The Republican Mob
Summary:Trump voters—categorized as 29% MAGA Hardliners, 21% Anti-Woke Conservatives, 30% Mainline Republicans, and 20% Reluctant Right—weren't fooled by PrumpTutin. They understood exactly who he was and voted for him anyway, deliberately. They wanted a weapon, not a president. MAGA believers crave resentment and spectacle above all else. Anti-Woke wealthy torched public education over curriculum wars. Mainline Republicans surrendered democracy for capital-gains tax cuts and massive deficits. The Reluctant Right claimed moral objections while enabling autocracy. None recoiled from corruption or sexual abuse. The line they wouldn't cross was gender and race. The grenade now explodes in their hands.
The taxonomists at The Atlantic are at it again. They have taken the sixty-something million people who dragged the United States into the abyss and sorted them into four neat little buckets, like they’re organizing a spice rack in a house that is currently on fire. They call this “political science.” I call it an autopsy on a body that is still screaming.
You want to know about these people? I know them. I drink with them.
They say 29 percent are “MAGA Hardliners.” These are the ones who think PrumpTutin is the second coming, a man who has clearly never read a Bible but sells them for sixty bucks a pop. They aren’t pious; they’re bored. They want a show, and he gives them blood. Look at the data. Church attendance among this group is at historic lows, while identification with Christian Nationalism is at historic highs. They don’t want salvation; they want permission. A theology that blesses their resentments and sanctifies their grudges.
Then there are the “Anti-Woke Conservatives,” the 21 percent who are wealthy, secular, and incandescently angry that their children learned the word “cisgender” in school. They burned down the Department of Education not because it was failing, but because they didn’t like the reading list. These are the people who demanded “school choice” and then acted shocked when rural public schools collapsed after voucher money drained the coffers. They got their tax credits for private academies. The working class got crumbling drywall, understaffed classrooms, and four-day school weeks.
Next come the “Mainline Republicans.” The Atlantic calls them “middle-of-the-road.” I call them the accountants of the apocalypse. They make up roughly 30 percent of this coalition. They watched a man with dozens of felony convictions and a civil adjudication for sexual abuse take the oath of office and told themselves it was worth it for the capital-gains tax cut. They look at the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—which kicked roughly 15 million people off Medicaid and reinstated work requirements for the dying—and nod gravely about fiscal responsibility. They ignore the small inconvenience that the deficit exploded by two trillion dollars in twelve months, because revenue does not magically appear when you slash corporate rates to 15 percent.
Finally, the “Reluctant Right.” Twenty percent. The cowards. The ones who insist they held their noses and voted for the “lesser of two evils.” They saw a man promise to act like a dictator on day one and decided the alternative was too old, too unfamiliar, too threatening. They are the getaway drivers who claim they didn’t know a bank was being robbed. They told pollsters they disliked his “rhetoric” but trusted his “policy.” Now that his policy involves weaponizing the Justice Department against political rivals, they have gone silent.
And let’s stop pretending there was ambiguity underneath it all.
The line they would not cross was not corruption or cruelty. It was gender and race. Criminality was familiar. A woman of color was intolerable.
You ask how the United States raised such a group of dullards.
That is the wrong word. “Dullard” implies they are stupid, slow, passive. A dullard forgets to turn off the stove. These people poured gasoline on the burner and disabled the smoke detector. They are not dull. They are malicious. They are bored. They are nihilists who treat the federal government like a loot box in a video game.
And look what they bought.
They elected a man who is legally an adjudicated sexual abuser. A man who owes more than half a billion dollars in civil fraud judgments. A man who stood on a stage and promised to “run” Venezuela—a sovereign nation—like it was a failed Atlantic City casino. Now the United States is militarily entangled in Venezuela. Thousands of troops are deployed under the pretext of “security,” guarding oil infrastructure that has not produced at capacity in over a decade. We are nation-building with one hand and stealing resources with the other, and the body bags are coming back to Dover.
The economy they claimed to save is eating its own tail. The so-called “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” was sold as a masterstroke; instead, it tethered the full faith and credit of the United States to a speculative asset whose value lurches on rumor and institutional whim. The national debt is rising faster, not shrinking.
And the tariffs. They promised protection. What we got was a sales tax on the poor. A 10 percent baseline tariff on all imports and 60 percent on China did not bring steel mills back to Pittsburgh. It made lumber, electronics, clothing, and appliances more expensive overnight. Inflation is not a mystery. It is policy. When you tax the things people need to live, people struggle to live. The price of a 2×4 did not fall. The price of insulin did not fall. The only things that went down were our standing in the world and the life expectancy of the poor.
PrumpTutin did not trick them. He did not hypnotize them. He looked them in the eye and told them exactly who he was. He promised to use the military for domestic deportation. He promised to gut the civil service. He promised revenge, not governance.
They did not vote for him despite that.
They voted for him because of it.
They wanted a weapon, not a president. Now they have one, and they are shocked to discover that a grenade does not care who is holding it when the pin is pulled.
