The Party of Losers

Trump and Republicans are obsessed with their own loserdom. Which only makes them look more like losers.

There was once a belief that to win the hearts of voters, politicians and parties had to be sunny and optimistic. They might have their grievances, but the most successful would be like John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, boldly leading their followers toward a brighter future. 

As he stands ready to begin his rapid march to the Republican nomination and perhaps a return to the White House, Donald Trump occasionally pays lip service to the idea that good things are in the offing. But there may never have been a presidential candidate, and a party, so consumed with what a bunch of losers they are. 

Consider the recent kabuki Trump engineered in his civil trial in New York, where the evidence that he constructed the Trump Organization as an engine of business fraud is overwhelming. Trump and his lawyers seem to have accepted from the beginning that they would lose; almost nothing they have done seemed designed to actually prevail in the case. In the final act, Trump’s lawyers told the judge that their client wanted to take the unusual step of offering some of their closing argument himself. The judge, being a man of unusual patience, replied that Trump could do so provided that he obey the same rules that always apply to closing statements: He would not be allowed to introduce new evidence, make a political speech, or attack the judge and his staff.

Trump refused to abide by these conditions, and simply stood up and started talking, doing exactly what he was forbidden to do. He attacked the prosecutors, attacked the judge, and whined like the sorest sore loser on the playground (“This is a fraud on me”).

What was his objective? It certainly made an unfavorable result in the courtroom more likely, not less. The point was clearly to create a public spectacle of moaning, one more opportunity to say that he’s a victim and is being “treated so unfairly” (in the phrase he so often uses). 

This is the irony: Trump has spent his entire life desperate to avoid being seen as a “loser,” yet these days much of his time is spent convincing people that’s exactly what he is. 

As his biographer Mike D’Antonio wrote in 2015, Trump “approaches all of life as an unending contest, which explains why he often uses the word winner when describing himself and calls people he dislikes losers.” This is an epithet he throws at everyone who displeases him, from political opponents to celebrities who mock him to those responsible for the most horrific crimes. After terrorists bombed an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017, the worst condemnation Trump could think of was to say the victims were “murdered by evil losers,” adding, “I will call them, from now on, losers because that's what they are: losers.” His first wife Ivana wrote that when she suggested naming their firstborn Donald Jr., the future president objected at first, saying “What if he’s a loser?” Indeed, what if?

Something extraordinary has happened to Trump lately, and to the party he leads: By obsessing over their losses and creating opportunities to complain loudly about their victimization, they only wind up looking even more like losers than they otherwise would have. 

What we ordinarily expect of a political party is that when it suffers a loss, it undertakes some reflection and adjusts, to try to make victory more likely the next time around. It might take a few losses in a row before they wise up, but eventually the party decides it has to make a fresh start in some way. But Republicans today seem incapable of moving on from losses, perhaps because they reject the idea that losing is something that happens to everyone in politics. No party (at least outside dictatorships) is going to win every election, and one of the foundational pillars of democracy is that someone has to lose; when you do, you accept defeat and try to win next time. 

There are ways Republicans have rejected that idea for some time; most of them refused to accept that Barack Obama was an American; he wasn’t legitimate, and therefore neither was the fact that he beat them twice. But especially in the wake of the 2020 election, their leaders encouraged them to define themselves by their losses, to believe that every lost election was a world-ending catastrophe and that they would forever be victims. 

In that sense Trump is the emblematic Republican; watch him speak for any length of time and you’ll have to sit through a litany of complaints that reaches back years, a rehashing of every time he thinks somebody did him wrong. There has never been a politician who spent so much time bitching and whining. 

This goes beyond elections; conservatives have embraced victimhood as a key foundation of their identity. For many years, they mocked liberals for the latter’s propensity to engage in “oppression Olympics,” in which members of different identity groups would compete for status based on how much they had suffered. But over time, elite conservatives came to seek out the moral status victimhood brings. Everywhere they looked, they saw themselves as oppressed — by increasing diversity, by civil rights laws, and by the inexorable progression of cultural change, all of which made them cry to the heavens that they were losing. 

This became a potent argument, particularly when it came to the law. They would argue not simply that legal and policy efforts to achieve equality were unnecessary, but that they turned White people or men or the wealthy into victims. Affirmative action? Discrimination against innocent White people. Laws limiting campaign spending? The cruel silencing of the voices of billionaires who want merely to participate in the political process. Laws limiting discrimination in commerce? Oppression of Christians. In all these cases, the Supreme Court lent a sympathetic ear to the stories of society’s most powerful people turned into losers by being treated like everyone else, and the justices again and again said This must not stand. 

In every such debate, conservatives loudly proclaim that they are the true victims, the hounded, the oppressed. This conception of themselves has now been woven deeply into conservative identity: We never get what we want, everyone is against us, we know nothing but defeat and misery. We are the losers.

That idea can be politically powerful; rage at the losses people have suffered can motivate them to march to war, or at least to the polling place. But at a certain point — especially when the claims of unfairness are so preposterous on their face — it just makes you look pathetic.