MAGA’s Wheel of Misfortune: Spin, Blame, Repeat
When governing is difficult, manufacture a villain. While everyone fights over the latest scapegoat, the people writing the checks keep collecting the winnings.
MAGA’s governing philosophy increasingly resembles a carnival wheel operated by the least trustworthy bastard at the fair.
Give it a spin.
Immigrants.
Spin again.
Teachers.
Another spin.
Drag queens, librarians, scientists, trans people, college students, women who vote incorrectly, cities that contain bicycles, or whichever appliance has recently been accused of making America insufficiently masculine.
The wheel never lands on “wealthy donors,” “corporate tax avoidance,” “medical monopolies,” “price gouging,” or “the billionaires standing behind you with both hands in your pockets.”
Funny how that works.
The enemy is the product
This isn’t a conventional policy agenda. It is a grievance subscription service.
The customer gets a fresh enemy delivered whenever the previous enemy stops producing enough outrage. The target changes, but the sales pitch remains remarkably consistent:
Your life would be perfect if those people had not ruined it.
That message is politically useful because governing is difficult. Housing costs require policy. Healthcare requires negotiations with powerful industries. Wages involve labor markets, corporate incentives, taxation and bargaining power. Infrastructure takes years. Schools need money, qualified employees and enough public patience to survive beyond the next election.
Blaming a frightened family at the border can be done before breakfast.
Attacking a teacher requires even less preparation. Find an anecdote, strip away its context, add the word “indoctrination,” and suddenly nobody is asking why classrooms are overcrowded or why educators are buying pencils with their own money.
Drag queens work beautifully too. Most Americans rarely attend drag performances, which leaves plenty of empty space for professional outrage merchants to fill with imaginary emergencies.
This part is analysis, not a secret memo discovered inside a MyPillow. The pattern is public. The Trump administration has repeatedly framed immigration, diversity programs, transgender inclusion and even cultural institutions as threats demanding federal intervention. Its own grantmaking order complained about drag shows, critical race theory and transgender education while directing agencies to police ideologically disfavored projects. The administration published that language itself.
The outrage is not an accidental side effect of the program. The outrage is what keeps the program running.
A grievance buffet with no nutritional value
The genius of the enemy wheel is that its targets do not need to share anything.
An immigrant harvesting vegetables, a librarian defending a book and a scientist applying for a grant may have absolutely nothing in common. But MAGA can toss all three into the same bubbling cauldron labeled “the radical left,” add a pronoun, and serve it as dinner.
The coalition stays unified because everybody is invited to hate something.
One voter gets immigrants. Another gets universities. Another gets cities. Another gets Muslims, gay people, unions or whatever “woke” currently means before somebody asks for a definition.
This is why the movement’s language is so elastic. “Woke” can mean an employment policy, a Black mermaid, a history lesson, a beer commercial or a stranger having blue hair at Target. A word that means everything conveniently proves nothing.
It is political Silly Putty for people who want their anger pre-chewed.
Meanwhile, resentment becomes a substitute for material improvement. Your rent is still high, but at least a teacher somewhere was terrified into removing a book. Your hospital bill still looks like a ransom note, but a trans kid has been publicly humiliated. Groceries remain expensive, yet the government successfully made a farmworker’s family miserable.
Victory!
Nobody repaired your road, reduced your premium or increased your paycheck, but somebody you were trained to resent had a worse afternoon.
Follow the money they don’t want you following
Here is where the carnival trick becomes less funny.
While the public is ordered to inspect immigrants’ documents and teachers’ reading lists, major economic legislation has continued shifting resources upward.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analyzed the 2025 reconciliation law and concluded that household resources would decrease near the bottom of the income distribution while increasing for households in the middle and toward the top. CBO attributed much of the loss in in-kind benefits to reduced Medicaid and SNAP spending. That is the government’s budget scorekeeper, not a resistance podcast hosted from somebody’s laundry room.
That does not mean every wealthy person personally stole a poor family’s lunch money. It means the measurable policy distribution travels in the same direction the rhetoric tells voters never to look: upward.
The country also has a massive tax-compliance problem. The IRS projects a gross federal tax gap of $696 billion for tax year 2022, most of it from underreported income. Enforcement and later payments recover only part of that amount. The IRS publishes the figures and methodology.
Yet national outrage is repeatedly redirected toward families using food assistance, workers without perfect paperwork and teachers with classroom flags.
Apparently the person receiving twelve dollars in grocery help is destroying civilization, while sophisticated tax avoidance is merely wealth wearing a tie.
The wheel protects the operator
Scapegoating provides another valuable service: it makes leaders less accountable.
If every failure can be blamed on immigrants, Democrats, bureaucrats, universities, judges or “the deep state,” then the leader never has to admit that his policy failed. He merely announces that a new enemy sabotaged it.
The movement becomes unfalsifiable.
Promises succeed because Trump is brilliant. Promises fail because traitors interfered. Bad economic news is fake. Good economic news is proof of genius. A court ruling is sacred when favorable and corrupt when inconvenient. Federal power is tyranny when Democrats exercise it and presidential virility when Felon 47 does.
That is not a governing philosophy. It is a customer-service policy for narcissism.
And the spinning wheel is essential because permanent outrage prevents reflection. If the crowd ever stops screaming long enough to compare its material conditions with the rewards delivered to wealthy interests, the carnival owner has a serious problem.
So the music gets louder.
“Look! An immigrant!”
“Look! A drag queen!”
“Look! A teacher said America made mistakes!”
Anything to keep the crowd facing the stage while the money exits through the tent flap.
Cruelty is not competence
A government can enforce immigration law without treating every migrant as an invading soldier. It can debate school policy without portraying teachers as predators. It can regulate federal spending without turning LGBTQ people into campaign props. It can design tax policy without asking working families to surrender healthcare and food assistance while high-income households collect larger benefits.
Those are policy choices.
The satire begins where politicians pretend cruelty itself is evidence of competence. Deport more people, ban more books, frighten more children, punish more cities and somehow prosperity will emerge from the rubble wearing a red hat.
It won’t.
A country does not become stronger by identifying its most politically vulnerable residents and competing to see who can make them suffer fastest. That is not strength. It is cowardice with federal stationery.
Real governing requires telling voters uncomfortable truths. Problems have multiple causes. Solutions cost money. Powerful industries sometimes need to lose. Wealthy donors may need to pay more. Compromises will disappoint everybody.
Scapegoating offers a cheaper product: one frightened group, one furious crowd and one orange showman promising that the next spin will finally make everything wonderful.
It never does.
The wheel must keep turning because the moment it stops, people might notice who has been winning every round.
