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The Rational League · Aug 6, 2026

MAGA's Malice

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Marco Rubio scrutinizing US counterterrorism’s ‘blind spot’ for far-left terrorism while the administration downplays far-right terrorism is a study in MAGA’s moral disengagement: the trick of never having to see your own violence as violence (U.S. Department of State, 2026). Since the first Trump, term there have been measurable spikes in harm towards anyone that MAGA believes is corrosive to their vision of America. An authoritarian population that mistakes its own violence for American exceptionalism is the recipe for pious malice toward the left. Or toward whichever group gets cast as the rot in the body politic that day.

Their thirst for hate was not subtle. It was available from the beginning. Trump started off his 2015 candidacy for president with prejudice by saying:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people (“Remarks Announcing Candidacy for President in New York City | The American Presidency Project,” n.d.).

It was immediately met with backlash. In June 2015, NBC ended its business relationship with Trump due to “recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants.” Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, Mexico’s former interior minister, said the remarks seemed “prejudicial and absurd.” The Mexican rock band Maná dedicated a song to Trump entitled “Somos Más Americanos.” Front man Fher Olvera said, “There is a character named Donald Trump, who made very violent declarations with great hatred of Mexicans and Latin Americans and called us rapists, criminals, drug traffickers. This is all trash” (Bencosme, 2015). Macy’s dumped his branded merchandise. The PGA pulled tournaments from his golf courses. Even Republicans were appalled by his comments (Killough, 2015).

Within two weeks of the speech, his support among Republican primary voters nearly tripled — from 4 percent to 11 percent, vaulting him into second place. (Spinelli, 2015)

In 2015, Trump vowed to ban Muslims from entering the US. Again, the criticism was swift. Ibrahim Hooper, the national communications director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations called it “anti-Muslim bigotry” (Johnson, 2015). From the 2016 election into Trump’s presidency, there was an anomalous rise in hate crimes. Muslims bore the brunt of this spike with a 67% increase over 2014 (“FBI: Hate Crimes against Muslims in US Surge 67 Percent,” n.d.), the highest level since the aftermath of 9/11 (Williamson & Gelfand, 2019). Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets were highly correlated with the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes (Muller & Schwarz, 2018). Marco Rubio followed suit, “I disagree with Donald Trump’s latest proposal. His habit of making offensive and outlandish statements will not bring Americans together” (Rubio, 2015). Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Trump was “unhinged” (Bush, 2015). The late Senator Graham tweeted that “every candidate for president needs to do the right thing and condemn Trump’s statement” (Graham, 2015). CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad reacted to Trump’s words as well, stating, “will not be intimidated or marginalized” (Ziv, 2016). Muslim Advocates said the Muslim ban has created, “such a toxic atmosphere,” and that his ultimate goal was, “religious discrimination” (Report - Total and Complete Shutdown - Muslim Advocates, 2018). Former leader of the Southern Baptist Convention Reverend Russell Moore said, “The idea of banning people from the country simply because of what they believe, it’s shocking to me,” and that it’s “ very troubling” (Religious Responses to Call for US Muslim Ban, 2015).

Trump’s ban received the most support from GOP voters with an average of 69% Across all GOP exit polls (Bridge, 2016).

The Jewish people experienced the largest single-year increase of antisemitic incidents on record from 2016 to 2017. For the first time since at least 2010, an incident occurred in every US state. By 2022, antisemitism was so rampant that 74 percent of Jewish voters viewed MAGA as a “threat to jews in America” (Samuels, 2022).

Hate decided to have a victory lap tour. On Trump’s first day in office of his second term, he signed Executive Order (EO) 14168, which prevents the federal recognition of trans people. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex to be listed as male or female shall “not request gender identity.” The federal government froze passports, and new ones had to “accurately reflect the holder’s sex.” It federally establishes a singular, binding definition of “sex” across all federal agencies and programs (Trump, 2025). Discrimination is the unfair or prejudicial treatment of people and groups based on characteristics such as race, gender, age, or sexual orientation. By definition, this EO is discrimination. Discrimination, once it has a presidential signature, doesn’t need a euphemism anymore.

And euphemism was never the goal in the first place — not when the target isn’t even on American soil. In the United States, we don’t kill people on the spot because they committed a crime. We give them a trial, and based on the verdict, we punish them accordingly. Any American will tell you this. For MAGA, that understanding disappears once you hit international waters, and suddenly they support extrajudicial killing. 89% of Republicans supported the bombing of alleged drug smugglers (Mittelstadt, 2025). 221 people have been killed across 66 strikes since the campaign began in September 2025 (Doherty, 2025). That’s violence with a foreign address. Domestically, the pattern looks just as familiar.

Far-right terrorism spiked under Trump’s first term and never really stopped. According to the ADL, right-wing extremists committed every single documented extremist-related murder in the United States in 2022, 2023, and 2024 — three consecutive years, one ideology (Center on Extremism, 2023, 2024, 2025). Anderson Lee Aldrich opened fire in a shooting spree at an LGBTQ bar, Club Q, killing 5 people and wounding 17 (Justice.gov, 2024). White supremacist Payton Gendron opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, targeting Black people (Death Penalty Information Center, 2024). In 2019, Patrick Crusius opened fire at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas (U.S. Department of Justice, 2023). In his manifesto, his motivation was, “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” (Hafez, 2019). In the 2024 election, 10% of the 745 campaign ads had the word “invasion” or “invaders” in it (Ence, 2024). Four different shooters, four different targets, one shared vocabulary.

This is documented cruelty, and from Trump’s 2015 candidacy for president announcement MAGA has supported him. How can a portion of the population cause so much hate, and receive so much backlash, and still believe they are doing right by society? Even as you read this section to your family or friend who is MAGA, they will shrug it off and manufacture some rationalization that creates the illusion of moral superiority. This isn’t exclusive to the US. When you explain to Filipinos who voted for Duterte that he was a murderous dictator, you will be told you’re a liar, and they will explain why what he did was justified. There is a blind spot that causes otherwise good people to allow cruelty as long as they believe it will bring stability. That blind spot has a color to it.

On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court, in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, issued a stay allowing the same race-based stop criteria to resume, permitting ICE agents in Los Angeles to make stops based on four specific factors: apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or accented English, presence at a location like a day-labor site or car wash, and type of manual-labor employment. As of 2024, there are 68 million Latino Americans (Beshay, 2025). That’s one in five Americans, and 79% of all Latinos in the country — including native-born and naturalized — are U.S. citizens. If apparent race or ethnicity is your criterion for stopping someone, then roughly 79 out of 100 Latinos are not who you are looking for. That’s not a moral argument; it’s a statistical problem, and when applied indiscriminately as ICE does, it will mostly create false positives. If speaking Spanish or accented English is a criterion, this also creates a statistical fallacy because accents and English speaking are dictated by age, not a metric of recency of arrival or status (Flege et al., 1999). Cato Institute’s own analysis found that age of entry is the single best predictor of English acquisition among immigrants, with 97% of immigrants arriving before the age of 5 achieving full English proficiency, though acquisition drops steadily with age at arrival (Landgrave, 2019). Race doesn’t track citizenship and accent doesn’t track arrival or status. Demographic shortcuts fail enforcement on their own statistical terms. The rhetoric that leads to decisions like these never runs dry.

If a racist declared that a specific race is genetically “low IQ” and considered them “bad people” while saying, “I can generalize” to justify it, would you defend them? Most people would not. This is a direct quote from Trump about Somali immigrants, “They’re low IQ. I can generalize. They’re low IQ people. They’re bad people” (“LIVE: Trump Speaks at WEF 2026 in Davos (Full Speech),” n.d.) Let’s not mince words: this is overt racism being said by a sitting president. MAGA will palter with the public rather than admit Trump is a racist. MAGA will cite stats on IQ and claim that all black people are low IQ, even as the American Anthropological Association’s official statement maintains that, “intelligence cannot be biologically determined by race, emphasizing that differences in test scores do not reflect innate differences in a population’s capacity to function effectively in any social setting” (Database, 2025). The American Psychological Association maintains that, “no single, adequate explanation—whether environmental or genetic—for the racial IQ gap is currently available, highlighting the need for further, ethically sound research” (Database, 2025). Their defense is disturbing and equally racist. This is scientific racism. Historians define it as taking real empirical measurement, stripping it of its methodological limits and confounds, and using it to assert a fixed hierarchy between racial groups; then using that to justify unequal treatment. MAGA uses IQ to generalize about a race, creating a hierarchy, which is then used to justify policy.

In a White House meeting, when discussing immigration protections, Trump suggested taking more immigrants from Norway instead of Haitians, El Salvadorans, and African nations, calling them “shit hole countries” (Vitali et al., 2018). Trump initially denied the claim but confirmed it in a December 2025 rally. There was no walking it back a second time.

If the racism isn’t apparent at this point, Trump signed an EO freezing all refugee processing to restart the program, prioritizing white Afrikaners claiming they were being persecuted (Brennan Center, 2026). Stephen Miller welcomed them and told reporters, “This is race-based persecution.” Pretoria strongly denied the allegations, insisting there was no evidence of state-sponsored persecution against any racial group.

Even with all these examples, MAGA will tell you Trump is not a racist. In 2019, Trump, in a tweet, told “The Squad,” consisting of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” Ilhan Omar is the only congresswoman born in another country; the others were born in America.

One of the more overt forms of racism was the push for the “Great Replacement Theory.” Supposedly, the Democrats are letting in waves of illegal immigrants to help them in some sinister plan to eradicate white people, I mean American citizens. Charlie Kirk, made into a martyr by MAGA, canonized as a “good man” — pushed the Great Replacement Theory: “The ‘Great Replacement’ is not a theory, it’s a reality” (“Charlie Kirk on Instagram: ‘The ‘Great Replacement’ Is Not a Theory, It’s a Reality.’,” 2022)

Throughout the years, MAGA has consistently whined that Black people are perpetual victims who need to stop bringing up racism. They eventually hijacked the term Black Fatigue, which was originally meant to describe the exhaustion the Black community has from dealing with racism constantly, with nothing ever really being done to end it. MAGA uses it to say they’re exhausted by Black culture or by the behavior of Black people.

With MAGA, this seems like a charming collection of grievances that belong on a plaque inside the White House. You would expect a eureka moment at some point, but even when Trump says that Civil Rights led to white people being “very badly treated,” there was no moment of clarity (Green, 2026). Each quote confirmed their grievance that white people were under attack. Trump has used every color in the crayon box to perpetuate this myth of reverse racism, except for one color: white.

Four months into Trump’s second term is all it took to label protesting as “a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” Under these presidential memoranda, sitting in front of an ICE vehicle is now considered a form of rebellion (“Department of Defense Security for the Protection of Department of Homeland Security Functions,” 2025). Civil disobedience, such as sitting in front of a vehicle or blocking a doorway, has a long history in the US. While it involves breaking minor laws, protestors usually aren’t trying to overthrow the government. Naming it as “rebellion” inflates a protest to justify extreme measures. That fiction bought 2,000 National Guard troops for 60 days. Judge Charles Breyer, on June 12th, 2025, ruled that Trump’s actions were “illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” therefore, “He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the Governor of the State of California forthwith” (Grumbach et al., 2025). The excuse for this federal escalation was a handful of incidents from the left, when ICE was in L.A. No Democratic president, going back to Kennedy, has federalized the National Guard over a governor’s objection to suppress domestic protest.

This was politically motivated against the left, not as an objective measure, but to paint the political opposition as what Stephen Miller would eventually call “enemies of civilization” (U.S. Department of State, 2026). MAGA Republicans have spent the better part of 10 years using the rhetoric of dehumanization to paint the left as a threat to society. During Trump’s January 6th, 2021 speech, it only took him two minutes before he called Democrats the “radical left,” and blamed them for stealing the 2020 election (Naylor, 2021). The speech runs on three moves: (a) paint the left as a threat, (b) lie about the election, (c) emotionally manipulate his base by calling for immediate action to a threat. After Trump paints the left as radical (a threat), he then claims the election was stolen (the lie), then he tells his base, “We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved” (emotional manipulation). He lies that Democrats have “gotten away” with election fraud “for years.” He calls his base the “real people” that “built this nation” and then claims the left are the ones who “tore down our nation” (Naylor, 2021). Notice the word ‘our.’ MAGA runs the nation in his telling — the left doesn’t even get to belong to it. One speech did that in two minutes. Multiply it by ten years and ask what that conditions a person to believe.

Dehumanization has many facets, and rhetoric is one. Another mechanism is worse: using the machinery of the state to paint ideas as terrorism. The Trump administration did this via an EO signed on September 22nd, 2025, designating “Antifa” as a terrorist organization (“Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization,” 2025). This would be moronic if it weren’t so dangerous. Antifa has no membership, no leadership, no organizational hierarchy of any kind. It’s not a set of doctrines or a religion with institutional scaffolding. It’s a stance. Anyone can have this thought, individually, in their own head, and never coordinate with another person. Ideas do not commit terrorism. The law cuts through the noise: labeling an ideology as terrorism is a violation of the First Amendment. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1189, used for foreign terrorist organizations, the Secretary of State must designate an organization (“8 U.S. Code § 1189 - Designation of Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” n.d.). On November 13, 2025, the U.S. Department of State designated four violent “Antifa” groups — Antifa Ost, Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (FAI/FRI), Armed Proletarian Justice, and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense — as SDGTs and subsequently designated all four as FTOs (2026 National Terrorist Financing Risk Assessment, n.d.). “The security authorities’ assessment is that the potential threat posed by the group has recently decreased significantly,” Interior Ministry spokesperson Sarah Fruehauf said during a press conference (Reuters, 2025). Dutch Justice Minister David van Weel said in a letter to the Tweede Kamer, “None of the competent authorities have information indicating a centralized (terrorist) organization exists, making placement on the national terrorism sanctions list impossible” (NL Times, 2026). They made up the threat, then went shopping in Europe for evidence to back it up. Some of the allies they asked to co-sign it told them, to their face, that they don’t believe it.

Spend a decade installing an idea with no basis in reality. Pass laws to make the delusion look official. That’s not messaging. That’s propaganda. Dangerous propaganda. This administration has tried to make disagreement a mental illness by making up a syndrome (TDS). Republicans in Congress tried to pass a bill that allows for investigations into it. What else is this but a tool to shut the opposition up? What’s actually dangerous is how MAGA answers for it. They will ask, “If Trump is authoritarian, why do you still have free speech,” or “where are the tanks?” Sit with that for a second: a political party invented a syndrome, then tried to get Congress to legally investigate it, for the sole purpose of labeling their opposition mentally ill. You don’t need to strip amendments for authoritarianism to flourish. All you need is an authoritarian leader, a willing government to legally harm the opposition, and a media apparatus that makes cruelty seem like a legitimate concern or beneficial. The political right has allowed the federal government to seek out ways to harm the left, and they are for it. Yet they have the audacity to blame the left for the things they’ve created. If that’s not authoritarian gaslighting, then Abraham Lincoln was a communist.

When you have a rap sheet of cruelty as long as MAGA does, there must be an explanation. Nothing happens without a reason. MAGA’s support for violence isn’t a feeling. It’s backed by research.

Before the support, there has to be wiring underneath it. In 2003, Jost established that conservatism itself correlates with threat-management psychology — death anxiety as the single strongest predictor, fear of instability close behind, and intolerance of ambiguity after that (Jost et al., 2003). This is architecture. All belief systems are partly motivated by psychological needs to manage fear and uncertainty. Armaly & Enders also looked at personality traits and support for political violence. They found the strongest predictors were perceived victimhood, authoritarianism, populism, and white identity (Armaly & Enders, 2022).

Perceived victimhood has a cousin, collective narcissism, which is believing your in-group deserves recognition that it isn’t getting. Golec looked into political parties and how this can threaten democracies by supporting a leader that promises the most destructive payback against out-groups. They found that national narcissists aren’t loyal to an ideology, but to whichever leader most convincingly promises to punish the in-group’s perceived enemies (Golec, 2024). Miller purposely called the left “enemies of civilization.”

Wintemute, in 2024, found that MAGA Republicans (58%) were far more likely than other Republicans or non-Republicans (25%) to say violence is usually/always justified to advance at least one out of the 17 political goals (Wintemute et al., 2024). A follow-up study was done in 2025 and the pattern held: 55% of self-identified MAGA Republicans said violence was justified in at least one of the 21 goals compared to 25% of non-MAGA non-Republicans (Wintemute et al., 2025). In another 2025 study, Wintemute found that people who strongly approved of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the white supremacy movement, the militia movement, QAnon, and Christian nationalism were dramatically more willing to commit violence (Wintemute et al., 2025). Three separate studies, three different years, the same gap every time.

Kalmoe & Mason investigated moral disengagement, rationalizing harm to the other side, and actual support for political violence. They found that 10-60% of partisans endorsed some moral disengagement. The strongest predictors of all three measures — moral disengagement, taking pleasure in schadenfreude, violence endorsement — were strength of party identity and trait aggression, not which party. No one is saying the left hasn’t caused its fair share of problems, and there has been an uptick in left-wing terrorism (Kalmoe & Mason, 2019).

Nai & Young tested whether personality traits like narcissism, manipulativeness, and psychopathy predict support for violence across five countries — Argentina, Australia, Germany, Italy, and the USA. Low honesty-humility — how willing someone is to lie, exploit, and serve only themselves — was the main driver in the five countries. In the deeper US study, psychopathy specifically was the dominant driver — the average violence support score rose to 60% (Nai & Young, 2024).

Beyond support for violence, there are ways to activate existing suppressed prejudice, which can lead to discrimination, whether verbal or physical. Newman looked into the emboldening effect and found that when exposed to discriminatory rhetoric via a political elite, those with existing suppressed prejudice were more likely to discriminate — especially when other elites tacitly condone Trump’s remarks (Newman et al., 2020).

Put the research together and the pattern isn’t subtle: psychological traits, existing prejudice, and conservatism, under certain conditions, will produce support for violence and discrimination.

We have seen the harm this administration and MAGA have produced. It’s the documented harm the right has and is causing but denies all of it as if it’s for some greater good. Vermin. Enemy from within. Enemies of civilization. A made-up syndrome to diagnose disagreement as disease. Say all four out loud, back-to-back, and tell yourself this was ever about making the world better, and not about making an entire out-group look like the reason it might end. MAGA chose cruelty, and they knew exactly what they were choosing. You don’t deny something you didn’t do.

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