MAGA is an Auto-Humiliation Movement

Today, FIFA, the most corrupt governing body in sports, gave its inaugural FIFA Peace Prize to Donald Trump, the most corrupt governing body in America. And the whole thing was exceptionally stupid.

Trump received a genuinely bizarre trophy and a medal that made him quite proud. The whole scene, of a man of childlike intelligence, having a pageant put on around him so he'd feel good about himself, reminded me of Batkid , the Make-A-Wish boy who got to pretend to be Batman for a day. Except Batkid is a feel-good story, and there's nothing feel-good about playing to Trump's imbecilic ego.

The other thing about this ceremony and the footage of it is just how humiliating the whole thing is. And it's humiliating in a way that is just a foundational feature of Trumpism and the MAGA movement.

We talk about how one of the ways Trump won the power he's achieved is that he's shameless. Behaviors that would've led other politicians to resign—and have in fact led other politicians to resign—don't seem to have much effect on Trump. He powers through the outrage, creates more outrage to distract from it, and never seems to face any consequences.

That's all true, and the decline in the power of shame has been one of his most corrosive contributions to American politics. But shamelessness is distinct from what's happening in this FIFA ceremony, or when Trump earlier this week renamed the Institute for Peace after himself.

What's happening here isn't shamelessness. It's auto-humiliation. Trump routinely absolutely humiliates himself in public, but doesn't recognize that he's being humiliated. And that behavior really is key to understanding MAGA as both a movement and a psychology.

Shamelessness comes with awareness. You know what you're doing and how others see it, and you don't care. Trump's corruption, for example, is a kind of shamelessness. He knows he's engaging in corrupt behavior, and that others view it as corrupt, but he just doesn't care.

Auto-humiliation is about lack of awareness. When Trump put on that stupid medal, he thought it made him look important and worthy. He wanted a prize because he thinks getting prizes makes you look important in the eyes of others, and he wants to look important in the eyes of others. Or when Pete Hegseth goes on long rants about warriors, he thinks it makes him look tough, and he wants to be seen as a tough guy.

In auto-humiliation, you believe people are perceiving your behavior positively or fearfully or in awe, when in fact you look like a moron or a fool. The entire aesthetics of Trumpism is auto-humiliation. The way DHS tweets out kitsch racist art is humiliating, but they believe it's intimidating. The way ICE agents deck themselves out in combat gear, they think makes them look badass when in fact it makes them look like silly cowards afraid of peaceful Mexican gardeners and day laborers. The way white Christian nationalists talk histrionically about the horrors of women doing basically anything that isn't staying home with kids, they think makes them look like gods of patriarchy when instead it makes them look like sad incels.

Trump spends most of his time humiliating himself. And Trumpism, as a movement, does the same. It's an ideology and psychology of people who want you to think they're big and tough and important and scary, but to achieve that have adopted behaviors and modes of expression that instead make them look pathetic and small and embarrassing. And this auto-humiliation, because it's coming from an ideological place, reinforces itself. That others laugh at them when they humiliate themselves isn't evidence that they're humiliating themselves, but instead evidence that others are so intimidated or scared or overawed that they're using laughter to hide it.

The upside is that auto-humiliation is ultimately self-defeating, because "Be like me and you'll humiliate yourself constantly, too" isn't great marketing copy.

So let's keep giving Trump dumb trophies.