Trump Has Become What He Most Despises: A Loser

There’s nothing more central to fascist authoritarianism than being proud of being a grievance-fueled failure.

The last two weeks have been disastrous for the Trump administration. In Europe, Vice President JD Vance made the extraordinary move of campaigning for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose illiberal far-right regime is a beacon for authoritarian conservatives around the Western world. Vance framed the election to Hungarians in stark terms.

“Will you stand against the bureaucrats in Brussels?” he asked them at a campaign rally. “Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers? Then, my friends, go to the polls and stand for Viktor Orbán!” Vance was apparently not very persuasive: Hungarians backed the anti-Orbán party by such an overwhelming margin that it will have enough seats in the country’s Parliament to enact far-reaching constitutional reforms.

President Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran continues to disrupt shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the geopolitical equivalent of stabbing the global economy’s femoral artery. A ceasefire last week reportedly required the U.S. to accept Iranian control of the strait among other concessions, leaving the world with the distinct impression that the U.S. had effectively lost the war. Trump himself, however, was unconcerned. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me, because we’ve won,” he told reporters on Saturday.

This is what happens when losers are elected to lead the world’s only superpower.

“Loser” is the president’s favorite insult. He has used it to describe, at various times, Rosie O’Donnell, John McCain, Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Graydon Carter, Russell Brand, Bill Barr, Jimmy Kimmel, Ron DeSantis, Paul Ryan, Joe Biden, Mark Cuban, Liz Cheney, Michael Bloomberg, Sadiq Khan, George Conway, Hillary Clinton, as well as ABC and CNN. This is only a partial list, but I think you get the picture.

A loser is often not someone who is actually left behind, nor is it someone who simply failed at something. Failure is a part of life; it can even be the first step on the path to success. Instead, a loser is one who thinks in terms of winners and losers at all—and who believes that they have not received the status and rewards to which they feel entitled. They always seem slighted by the world at large, which has cheated and denied them things that they think belong to them by virtue of their supposed innate superiority.

In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, for example, Vance criticized his fellow conservatives for going soft on their own constituents. “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations they had for their own lives,” he wrote. “Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.” His implication is that it is your fault if you’re a loser.

Losers do not actually care about the reality of winning and losing. Instead they care about the perception of success and failure. Trump, who is hardly the wealthiest New York real estate mogul nor the most successful, always insisted that he was the biggest and the best. “Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser,” Trump once wrote in a 2004 book. To that end, he has covered the White House in tacky gold ornaments and plans to build a giant triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, despite having won no wars (and having lost at least one of them).

Most importantly, losers internalize their own self-perception and seek to reinforce it in the world. They are drawn to hierarchy, and are therefore hostile to America’s fundamentally egalitarian ethos. A stratified society gives them a clearer sense of their inferiors, which is usually bound together with their perceptions of race, sex, genetics, or some other apparently inborn trait. Racism is the most familiar redoubt for the loser, since it provides what they think as highly visible proof of their own supposed superiority.

Trump, for example, often describes migrants in eugenic terms, claiming that they are “low IQ” or bring “bad genes” into the country. Conversely, he often describes himself as highly intelligent on genetic grounds. “Same genes, we have the genes,” Trump once said of an uncle who was an MIT professor, as if it were a credential for his own cognitive ability. “We’re smart people.… We’re like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones don’t work out so well, right? But we’re no, we’re no different in that sense.” In 2020, The New York Times reported, he described a largely white crowd at a Minnesota rally as having “good genes.”

Fascism and loserdom go hand in hand because fascism is predicated on the notion that the fascist has been unjustly cheated and robbed, and that only through force can they restore and revitalize themselves. Fascists idolize losers because no fascist society has ever flourished and because they see themselves reflected in other people’s failures. It is fitting that Trump and his allies have lavished praise and public statuary upon Robert E. Lee, a Virginia-born colonel who is best known for leading a failed rebellion against the United States on behalf of a slaver aristocracy in the South.

The goal of Trumpism, it could be said, is to create losers of us all. The political and economic project’s goal is not to materially improve its adherents’ lives. Instead, it is to create a sense of social order for some people that offers an aesthetic sense of improvement, even as one’s standard of living declines in real terms. These illusory gains can only go so far. Or as one frustrated Trump voter told reporters during Trump’s first-term trade war with China in 2019, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

It helps that Trump’s administration is often populated by people whose worldview is driven by personal grievances against the world. Foremost among them is Vance, whose memoir sought to rationalize his impoverished background with his own sense of superiority. Vance’s Appalachian childhood was not an easy one: His father abandoned him, his mother remarried multiple times while wrestling with drug addiction, and his grandparents largely raised him. Even his own name changed multiple times.

That disjointed upbringing led Vance to define his identity in other ways. “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast,” Vance wrote. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish........

© New Republic