Everyone in the Trump coalition voted for someone to get got. Most of them didn't realize that they were that someone to someone else — Adam Serwer
In late May, Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, left DOGE, where she served as an advisor and spokesperson, to work for Elon Musk “full-time”. (She later “resurfaced” at xAI, best known for the “white genocide”-promoting Grok.)
Her transfer led to natural speculation about whether Musk had bagged another woman (womb?) for his harem. The official Democratic social media account posted a picture of a “cuck chair” and tagged Miller. The Onion ran an article with the headline, “Stephen Miller Informed Wife Will Be Working Late On Baby For Elon Again”.
I truly have no idea if Stephen Miller is being “cucked” or not. (What a world, in which I get to write that sentence.) But I wonder whether he’d care. The throughline of Miller’s politics is racism. Here's an example from his high school years:
At our high school, half the graduating class went on to Ivy League colleges and the other half did not. SAMOHI was very open about actively trying to help minorities get into college, and it set up a Hispanic club for that purpose. Stephen deeply hated this club, and he saw its members as militants who did not want to be part of the English-speaking world and as threats to America. He also said that minorities are too busy complaining to succeed and that Hispanics are overrepresented in Congress. At the time there was no Google, so we couldn’t check his stats.
Back then, Miller wanted minorities out of U.S. education. Now he wants them out of the U.S. altogether. With the re-election of Trump, he stands ready to deliver on that promise. If the deal offered to him truly were “offer up your wife to our billionaire patron and get to ethnically cleanse America for four (or more) years”, I imagine he — and his wife — would take it.
Trump recently went on a rant about the estate tax and claimed that, after the passage of his “beautiful” bill, there would be “No going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker — and in some cases, Shylocks and bad people.” (As Chris Hayes explained, “Trump's argument for the elimination of the estate tax is that the heirs of the super rich will no longer have to go beg a predatory Jewish banker for a bridge loan to overcome cash flow problems associated with the $15 million dollar estate they're about to get.”)
John Podhoretz, a truly odious neocon (and racist, and nepo baby), tweeted that criticism of Trump for his remarks was unwarranted: “Trump bombed Iran. He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever as far as I'm concerned”
This is, I suppose, cuck politics for right wing Jews. (Which Miller also is.) They are willing to accept second-tier status in the Republican coalition, and ally themselves with people who, quite literally, want them dead, as long as a third, even lower-tier group is punished. “Take my wife but stick it to the Mexicans” is not too different from “insult my people but stick it to the Muslims”.
It’s something of a mistake to believe that “most” in the Trump coalition didn’t realize they’d “get got”. There’s a long history of (white) people accepting bad conditions for themselves in order to make things worse for everyone else. The conservative bargain is the bargain of hierarchy. You accept your place, likely not near the top, but above those you consider inferior. You accede to a worse life in order to be above those you hate, because that’s a better outcome than having everyone succeed, and seeing “those people” equal or even surpass you. The problem with common prosperity is that it benefits the commoners.
So it isn’t just elites like Miller and Podhoretz who have signed this poisonous deal. According to a poll from Pew, “A 56% majority of Republicans say they favor [Trump’s] budget and tax bill, while 19% are opposed and 24% are not sure.” Even much of the Republican base recognizes Trump won’t materially help people like them. But this isn’t necessarily evidence that these people were duped (although some, undoubtedly, were). It’s rather that many in Trump’s coalition are rewarded psychically, not materially, by “MAGA” politics. Sure, their Medicaid benefits might be cut, and tariffs might destroy their small businesses. But isn’t that a small price to pay in order to own the libs?
(One particularly funny polling question was about the State and Local Tax deduction, or SALT for short. Trump’s tax bill, in a sop to Republican holdouts who represent wealthy congressional districts, increased the SALT cap from $10000 to $40000. But Republican voters favor this proposal by only a narrow margin: 45% to 28%. Keep in mind: increasing the SALT cap benefits only the wealthiest of taxpayers, who itemize their deductions. Only 9% of filers did this in 2020.
Republican supporters of the SALT cap increase are probably lower or middle class people who believe that, one day, they too will be rich enough to benefit from SALT. Some might even be lower or middle class people who believe they are already rich enough to benefit from SALT. But there are also plenty of Republican opposers: 20-40%, depending on the question. They disagree with every single policy in Trump’s budget and tax bill, but would probably vote for Trump again anyway. That’s because politics, for them, isn’t about being better off.)
The fortunate thing for Democrats is that 5-10% of the electorate will swing back (or stay at home) if Republicans make their lives much worse. (That didn’t really happen in Trump’s first term, besides COVID.) In the long run, these “thermostatic” movements won’t improve our politics — we’ll simply have cycles of destruction, followed by feeble attempts at reconstruction —, but they should at least prevent politics from becoming terminal.
But thermostasis would fail if Democratic lives are made worse and Republican lives are not. If, somehow, Republicans manage to cleave apart the fortunes of the two nations that inhabit our one nation. I think this is unlikely, but not as unlikely as I’d like. Trump can, and has, deployed ICE and the National Guard selectively: against jurisdictions he despises, and wants to bring to heel, but not against the farmers and other industries who constitute his strongest supporters. He has cut off national aid to blue states experiencing national disasters, but not red ones. He has threatened universities in blue cities. He has taken funds away from liberal scholars investigating discrimination, or disparate impact. He has coerced big law firms he perceives as his enemies. He has forced minorities out of federal government and replaced them with white mediocrities (as Jamelle Bouie argues, Trump wants to “reintroduc[e]…something like segregation”). One of the most absurd examples was the attempt, in Trump's tax bill, to preserve SNAP funding for the states with the highest error rates, One can envision a clever authoritarian using the vast machinery of the federal government solely to inflict pain upon his adversaries and redistribute the rewards to his supporters.
Luckily, I don’t think these people are that clever. And there are two big structural factors working against them.
The first is that the Trump coalition is more racially diverse than you’d think. (Only 78% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 were white, compared with 88% in 2016.) To the extent that people like Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance follow through with mass deportation, it will cause deep fractures in Hispanic and Asian support for Republicans (and, even if these voters don’t flip back to Democrats, many will stay at home). There’s some evidence this is already happening.
The second is that the Trump coalition is also more socioeconomically diverse than you’d think. According to exit polls, “the majority of lower-income households or those earning less than $50,000 a year voted for Trump this election.” Republican tax and economic policy is designed to fuck over these people: that’s what it means to be a Republican. Poor voters pay almost no federal income tax; they are hurt disproportionately by sales taxes, like tariffs; and they are the main beneficiaries of means-tested programs like Medicaid and SNAP (you know, the ones that just got gutted.)
I have no doubt that many Trump supporters will witness all of this and say, “please sir, I want some more”. As I explained, Trumpism is about being better off in relative terms, not absolute ones. (Although one might question whether even the “relative” part of that promise will be upheld.) The real goal of the next 3.5 years, for the opposition, is to emphasize the cost of participating in MAGA politics: to bring the psychic gains and material harms into balance.
The worst scenario is one in which there is no harm. Where Republicans are able to destroy half the country without hurting themselves. Instead, I’d argue, we should “hope” for common suffering.
Over the next few years, the nation, and the world, will suffer countless tragedies. Tariffs will make the poorest households even poorer. The job market is already on shaky footing, and the odds of a recession are nearly 50%. Job loss, in this country, means both your salary and your benefits.
Trump’s budget and tax bill is one of the most destructive pieces of legislation ever passed. Almost 12 million Americans will lose their health insurance. Hundreds of hospitals are set to close. Two million children could be affected by SNAP (food assistance) cuts.
Tens of thousands will be caught by our cruel immigration system, and their lives and those of their families will be altered irrevocably. Thousands will die in heat waves, flooding, hurricanes, and other disasters exacerbated by the climate crisis, and DOGE cuts to critical safety infrastructure, like weather modeling, will only make things worse. And the gutting of scientific research funding will mean there will be dozens of cures we will not have discovered, thousands of people we might have saved.
While any life lost, or suffering caused, is tragic, the best hope for America is that as much of that loss as possible is borne by Republicans. Better that a hospital closes in a Republican district than a Democratic one, better that a Republican loses their job than a Democrat, better that brown Republican is whisked away by Trump’s Gestapo than a brown Democrat, better that a Republican small business shutters than a Democratic one. Better that a kapo experiences consequences than a resistor. And, while the experience of COVID does not inspire much confidence, it’s better that Republicans suffer death caused by their own people, and try to reckon with it, than that burden falls on one side alone.
