MAGA and the Cringe Factor

A look at the undercovered side of the new administration's polling woes.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Now more than half a year after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, the consensus surrounding the implications of his triumph is slowly starting to change. Right after he won, the perceived scale of his win led many to describe it as generational realignment that would shift American politics and culture in a right-wing direction for years to come. But in the months since Trump has entered the White House, this interpretation has taken countless blows as his popularity has rapidly decreased. Far earlier than expected, and without any liberal Joe Rogan in sight, it has suddenly become necessary to square past claims of right-wing cultural dominance with the administration’s rapidly-mounting polling woes.

To do so, a new theory has been constructed that relies almost solely on the economy to explain why things are going wrong. “Anti-woke” cultural strength, the exhaustion of progressive liberalism, the power of right-wing new media—all of this is still real, it is said. As mad as the public may be about tariffs, these supposed cultural foundations for right-wing strength have not gone away. As such, the tumult of Trump’s first 100 days is, at most, a missed opportunity—not any real refutation of the “vibe shift” thesis.

The problem with this idea is that Trump has not just lost support on economic issues since his inauguration. On immigration, he has seen a dramatic and widely recognized slide that has turned his once-strongest position into a 50/50 issue. His numbers on foreign policy—his most underrated advantage in 2024—have seen an even more rapid slide. Even perceptions of his personality, now regarded as the most settled of all settled issues, have taken a turn for the worse. Taken individually, each of these declines could be written off as a unique circumstance, the product of a single mistake here and some spillover from the economy there. But when such wide declines are happening on such a wide variety of subjects, all of them unrelated to the stock market or trade wars, the conventional wisdom about the right’s cultural dominance becomes ever more difficult to believe. Rather than its greatest asset, the way the administration conducts itself in public and on social media starts to look like something else entirely.

That “something else entirely” being a complete, existential, bone-chilling embarrassment.

There is a great fear to recognize this for what it is. After years of watching Trump touch countless third rails and walk away unscathed, simply assuming that whatever outrageous new thing he does will either have no impact or be met with approval can feel like the safest and most reliable option. But four months of this is more than enough time to see this pass without saying something. Here, I am willing to take a stand. I am going to argue that, rather than being a mold-breaking strength, the way Republicans act—especially online—is one of their greatest liabilities.

Shit like this.

Posts like these are lame. They are tryhard. They are are cringe as fuck, and they’re not even a fraction as smart as the people posting them would want you to think. Here’s why they act like this, and why it stands as a massive problem no matter what they do on policy.

A Brief History of the Soy Right

When trying to understand Trump 2.0’s current media strategy, the first mistake many make is simply assuming that it is a direct continuation of the way Trump and his allies have advertised themselves in the past. For the untrained eye, this can be quite a difficult thing to recognize, as there are a great many continuities between the combative posting style we have always known from Trump and the kinds of things the White House is posting today. Just that they are abrasive, for instance, does not make them substantially different from past Trump posts, like his 2019 broadside against “washed up psycho Bette Midler.” The cultish partisanship, too, is entirely in line with how the Republican Party has acted for years. But what the people running the White House Twitter now are doing now is quite different from what Trumpworld has done before, and it has a lot to do with one thing: age.

To explain what I mean by this, I am going to ask you to do something terrible. I am going to ask you to step into the shoes of something unbelievably, unspeakably loathsome: the Republican millennial. Or, more specifically, the shoes of one Republican millennial in particular: a man by the name of Kaelan Dorr.

(Yes, seriously. That’s actually his name.)

You may not know this man, but you have almost certainly seen his work. Since January 20th, 2025, Kaelan here has held the position of Deputy Communications Director at the Trump White House. In this capacity, he has run the official White House Twitter. He is the one behind the Studio Ghibli AI images, deportation ASMRs, and other awful posts you have seen on your feed. He has also never been profiled by any political writer until now.