As Election Day approached, Trump’s supporters increasingly adopted their dear leader’s main article of faith: “It’s all about me.”
A mannequin outfitted with a Donald Trump mask with a fist raised in defiance outside the early voting site at the Palm Beach County Main Library in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday, October 28, 2024.(Anthony Man / South Florida Sun Sentinel)
It’s been a rough homestretch for MAGA world. Early-voting trends seemed to break the other way in most swing states. The hallowed quest for the mythical low-propensity young male voter turned into a will-o’-the-wisp. And the Trump campaign’s outsourced get-out-the-vote initiative, under the command of terminally disorganized MAGA bros like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk, crashed in many key battleground states before it had a chance to get off the ground.
So the MAGA faithful resorted en masse to the thing they know best: making every small tributary and byway in our degenerating public discourse about them. Call it MAGA main character syndrome—the grim determination to forensically track down, and then act out, the smallest of perceived slights as evidence that the drama of history is always and forever about them.
Illustrative texts can be cited almost at random, but consider one representative X outburst Naomi Wolf, the feminist literary scholar turned outrage merchant, posted late last week. “I endorsed Pres Trump yesterday,” Wolf reported. “Today all day my phone froze, the cursor on my computer started wandering around the desktop, and my wifi continually disconnected. All coincidentally.”
Of course, by “all coincidentally,” Wolf means “not at all coincidentally.” Wolf has long endorsed a vast and wooly array of conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific fables, from vaccine denialism to false-flag ISIS decapitations to chemtrails. For this particular variant to gain any purchase on belief, you’d have to accept that the telecom and tech industries, which stand to realize significant tax and regulatory gains under a second Trump administration, would immediately conspire to block WiFi access to a mid-level MAGA para-intellectual as an act of ideological vengeance. You’d also have to go along with the premise that, after the mobilization of billions of dollars, a vast corps of volunteers, and a ceaseless torrent of ads and media appeals on all sides of the 2024 presidential battle, a late October endorsement from the discredited author of The Beauty Myth was deemed a critical inflection point.
But what outside observers would dismiss as a pathological level of self-absorption is precisely the point: Wolf intuitively knows that the world is cunningly arraying itself, at every turn, against her heroic and rebellious political preferences. Her Captain Ahab–like worldview, while extreme, is entirely in line with the MAGA mainstream.
Main character syndrome is, after all, the heart and soul of the election denialist dogma that’s become an unanswerable article of faith in the Trump catechism. The notion that more than 80 million voters denied Donald Trump the presidency cannot register as empirical truth for the movement—and so the whole election had to be rigged against their own True American convictions. This delusional refrain is easily punctured by noting that, somehow, none of the Republican candidates who won office during the 2020 cycle gets mentioned as an amoral election grifter—but raising this sticking point in the Trumpist theology of power is roughly akin to telling Wolf that telecom executives simply don’t give a shit about what she believes, or whom she endorses for president.
Indeed, everywhere you turned during the election’s final full week, you saw MAGA main character syndrome in full flower. There was the New Jersey voter who turned up at a polling station in a MAGA shirt, and when poll workers told her she couldn’t vote in electioneering attire, she ripped off the shirt to vote in her bra, calling one worker a “dickhead,” and telling another to “suck my cunt.” This inspired Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, to repost a Reddit account of the episode (since deleted) on X under the motivational comment, “What a patriot.” A Texas Trump supporter in the same plight decided to forgo the theatrical flourishes and punched out the poll worker who denied him entry to the voting booth while he was sporting his MAGA hat.
Such antics are distant echoes of the conduct of the greatest main character of all, Donald Trump himself. As a congenital narcissist, Trump is incapable of comprehending that anything in the world isn’t about him. That’s why his own election-denialist mantra dates back to Ted Cruz’s victory in the 2016 Iowa caucus, and why he’s unable to forge basic electoral alliances that would undeniably help his efforts, such as enlisting Nikki Haley as a campaign surrogate in a gender-dominated election cycle.
It’s also why he’s devoted the last stretch of the election to absurdist cosplaying flourishes. The entirely commonplace lack of a paper trail to confirm Kamala Harris’s youthful summer job at a McDonald’s got the Fauntleroy heir to a real estate fortune to pretend to serve fake customers at a closed McDonald’s franchise in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t sufficient, in other words, to cast suspicion on Harris’s fast-food résumé; no, Trump needed to make the nonstory all about him, even though the whole photo op made no coherent point beyond underlining his own manifest inability to take any non-white person at their word.
The same goes, of course, for the garbage mania that overtook the Trump campaign in its final days. Trump and his followers adopted any means necessary to wring maximum outrage from an errant Zoom remark by President Joe Biden on a call for Latino supporters of the Harris campaign; in his halting delivery, and via the miracle of bad-faith editing, Biden was made to sound as if he were deriding all Trump supporters as “garbage.” Biden clearly was denouncing the racist joke from Trumpist comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at the campaign’s ghastly and fascist Madison Square Garden rally, but MAGA world leapt at a truncated version of Biden’s quote to, yes, make it once more about all of them. Hoping for a replay of the outrage cycle that greeted Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” remark, MAGA apparatchiks gleefully called Biden out for his half-gaffe. Before long, eager Trumpian shills like Megyn Kelly were donning garbage-bag Halloween costumes to dramatize their sense of righteous victimization.
It mattered not at all, of course, that Biden instantly clarified his intended meaning by insisting he was referencing Hinchliffe and Hinchcliffe only, or that Kamala Harris, the actual candidate for the presidency, distanced herself from the misconstrued version of Biden’s comment in the midst of a campaign doggedly focused on wooing Republican support. And it mattered still less that Trump had referred to Democrats as “garbage” and “scum” (when he wasn’t maligning them as “the enemy within”) and sneered that the country at large was “a garbage can for the world.”
Never to be outdone, Trump reached once more for his costume closet. He donned a generic safety vest to awkwardly climb into a garbage truck on an airport tarmac in Wisconsin. Here, too, the semiotics of the photo op were muddled at best: If the claim is that MAGA Nation is garbage in Biden’s view, why was Trump outfitted as a person who hauls garbage away? Was an Oscar the Grouch costume unavailable?
Beyond that, of course, the Trump garbage show was meant to drown out the baleful political fallout from Hinchcliffe’s racist swipe at Puerto Rico—just as Trump’s stunt invitation to a bloc of Bill Clinton’s sexual-assault accusers to be in the audience for his second debate with Hillary Clinton was intended to flip the script from the release of the Access Hollywood tape, which documented the candidate’s history of sexual assault in his own words. The underlying message here was plain: When MAGA allies hurl hate speech at populations it deems threatening, that’s just the exercise of free speech in the face of stifling political correctness; when a political opponent calls out that very act, he’s a hateful and malicious elitist—and we will flout any mere logic that contradicts our sense of pious umbrage.
But again, rationality is never the point in the MAGA penchant for utmost self-dramatization. You might just as profitably point out that, at the very same MSG rally, Hinchcliffe and other Trump champions derided Black Americans, Hispanics, and immigrants for sport and called Kamala Harris the Antichrist—or note, per reporting among Hispanic voters in the wake of Trump’s garbage-truck stunt, that many of them viewed it as an extension of Hinchcliffe’s slur rather than a callout to elite liberal condescension targeting the MAGA base. This is just the way cultic worship functions—especially when it finds itself pressed up ever harder against the reality principle.
Indeed, the real sign of how deep the main character syndrome runs is its apparent grip on the private lives of true MAGA believers. In addition to Wolf’s jarring encounter with WiFi dysfunction, the final days of the campaign had Vance confessing to Joe Rogan that, in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Vance abruptly went into “fight or flight” mode, thinking he might well be next—even though he had not yet been named to the Trump ticket. He adjourned from the mini-golf facility where he’d been with his kids, and marshaled his domestic cache of weaponry toward the front of his house, to meet the lurking-yet-apparently-omnipresent enemy head-on. And in perhaps the most bizarre main-character testimonial of this demented time, Tucker Carlson confessed to a Christian nationalist YouTuber that a year and a half ago he’d been “mauled by a demon” while sleeping alongside his wife and four dogs. Carlson—who also recently helped preside over the klieg-lighted announcement of British comedian and accused sexual assaulter Russell Brand’s conversion to Christianity—was pandering here to the New Apostolic Reformation, the vanguardist evangelical wing of the MAGA movement, which professes to divine the stuff of “spiritual warfare” in American political contests. Yet, in another register, Carlson was replicating the same basic Trumpist refrain: that even supernatural powers have a keen and malicious investment in the mundane conduct of MAGA believers’ lives. Your move, Naomi Wolf.
Chris LehmannTwitterChris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).