke about the importance of discrimination. Although the word has a negative connotation after decades of Civil Rights regime propaganda, discrimination is actually the cornerstone of civilization: Life is full of distinctions that must be recognized in order to achieve anything good. You must discriminate between what is true and what is untrue. You must discriminate between good ideas and bad ideas. You must discriminate between your friends and your enemies. When you reach into an apple barrel to get something to eat, you discriminate between the apples. Failure to discriminate is not a virtue, more often than not it requires active denial of reality.

When people fail to set boundaries or maintain standards, they are not upholding some kind of principle, they are rather revealing that they hold no principles at all. We should not be debating over whether it was worth it to win and survive another day. We should not be debating over whether we should kill ourselves. Merely indulging in this kind of debate constitutes a defeat in of itself.

It is time to discriminate. Just as it is important to oppose liberals, it is important to oppose the people who help liberals. I am sure everyone has noticed that no one who opposed Trump before the election has admitted that they were wrong to do so. There are lots of bad actors who discouraged people from voting for Trump before the election, trying to elect Kamala, and then pivoted straight to offering harsh criticism of Trump for sometimes totally imagined failures. You have to stop tolerating these people. What’s more, you also have to stop tolerating people who tolerate them.

If someone won’t fight, they are a liability. If they can be convinced to help the enemy, they are worse than that. The only way to end this threat is to be willing to say “No.” If you aren’t willing to say that betrayal is not acceptable, and change the incentive structure to back that up, you can only expect future betrayal. Most people are not approaching these topics ideologically. They will go with the flow in any direction, including very bad ones, if there are no obstacles to doing so.

I have more contempt for people who are easily demoralized than I do for the bad actors who demoralize them. They see messaging from people who they know are liars, who have been wrong again and again, who have proven that they want bad outcomes and will work to achieve them, and the only response they can muster is “Wow, I guess he makes a good point this time.” In a few days when the situation is revealed to be very different than how the bad actors claimed it was, they do not remember that they were wrong, they only remember the despair they felt and use those feelings to validate future panic. These spineless people stay spineless (they should look into fecal microbiota transplantation), and whenever times are bad can be counted on to make them worse. Bad actors would not have any power at all if they were unable to provoke a reaction out of such people.

I am not proposing a rerun of Cancel Culture, forcing anyone to take loyalty oaths, or going to these people’s houses and killing them. I am saying, though, that you should just want nothing to do with people who engage in this behavior or tolerate it. You should not debate with them or hear them out. You should not say nice things about them or signal to others that they are acceptable to interact with with anything other than hostility. After a certain point, people have to stop getting credit for being right about this or that other issue while pushing for very bad things. You either support good things happening or you don’t, and it’s clear where Trump resides in this arrangement.

One small allowance should be made for people who genuinely don’t care. I disagree with apathy but, if you’re genuinely checked out of politics, more power to you. There are many very nice things in this world outside of the news and I hope you get a lot out of them.

Most post-political people do not “not care,” though. They are merely trying to encourage you to remain passive because they are trying to achieve some political (or even personal) goal of their own. Remember all the people who said “Ugh. I’m done.” after Trump made some clumsy or even bad remark during the campaign? None of those people shifted their focus to cooking or nature or the many other productive uses of energy outside of politics, they just moved on to bitterly criticizing Trump for something else the next week. They were always just trying to torpedo Trump, and everyone needs to stop tolerating this.

America has a rare opportunity right now. Lots of people worked very hard to get us this far. We have the chance to fundamentally transform our country for the better in a few short years. We aren’t guaranteed to take advantage of that opportunity, though. The evil system that almost destroyed us could spring back just as easily as it receded. If we aren’t willing to fight, if we aren’t willing to give this thing a definition and say “You can’t do this anymore,” then someone else will and I promise they will be much less charitable to you than you are towards them.

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And that’s it. “Support Trump” and “Oppose the Enemy” are the only real principles you need for the current moment. I really don’t care about your views on most individual issues if you can meet this low bar. You’re probably fine. It’s not people who agree with me 100% on tax policy or whatever who are going to get us out of this. It’s going to take people who are willing and able to work with what we have, and get over themselves, to improve the situation. If you can’t do that because you’re too smart or your feelings are too hurt or any other excuse you might come up with, you’re useless or worse and I hope you get what’s coming to you.

Honestly, the first two weeks have gone even better than I was expecting. My Trump sycophancy remains intact. The list of things I would not do if Trump ordered me to is small and shrinking fast. I genuinely can’t relate to the people who hang on every word Trump says as if that is going to validate their feelings or justify a reaction. I don’t need any more reasons or more debates. The time for arguments is over. It’s time for us to live.