The Bulwark’s Tim Miller went to the TPUSA pre-Christmas “Gathering of the MAGAlos” as he does every year. He’s very brave:
I was standing beside the step-and-repeat at James O’Keefe’s annual AmFest afterparty nursing a bourbon and coke when out of the corner-of-my-eye emerged a face that was mostly familiar, minus the signature sepia blur. The face was approaching fast. Wide TV anchor smile. Caked on make-up. Main-character energy.
I quickly realized I was in its sights.
Immediately I’m greeted with the familiar booming, midwestern-announcer voice. Knowing that I was on enemy turf I attempted a pleasant return greeting, hoping to disarm and signal that I came in peace.
“DON’T TOUCH ME,” Kari Lake screams in my face, I assume in reference to a bit of discomfort with mid-interview physical contact that I had expressed in our last encounter. “YOU ARE A PIECE OF SHIT.”
The face briefly collects itself and appears to look back and see if her husband was taping the exchange. One of the many observers of the scene—and let me tell you, it was a SCENE—later told me that they thought Cameraman Lake had missed the approach, possibly the cause of Kari’s decision to double back for more.
She turns back around.
“You are a piece of shit!” she repeats over, and over, and over, and over, and over, staring up at me with increasing rage in her eyes and at times pinching my arm like an angry grandmother.1 Lake goes on to make a series of other accusations about my integrity. Among them: That I don’t care about “fentanyl mothers,” that I am a “fake news” “liar,” and that I was hiding my signature pearl necklace underneath a button up shirt. (On this last count, at least, I can conclusively say that she was incorrect. )
The attack subsided when an unlikely peace-maker emerged from the growing crowd of onlookers: The right-wing conspiracist Laura Loomer, who you may recall as the Trump hanger-on who briefly became a lightning rod during the 2024 campaign. Loomer made her way through the crowd of onlookers, stood next to Lake and echoed her assessment that I was a lying POS, but in a tone that was more appropriate for a public gathering. Loomer’s calm-disdain-mixed-with-curiosity about my presence seemed to cause Lake’s manic rage to peter out.
Throughout Kari’s tirade, I think I mostly smiled awkwardly. Though who can say. Unless she releases the video, I can’t be sure what I looked like. I remember looking around at my surroundings with low-grade anxiety and trying to assess whether this was real life or if I had mistakenly taken a hallucinogenic gummy. A few times I attempted to congratulate Lake on her new role as the nominee to be the director of the Voice Of America. At first I was trying to de-escalate, but eventually I confess that I was mocking her.
The rest is just as good. And he notes something that I’ve been sort of seeing on social media:
The Lake exchange, while frivolous and a quite a bit cray, was telling. Her behavior was the most unhinged—by far—of anyone I encountered. But it reflected the broader vibe I got from the attendees: People just didn’t seem as happy and fulfilled as I expected.
They just can’t be happy. That goes against their entire ethos. They just have to be mad or they don’t feel alive. (I wrote about this phenomenon after Trump won in 2016.)
The best they can come up with is:
They just don’t know what to do when they win:
Then there were the speeches from the main stage, where the crowd reaction was tepid compared to last year. You could sense the speakers searching for material that would generate some heat. Many settled on talking about how this year proved that God was on Trump’s side and that His hand had emerged from the heavens to protect him on that field in Butler. (This bit was well received.)
But in years past the real juice had come from defining foes. The crowd would get rabid as speakers railed against the deep state, and the election thieves, and Dementia Joe. Kamabla. The Never Trumpers. Kevin McCarthy. The Establishment RINO Cucks. The Muslims. The Killer Migrants. The Trans people who worked in the Biden Administration. Etc. Etc.
The problem for speaker’s this year is that most of their enemies have been defeated and are down bad. And sure, some of us got kicked around a bit on stage to standard applause. But the rabidity was missing. Turns out that it’s hard to get it up for kicking the wounded donkey.
They are tired of winning, I guess. The libs have been owned so they just don’t have any reason for being.