Republicans are exhausted — not from governing, but from pretending to.
For nearly a decade, MAGA has sold performance anxiety as authenticity: rage as a lifestyle brand, cruelty as patriotism, and daily humiliation as community service. But the November 4, 2025 results were less “wave” and more “intervention.” Voters pried open the circus tent and walked out. Democrats didn’t just hold ground — they flipped Georgia, shoved Pennsylvania, and even cracked Mississippi’s supermajority. The country collectively said, “Nah — we’re done with the clown auditions.”
If you want to understand why, skip the pundits and start with a simpler truth: the MAGA brand ran out of monsters. Republicans have always needed something under the bed to sell you a flashlight. The problem is, they’ve been running the same horror franchise since Reagan. In the 1980s, Reagan peddled “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” like he was auditioning for Birth of a Nation 2: Trickledown Boogaloo — racist caricature disguised as economic policy. Then came George W. Bush, who turned homophobia into a campaign plank and called it “family values.” It was basically Queer Eye for the Straight Fear. For half a century, GOP politics has been an infomercial for panic, selling fear in exchange for votes and occasionally a tote bag. They’ve recycled so many boogeymen that Freddy Krueger should’ve filed a cease-and-desist.
The original recipe was called the Southern Strategy — the political equivalent of laundering hate through a focus group. Lee Atwater didn’t invent racism in politics; he just gave it a PowerPoint. Say less “segregation,” more “states’ rights.” Replace the slur with a spreadsheet. Atwater admitted the point was to let racists feel respectable while staying racist — to swap their white hoods for Brooks Brothers suits and call it “heritage.” It was the strategy part of the Southern Strategy — the camouflage that made bigotry sound like economics. But somewhere along the way, Republicans forgot the “strategy” and just kept the “Southern.” When Trump logged on, he didn’t even bother with the code words. He was the first politician to look at the dog whistle and say, “Why not just bark?”
Trump’s breakthrough wasn’t genius; it was nihilism with a Twitter account. He didn’t whisper about immigrants “taking our jobs” — he flat-out announced that Mexico was “sending over rapists,” then smirked for the cameras like he’d just solved racism by rebranding it. At first, the Republican Party didn’t know whether to laugh, hide, or call security. Marco Rubio called him a “con artist.” Lindsey Graham called him a “kook,” which is rich in hindsight, coming from a man who’s spent a decade auditioning for the role of Trump’s emotional support senator. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich fell in love immediately — which tracks, considering Trump’s combination of moral vacancy and performative cruelty must’ve felt like home.
Then came November 8, 2016 — the night the punchline became the president. What started as a political prank turned into a full-blown hostile takeover. Trump didn’t bother courting the middle; he declared war on it. The man didn’t run a campaign — he ran a group-therapy session for people allergic to accountability. If you were broke, it wasn’t automation — it was immigrants “stealing jobs.” If you were single and couldn’t get laid, it wasn’t your personality — it was feminism. If you were uneducated, it wasn’t disinterest — it was “the elites.” If you didn’t get promoted, blame DEI. If you lost an argument online, blame CRT. His rallies were motivational seminars for men who think foreplay is a liberal conspiracy. Somewhere in that stew of insecurity, the manosphere — that digital wasteland of fragile masculinity and podcast mics — found its messiah.
Trump didn’t sell policy; he sold resentment wholesale. His campaign wasn’t a movement — it was a middle finger wrapped in a red hat, waved proudly by people who mistook defiance for direction.
There’s actual psychology behind this — a syllabus of dysfunction that turns cruelty into currency. Once cruelty became performance, psychology replaced policy. The first concept is moral disengagement — convincing yourself that doing harm is doing good. It’s the duct tape of political cruelty, letting a congressman slash school lunches with a smile and call it “fiscal responsibility.” Then comes deindividuation — mob behavior without accountability. It’s how a group of retirees with flag capes can beat a cop with a Blue Lives Matter flag and still think they’re patriots.
And then there’s schadenfreude — the guilty pleasure of watching someone else suffer. It’s more than spite; it’s emotional outsourcing. The brain literally lights up when you see your enemies humiliated. MAGA made that sensation political currency. You could hear it at every rally: the laughter when Trump mocked a disabled reporter or told protesters to “get out.” Cruelty wasn’t collateral — it was the product. Neuroscientists call it a dopamine hit. The rest of us call it evil.
Put those three together — moral disengagement, deindividuation, and schadenfreude — and you’ve got a movement built on psychological self-harm. Cruelty made clicks, clicks made donors, donors made power, and power made cruelty again. But like any addiction, the high fades. By 2025, the same stunt that once went viral barely earned a grunt. The mob needed a stronger fix, but they’d already burned through every enemy worth hating.
Race, the Original Republican Sin
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the first chapter of Stuart Stevens’ book, It Was All a Lie.
Even the GOP’s “serious” class caught the contagion. The think tanks turned into meme farms. The moral arc of Republicanism didn’t just bend — it twisted into a pretzel of self-preservation. Liz Cheney got excommunicated for being lucid. The message was clear: dissent was treason, lucidity was liberalism.
Not everyone drank the Kool-Aid. Some conservatives had the foresight — or just the conscience — to see the writing on the wall early. The Republican Accountability Project, The Lincoln Project and a few other breakaway factions refused to trade integrity for proximity to power. They warned that Trumpism wasn’t a governing philosophy; it was an infection. They weren’t perfect, but they preserved something rare in modern politics: a working moral compass.
Inside the party, though, loyalty became currency. Cross Trump, and you were finished. Ask Liz Cheney, replaced in Wyoming by a woman whose slogan might as well have been “Trump’s Favorite Student.” Ask Marco Rubio, who once called Trump a con artist and now sounds like a motivational speaker for hostages. The party of Reagan’s discipline and Bush’s decorum mutated into a traveling circus of unlicensed life coaches shouting “freedom!” while juggling voter-suppression bills.
When Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, America saw how authoritarians handle rejection — poorly. Instead of conceding like an adult, he called for an insurrection like a cult leader learning democracy for the first time. For about twenty-four hours, Republicans pretended to be horrified. Lindsey Graham got to cosplay as a concerned citizen. Mitch McConnell gave a speech that sounded like it was ghost-written by Aaron Sorkin, then promptly voted to acquit. Fear did what morality couldn’t. Trump didn’t need to start a new party; the threat of it was enough. The GOP became his hostage negotiation team.
By 2022, “Never Trump” had become “Never Speak Ill of Trump.” He may have lost the presidency, but he won the party.
When he narrowly beat Kamala Harris in 2024, Republicans acted like he’d conquered the Axis powers. The margin was razor-thin, but MAGA called it a landslide. Fox News ran “Redemption Tour 2024.” Trump bragged that Harris “didn’t even win her own apartment complex.” Reality wasn’t bent — it was vacuum-sealed.
When he ran for that term, he’d made the Jeffrey Epstein files feel important to his base — the red-pill revelation to end all conspiracies. Then as president, he shrugged them off as “irrelevant.”
MAGA wasn’t a movement anymore; it was a subscription service for people allergic to truth. The rallies came back — louder, stranger — nostalgia tours for a washed-up frontman whose greatest hit was January 6th. Trump promised revenge and prosperity; he delivered inflation, tariffs, and foreign policy best described as “yelling at clouds.”
Politics has consequences, and karma has a calendar. Trump’s second, non-consecutive term hit voters like a hangover: tariffs, tantrums, and a trade war with Canada that made milk and eggs feel like luxury goods. The MAGA economy was supposed to make farmers rich; instead, it made them nostalgic for NAFTA.
When he ran for that term, he’d made the Jeffrey Epstein files feel important to his base — the red-pill revelation to end all conspiracies. Then as president, he shrugged them off as “irrelevant.” For his base, it was like finding out pro-wrestling was fake. Disillusionment set in fast. For the first time, MAGA realized their Excalibur was imaginary — so they did what addicts do best: they distracted. Culture wars, tariffs, victimhood; rinse and repeat.
Meanwhile, cruelty metastasized. Nancy Mace, who once played the role of LGBTQ ally, reinvented herself as a culture-war mercenary, trading “pro-gay” for “anti-trans for applause.” She proposed bills to ban trans women from Capitol restrooms and dismissed backlash with “I don’t care.” The “law and order” crowd now cheers book bans and threats against librarians — as if they watched Footloose and decided the villain had a point.
Then came absurdity that proved how burnt-out the outrage machine had become: ABC yanked Jimmy Kimmel Live! after he told an innocuous joke about Trump’s lack of grief at Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Offending conservatives, it turned out, was a violation of both decency and profit. FCC chair Brendan Carr even hinted he could “send the cavalry” for non-compliant networks — turning moral panic into regulatory mob theater. America wasn’t being told what to laugh at anymore; it was being told why.
When the 2025 special elections arrived, MAGA had nothing left but déjà vu. Blame DEI. Ban drag queens. Pretend “woke” is ideology instead of tantrum. Voters wanted potholes fixed and rent stabilized, not sermons about Mr. Potato Head’s pronouns. In Virginia, Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears ran on anti-trans panic and got flattened by Abigail Spanberger. In New York, Andrew Cuomo tried an AI-generated xenophobic ad against Zohran Mamdani and publicly torched his own legacy. And in New Jersey, everyone I knew swore Mikie Sherrill was toast — yet she won by a mile. Jack Ciattarelli, her MAGA-lite opponent, had no policy beyond “still mad about DEI.” At that point, he could’ve lost to a cup of decaf coffee if it had a D next to it.
The Heritage Foundation — once conservatism’s brain — now sits between a rock and an antisemitic place. It built half the panic-era policy playbook but is funded by pro-Israel donors appalled by its own monster. When Tucker Carlson platformed Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes and Heritage’s president defended it, the think-tank face-planted into parody. Donors fled; staff resigned; and suddenly a fifty-year-old institution was workshopping slogans like, “Open bigotry — is it on brand?”
In September, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, it should’ve been a moment of unity — a line against political violence. I was never a fan of Kirk or his rhetoric, but no one deserves to die for words. That should’ve been the easy part. Instead, Republicans blamed Democrats before the body was even cold. They could’ve called for calm; they called for clicks.
By then, fatigue was visible. Lindsey Graham defending Trump looks like a hostage blinking SOS in Morse code. Ted Cruz explaining policy sounds like a man faking a book report. Even the cruelty has bags under its eyes. MAGA wasn’t angry anymore; it was tired. Hate, it turns out, is an unsustainable business model.
A movement built on schadenfreude discovered that hatred burns calories. Psychologists call it ego depletion — you can only fake moral passion so long before your brain begs for a nap. Inside the echo chamber, logic short-circuited. Moderation doesn’t trend; cruelty does. And hate is exhausting — not just for the people hearing it, but for the people producing it. Finding fresh boogeymen takes real energy. Neuroscientists call it ego depletion; the rest of us call it burnout.
By 2025, the right’s creative tank was running on fumes. They’d already blamed immigrants, teachers, drag queens, and Mr. Potato Head’s pronouns. With the government shut down, MAGA elites hosted Gatsby-themed soirées while SNAP recipients waited for groceries. When people worry about rent and flights, they don’t care about culture wars. The villains stopped being interesting. You can only shout “indoctrination!” so many times before the audience starts scrolling.
The Blue Wave of 2025 wasn’t just a Democratic win — it was a national sigh. Voters fled from chaos. Competence was suddenly sexy. Mississippi breaking its Republican supermajority wasn’t a fluke; it was prophecy.
But don’t mistake exhaustion for extinction. Authoritarian movements don’t retire; they rebrand. You’d hope Republicans might read the room and try governing again. Instead, they’re comic-book villains — the Legion of Doom in flag pins and golf polos — convinced they’re the heroes. Expect Faith & Freedom 2.0, new think tanks, fresh slurs, and rediscovered “law and order” the second it polls well. Hate is their most renewable resource.
Still, Republican fatigue is real — and self-inflicted. You can’t run a hate factory forever; eventually even the workers quit.
But tired villains are still dangerous. They reach for power the way addicts reach for the bottle. So no, this isn’t the time to relax — it’s the time to finish the job. Accountability isn’t vengeance; it’s rehab for democracy.
The cure for their exhaustion isn’t mercy — it’s consequences. November 4 proved it. Republicans showed the country just how tired and creatively bankrupt they’ve become. This isn’t the time for Democrats to get cocky, but let’s be honest — MAGA looks like a fighter begging for a mercy beating. Think Muhammad Ali vs. Larry Holmes — all flailing arms, no footwork, still talking trash while taking punches they can’t block. The best thing Democrats can do now is keep swinging — not out of cruelty, but clarity. Beat them with competence, drown them in turnout, smother them with good governance until their only complaint is that the trains run on time.
The moral is simple: fear politics only lose power when people stop being afraid. And in 2025, America finally looked the boogeyman in the eye and said, “Boo yourself.” If Democrats want 2026 and 2028 to look the same, they don’t need miracles — just stamina. Keep them tired. Keep them accountable. Let MAGA exhaust itself into political sleep paralysis while the rest of the country gets back to work.
Republicans are exhausted — and the only cure for their fatigue is defeat.
Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons.
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Great article professor! I hope and pray that MAGA hate is tired and we can stay strong enough to keep the fight going and get the clowns out of power. Thank you.
Yet another homer with the bases loaded. As a retired therapist I appreciate your fresh take on some of the psychological mechanisms foundational to MAGA. (You might keep mining that vein, por ejemplo, the politicians' favorite character disorder, aka The Dark Triad. I'm guessing many of the same traits are overrepresented among the MAGA faithful.) I also very much appreciated your illumination of the Southern Strategy in the history of the GOP. You and Heather Cox Richardson ought to do a podcast on that subject.