MAGA Will Hurt You, and They’ll Applaud While They Do It

Trump’s second term reveals what research has shown for decades: authoritarian voters don’t want solutions, they want someone to suffer.

Introduction: The Politics of Harm

The movement that calls itself MAGA has never been about greatness. It has never been about jobs, prosperity, or even the faintest whiff of liberty. Its defining characteristic is cruelty, deliberate, vindictive, and proudly displayed. The signature of Trump’s revived presidency is not governance but punishment: punishment of immigrants, of minorities, of the poor, of the inconvenient. In this respect, MAGA is not a deviation from conservatism but the inevitable fruit of authoritarian psychology, where domination of “outsiders” is more important than the well-being of the nation itself (Altemeyer 1996; Stenner 2005).

The evidence of this second term is already damning. An executive order has declared gender immutable “at conception,” erasing federal recognition of transgender Americans in a stroke of bureaucratic spite (them.us 2025). Federal marshals and ICE agents now conduct spectacular raids in workplaces and restaurants, dragging immigrants away in a theatre of humiliation that does nothing to reduce crime or improve safety (Miles & Cox 2014; Guardian 2025). The homeless of Washington, D.C., have been ordered to “move out immediately,” as if poverty were a misdemeanor to be scrubbed from the sidewalks rather than a social ill to be addressed (Daily Beast 2025). Local autonomy has been trampled as the White House seized control of D.C.’s police force, deploying troops against a population whose crime rate is already at a generational low (AP 2025). None of these measures advance prosperity, none safeguard liberty, none uphold dignity. They serve only one purpose: to demonstrate who wields power, and who can be degraded by it.

Why do millions of Americans cheer for this? Why do voters back a movement that inflicts gratuitous harm on their neighbors, sometimes even on themselves? Decades of research on authoritarianism, dominance, and collective narcissism provide the answer: the punishment is not incidental, it is the point (Golec de Zavala & Lantos 2020; Duckitt 2010). MAGA’s base rallies behind Trump not despite the cruelty but because of it. The infliction of pain on out-groups, whether immigrants, trans people, the poor, or “woke elites”, is felt as a restoration of order, a proof that their tribe still rules the land.

This series will demonstrate, with ruthless clarity, that MAGA is the political embodiment of authoritarian psychology. Its voters do not dream of a better America; they demand an America where someone else is always losing. And in Trump’s second term, America itself has become the proving ground of punitive governance, where cruelty is elevated to civic religion, and punishment is the creed.

2. The Psychology of Punishment

It is tempting to think of MAGA as merely reactionary politics gone haywire, a grotesque form of conservatism in red baseball caps. But the deeper truth is darker, and more enduring: authoritarian psychology predisposes people to value punishment, conformity, and hierarchy over liberty, fairness, or even efficacy. Trump’s movement is not an anomaly but a crystallization of decades of findings in political psychology.

Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA): Submission and Aggression

Bob Altemeyer, who spent his career studying authoritarian personalities, identified three pillars that define right-wing authoritarianism: submission to authority, aggression against designated outsiders, and rigid conventionalism (Altemeyer 1996). These traits do not produce good governance; they produce docility toward leaders and sadism toward scapegoats. In controlled experiments, high-RWA groups repeatedly endorsed harsher punishments, greater restrictions on civil liberties, and hostility toward minorities, even when these measures demonstrably failed to solve problems (Altemeyer 1998). In other words, effectiveness was irrelevant. What mattered was the satisfaction of obedience and the spectacle of punishment. Trump’s voters exhibit exactly this pattern: they cheer the humiliation of immigrants or the erasure of trans identity, not because these measures improve their lives, but because they confirm that “deviants” are being put in their place.

Social Dominance Orientation (SDO): Winners and Losers

Complementing authoritarian submission is the psychology of dominance. John Duckitt’s dual-process model shows that people who view the world as a ruthless competition adopt a Social Dominance Orientation, craving hierarchy and inequality (Duckitt 2010). They want a world of “winners and losers,” where some groups are permanently above others. It is no accident that Trump’s rhetoric is saturated with the language of domination: “weakness,” “losers,” “disgrace.” MAGA supporters resonate with this because SDO disposes them to see social progress, civil rights, gender equality, even poverty relief, not as justice but as theft, a redistribution of status they believe rightly belongs to them (Perry 2013). Thus policies like Medicaid cuts, which objectively harm poor whites as well as minorities, are embraced because they reinforce the principle that someone beneath them will suffer more.

Collective Narcissism: Fragile Superiority

Yet authoritarian aggression is not sustained by dominance alone. It also feeds on grievance, what Agnieszka Golec de Zavala has called “collective narcissism” (Golec de Zavala & Lantos 2020). This is the brittle conviction that one’s group is special and superior, combined with a gnawing fear that others fail to recognize this “greatness.” Collective narcissists interpret criticism as persecution, satire as assault, and diversity as humiliation. Trumpism is soaked in this fragile superiority: every perceived slight against “real Americans” (read: white, Christian, heterosexual) is inflated into proof of a conspiracy to erase them. The backlash against DEI programs is a perfect example. Hiring or celebrating minorities is reinterpreted not as fairness but as an insult to white accomplishment. Thus, calling someone a “DEI hire” is not merely prejudice; it is the narcissist’s reflexive rage that recognition is being “stolen” from their tribe.

Ressentiment: Cruelty as Civic Virtue

To these psychological predispositions we can add a deeper cultural toxin: ressentiment. As Casey Ryan Kelly (2020) has argued, Trump’s rhetoric is not simply angry but weaponizes resentment, converting grievance into revenge and cruelty into moral theater. In this twisted morality play, punishing the vulnerable becomes proof of civic virtue. Deprive immigrants of due process? That is justice. Strip trans people of legal recognition? That is “protecting children.” Evict the homeless at midnight? That is “restoring order.” MAGA supporters interpret such cruelty not as excess but as strength. To be merciful is to be weak; to be punitive is to be righteous.

From Psychology to Policy

Taken together, RWA, SDO, collective narcissism, and ressentiment form a psychology tailor-made for Trump’s brand of punitive politics. It explains why his followers are not disturbed by policies that fail, that kill, or that humiliate. The infliction of harm is not a bug but a feature. As Karen Stenner’s work demonstrates, authoritarian predispositions lie dormant until “threats” from diversity or disorder awaken them, at which point demands for conformity and punishment intensify (Stenner 2005). Trump has mastered the art of keeping these threats constantly alive: migrants at the border, drag queens in libraries, “woke” universities, Black-led cities. Each new target keeps authoritarian psychology inflamed, guaranteeing support for measures that punish rather than protect.

This is the psychological furnace in which MAGA forges its politics. The cruelty is not incidental, it is the lifeblood.

3. Case Studies: Punitive Policies in Trump’s Second Term

Immigration & Citizenship: Borders as Punishment

Trump’s immigration policies in his second term are not designed to solve problems, they are designed to stage them. The crackdown on sanctuary cities, spearheaded through federal threats of lawsuits and withdrawal of funds, is less about law enforcement than it is about punishing Democratic jurisdictions for their defiance (Guardian 2025). This is political retribution masquerading as public safety.

At the same time, ICE raids have returned in force, targeting workplaces and restaurants with dramatic, militarized arrests. Decades of research have shown that such operations do little to reduce crime or improve economic security; Miles and Cox (2014) found no measurable effect of “Secure Communities” deportations on local crime rates. Their real purpose is theatrical: to terrify communities, to remind immigrants that they live at the mercy of the state, and to reassure MAGA voters that “illegals” are being hunted.

Perhaps most symbolically violent is Trump’s revival of his campaign to end birthright citizenship. Legally dubious under the Fourteenth Amendment, the proposal is unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny. But that hardly matters, because the point is not law but spectacle. By declaring that children of undocumented parents are not “real Americans,” Trump communicates a racial hierarchy written into citizenship itself. It is political sadism dressed up as constitutional reform.

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Erasing Identities: The Administrative Weaponization of Spite

Executive Order 14168, signed in Trump’s first hundred days, declared gender immutable and fixed “at conception.” This seemingly sterile bureaucratic decree erases transgender identity at the federal level, stripping protections and recognition from millions (them.us 2025). It does not improve healthcare, strengthen families, or advance liberty. It is an act of erasure, a denial of existence enforced by paperwork.

The cruelty does not end there. The administration has slashed $800 million in LGBTQ+ health research, reinstated bans on transgender troops, and defunded suicide prevention hotlines tailored for queer youth (them.us 2025). These are not neutral budget cuts but targeted blows, designed to remind already vulnerable communities that the state considers them disposable.

Layered atop policy is rhetoric: the sneering invocation of “DEI hires” as an insult. This phrase, now a staple of MAGA discourse, is meant to delegitimize the accomplishments of minorities by reducing them to tokens. It functions as cultural punishment, transforming diversity itself into a mark of shame. This is the psychology of collective narcissism translated into language: the fragile majority’s demand that no minority achievement be recognized as legitimate (Golec de Zavala & Lantos 2020).

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Criminalizing Vulnerability: Poverty as Crime

Trump’s order to remove the homeless from Washington, D.C., “immediately” is perhaps the most grotesque example of cruelty as policy (Daily Beast 2025). This is not an attempt to solve homelessness but to disappear it, to treat poverty as a contamination unfit for public sight. Institutionalization, relocation, and forced encampments are not remedies but punishments, solutions only if the problem is defined as visibility, not suffering.

Similarly, the administration’s quiet war on Medicaid funding has produced cascading cuts at the state level. Denying coverage for the poor is not a fiscal necessity; it is a calculated cruelty that falls heaviest on those with the least recourse. Health becomes a privilege, and suffering a form of social discipline.

Finally, the federal takeover of D.C.’s police force under the pretext of a “crime emergency” is authoritarian theater. Crime rates are at historic lows, yet the president deployed National Guard troops and stripped local officials of control (AP 2025). This was not crime prevention but political humiliation, a demonstration that Black-led city governments can be overridden at will.

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Suppressing Opposition: Law as a Weapon

The administration has not been content to punish the marginalized; it has also turned its sights on those who defend them. A Reuters investigation revealed that top law firms have scaled back pro bono work in immigration and civil rights cases after direct pressure from the Trump administration (Reuters 2025). This is punishment by chilling effect, suffocate advocacy by threatening its enablers.

Journalists have also been targeted. The Committee to Protect Journalists warns of a steep decline in press freedoms: reporters denied access, newsrooms harassed, independent media vilified as “enemies” (CPJ 2025). Trump does not merely tolerate criticism poorly; he seeks to eliminate it.

And then, in the starkest demonstration of selective justice, came the mass pardons of January 6th insurrectionists. Over 1,500 rioters were absolved, their crimes recast as patriotism, even as immigrant families, protesters, and political opponents faced the full weight of federal punishment. Impunity for loyalists, retribution for dissent: the scales of justice tipped into authoritarian parody.

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Authoritarian Overreach: Punishment by Design

Perhaps the clearest sign that cruelty is not incidental but systemic is Trump’s embrace of emergency powers. Tariffs on allies, military deployments at the border, suspension of regulatory safeguards, all imposed not through deliberation but by decree (AP 2025). Emergency has become the normal mode of governance, a cudgel wielded against enemies foreign and domestic.

This is institutionalized in Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint now openly guiding the administration. Its agenda is explicit: purge the civil service, politicize the justice system, dismantle reproductive rights, impose Christian nationalist doctrine, and centralize executive power. It is not a vision of governance but of domination. The punitive through-line becomes structural, embedded not just in Trump’s whims but in the machinery of state.

4. Why MAGA Cheers Cruelty

The casual observer often asks: Why would anyone vote for policies that are so obviously cruel, so openly harmful, and so plainly indifferent to solutions? The answer is as blunt as it is unsettling: because cruelty is the point. For MAGA, punishment of out-groups is not a regrettable byproduct of governance, it is the very measure of success.

The Psychological Payoff: Us Protected by Them Punished

Research on authoritarianism shows that aggression toward out-groups is not merely tolerated but is psychologically rewarding for authoritarian followers. When “deviants” are punished, the in-group feels safer, even if no material problem is solved (Altemeyer 1996). Deporting immigrants does not raise wages, erasing trans identity does not stabilize families, and banning books does not educate children. But for the authoritarian psyche, these acts signal that the tribe is defended and its boundaries enforced. The satisfaction lies not in the solution but in the suffering of others.

Symbolism Over Solutions: The Theater of Punishment

This explains why Trump’s policies so often take the form of symbolic spectacle rather than effective reform. ICE raids staged in crowded restaurants, homeless encampments cleared by military trucks, executive orders written for maximum media outrage, all are designed to be watched, not to work. Political scientists call this “expressive politics” (Hetherington & Weiler 2009): the point is not policy efficacy but emotional catharsis. The sight of migrants in shackles or tents bulldozed into the night reassures MAGA supporters that someone is paying a price. Failure is irrelevant as long as humiliation is visible.

Cruelty as Strength: The Authoritarian Virtue

To MAGA’s base, cruelty itself is evidence of strength. As Stenner (2005) observed, authoritarians value conformity and order above all, and equate harshness with leadership. Thus, when Trump mocks the disabled, humiliates women, or threatens protesters, his supporters do not cringe; they applaud. Mercy is weakness, compromise is betrayal, and empathy is effeminacy. By this logic, the more brutally a leader punishes outsiders, the more virile and decisive he appears. Trump’s second term has turned this ethos into governance: eviction orders, federal takeovers, bans, raids, all exalt cruelty as proof of resolve.

Status Threat: The Fear of Losing Dominance

Underlying this psychology is what Diana Mutz (2018) has shown empirically: support for Trump and MAGA is best explained not by economic despair but by perceived status threat. White, Christian, and male dominance, once assumed as the natural order, is experienced as slipping away. Diversity, gender equality, and secularism are not welcomed as progress but feared as extinction. In this paranoid worldview, every policy that harms minorities or “cosmopolitans” is a defense of survival. Punitive governance becomes existential warfare, a way of declaring that the old hierarchy still stands.

The Cruelty Creed

In this sense, cheering cruelty is not a contradiction; it is coherence. MAGA voters admire the harm done to others because they see in it the preservation of themselves. Deportations, bans, raids, and rollbacks are not policy failures to them but policy triumphs. The suffering is the message, the punishment the proof of victory. America may be poorer, sicker, and less free, but so long as others are humiliated, the tribe feels secure.

5. Historical & Global Continuity

Authoritarian movements don’t invent new vices so much as update the user manual. What MAGA markets as “order” and “strength” is the familiar repertoire of modern strongmen: use the law as a whip, propaganda as anesthesia, and policy as a public spectacle of hurt. Guriev and Treisman call them “spin dictators,” leaders who prefer the velvet glove of legalism and media capture to the iron fist of mass terror, yet the bruise on the body politic is the same (Guriev & Treisman 2022). The punitive through-line is global; MAGA is merely the American franchise.

Hungary as Template: Punish by Statute, Rule by Humiliation

Viktor Orbán’s decade-plus project shows how punitive politics becomes a state architecture. He weakened checks and balances, gerrymandered districts, and harried civil society and universities, not to solve problems but to punish enemies and entrench dominance (Lendvai 2017). Jan-Werner Müller’s early diagnosis of a “partially illiberal democracy” that undermines checks and balances, intimidates or controls the media, weakens civil society, and rigs the playing field through legal redesign now reads like a blueprint for would-be authoritarians elsewhere (Lendvai 2017).

Orbán paired structural changes with deliberately punitive spectacles. His government forced asylum seekers into steel-container camps, a policy condemned by UNHCR and rights groups as “deeply inhuman,” while selling migration as a “Trojan horse for terrorism.” The point wasn’t security, it was stigma and fear (Lendvai 2017).

At home, he ran a demagogic “Let’s Stop Brussels” campaign and waged war on universities and NGOs, especially CEU and “foreign-financed” groups, tying them to a conspiracy featuring George Soros, and prompting EU infringement actions (Lendvai 2017). This is punitive governance by mailer, billboard, and decree, a politics of humiliation masquerading as sovereignty.

When courts pushed back, Orbán retaliated by curbing constitutional review and converting previously struck-down laws into constitutional text, lawfare as reprisal (Lendvai 2017). This is a masterclass in turning emergency, procedure, and paperwork into instruments of punishment.

The Global Pattern: Misinformation + Out-Group Pain

Across 26 democracies, the strongest predictor of elite misinformation isn’t “populism” in general but radical-right populism, the family that feeds on institutional hostility and thrives in ecosystems of grievance media (Törnberg & Chueri 2025). It’s not just that these parties lie; it’s that the lies serve the punitive project by painting minorities, migrants, and “woke elites” as existential threats, justifying harsher rules and rougher treatment.

The authors show how radical-right actors cultivate parallel media ecosystems designed to amplify resentment and delegitimize watchdog institutions, fertile soil for policies whose function is expressive harm rather than practical remedy (Törnberg & Chueri 2025). In other words: first the lie, then the lash.

Why This Keeps Recurring

Authoritarian predispositions are activated by perceived threat; once inflamed, they demand conformity and punishment of norm-breakers (Stenner 2005). That dynamic explains the eerie continuity from Orbán’s Budapest to Trump’s Washington: a governing style where the state’s highest purpose is to make someone else hurt, and where law is refashioned into a public instrument of degradation.

Bottom line: MAGA’s second-term agenda, attacking sanctuary cities, erasing gender identity, crushing dissent through legal intimidation, sits squarely inside a global, well-documented authoritarian pattern: use the theater of policy to punish out-groups and the machinery of the state to secure impunity for the in-group (Guriev & Treisman 2022; Lendvai 2017; Törnberg & Chueri 2025; Stenner 2005). The cruelty isn’t a byproduct; it’s the product.

VI. The Cost of Cruelty

If cruelty is the creed of MAGA, then the cost is paid in human lives, civil rights, and the erosion of democracy itself. The consequences are not theoretical. They are inscribed in hate crime statistics, in bullied schoolchildren, in shuttered civic institutions, and in a public culture that learns to mistake brutality for patriotism.

Hate Crimes and Social Violence

The Trump era has coincided with a measurable surge in hate crimes. Empirical work by Müller and Schwarz (2018) demonstrated that counties with the highest levels of Trump’s Twitter activity saw the sharpest increases in anti-minority hate crimes. Hate is not a byproduct but a bylaw of Trumpism; presidential rhetoric authorizes everyday citizens to police the social hierarchy with fists and firebombs. When leaders mock and stigmatize minorities, followers act accordingly.

Bullying and the Education of Cruelty

The cruelty filters down into classrooms. Huang and Cornell (2019) found that bullying in U.S. schools spiked significantly after Trump’s election, particularly targeting Hispanic, Muslim, and LGBTQ students. This is not coincidence but transmission: children ape the behavior of the man at the podium. In MAGA’s America, the president’s jeer becomes the bully’s taunt, and cruelty is taught as a civic lesson.

Civil Rights Erosion

Policy follows rhetoric, and rights erode with bureaucratic precision. Federal agencies under Trump have rolled back civil rights protections across the board, targeting LGBTQ individuals, immigrants, and racial minorities (them.us 2025). When Medicaid funds are cut, when federal recognition of trans identity is erased, when sanctuary cities are punished, the effect is not symbolic but material: lives shortened, protections withdrawn, communities destabilized. These are not “policy preferences” but structured punishments with measurable consequences.

Democratic Decline

Perhaps the deepest cost is institutional. Hetherington and Weiler (2009) warn that authoritarian polarization corrodes the foundations of democracy itself. The federal takeover of D.C. police, the pardons of January 6th insurrectionists, the harassment of the press, each undermines the principle that government is accountable, law is impartial, and dissent is legitimate. Authoritarian governance normalizes impunity for loyalists and repression for opponents. Democracy, in this schema, is not a shared system but a weapon, to be bent and broken so long as the “enemy” suffers.

Cruelty as Civic Religion

What emerges from all this is a political culture where cruelty itself becomes the civic religion. Hate crimes rise, bullying intensifies, protections vanish, institutions wither, and yet for MAGA, this is victory. Because victory is measured not in prosperity but in punishment. The cost of cruelty is borne by the weak and the vulnerable, but the true price is collective: a nation that forgets how to tell the difference between governing and tormenting.

Conclusion: The Authoritarian Nightmare in Plain Sight

Strip away the slogans, the flags, and the sanctimony, and MAGA is revealed for what it is: a movement dedicated to punishment. Its voters do not rally for liberty, prosperity, or stability. They rally for the spectacle of harm, for immigrants cuffed in raids, for the homeless expelled at gunpoint, for minorities derided as “DEI hires,” for trans identities scrubbed from the record. It is not policy failure; it is the program working exactly as designed.

Psychology explains the rest. Authoritarian submission, social dominance, collective narcissism, ressentiment, these are not academic abstractions but the mental furniture of Trump’s base. They do not crave freedom but hierarchy, not fairness but obedience, not dignity but humiliation. And Trump, ever the showman, delivers: cruelty as strength, vengeance as justice, spite as policy.

Globally, the pattern is unmistakable. From Orbán’s Hungary to Putin’s Russia, from Bolsonaro’s Brazil to MAGA’s America, the script repeats: weaponize fear, punish the vulnerable, erode institutions, and sell cruelty as order. Guriev and Treisman call them “spin dictators.” In practice, they are tormentors-in-chief, governing not by solutions but by spectacles of pain. Trump has simply Americanized the template.

The cost is already visible. Hate crimes rise, schoolchildren bully with the president’s words, civil rights protections collapse, democratic institutions corrode. The social fabric frays as cruelty becomes civic religion. This is the authoritarian nightmare, not a fantasy of jackboots and gulags, but the slow, daily degradation of liberty, disguised as patriotism and applauded as strength.

There is no misunderstanding here. MAGA is not a broken version of conservatism, nor a populist fever dream gone astray. It is authoritarianism in its purest and most banal form: governance as punishment, cruelty as creed. And unless it is confronted without illusion or apology, America’s future will be written not in laws of justice, but in the bruises of its most vulnerable.

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