"Tim Walz is not trans," the reactionary influencer Christopher Rufo tweeted on Tuesday. "But he knows about cross-sex hormones. He's familiar with breast binders. He has a soft spot for tucking." Rufo's post goes on like that for a while, in a tone that seems to be aiming for comic escalation and which lands closer to skronking free jazz. The last sentence is, "They will cry when they hear our transgender patriots roar!" Rufo's post is a quote-tweet of a 2019 post by Minnesota Governor and Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz, in which Walz writes, "Our transgender military members are true patriots. They deserve to be thanked, not attacked." Walz was responding to a Trump administration policy that all but banned transgender people from serving in the military; Rufo, five years later, was not so much responding to that response as he was performing his disgust at the concept of trans people existing in any context. The idea was that this would make Walz look bad.
As with so many similar distress signals from the American right, Rufo's post is easy to understand at one level—it's a man getting upset about something in a strange and theatrical way—and pretty much impossible to parse at every other. The tiresome meta-debate over the strategic merit of tagging Trumpist Republicans as "weird" notwithstanding, it is honestly just hard to think of what else to call this sort of thing. It helps a bit if you know what Rufo's particular job is, and how Trump's own bottomless and babyish appetite for umbrage, flattery, and spectacle have reshaped conservative politics into something designed to generate those above any other end. If you think of Rufo as an influencer in the classic hey-guys-please-like-and-subscribe sense, pulling faces and cutting spiteful little promos for his audience of addled conservative elites, the stilted and overstated tone at least begins to make sense.
Both greasy strivers like Rufo and also your more warped and willful elected officials on the right all understand their jobs this way and behave accordingly. If they seem somehow unlike actual people, if they are too big and too mad and too much, it is because they are now full-time content creators, and so actually not quite like actual people at all. They are all pinned into a deteriorating orbit around the dense collapsing star at the center of the conservative universe, but they have committed to at least make their turns around Donald Trump's imperial bulk as loudly as possible. Again, this is the job.
The result of that work is a chunky slurry of gossip and fantasy and rank bigotry blasting from a thousand gilded hydrants at every hour of the day; it amounts to a grim sort of fan service catering to an even grimmer fanbase. This has limited public appeal, just in the sense of not being the sort of thing that most people are interested in hearing about, let alone to the exclusion of any other topic and in the most vexed n' fervid keening imaginable, and that poses an obvious problem for a political party that has entirely given itself over to the making of this kind of noise. The bigger issue, though, is that these imperatives only run in one direction—louder, uglier, more confrontational, further out, more. If the obvious tactical challenge here is that this shit absolutely sucks and most people hate it, the more fundamental one is that the internal incentives are such that it can only ever get worse.
The fantasy of a chastened or refined Trump is, and has long been, the dumbest dream of political media dorks; the followers that put this prissy old dunce at the center of their world, and the mediocrities and opportunists who identified his rancid charisma as their own tickets to ride, know that they can only ever and always do more. This is the nature of this type of content-creation gig, which can never turn off or calm down, but also this is the dead end that conservative politics was steering towards long before Trump took the wheel. A politics whose most fundamental idea is Make Progress Stop Happening would inevitably find itself fetishizing the torment of having to live in a world in which other people, who are not even you, are somehow supposed to matter just as much.
There is some power in that, but because that appeal is grounded in humiliation and retribution and anger, its expression will naturally tend to come out vengeful and sour. This might resonate, and mostly has resonated, with people who feel those feelings and get some low thrill from how angry it makes them, but it will struggle to win over people who not only do not feel that way, but quite naturally don't want to feel that way. There are a lot of people out there who really want to punish other people, and who will indulge that fantasy until it is big enough to crowd out every other thing in and around them, but there are also people who aspire to something more or just other than that. The former population will tend to think the latter secretly wants the same things they do, and hate them for not admitting it; the latter will hold the former in contempt, not just because of their backwards and shabby aspirations but because of how unappealing—how much smaller and more anxious and more spiteful—those desires have made them. That assessment is easy, less automatic than autonomic. It's the sort of decision that gets made in the same part of your brain that tells you not to eat a hot dog you see lying on the sidewalk.
It is very important to Christopher Rufo that he be seen as a master political communicator; if he didn't insist upon his own brilliance so vigorously, Rufo would be very difficult to distinguish from the other severe, offended, invariably bearded "traditionalists" in his cohort. Plenty of institutions have been willing to take Rufo at his word on this, but the perverse institutional tics and tendencies that compel the New York Times to treat Rufo as an actual authority don't apply to any normal person trying to figure out what the fuck this guy is even on about. If someone dressed rather ostentatiously as a clown hands you a business card identifying themselves as a Certified Children's Entertainment Professional, it would be reasonable to assume that they are what they look like.
The contrast provided by the quoted material in Rufo's "Tim Walz isn't trans" tweet doesn't flatter either the form or the substance of Rufo's performance—in Walz's post you see a straightforward affirmation that some people are worthy of respect; in Rufo's you get a screeching, pop-eyed, manically cartwheeling refusal of that premise. If the current Democratic campaign gambit of painting contemporary American conservatism as the province of lonely fuming weirdos, sociopathic local gentry, and busybody billionaires is working—if it feels not just overdue but liberating to be able to call this goof troop of aggro freaks and slavering mediocrities by their rightful names—it is mostly because it is so obviously, manifestly correct. There are other, nicer names for whatever this is, but none quite so accurate.
But that contrast is important, too. Rufo's jag of delirious nastiness looks weirder and uglier—or, maybe, just as weird and ugly as it is—because of the simple and humane assertion to which it is responding. The same goes for GOP Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance's answer, on Wednesday, to a question from local media asking, "What makes you smile, what makes you happy?" Vance grimaced and huffed and answered, "Well, I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media, man," before delivering a spectacularly mirthless laugh and steering things back towards what he was angry about. It was a bad answer, badly delivered, but it was also a disciplined one. The idea was to get back to being upset, both in the broadest possible sense and more specifically about the litany of vibe-y cable-news fixations that define the Trump/Vance campaign, such as it exists.
Again, some of this is just how conservative politics works; in lieu of any solution to any problem, lavishing attention upon the problem and identifying it as what the other guys want becomes the move more or less by default. But the limitations of this approach are not just obvious but overbearing. If the only answer available to the vice presidential nominee when asked What stuff do you like is a tremulous Go fuck yourself, something has gone wrong; if the only possible engagement with any or every other person is to antagonize or dominate, you will wind up lonely. There's no levity or recognizable human brightness to be found here, but there is also no air, nothing but grievance and its performance.
Again, a lot of this is just a politics built around one strange man mirroring that man's decline and serving his catastrophic tastes; as Trump's former insult-comic zest has slumped into recursive and increasingly obscure complaint, his movement has followed suit, to the point where aspirants like Ron DeSantis seem somehow to have un-learned how to smile as a strategic gambit. A political movement built on conservatism's signature combination of servility, sadism, and selfishness would naturally be inclined towards someone like Trump, who authentically embodies those, uh, let's call them "values." But installing someone that relentlessly corrupt and fundamentally unhappy atop a movement so inclined towards degrading mimesis would eventually turn it inward in destructive ways. The crises and anxieties feed on and fight with each other; they multiply, and grow louder and more chaotic. It gets weirder and weirder without any of the people inside of it noticing. They are all always saying the same things, but somehow never in any kind of harmony.
Such a movement would be unstable, of course, but all the more so because it can no longer speak or see beyond itself. This is the conflict that Trumpism can't resolve, the thing that makes even the most gently lobbed of softball questions impossible to handle and what makes an assertion like Walz's—other people are just as real as you, and they deserve respect—not just unanswerable, but incomprehensible. It's not just the idea that Walz is expressing but the very idea of someone like Walz expressing it that is so fundamentally confounding to operators like Rufo; the concept of a normal, empathetic, passably happy heterosexual white man who is not constantly afraid and angry and arguing with everyone around him simply does not compute.
It would be a fitting end for such a cynical movement to wind up so entangled in the performance of its various individuated grifts that it can't do anything but thrash itself further into entanglement. The movement's seething antiheroes can't even afford to win, really, because of the threat that any such resolution poses to their all-devouring hustle. It has forgotten how to do anything else; for Trump and his acolytes and impersonators, to do less would mean humiliation, to change would be something like death. They will drown themselves on principle; we might as well leave them to it.
