Trump Has Become What He Most Despises: A Loser

The last two weeks have been disastrous for the Trump administration. In Europe, Vice President JD Vance made the extraordinary move of campaigning for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose illiberal far-right regime is a beacon for authoritarian conservatives around the Western world. Vance framed the election to Hungarians in stark terms.

“Will you stand against the bureaucrats in Brussels?” he asked them at a campaign rally. “Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers? Then, my friends, go to the polls and stand for Viktor Orbán!” Vance was apparently not very persuasive: Hungarians backed the anti-Orbán party by such an overwhelming margin that it will have enough seats in the country’s Parliament to enact far-reaching constitutional reforms.

President Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran continues to disrupt shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the geopolitical equivalent of stabbing the global economy’s femoral artery. A ceasefire last week reportedly required the U.S. to accept Iranian control of the strait among other concessions, leaving the world with the distinct impression that the U.S. had effectively lost the war. Trump himself, however, was unconcerned. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me, because we’ve won,” he told reporters on Saturday.

This is what happens when losers are elected to lead the world’s only superpower.

“Loser” is the president’s favorite insult. He has used it to describe, at various times, Rosie O’Donnell, John McCain, Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Graydon Carter, Russell Brand, Bill Barr, Jimmy Kimmel, Ron DeSantis, Paul Ryan, Joe Biden, Mark Cuban, Liz Cheney, Michael Bloomberg, Sadiq Khan, George Conway, Hillary Clinton, as well as ABC and CNN. This is only a partial list, but I think you get the picture.

A loser is often not someone who is actually left behind, nor is it someone who simply failed at something. Failure is a part of life; it can even be the first step on the path to success. Instead, a loser is one who thinks in terms of winners and losers at all—and who believes that they have not received the status and rewards to which they feel entitled. They always seem slighted by the world at large, which has cheated and denied them things that they think belong to them by virtue of their supposed innate superiority.

In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, for example, Vance criticized his fellow conservatives for going soft on their own constituents. “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations they had for their own lives,” he wrote. “Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.” His implication is that it is your fault if you’re a loser.

Losers do not actually care about the reality of winning and losing. Instead they care about the perception of success and failure. Trump, who is hardly the wealthiest New York real estate mogul nor the most successful, always insisted that he was the biggest and the best. “Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser,” Trump once wrote in a 2004 book. To that end, he has covered the White House in tacky gold ornaments and plans to build a giant triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, despite having won no wars (and having lost at least one of them).

Most importantly, losers internalize their own self-perception and seek to reinforce it in the world. They are drawn to hierarchy, and are therefore hostile to America’s fundamentally egalitarian ethos. A stratified society gives them a clearer sense of their inferiors, which is usually bound together with their perceptions of race, sex, genetics, or some other apparently inborn trait. Racism is the most familiar redoubt for the loser, since it provides what they think as highly visible proof of their own supposed superiority.

Trump, for example, often describes migrants in eugenic terms, claiming that they are “low IQ” or bring “bad genes” into the country. Conversely, he often describes himself as highly intelligent on genetic grounds. “Same genes, we have the genes,” Trump once said of an uncle who was an MIT professor, as if it were a credential for his own cognitive ability. “We’re smart people.… We’re like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones don’t work out so well, right? But we’re no, we’re no different in that sense.” In 2020, The New York Times reported, he described a largely white crowd at a Minnesota rally as having “good genes.”

Fascism and loserdom go hand in hand because fascism is predicated on the notion that the fascist has been unjustly cheated and robbed, and that only through force can they restore and revitalize themselves. Fascists idolize losers because no fascist society has ever flourished and because they see themselves reflected in other people’s failures. It is fitting that Trump and his allies have lavished praise and public statuary upon Robert E. Lee, a Virginia-born colonel who is best known for leading a failed rebellion against the United States on behalf of a slaver aristocracy in the South.

The goal of Trumpism, it could be said, is to create losers of us all. The political and economic project’s goal is not to materially improve its adherents’ lives. Instead, it is to create a sense of social order for some people that offers an aesthetic sense of improvement, even as one’s standard of living declines in real terms. These illusory gains can only go so far. Or as one frustrated Trump voter told reporters during Trump’s first-term trade war with China in 2019, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

It helps that Trump’s administration is often populated by people whose worldview is driven by personal grievances against the world. Foremost among them is Vance, whose memoir sought to rationalize his impoverished background with his own sense of superiority. Vance’s Appalachian childhood was not an easy one: His father abandoned him, his mother remarried multiple times while wrestling with drug addiction, and his grandparents largely raised him. Even his own name changed multiple times.

That disjointed upbringing led Vance to define his identity in other ways. “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast,” Vance wrote. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”

Vance’s description of a distinct Scots-Irish identity is far from baseless. Distinct cultural and religious communities settled America in the 1600s and 1700s, ranging from the Puritans of Massachusetts and the Quakers of Pennsylvania to the Reformed Dutch communities in New York and the Catholic dissidents of Maryland. What Vance attempts to describe, however, is some sort of Scots-Irish American Volk that is more authentic than anyone else. He then transmuted his perceived sense of cultural inferiority into one of apparent personal superiority for escaping into the affluent world of Yale Law School and a hedge fund backed by Peter Thiel, the far-right tech magnate.

Throughout his public writings, Vance has often sounded self-consciously haunted by his origins. In a 2017 New York Times op-ed about the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, Vance described the disappointment he felt with Bill Clinton—a “poor boy with a vaguely Southern accent, raised by a single mother with a heavy dose of loving grandparents”—after the president’s personal failings dragged down his marriage and his administration. “I cared that he had managed to build the domestic tranquillity that he lacked as a child,” Vance reflected. “But here, in one sex scandal, he had blown it all up. If a man of his abilities had done this, then what hope was there for me?”

He then contrasted Clinton’s failings with Barack Obama’s happy family life. The two men weren’t on the same political wavelength at the time. (That gap has now obviously become a chasm.) But Vance professed at the time to admire Obama for overcoming his own untraditional upbringing. “Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal,” Vance said.

“At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams,” he wrote. “For that, I’ll miss him, and the example he set.” Six years later, he would be elected to a Senate seat of his own in Ohio. Vance has built the family life that he once craved: He met his wife, Usha, at Yale and they now have three children together, with a fourth one on the way.

Despite these successes, Vance seems unsatisfied. Throughout the years he has denounced “childless” liberals and “cat moms” by claiming they have no stake in the future of the country and, therefore, should not decide it. He spent the 2024 campaign spreading a racist smear that Haitian refugees in Ohio had eaten people’s pets, a claim vehemently denied by local officials and by the state’s Republican governor. Though he is now one heartbeat away from the presidency, he has no real accomplishments in public life. His recent ventures on the world stage—which my colleague Alex Shephard described as a “hell of a losing streak”—have not helped matters.

Other far-right figures are even more openly troubled. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has spent the last year trying to reshape the U.S. military into a whiter, less politically neutral, and more religiously sectarian force. Hegseth had a largely unremarkable military career in the Army National Guard and rarely stood out while working as a television host on Fox News. But he did catch the eye of Trump, who elevated him to run the world’s most powerful bureaucracy.

Along the way, Hegseth’s Senate confirmation narrowly survived damning allegations of sexual abuse and harassment. In a 2018 letter, his own mother condemned his behavior toward his ex-wife during his divorce. “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote. “You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” (She later recanted the accusations during the confirmation fight.)

Since being installed in the Pentagon, Hegseth has sought to redefine the American military along the social and cultural lines of a teenage Call of Duty voice chat. He oversaw the department’s rebranding to the Department of War, its pre-1940s name, and turned “lethality” into the reigning mantra. He has replaced judge advocate generals who might advise against military operations’ legality and restored medals to soldiers who slaughtered Native American women and children in the nineteenth-century frontier wars. Under his leadership, even the names of American military operations sound like something a teenager came up with. Hundreds of American service members have been killed or wounded in Operation Epic Fury—his latest creation.

In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth laid out his self-centered vision for the military. He described the nation’s service members as a “camouflaged class” of Americans who stand apart and above the sordidness of American society and politics. That changed, according to Hegseth, when Obama took office and began to impose leftist values upon American service members. Warfare and military service, in Hegseth’s eyes, are a credentialing process for masculinity itself, which the woke left had come to threaten.

“We used to see the dignity and value of men who got up early, made real things, lived by a code, and worked with their hands,” Hegseth wrote. “Cowboys were our heroes, as were soldiers, explorers, and astronauts. Now? It’s Tony Fauci and Michelle Obama who get the hero treatment. Careerist media-types only recognize so-called elite people like themselves.”

The persistent desire to overcome a young man’s personal insecurities radiates from the book. He recalled how a “stoic Vietnam veteran” told him when he was 19 years old, “Pete, whatever you do, don’t miss your first war.” He described that “the stark statement ricocheted around my brain like a stray bullet” and that he was struck by the “certainty that I had yet to hear in my short life, except from a pulpit. (And they didn’t teach that in church.)”

“Through those four words—don’t miss your war—he spoke of honor,” Hegseth continued. “Of duty. Of courage. Of God and country. Of the arena. Like an evangelical preacher of America’s civil religion—and like Teddy Roosevelt—he had been to the arena, and he was urging me.” America’s twenty-first-century wars, which involved long foreign occupations, building complex relationships with civilian populaces, and trying to suppress elusive insurgencies, must have paled in comparison in Hegseth’s mind to the pitched battles of yesteryear.

Hegseth then claimed that “coastal elites” had turned military service into a “passive-aggressive mark against a man,” blaming progressive presidents like Woodrow Wilson for the shift. (Yes, history is not Hegseth’s strong suit.) “This inversion has jettisoned a lot of attributes that virtuous men used to covet: honor, selflessness, courage, integrity,” he declared. “Instead, these values are replaced with optics-obsessed performativity, selfish careerism, effeminacy, and duplicity.” In Hegseth’s worldview, it is military service that confers dignity to the soldier, not the soldier who confers dignity to military service.

One does not need to be a veteran to sense that all of this doesn’t line up. The U.S. military’s ability to kill people has never really been in doubt; its greatest challenges over the past quarter-century have been mission creep, indefinite wars of choice, and poor grand strategic planning by the nation’s political leadership. Hegseth’s own oversight of the Iran war is both a testament to, and an extension of, these failures: U.S. forces killed numerous Iranian political leaders and severely reduced their conventional military strength, yet still managed to yield de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz to Tehran in the ceasefire.

Other personal grievances appear to have driven Hegseth’s monomaniacal focus on eradicating “wokeness” from the armed forces. In his book, he opened by recounting how he had been “deemed an ‘extremist’” by the military in which he had served for twenty years. “Yes, you read that right,” he added, apparently under the impression that this would be a surprise to most readers. “Twenty years ... and the military I loved, I fought for, I revered ... spit me out,” he wrote, complete with dramatic pauses. “While writing this book, I separated from an Army that didn’t want me anymore. The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either.”

What actually happened was that Hegseth was initially assigned to a D.C. National Guard unit that provided security to President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, only to be pulled after another soldier reported him as a potential “insider threat” for, as Politico reported two years ago, having a “tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups.” While Hegseth claimed it was because of a cross tattoo on his chest, Politico reported that it was actually because of a “Deus Vult” tattoo on his arm.

A sense of betrayal permeates Hegseth’s version of events. “I could have stayed in, which would have required renewing my top secret security clearance—and an extensive background check,” he claimed in the book. “I’ve done it many times before. No sweat. I have nothing to hide. But, to put it plainly, I don’t trust this government, this commander in chief, or this Pentagon. That’s not to say the situation is permanent—hence this book—but my trust, for this Army, is irrevocably broken.” Given his perception that it defines his manhood, the shift must have been deeply psychically wounding.

Since taking over the Pentagon, however, Hegseth has largely validated those 2021 concerns about his ideological views. He approved new policies on facial hair that would disproportionately require Black men to leave the armed forces and oversaw a purge of the general-officer corps that largely affected generals and admirals who weren’t white men. Last February, Trump fired General Charles Brown, a Black man, from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after Hegseth previously called for his removal for pushing a “woke” agenda. According to NPR, Brown had supported policies that sought to “increase recruitment by attracting Americans from more diverse backgrounds.”

A common refrain from opponents of DEI is that diversity programs are anti-meritocratic because they elevate unqualified minority applicants. Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon suggests that the opposite is true: DEI policies help prevent qualified personnel from missing out on merit-based opportunities by virtue of their race or sex. Hegseth made a rare intervention last month in the Pentagon’s internal promotion system for flag officers, for example, to block two Black men and two women from advancing to a one-star general rank. The move was internally criticized by some Pentagon officials as overturning the department’s meritocratic processes.

For Hegseth, symbolism and aesthetics are paramount over results. His order to purge any Pentagon material that involved “diversity, equity, and inclusion” led the department in 2025 to briefly take down a website honoring Jackie Robinson, the World War II veteran who later broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. In his book, he made a pitch that he would later carry out. “The next president should also change the name of the Department of Defense back to the War Department,” he declared. “Sure, our military defends us. And in a perfect world it exists to deter threats and preserve peace. But ultimately its job is to conduct war. We either win or lose wars.” So far, under his tenure, it has been the latter.

I could go on and on. One can also think of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has squandered his family’s legacy of public service by demolishing the nation’s public health institutions and spreading anti-vaccine conspiracies that have and will cost lives. Or there is Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and the owner of a rocket ship company. One might think that would bring a measure of personal satisfaction, but according to him, it does not. “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about,” he wrote on Twitter in February, adding a sad-faced emoji at the end. Since his divorce in 2016, and especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, Musk has increasingly devoted himself to funding far-right causes, tweeting racist conspiracy theories, and turning Twitter from a useful public forum into a cesspool of AI-driven fascist slop.

Musk’s use of Twitter is particularly ironic, since his political evolution appears to be driven in part by the algorithmic forces he now commands. A central theme of the modern far-right political project is to make people feel like they are worthless and powerless so it can exploit the anxieties and resentments that come with that. One influential figure among young conservatives is Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist and sex trafficker. His hatred of women and minorities is perhaps his best-known attribute, but he also hates the audience of troubled and alienated young men that he has cultivated.

“You’re obsessed with [Grand Theft Auto VI] because you have zero cars, women, yachts, money, or action in your real life,” he wrote in a September 2025 post on Twitter, directed at his own fans. The only way to overcome your self-described inferiority, Tate evangelizes, is by inflicting harm on those you perceive to be inferior. “Being racist is one of the last things that’s fun,” he wrote in a February 2026 tweet. “It’s basically the only remaining reason to not kill yourself.”

Nigel Farage, a far-right politician in Britain, once described Tate as the spokesperson for repressed and “emasculated” young British men. “You three guys,” he said in a podcast appearance in 2024, referring to the hosts, “you are all 25, you are all kind of being told you can’t be blokes, you can’t do laddish, fun, bloke things.… That’s almost what you’re being told. That masculinity is something we should look down upon, something that we should frown upon.” Even Farage had to concede, however, that Tate “maybe took that alter-ego of masculinity too far in his relationships with women” and that some of his social media posts were “over the top.”

Other manifestations come from incel culture, which blames some men’s failure to form romantic relationships on women instead of the men themselves. This subculture is popular among young, insecure men who are typically at an emotionally tempestuous time in their lives. Part of their online radicalization is “blackpilling,” a term for embracing incel ideology that is derived from a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix.

“It’s about a feeling of gleeful nihilism,” Elle Reeve, a reporter who wrote a book on incel culture, explained in a podcast in 2024. “That all of this is corrupt. It’s hopeless. Like society is irredeemable. And so the best thing you can possibly do is accelerate towards its destruction, because what comes after will be a golden era. You can remake the world the way it ought to be. And with blackpill thinking, you can rationalize a lot of immoral and unethical actions because the morals and ethics created by this society are totally bankrupt.”

These semi-adolescent ideologies often manifest themselves in adolescent ways. In the mid-2010s, one of the precursors to alt-right ideologies and Trumpism took the form of Gamergate, a targeted harassment campaign of feminist figures in video game circles. Central to the harassers’ grievances was the perceived infringement upon video games—which they saw as a traditionally white and male space—by women and racial minorities, especially as game developers sought to appeal to broader audiences.

The newest iteration is “looksmaxxing,” where young men injure themselves and self-administer drugs to supposedly improve their looks and reach some sort of aesthetic ideal. The goal, however, is not actual self-improvement but rather the humiliation of perceived lessers. Braden Peters, a 20-year-old influencer who goes by the name Clavicular, is the most prominent figure in this online subculture. He often seeks, somewhat strangely, to try to humiliate other men by standing next to those he perceives as less attractive and “mogging” them.

Looksmaxxing is not only unnecessary for improving one’s self-image and handling body dysmorphia, but it may be dangerously self-defeating and even self-destructive. Peters told a New York Times reporter that he thinks his testosterone treatments have left him sterile and that his goal is not to actually sleep with women, which would “gain me nothing,” he claimed. This week, after 60 Minutes Australia reporter Adam Hegarty questioned Peters about the incel community and his connections to Andrew Tate, Peters suggested that the reporter was a cuckold and that he would look into “who your wife cheated with.” Hegarty noted that he wasn’t married, and Peters ended the interview shortly after. (One might even say that he had been interview-mogged.)

This relationship between some far-right influencers and their audiences can almost be described as abusive in nature. The apparent goal is to make them feel weak and unwanted, to feel lesser than their peers and cohorts, and then to provide a false sense of community to soothe their insecurities—as well as an out-group to blame for any shortcomings. Trump and other leading far-right figures have sought to apply this on a national scale, holding out themselves as the only chance for salvation. “I alone can fix it,” the president declared a decade ago during his 2016 speech at the Republican National Convention.

In 2024, there is no social problem that the Trump administration says it cannot solve through mass deportations. Trump officials and right-wing policy wonks have sought to de-educate and de-intellectualize Americans by targeting universities with anti-DEI lawsuits, slashing federal funding for sciences and the humanities, and demanding ideological compliance from the nation’s cultural, entertainment, and journalistic infrastructure. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir and a Thiel associate, recently predicted that widespread adoption of AI products “disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less” even as it “increases the power, economic power [of] vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters.”

That is a dubious assertion on both fronts, of course, but it speaks to the aspirations of Silicon Valley’s increasingly illiberal caste of tech moguls. Destabilizing sources of economic stability is an opportunity for profit. “Brexit, just the beginning,” Jeffrey Epstein said in an email exchange with Thiel shortly after the U.K. referendum in 2016, writing with the poorly structured sentences that the financier and sex trafficker always favored: “return to tribalism. counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain.” The result, if they succeed, will be an ironic egalitarianism: In this far-right future, everyone will be a loser but them.