7 stories credited to The Conversation (2 on theconversation.com, 5 reproduced by other sites)
Latest story Apr 4, 2026 · on ChamberLight since Apr 2026
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| Month | Stories | All outlets |
|---|---|---|
| March 2026 | 1 | 814 |
| April 2026 | 6 | 4,537 |
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| September 2026 | 0 | 598 |
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- Criminal Justice7
100% of 7 stories · 20% across all outlets
- Ethics/Corruption7
100% of 7 stories · 62% across all outlets
- Budget/Spending2
29% of 7 stories · 33% across all outlets
- Defense/Military1
14% of 7 stories · 26% across all outlets
- Foreign Policy1
14% of 7 stories · 30% across all outlets
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- Republican93% · 14 pairs
- Party not recorded7% · 1 pair
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- Good Look
- 0 (0%)
- Mixed
- 6 (86%)
- Informational
- 0 (0%)
- Bad Look
- 1 (14%)
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5
Pam Bondi’s extreme political loyalty to Trump wasn’t enough to save her job
President Donald Trump participates in a roundtable discussion in Memphis, Tenn., with Attorney General Pam Bondi on March 23, 2026. AP Photo/Bruce Newman After President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2, 2026, news reports suggested that she fell from grace, not for being too independent, but for not being effective enough at defending him and prosecuting his political enemies. As The New York Times reported the previous day, Trump was disappointed with “Ms. Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which has become a political liability for Mr. Trump among his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and vented about what he sees as the Department of Justice’s lack of aggressiveness in going after his foes.” The president has long indicated that whoever served as attorney general in his administration should see themselves as his lawyer rather than as someone representing the U.S. government. During his first presidential term, Trump was gravely disappointed with Jeff Sessions, his first attorney general, who recused himself from the investigation into alleged political interference in the 2016 election. He replaced Sessions with William Barr, who abandoned Trump when the president did not accept the results of the 2020 election. Having learned from those mistakes, Trump set out to find a political ally and loyalist to take the helm at the Justice Department in his second administration. As a scholar of law and politics, and someone who has written about the role of the attorney general, I think Trump’s desire has a familiar ring to it. It is not unusual for presidents to put people who share their views and policy preferences into the role. But Trump has gone far beyond what is usually done. Jeff Sessions is sworn in as attorney general before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill on Nov. 14, 2017. AP Photo/Alex Brandon Bondi’s ascent Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz was Trump’s first choice for attorney general during the president’s second term. Many commentators viewed Gaetz as a firebrand who was temperamentally unsuited for that position. Some criticized him for calling the president an “inspirational leader of a loving and patriotic movement” in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In the face of growing opposition generated in part by allegations of his misconduct, Gaetz withdrew. Trump turned to Bondi a few hours later. She had served as Florida’s attorney general and drawn praise from across the political spectrum for her professionalism. A bipartisan group of former state attorneys general wrote a letter attesting to their “firsthand knowledge of her fitness for the office” and her “wealth of prosecutorial experience and commitment to public service.” In addition, as PBS noted at the time of her appointment, Bondi was “a longtime Trump ally and was one of his lawyers during his first impeachment trial, when he was accused — but not convicted — of abusing his power as he tried to condition U.S. military assistance to Ukraine on that country investigating then-former Vice President Joe Biden.” She also showed her loyalty by attending Trump’s New York trial for paying hush money to porn actor Stormy Daniels, with whom he allegedly had an affair. At the time of her nomination, Bondi seemed to have the attributes of an attorney general. She had the credentials to take on the job of running the DOJ and the confidence of the president who appointed her. From confirmation to downfall During her confirmation hearings, Bondi promised to safeguard the Justice Department’s independence and bolster its transparency. She also vowed to not serve as the president’s personal attorney. And in response to a question from Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, she pledged in January 2025 that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” But she also showed her willingness to joust with Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She hewed to the MAGA script by refusing to say that the president had lost the 2020 election. And she mounted a spirited attack on the Biden Justice Department, which she claimed had been “weaponized for years and years and years.” Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche speak to reporters in Washington on March 18, 2026. Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images Once in office, Bondi took on the difficult task of leading the Justice Department while also pleasing the president. She stood by when Trump used an appearance at the department to give, according to The New York Times, a “grievance-filled attack on the very people who have worked in the building and others like them.” The Times added: “He appeared to offer his own vision of justice in America, one defined by personal vengeance rather than by institutional principles.” Bondi apparently did not do enough to deliver on that version of justice. Last year, Trump had to urge Bondi to take action against his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, California Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Leticia James. “They’re all guilty as hell,” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, “but nothing is going to be done. "We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he added. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Bondi took her marching orders and launched investigations of those the president named. However, she was not able to secure any convictions. NBC News quoted a former official in the Trump White House who said that failing to secure indictments “is a problem for job security with the president.” If that wasn’t enough, Trump was also reportedly frustrated with the way Bondi had handled the release of the Epstein files, first promising full disclosure and then botching the rollout of the files. Contending visions of the attorney general’s job Bondi’s tenure illustrates the conflicting visions of what an attorney general should do that animate today’s American politics. The questions Democrats asked her during her confirmation were designed to get her to commit to their view of what the attorney general should do. Those questions signaled their belief that anyone occupying that office should maintain their distance from the president and uphold the Justice Department’s independence. But right from the start of the republic, presidents have chosen close political allies to serve as attorney general. It’s common for presidents to appoint their friends and supporters to be attorneys general. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, many presidents have chosen their campaign manager or their party’s national chairperson to be attorney general of the United States. But even compared with this history, Trump and his allies have a radically different vision, seeing the attorney general as just another Cabinet member whose responsibility is to carry out the president’s policies and implement his directions. As Trump put it in a 2017 interview with The New York Times, he has the “absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.” In the end, it seems that Bondi was fired for her failure to be effective in the political role assigned to her. It is likely that the president will want to replace her with someone even more political than she was, who promises to deliver more of the results he wants. Austin Sarat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Friday essay: ‘epic fury’ – the men of MAGA might be the most emotional US leaders ever
In 2016 and again in 2024, Donald Trump ran against two supremely qualified presidential candidates, who both lost. Both had decades of service to government and high-ranking jobs within Democratic administrations. Both were women. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’ losses have prompted a thousand think pieces on whether or not the United States is ready to elect a female president. The old adage, dating back to the Cold War, is that women are too emotional to be trusted with the nuclear button. But the men in the current White House might be the most emotional leadership group the US has ever had. And while their outbursts often seem spontaneous and even silly, we should take them seriously. War and fury Trump chronicler Michael Wolff shared his belief this week that “nothing” Trump says is ever “related to meaning” but it’s “all related to what he is feeling” – which, he says, informs Trump’s behaviour around the Iran war. The Daily Beast, which reported Wolff’s comments, approached the White House for comment. Communications director Steven Cheung responded by calling Wolff “a lying sack of s–t” who has “been proven to be a fraud”. (Wolff has been criticised for his casual approach to fact-checking, including in his Trump biography.) Cheung continued: He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain. This in itself is unusually emotional (and colloquial) language for an official White House communication, but is not surprising in the era of Trump 2.0. From “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” to the president’s many legal suits against those who have wronged him and his apparent need for his name to be on buildings – including the former Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – big feelings are on full display in the era of Donald Trump. Those big feelings are also reflected in the Trump administration’s policies. What is ICE but an agency dedicated to the irrational fear of foreigners? Greed, envy, anger, lust, fear: they are all on constant display in Trump’s White House. They come from his chief of staff Stephen Miller, former DOGE head Elon Musk, Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance. Even the name for the current war on Iran, Operation Epic Fury, is emotional. Compare it to the names of the initial wars on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom). This comes after Trump renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War last year, to make it sound more aggressive. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” Hegseth said of the change, which is reflected in his language about Iran this week: Death and destruction from the sky all day long […] This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be. Fear, anger and MAGA Sociology professor Thomas Henricks explains how fear, a negative emotion “that feels bad to possess”, is often converted to anger, “an emotion that restores agency, direction, and self-esteem”. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has long focused her research on feelings. She was studying MAGA supporters before they had a name. For her latest book, she looked at how shame and pride motivated this cohort in Kentucky. Many of those she spoke to “saw Trump as a bully — but a bully who stood up for them, against what they perceived as urban liberal elites”. Giving loyalty to a dynamic leader, writes Henricks, can seem “the surest route to regaining” personal power that feels like it is “slipping away”. English professor Lauren Berlant believes Trump supporters are attracted to the president’s performance of freedom, through saying whatever he feels. When expression is policed in the name of civil rights and feminism, she observes, it rejects “what feels like people’s spontaneous, ingrained responses”. But the “Trump Emotion Machine” delivers “feeling ok” and “acting free”. It means “being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter”. Gender and emotion For centuries, political philosophy has noted that much social power is “affective”, relating to moods, feelings and attitudes. Whatever you think of Trump, his policy and style make him exactly the kind of case study political affect theorists have been waiting for. He is the most conspicuous proponent yet of what we call aesthetarchy – or rule by feelings. Many feminists and other writers have critiqued the gendered inequity of displays of emotion. Explaining the politics of sex roles, feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye says we all internalise and monitor ourselves to adapt to outside expectations – or “the needs and tastes and tyrannies of others”. For example, “women’s cramped postures and attenuated strides and men’s restraint of emotional self-expression (except for anger)”. The crying man was once mocked as womanly and the athletic or politically powerful woman was seen as manly. Both transgressions maintain positive valuations of the masculine and negative valuations of the feminine. Sex roles were once a stronger form of control than they are now. Yet in MAGA, we have something different happening. Tantrums and explosions: MAGA men Hegseth has been criticised, even ridiculed by some media outlets, for his emotional outbursts in media briefings. A Pentagon briefing on US strikes on Iran last June, during which he lashed out at reporters, was labelled a “tantrum” by The Daily Beast. Miller, too, has been criticised for on-air “temper tantrums”. Insiders revealed his daily conference calls “routinely descend into him loudly berating staff and launching into full-on meltdowns”. Vance, who made headlines for leading a verbal attack on Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House last year, wrote in his memoir about his struggles to control his anger: “Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion.” It is hard to imagine Democrat women getting away with such behaviour. Just this week, Fox News titled an article: “Hillary Clinton storms out of Epstein deposition after House lawmaker leaks photo from inside.” It described a “stunning moment” when Clinton was made aware of the fact that Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert violated House rules by taking and sending a photo of her during her deposition. Caricatures of femininity: MAGA women What about the women of MAGA? How does emotion drive their involvement? In 1983, Andrea Dworkin published Right-Wing Women, a confronting study of Republican women’s active participation in conservative politics in the US. She proposed that right-wing activist women submit to men and the patriarchy in exchange for structure to their lives: shelter, safety, rules and love from men. As these rewards are conditional on their ongoing obedience to men, right-wing activist women become not just complicit, but enthusiastic perpetrators of violence and discrimination against other women. What motivates the trade? Fear of vulnerability to men and male violence, which they believe naturally finds a target in “an independent woman”. The “hates” Dworkin documents are just as relevant now, more than 40 years later: anti-abortion, antisemitism, homophobia, anti-feminism, disregard for female poverty, and more. The tirades of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt against diversity, equity and inclusion are prime examples of a woman attacking feminine solidarity to strengthen her quest for power. MAGA women can be emotional – but we only see them unleashing emotions that serve the needs of the most powerful men. Instead of embodying soft emotions such as empathy, care and kindness (like New Zealand’s former prime minister Jacinda Adern), the women of MAGA strive to be as tough as the men in their administration. Look at Kristi Noem, who was secretary of homeland security – until she was ousted last week. A new book reports Trump saw Noem’s pre-election admission of shooting her own dog as a reason to appoint her to implement his mass-deportation agenda. And she did play this hard-nosed role. She responded to the murders of mother Renee Nicole Good and intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents by saying the victims were involved in “domestic terrorism”. MAGA women often nod to conventional femininity with their hyper-feminine looks. Both Noem and Leavitt have been described as having what commentators dub “Mar-a-Lago Face”. This “caricature of femininity”, often achieved through surgery, Botox or fillers, not only signals wealth, but is a form of submission. “The unspoken message Mar-a-Lago face gives to men in power,” HuffPost reporter Brittany Wong suggests, “is that the woman is willing to tear into their flesh and change their entire individual appearance to gain approval.” (Admittedly, a few men, such as Matt Gaetz, have also been accused of having Mar-a-Lago face: a masculine, rather than feminine, caricature.) Yet, as we have seen, power for MAGA women is always conditional. Noem’s “toughness” was not enough to save her. Many possible reasons have been cited for Noem’s firing, including the US$220 million advertising campaign for ICE featuring her on horseback, and alleged misuse of public funds. But she is not the first administration official to be accused of such things – or incompetence. Remember when Hegseth accidentally sent a top-secret group chat detailing an upcoming US strike to a journalist? He still has his job. Macho sensitivity Men’s anger, lust or avarice has often been rationalised as acceptable or inevitable on a gendered basis. Women’s emotional outbursts were long labelled hysterical. But on Truth Social, X and other MAGA forums, emotional outbursts no longer need rational underpinning to be positively valued. They can be seen as perfectly masculine. As Berlant says, unleashed emotion by MAGA types on social media is seen as anti-political-correctness: “being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter”. Trump’s actions, such as his threat to sue comedian Trevor Noah for a joke at the Grammys, are seen as another example of strongly anti-woke, pro-white leadership, rather than thin-skinned emotional hysteria. So is Trump calling Robert De Niro “another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ” last month, in response to the actor calling him an “idiot”. Behind the machismo there is a strange vulnerabilty, a heightened sensitivity to the slightest criticism or perceived threat to the white, male order. Last month, Daily Show host Jon Stewart pointed out the hypocrisy, after MAGA complaints about Bad Bunny performing in Spanish at the Super Bowl. “When did the right become such fucking pussies?” he said. “Remember 2017? Remember what you hated about liberals? Perpetually offended, safe spaces, censoring free speech, culture of victimhood. Remind you of anyone?” In some ways, perhaps this public outpouring of emotion from the predominantly white men in Trump’s government should not be surprising. A former high-school acquaintance of Miller told Vanity Fair that, even as a student, he was “all about this victimhood idea, that he was this lonely soldier crusading”. The rise of the alt-right, which contributed to Trump’s arrival in office, coalesced through movements such as GamerGate: the online social harassment campaign against female video-game journalists by predominantly white men on 4chan, who felt both victimised and infuriated by calls for more inclusive casts in video games. Stewing in the same digital sewers were the incels: single men who consider themselves hard-done by women who have not deigned to have sex with them. The number of lives this cohort has claimed through violent attacks is comparable to those killed by Islamic State terrorists in the same period. They are particularly known for their appetite for violence. These acts are, in part, fuelled by the irreconcilable shame and humiliation they feel at the wounding of their masculinity, along with a desire for retribution against women and any men who provoke their jealousy. Trump’s administration, and indeed his own emotionally volatile behaviour, validates these hurt feelings through his slashing of funding support for diversity and inclusion initiatives, and violent roundups of people deemed “un-American” — even some US citizens. In this way, the current administration is a GamerGate fantasy brought to life. Power through feeling Political philosophy tells us social power often manifests primarily through aesthetics, or how things feel, rather than logic. The rise of totalitarianism in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s motivated many journalists and commentators to pay close attention to this problem. Much of the work was published after 1945, some of it posthumously, by well-known writers such as Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Primo Levi and Simone Weil. Emotions – particularly anger and fear – are classic tools used by authoritarian leaders. But anger can work the other way, too. Political science professor Bryn Rosenfeld argues it can power action against repressive regimes, fuelling resistance and encouraging risk. Either way, Trump’s electoral success and political power – helped by his supporters’ deep emotional identification with him – show that the philosophers are onto something important. Emily Booth receives funding from the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator. Michael Burke, Natalie Kon-yu, and Tom Clark do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Friday essay: ‘epic fury’ – the men of MAGA might be the most emotional US leaders ever
In 2016 and again in 2024, Donald Trump ran against two supremely qualified presidential candidates, who both lost. Both had decades of service to government and high-ranking jobs within Democratic administrations. Both were women. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’ losses have prompted a thousand think pieces on whether or not the United States is ready to elect a female president. The old adage, dating back to the Cold War, is that women are too emotional to be trusted with the nuclear button. But the men in the current White House might be the most emotional leadership group the US has ever had. And while their outbursts often seem spontaneous and even silly, we should take them seriously. War and fury Trump chronicler Michael Wolff shared his belief this week that “nothing” Trump says is ever “related to meaning” but it’s “all related to what he is feeling” – which, he says, informs Trump’s behaviour around the Iran war. The Daily Beast, which reported Wolff’s comments, approached the White House for comment. Communications director Steven Cheung responded by calling Wolff “a lying sack of s–t” who has “been proven to be a fraud”. (Wolff has been criticised for his casual approach to fact-checking, including in his Trump biography.) Cheung continued: He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain. This in itself is unusually emotional (and colloquial) language for an official White House communication, but is not surprising in the era of Trump 2.0. From “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” to the president’s many legal suits against those who have wronged him and his apparent need for his name to be on buildings – including the former Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – big feelings are on full display in the era of Donald Trump. Those big feelings are also reflected in the Trump administration’s policies. What is ICE but an agency dedicated to the irrational fear of foreigners? Greed, envy, anger, lust, fear: they are all on constant display in Trump’s White House. They come from his chief of staff Stephen Miller, former DOGE head Elon Musk, Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance. Even the name for the current war on Iran, Operation Epic Fury, is emotional. Compare it to the names of the initial wars on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom). This comes after Trump renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War last year, to make it sound more aggressive. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” Hegseth said of the change, which is reflected in his language about Iran this week: Death and destruction from the sky all day long […] This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be. Fear, anger and MAGA Sociology professor Thomas Henricks explains how fear, a negative emotion “that feels bad to possess”, is often converted to anger, “an emotion that restores agency, direction, and self-esteem”. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has long focused her research on feelings. She was studying MAGA supporters before they had a name. For her latest book, she looked at how shame and pride motivated this cohort in Kentucky. Many of those she spoke to “saw Trump as a bully — but a bully who stood up for them, against what they perceived as urban liberal elites”. Giving loyalty to a dynamic leader, writes Henricks, can seem “the surest route to regaining” personal power that feels like it is “slipping away”. English professor Lauren Berlant believes Trump supporters are attracted to the president’s performance of freedom, through saying whatever he feels. When expression is policed in the name of civil rights and feminism, she observes, it rejects “what feels like people’s spontaneous, ingrained responses”. But the “Trump Emotion Machine” delivers “feeling ok” and “acting free”. It means “being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter”. Gender and emotion For centuries, political philosophy has noted that much social power is “affective”, relating to moods, feelings and attitudes. Whatever you think of Trump, his policy and style make him exactly the kind of case study political affect theorists have been waiting for. He is the most conspicuous proponent yet of what we call aesthetarchy – or rule by feelings. Many feminists and other writers have critiqued the gendered inequity of displays of emotion. Explaining the politics of sex roles, feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye says we all internalise and monitor ourselves to adapt to outside expectations – or “the needs and tastes and tyrannies of others”. For example, “women’s cramped postures and attenuated strides and men’s restraint of emotional self-expression (except for anger)”. The crying man was once mocked as womanly and the athletic or politically powerful woman was seen as manly. Both transgressions maintain positive valuations of the masculine and negative valuations of the feminine. Sex roles were once a stronger form of control than they are now. Yet in MAGA, we have something different happening. Tantrums and explosions: MAGA men Hegseth has been criticised, even ridiculed by some media outlets, for his emotional outbursts in media briefings. A Pentagon briefing on US strikes on Iran last June, during which he lashed out at reporters, was labelled a “tantrum” by The Daily Beast. Miller, too, has been criticised for on-air “temper tantrums”. Insiders revealed his daily conference calls “routinely descend into him loudly berating staff and launching into full-on meltdowns”. Vance, who made headlines for leading a verbal attack on Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House last year, wrote in his memoir about his struggles to control his anger: “Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion.” It is hard to imagine Democrat women getting away with such behaviour. Just this week, Fox News titled an article: “Hillary Clinton storms out of Epstein deposition after House lawmaker leaks photo from inside.” It described a “stunning moment” when Clinton was made aware of the fact that Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert violated House rules by taking and sending a photo of her during her deposition. Caricatures of femininity: MAGA women What about the women of MAGA? How does emotion drive their involvement? In 1983, Andrea Dworkin published Right-Wing Women, a confronting study of Republican women’s active participation in conservative politics in the US. She proposed that right-wing activist women submit to men and the patriarchy in exchange for structure to their lives: shelter, safety, rules and love from men. As these rewards are conditional on their ongoing obedience to men, right-wing activist women become not just complicit, but enthusiastic perpetrators of violence and discrimination against other women. What motivates the trade? Fear of vulnerability to men and male violence, which they believe naturally finds a target in “an independent woman”. The “hates” Dworkin documents are just as relevant now, more than 40 years later: anti-abortion, antisemitism, homophobia, anti-feminism, disregard for female poverty, and more. The tirades of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt against diversity, equity and inclusion are prime examples of a woman attacking feminine solidarity to strengthen her quest for power. MAGA women can be emotional – but we only see them unleashing emotions that serve the needs of the most powerful men. Instead of embodying soft emotions such as empathy, care and kindness (like New Zealand’s former prime minister Jacinda Adern), the women of MAGA strive to be as tough as the men in their administration. Look at Kristi Noem, who was secretary of homeland security – until she was ousted last week. A new book reports Trump saw Noem’s pre-election admission of shooting her own dog as a reason to appoint her to implement his mass-deportation agenda. And she did play this hard-nosed role. She responded to the murders of mother Renee Nicole Good and intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents by saying the victims were involved in “domestic terrorism”. MAGA women often nod to conventional femininity with their hyper-feminine looks. Both Noem and Leavitt have been described as having what commentators dub “Mar-a-Lago Face”. This “caricature of femininity”, often achieved through surgery, Botox or fillers, not only signals wealth, but is a form of submission. “The unspoken message Mar-a-Lago face gives to men in power,” HuffPost reporter Brittany Wong suggests, “is that the woman is willing to tear into their flesh and change their entire individual appearance to gain approval.” (Admittedly, a few men, such as Matt Gaetz, have also been accused of having Mar-a-Lago face: a masculine, rather than feminine, caricature.) Yet, as we have seen, power for MAGA women is always conditional. Noem’s “toughness” was not enough to save her. Many possible reasons have been cited for Noem’s firing, including the US$220 million advertising campaign for ICE featuring her on horseback, and alleged misuse of public funds. But she is not the first administration official to be accused of such things – or incompetence. Remember when Hegseth accidentally sent a top-secret group chat detailing an upcoming US strike to a journalist? He still has his job. Macho sensitivity Men’s anger, lust or avarice has often been rationalised as acceptable or inevitable on a gendered basis. Women’s emotional outbursts were long labelled hysterical. But on Truth Social, X and other MAGA forums, emotional outbursts no longer need rational underpinning to be positively valued. They can be seen as perfectly masculine. As Berlant says, unleashed emotion by MAGA types on social media is seen as anti-political-correctness: “being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter”. Trump’s actions, such as his threat to sue comedian Trevor Noah for a joke at the Grammys, are seen as another example of strongly anti-woke, pro-white leadership, rather than thin-skinned emotional hysteria. So is Trump calling Robert De Niro “another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ” last month, in response to the actor calling him an “idiot”. Behind the machismo there is a strange vulnerabilty, a heightened sensitivity to the slightest criticism or perceived threat to the white, male order. Last month, Daily Show host Jon Stewart pointed out the hypocrisy, after MAGA complaints about Bad Bunny performing in Spanish at the Super Bowl. “When did the right become such fucking pussies?” he said. “Remember 2017? Remember what you hated about liberals? Perpetually offended, safe spaces, censoring free speech, culture of victimhood. Remind you of anyone?” In some ways, perhaps this public outpouring of emotion from the predominantly white men in Trump’s government should not be surprising. A former high-school acquaintance of Miller told Vanity Fair that, even as a student, he was “all about this victimhood idea, that he was this lonely soldier crusading”. The rise of the alt-right, which contributed to Trump’s arrival in office, coalesced through movements such as GamerGate: the online social harassment campaign against female video-game journalists by predominantly white men on 4chan, who felt both victimised and infuriated by calls for more inclusive casts in video games. Stewing in the same digital sewers were the incels: single men who consider themselves hard-done by women who have not deigned to have sex with them. The number of lives this cohort has claimed through violent attacks is comparable to those killed by Islamic State terrorists in the same period. They are particularly known for their appetite for violence. These acts are, in part, fuelled by the irreconcilable shame and humiliation they feel at the wounding of their masculinity, along with a desire for retribution against women and any men who provoke their jealousy. Trump’s administration, and indeed his own emotionally volatile behaviour, validates these hurt feelings through his slashing of funding support for diversity and inclusion initiatives, and violent roundups of people deemed “un-American” — even some US citizens. In this way, the current administration is a GamerGate fantasy brought to life. Power through feeling Political philosophy tells us social power often manifests primarily through aesthetics, or how things feel, rather than logic. The rise of totalitarianism in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s motivated many journalists and commentators to pay close attention to this problem. Much of the work was published after 1945, some of it posthumously, by well-known writers such as Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Primo Levi and Simone Weil. Emotions – particularly anger and fear – are classic tools used by authoritarian leaders. But anger can work the other way, too. Political science professor Bryn Rosenfeld argues it can power action against repressive regimes, fuelling resistance and encouraging risk. Either way, Trump’s electoral success and political power – helped by his supporters’ deep emotional identification with him – show that the philosophers are onto something important. Emily Booth receives funding from the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator. Michael Burke, Natalie Kon-yu, and Tom Clark do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Friday essay: ‘epic fury’ – the men of MAGA might be the most emotional US leaders ever
In 2016 and again in 2024, Donald Trump ran against two supremely qualified presidential candidates, who both lost. Both had decades of service to government and high-ranking jobs within Democratic administrations. Both were women. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’ losses have prompted a thousand think pieces on whether or not the United States is ready to elect a female president. The old adage, dating back to the Cold War, is that women are too emotional to be trusted with the nuclear button. But the men in the current White House might be the most emotional leadership group the US has ever had. And while their outbursts often seem spontaneous and even silly, we should take them seriously. War and fury Trump chronicler Michael Wolff shared his belief this week that “nothing” Trump says is ever “related to meaning” but it’s “all related to what he is feeling” – which, he says, informs Trump’s behaviour around the Iran war. The Daily Beast, which reported Wolff’s comments, approached the White House for comment. Communications director Steven Cheung responded by calling Wolff “a lying sack of s–t” who has “been proven to be a fraud”. (Wolff has been criticised for his casual approach to fact-checking, including in his Trump biography.) Cheung continued: He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain. This in itself is unusually emotional (and colloquial) language for an official White House communication, but is not surprising in the era of Trump 2.0. From “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” to the president’s many legal suits against those who have wronged him and his apparent need for his name to be on buildings – including the former Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – big feelings are on full display in the era of Donald Trump. Those big feelings are also reflected in the Trump administration’s policies. What is ICE but an agency dedicated to the irrational fear of foreigners? Greed, envy, anger, lust, fear: they are all on constant display in Trump’s White House. They come from his chief of staff Stephen Miller, former DOGE head Elon Musk, Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance. Even the name for the current war on Iran, Operation Epic Fury, is emotional. Compare it to the names of the initial wars on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom). This comes after Trump renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War last year, to make it sound more aggressive. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” Hegseth said of the change, which is reflected in his language about Iran this week: Death and destruction from the sky all day long […] This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be. Fear, anger and MAGA Sociology professor Thomas Henricks explains how fear, a negative emotion “that feels bad to possess”, is often converted to anger, “an emotion that restores agency, direction, and self-esteem”. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has long focused her research on feelings. She was studying MAGA supporters before they had a name. For her latest book, she looked at how shame and pride motivated this cohort in Kentucky. Many of those she spoke to “saw Trump as a bully — but a bully who stood up for them, against what they perceived as urban liberal elites”. Giving loyalty to a dynamic leader, writes Henricks, can seem “the surest route to regaining” personal power that feels like it is “slipping away”. English professor Lauren Berlant believes Trump supporters are attracted to the president’s performance of freedom, through saying whatever he feels. When expression is policed in the name of civil rights and feminism, she observes, it rejects “what feels like people’s spontaneous, ingrained responses”. But the “Trump Emotion Machine” delivers “feeling ok” and “acting free”. It means “being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter”. Gender and emotion For centuries, political philosophy has noted that much social power is “affective”, relating to moods, feelings and attitudes. Whatever you think of Trump, his policy and style make him exactly the kind of case study political affect theorists have been waiting for. He is the most conspicuous proponent yet of what we call aesthetarchy – or rule by feelings. Many feminists and other writers have critiqued the gendered inequity of displays of emotion. Explaining the politics of sex roles, feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye says we all internalise and monitor ourselves to adapt to outside expectations – or “the needs and tastes and tyrannies of others”. For example, “women’s cramped postures and attenuated strides and men’s restraint of emotional self-expression (except for anger)”. The crying man was once mocked as womanly and the athletic or politically powerful woman was seen as manly. Both transgressions maintain positive valuations of the masculine and negative valuations of the feminine. Sex roles were once a stronger form of control than they are now. Yet in MAGA, we have something different happening. Tantrums and explosions: MAGA men Hegseth has been criticised, even ridiculed by some media outlets, for his emotional outbursts in media briefings. A Pentagon briefing on US strikes on Iran last June, during which he lashed out at reporters, was labelled a “tantrum” by The Daily Beast. Miller, too, has been criticised for on-air “temper tantrums”. Insiders revealed his daily conference calls “routinely descend into him loudly berating staff and launching into full-on meltdowns”. Vance, who made headlines for leading a verbal attack on Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House last year, wrote in his memoir about his struggles to control his anger: “Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion.” It is hard to imagine Democrat women getting away with such behaviour. Just this week, Fox News titled an article: “Hillary Clinton storms out of Epstein deposition after House lawmaker leaks photo from inside.” It described a “stunning moment” when Clinton was made aware of the fact that Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert violated House rules by taking and sending a photo of her during her deposition. Caricatures of femininity: MAGA women What about the women of MAGA? How does emotion drive their involvement? In 1983, Andrea Dworkin published Right-Wing Women, a confronting study of Republican women’s active participation in conservative politics in the US. She proposed that right-wing activist women submit to men and the patriarchy in exchange for structure to their lives: shelter, safety, rules and love from men. As these rewards are conditional on their ongoing obedience to men, right-wing activist women become not just complicit, but enthusiastic perpetrators of violence and discrimination against other women. What motivates the trade? Fear of vulnerability to men and male violence, which they believe naturally finds a target in “an independent woman”. The “hates” Dworkin documents are just as relevant now, more than 40 years later: anti-abortion, antisemitism, homophobia, anti-feminism, disregard for female poverty, and more. The tirades of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt against diversity, equity and inclusion are prime examples of a woman attacking feminine solidarity to strengthen her quest for power. MAGA women can be emotional – but we only see them unleashing emotions that serve the needs of the most powerful men. Instead of embodying soft emotions such as empathy, care and kindness (like New Zealand’s former prime minister Jacinda Adern), the women of MAGA strive to be as tough as the men in their administration. Look at Kristi Noem, who was secretary of homeland security – until she was ousted last week. A new book reports Trump saw Noem’s pre-election admission of shooting her own dog as a reason to appoint her to implement his mass-deportation agenda. And she did play this hard-nosed role. She responded to the murders of mother Renee Nicole Good and intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents by saying the victims were involved in “domestic terrorism”. MAGA women often nod to conventional femininity with their hyper-feminine looks. Both Noem and Leavitt have been described as having what commentators dub “Mar-a-Lago Face”. This “caricature of femininity”, often achieved through surgery, Botox or fillers, not only signals wealth, but is a form of submission. “The unspoken message Mar-a-Lago face gives to men in power,” HuffPost reporter Brittany Wong suggests, “is that the woman is willing to tear into their flesh and change their entire individual appearance to gain approval.” (Admittedly, a few men, such as Matt Gaetz, have also been accused of having Mar-a-Lago face: a masculine, rather than feminine, caricature.) Yet, as we have seen, power for MAGA women is always conditional. Noem’s “toughness” was not enough to save her. Many possible reasons have been cited for Noem’s firing, including the US$220 million advertising campaign for ICE featuring her on horseback, and alleged misuse of public funds. But she is not the first administration official to be accused of such things – or incompetence. Remember when Hegseth accidentally sent a top-secret group chat detailing an upcoming US strike to a journalist? He still has his job. Macho sensitivity Men’s anger, lust or avarice has often been rationalised as acceptable or inevitable on a gendered basis. Women’s emotional outbursts were long labelled hysterical. But on Truth Social, X and other MAGA forums, emotional outbursts no longer need rational underpinning to be positively valued. They can be seen as perfectly masculine. As Berlant says, unleashed emotion by MAGA types on social media is seen as anti-political-correctness: “being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter”. Trump’s actions, such as his threat to sue comedian Trevor Noah for a joke at the Grammys, are seen as another example of strongly anti-woke, pro-white leadership, rather than thin-skinned emotional hysteria. So is Trump calling Robert De Niro “another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ” last month, in response to the actor calling him an “idiot”. Behind the machismo there is a strange vulnerabilty, a heightened sensitivity to the slightest criticism or perceived threat to the white, male order. Last month, Daily Show host Jon Stewart pointed out the hypocrisy, after MAGA complaints about Bad Bunny performing in Spanish at the Super Bowl. “When did the right become such fucking pussies?” he said. “Remember 2017? Remember what you hated about liberals? Perpetually offended, safe spaces, censoring free speech, culture of victimhood. Remind you of anyone?” In some ways, perhaps this public outpouring of emotion from the predominantly white men in Trump’s government should not be surprising. A former high-school acquaintance of Miller told Vanity Fair that, even as a student, he was “all about this victimhood idea, that he was this lonely soldier crusading”. The rise of the alt-right, which contributed to Trump’s arrival in office, coalesced through movements such as GamerGate: the online social harassment campaign against female video-game journalists by predominantly white men on 4chan, who felt both victimised and infuriated by calls for more inclusive casts in video games. Stewing in the same digital sewers were the incels: single men who consider themselves hard-done by women who have not deigned to have sex with them. The number of lives this cohort has claimed through violent attacks is comparable to those killed by Islamic State terrorists in the same period. They are particularly known for their appetite for violence. These acts are, in part, fuelled by the irreconcilable shame and humiliation they feel at the wounding of their masculinity, along with a desire for retribution against women and any men who provoke their jealousy. Trump’s administration, and indeed his own emotionally volatile behaviour, validates these hurt feelings through his slashing of funding support for diversity and inclusion initiatives, and violent roundups of people deemed “un-American” — even some US citizens. In this way, the current administration is a GamerGate fantasy brought to life. Power through feeling Political philosophy tells us social power often manifests primarily through aesthetics, or how things feel, rather than logic. The rise of totalitarianism in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s motivated many journalists and commentators to pay close attention to this problem. Much of the work was published after 1945, some of it posthumously, by well-known writers such as Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Primo Levi and Simone Weil. Emotions – particularly anger and fear – are classic tools used by authoritarian leaders. But anger can work the other way, too. Political science professor Bryn Rosenfeld argues it can power action against repressive regimes, fuelling resistance and encouraging risk. Either way, Trump’s electoral success and political power – helped by his supporters’ deep emotional identification with him – show that the philosophers are onto something important. Emily Booth receives funding from the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator. Michael Burke, Natalie Kon-yu, and Tom Clark do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Friday essay: ‘epic fury’ – the men of MAGA might be the most emotional US leaders ever
In 2016 and again in 2024, Donald Trump ran against two supremely qualified presidential candidates, who both lost. Both had decades of service to government and high-ranking jobs within Democratic administrations. Both were women. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’ losses have prompted a thousand think pieces on whether or not the United States is ready to elect a female president. The old adage, dating back to the Cold War, is that women are too emotional to be trusted with the nuclear button. But the men in the current White House might be the most emotional leadership group the US has ever had. And while their outbursts often seem spontaneous and even silly, we should take them seriously. War and fury Trump chronicler Michael Wolff shared his belief this week that “nothing” Trump says is ever “related to meaning” but it’s “all related to what he is feeling” – which, he says, informs Trump’s behaviour around the Iran war. The Daily Beast, which reported Wolff’s comments, approached the White House for comment. Communications director Steven Cheung responded by calling Wolff “a lying sack of s–t” who has “been proven to be a fraud”. (Wolff has been criticised for his casual approach to fact-checking, including in his Trump biography.) Cheung continued: He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain. This in itself is unusually emotional (and colloquial) language for an official White House communication, but is not surprising in the era of Trump 2.0. From “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” to the president’s many legal suits against those who have wronged him and his apparent need for his name to be on buildings – including the former Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – big feelings are on full display in the era of Donald Trump. Those big feelings are also reflected in the Trump administration’s policies. What is ICE but an agency dedicated to the irrational fear of foreigners? Greed, envy, anger, lust, fear: they are all on constant display in Trump’s White House. They come from his chief of staff Stephen Miller, former DOGE head Elon Musk, Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance. Even the name for the current war on Iran, Operation Epic Fury, is emotional. Compare it to the names of the initial wars on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom). This comes after Trump renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War last year, to make it sound more aggressive. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” Hegseth said of the change, which is reflected in his language about Iran this week: Death and destruction from the sky all day long […] This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be. Fear, anger and MAGA Sociology professor Thomas Henricks explains how fear, a negative emotion “that feels bad to possess”, is often converted to anger, “an emotion that restores agency, direction, and self-esteem”. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has long focused her research on feelings. She was studying MAGA supporters before they had a name. For her latest book, she looked at how shame and pride motivated this cohort in Kentucky. Many of those she spoke to “saw Trump as a bully — but a bully who stood up for them, against what they perceived as urban liberal elites”. Giving loyalty to a dynamic leader, writes Henricks, can seem “the surest route to regaining” personal power that feels like it is “slipping away”. English professor Lauren Berlant believes Trump supporters are attracted to the president’s performance of freedom, through saying whatever he feels. When expression is policed in the name of civil rights and feminism, she observes, it rejects “what feels like people’s spontaneous, ingrained responses”. But the “Trump Emotion Machine” delivers “feeling ok” and “acting free”. It means “being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter”. Gender and emotion For centuries, political philosophy has noted that much social power is “affective”, relating to moods, feelings and attitudes. Whatever you think of Trump, his policy and style make him exactly the kind of case study political affect theorists have been waiting for. He is the most conspicuous proponent yet of what we call aesthetarchy – or rule by feelings. Many feminists and other writers have critiqued the gendered inequity of displays of emotion. Explaining the politics of sex roles, feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye says we all internalise and monitor ourselves to adapt to outside expectations – or “the needs and tastes and tyrannies of others”. For example, “women’s cramped postures and attenuated strides and men’s restraint of emotional self-expression (except for anger)”. The crying man was once mocked as womanly and the athletic or politically powerful woman was seen as manly. Both transgressions maintain positive valuations of the masculine and negative valuations of the feminine. Sex roles were once a stronger form of control than they are now. Yet in MAGA, we have something different happening. Tantrums and explosions: MAGA men Hegseth has been criticised, even ridiculed by some media outlets, for his emotional outbursts in media briefings. A Pentagon briefing on US strikes on Iran last June, during which he lashed out at reporters, was labelled a “tantrum” by The Daily Beast. Miller, too, has been criticised for on-air “temper tantrums”. Insiders revealed his daily conference calls “routinely descend into him loudly berating staff and launching into full-on meltdowns”. Vance, who made headlines for leading a verbal attack on Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House last year, wrote in his memoir about his struggles to control his anger: “Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion.” It is hard to imagine Democrat women getting away with such behaviour. Just this week, Fox News titled an article: “Hillary Clinton storms out of Epstein deposition after House lawmaker leaks photo from inside.” It described a “stunning moment” when Clinton was made aware of the fact that Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert violated House rules by taking and sending a photo of her during her deposition. Caricatures of femininity: MAGA women What about the women of MAGA? How does emotion drive their involvement? In 1983, Andrea Dworkin published Right-Wing Women, a confronting study of Republican women’s active participation in conservative politics in the US. She proposed that right-wing activist women submit to men and the patriarchy in exchange for structure to their lives: shelter, safety, rules and love from men. As these rewards are conditional on their ongoing obedience to men, right-wing activist women become not just complicit, but enthusiastic perpetrators of violence and discrimination against other women. What motivates the trade? Fear of vulnerability to men and male violence, which they believe naturally finds a target in “an independent woman”. The “hates” Dworkin documents are just as relevant now, more than 40 years later: anti-abortion, antisemitism, homophobia, anti-feminism, disregard for female poverty, and more. The tirades of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt against diversity, equity and inclusion are prime examples of a woman attacking feminine solidarity to strengthen her quest for power. MAGA women can be emotional – but we only see them unleashing emotions that serve the needs of the most powerful men. Instead of embodying soft emotions such as empathy, care and kindness (like New Zealand’s former prime minister Jacinda Adern), the women of MAGA strive to be as tough as the men in their administration. Look at Kristi Noem, who was secretary of homeland security – until she was ousted last week. A new book reports Trump saw Noem’s pre-election admission of shooting her own dog as a reason to appoint her to implement his mass-deportation agenda. And she did play this hard-nosed role. She responded to the murders of mother Renee Nicole Good and intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents by saying the victims were involved in “domestic terrorism”. MAGA women often nod to conventional femininity with their hyper-feminine looks. Both Noem and Leavitt have been described as having what commentators dub “Mar-a-Lago Face”. This “caricature of femininity”, often achieved through surgery, Botox or fillers, not only signals wealth, but is a form of submission. “The unspoken message Mar-a-Lago face gives to men in power,” HuffPost reporter Brittany Wong suggests, “is that the woman is willing to tear into their flesh and change their entire individual appearance to gain approval.” (Admittedly, a few men, such as Matt Gaetz, have also been accused of having Mar-a-Lago face: a masculine, rather than feminine, caricature.) Yet, as we have seen, power for MAGA women is always conditional. Noem’s “toughness” was not enough to save her. Many possible reasons have been cited for Noem’s firing, including the US$220 million advertising campaign for ICE featuring her on horseback, and alleged misuse of public funds. But she is not the first administration official to be accused of such things – or incompetence. Remember when Hegseth accidentally sent a top-secret group chat detailing an upcoming US strike to a journalist? He still has his job. Macho sensitivity Men’s anger, lust or avarice has often been rationalised as acceptable or inevitable on a gendered basis. Women’s emotional outbursts were long labelled hysterical. But on Truth Social, X and other MAGA forums, emotional outbursts no longer need rational underpinning to be positively valued. They can be seen as perfectly masculine. As Berlant says, unleashed emotion by MAGA types on social media is seen as anti-political-correctness: “being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter”. Trump’s actions, such as his threat to sue comedian Trevor Noah for a joke at the Grammys, are seen as another example of strongly anti-woke, pro-white leadership, rather than thin-skinned emotional hysteria. So is Trump calling Robert De Niro “another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ” last month, in response to the actor calling him an “idiot”. Behind the machismo there is a strange vulnerabilty, a heightened sensitivity to the slightest criticism or perceived threat to the white, male order. Last month, Daily Show host Jon Stewart pointed out the hypocrisy, after MAGA complaints about Bad Bunny performing in Spanish at the Super Bowl. “When did the right become such fucking pussies?” he said. “Remember 2017? Remember what you hated about liberals? Perpetually offended, safe spaces, censoring free speech, culture of victimhood. Remind you of anyone?” In some ways, perhaps this public outpouring of emotion from the predominantly white men in Trump’s government should not be surprising. A former high-school acquaintance of Miller told Vanity Fair that, even as a student, he was “all about this victimhood idea, that he was this lonely soldier crusading”. The rise of the alt-right, which contributed to Trump’s arrival in office, coalesced through movements such as GamerGate: the online social harassment campaign against female video-game journalists by predominantly white men on 4chan, who felt both victimised and infuriated by calls for more inclusive casts in video games. Stewing in the same digital sewers were the incels: single men who consider themselves hard-done by women who have not deigned to have sex with them. The number of lives this cohort has claimed through violent attacks is comparable to those killed by Islamic State terrorists in the same period. They are particularly known for their appetite for violence. These acts are, in part, fuelled by the irreconcilable shame and humiliation they feel at the wounding of their masculinity, along with a desire for retribution against women and any men who provoke their jealousy. Trump’s administration, and indeed his own emotionally volatile behaviour, validates these hurt feelings through his slashing of funding support for diversity and inclusion initiatives, and violent roundups of people deemed “un-American” — even some US citizens. In this way, the current administration is a GamerGate fantasy brought to life. Power through feeling Political philosophy tells us social power often manifests primarily through aesthetics, or how things feel, rather than logic. The rise of totalitarianism in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s motivated many journalists and commentators to pay close attention to this problem. Much of the work was published after 1945, some of it posthumously, by well-known writers such as Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Primo Levi and Simone Weil. Emotions – particularly anger and fear – are classic tools used by authoritarian leaders. But anger can work the other way, too. Political science professor Bryn Rosenfeld argues it can power action against repressive regimes, fuelling resistance and encouraging risk. Either way, Trump’s electoral success and political power – helped by his supporters’ deep emotional identification with him – show that the philosophers are onto something important. Emily Booth receives funding from the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator. Michael Burke, Natalie Kon-yu, and Tom Clark do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.