On a morning in March, a 30-year-old computer technician named Nathan was tapping at the keyboard in his Pittsburgh home when he had a breakthrough with his support group. He wasn’t in rehab. And this wasn’t exactly AA. Nathan told me that for years, he’s fought alcoholism and an addiction to crystal meth, without much success—until he discovered the online self-help network that changed his life, a Donald Trump-themed discussion forum on the website Reddit. It was there that, two months ago, after weeks of reading messages of self-improvement and positive visualization, Nathan declared he had been saved, pecking out a message of hope and encouragement to his group under the title: “Quitting Drugs Because of Trump.”
“Trump has inspired me,” he wrote. “I’m getting sober and doing my bit to Make America Great Again. Thank you Donald!”
Nathan, who did not want his last name to be used for this story, is one of a substantial number of young men tapping into a growing informal online network: A dedicated denomination of self-improvement, built on the “teachings” of one Donald J. Trump. From his books, public statements, and general attitude toward the world, they’ve extracted a highly motivating philosophy of positive thinking and the virtues of self-love and brazening things out, as real men do. Their numbers are unknown, but the trend exists in the form of dozens of their posts flourishing online, bouncing across Trump discussion threads and Twitter and the right-wing blogosphere, peppered with buzzwords and moments of epiphany. “Donald J. Trump has already won, and changed my life,” declares one poster. “How Donald inspired me to be a great American once again” proclaims another. And many more: “Trump inspired me to change my life.” “Story of how Donald Trump changed my life around.” “Donald trumps campaign has changed me.” “Trump saved my life!” “Hey Brigadiers, stop wasting your time and learn what this is. Make Yourself Great Again!”
In a phone conversation, Nathan told me that he had been able to turn his life around thanks to Trump’s “high energy” persona, his refusal to give in or be pushed around—and his declared abstinence from alcohol, tobacco or drugs. “I’ve had an ongoing fight to get off drugs, but this is the most successful I’ve ever been,” he said. “I was given the strength and the resolve of spirit to not buy drugs again.” He took a deep breath. “Through the Trump campaign.”
When Nathan posted his message to his Trump discussion thread last month, he was smothered by a wave of positive responses, each a variation on a familiar theme. “I’m also quitting booze for many reasons, Trump being one of them,” commented one user. Wrote another: “It might sound lame, but trying to be more like Donald has led to positive changes in my life.” A commenter described his own years-long drug habit, chiming in, “After reading 2 of Trump’s books I decided it’s time to quit.” And then, about two-thirds down, the prevailing leitmotif appeared:
“I just tell myself ‘it’s time to make myself great again.’”
In gargantuan, all-capital letters: “MYGA!”
MYGA, of course, stands for “Make Yourself Great Again,” a riff on the Trump campaign slogan that appears frequently in these posts. Nathan’s message, and dozens like it, are appearing as a new strain of Trumpism on forums like Reddit and 4Chan, and echoing on darker corners of the Internet like the white nationalist forum TheRightStuff. Posters take turns soliloquizing on the lessons of self-reliance and perseverance from Trump’s life story, from his childhood and adolescence, to his early days as a struggling businessman, to his seemingly constant high energy as a 69-year-old man who refuses to drink or smoke (and who required the same of his children).
“Instead of an AA meeting, what you’re seeing here are good habits being broadcast as popular. It’s cool to make yourself better, to be trying to improve yourself, because of Donald Trump,” Jon Sharpe, a 36-year-old lawyer in Columbus, Ohio, told me. After seeing a tide of inspirational Trump-themed messages, Sharpe formed a Reddit group and called it MYGA, intending to vacuum up the people and posts espousing the philosophy. (His other Reddit adventures include moderating the forum HottiesForTrump.) He later spiked the idea, partly for lack of time, and partly for redundancy, citing the esprit de corps that already exists organically on Reddit. “You get the satisfaction that I’m part of this club,” Sharpe explained. “I’m doing something because of this, and everybody’s around to pat you on the back and say, yeah, this is awesome. Make yourself great again.”
MYGA posts cover topics as wide-ranging as they are banal: Themes include going to the gym, asking out beautiful women or asking for a raise. In one post titled, “Life Tips I’ve Learned from Watching Trump!!” an Illinois man lists a dozen areas of personal improvement in which he looks to Trump, including “Being a great parent” and “NO DRUGS AND NO ALCOHOL.” In a now-deleted post, a user noted that watching Trump inspired him to get into the “gym 5 times a week from 0,” adding, “no more pot, cigs, cut drinking a lot.” Finding Donald Trump, writes another poster, “inspired me to become the high-energy person I used to be,” adding, “I decided that I want to get back into running 10k races. ... Remember guys, you can’t make America great again without feeling great yourself.”
“We take Trump’s energy and just magnify it,” Nathan told me. “We’re constantly feeding on each other’s energy. It’s great. It’s fantastic. It’s positive.”
The most common thread in the world of MYGA is a feral obsession with Trump’s domineering maleness. In posts and interviews, MYGA writers express varying degrees of the idea that the Trump campaign is helping them become real men—in similar terms as their understanding of Trump’s unapologetic, aggressive vision for the country.
“He’s this alpha kind of guy, and I do think that resonates with young men,” a 21-year-old professional athlete from Idaho and a MYGA poster who uses the name HighlyVenomous, told me. (He didn’t want me to identify his event, but instructed me to describe it as “extreme sports.”) Sharpe said the same. “He comes across as an alpha male. He’s sure of himself, and whatever flaws he does have, like his hair, he doesn’t care, and he runs with it,” he said. “Mainstream politics requires that sort of demure attitude, you have to almost apologize for whatever good you have. Trump doesn’t do that.”
“The Apprentice really showed me what a world class alpha male looks like and operates,” writes one poster in the Reddit thread LifeProTrumpTips. “As a group of dominant alphas you can achieve impossible things.”
As the MYGA crowd’s open obsession with dominance, manliness, and alpha-status suggests, the gospel can quickly turn down a dark corridor. The deeper one ventures into the strange world of MYGA, the more the country’s problems become laced with an array of white-male-themed anxieties—men are apologizing for their maleness, the users say; policies are lifting up the weak and punishing the strong; and culture at large is becoming more feminized. Go deep enough, and you’ll hit the so-called alt-right movement, an online waystation where MYGA has thrived most principally as an ideation of male virility. (The world of the alt-right is best known for creating the “#Cuckservative” hashtag—a racially tinged portmanteau of cuckold and conservative, created to call out those who are insufficiently far-right.)
Christopher Cantwell, a controversial anarchist-libertarian blogger from New Hampshire who has also credited Trump with helping him treat his drug addiction, is one of the denizens of this site. “There’s certainly an attitude toward the striking back against the emasculation of men,” Cantwell told me. “Let’s promote rugged masculinity—and that would be striving to be a more dominant strong, assertive person.” In an hour-long conversation, Caldwell riffed on the MYGA theme to describe his frustration that transgenderism isn’t treated as a neurological disorder; why taking the stigma out of mental illness was misguided; and how he was fired from his job as a radio host when his boss worried he was insinuating that other races are genetically inferior to whites. All such things, he suggested, violate the principle of MYGA. (He also, in a Trumpian effort to grab the initiative in our interview, recorded an introduction that tried to frame the interview as a “conversation,” as if I had been a guest on his online radio show, and told me he’d release it if I misquoted him.)
***
One’s first reaction to discovering the MYGA movement is that this must be a hoax—a gang of cynical pranksters having fun at someone’s expense on the Internet. The places it lives online, especially Reddit and 4Chan, are the Internet’s hives of smut and sarcasm, where even the most earnest entreaties are swiftly dismissed with eye rolls or worse.
But in their online traffic Nathan and others treat each other with real sincerity and support, even if it can seem almost comically chest-thumping to outsiders. And in all our phone calls and email interviews they insist the nascent community constitutes a movement. “I know it looks like theater to some,” Nathan said with a sigh. “But this has helped me. This whole movement has helped me.”
So, who are they? The easy assumption is that the writers would represent a particularly frustrated corner of Trump’s base, maybe high-school graduates whose assembly line gigs were recently punted over to China. But the half dozen MYGA acolytes I interviewed were mostly white-collar professionals with advanced degrees. The first person I talked to was HighlyVenomous, the Idaho professional athlete who appeared to be one of the most sarcastic posters. One post, titled My Life Is Changed, read, “I jumped out of bed this morning after 2 hours of sleep and literally shouted HIGH ENERGY. … I’m pedal to the metal, 24/7.”
“For me at least, it wasn’t a joke. It was maybe humorous and funny, but it was sincere thoughts and actually discussion, you know?” he told me haltingly when I reached him over the phone. Every few minutes, he slipped into a recitation of Trump’s prowess, and the topic had to be gently resuscitated. But eventually, the athlete explained how the celebrity real-estate developer has helped him supercharge his competitive drive. “In my personal life, Trump has kind of energized me and vitalized things. His high energy mentality has definitely carried over, absolutely,” he continued. “I’ve had a lot more energy, but also a lot more drive to push myself further to better my performance, to innovate in my realm.”
“Trump’s inspired me in more ways than one,” writes a user called UnholyZealot, in a message titled Make Yourself Great Challenge. “Give yourself a challenge too! Ask that girl out! Go for that job! Ask for a raise! Make America and yourself great again!” That was a 26-year-old young man from Pennsylvania who works in finance, who would only speak on background. He told me about his Donald-themed weight loss regimen. “I’ve lost around 12 pounds so far, and about 10 pounds of that was after I joined The Donald,” he told me. “I noticed some people talking about improving themselves, so I decided to add my view.”
One college student, a 22-year-old accounting major in Connecticut, told me how Trump had improved his public speaking. “I see a guy takin’ more heat, more incoming than any human being I’ve ever seen,” he told me. “So he just gave me confidence to speak in front of people, and talk to more people.”
***
Much as it resembles the generally anodyne subgenre of Internet self-help, MYGA is also driven by a current of the aggressive politics that underlie a Trump rally. For starters, much of the posting is an uninhibited gush of patriotic intensity. At long last, I was told repeatedly, Trump has finally made it politically viable to say how much you love America. “It’s really a lot about pride,” says Sharpe, the Columbus lawyer who started the MYGA page. “We don’t hear a lot of people who champion a nation that we love very often. Trump kind of oozes it.” As one Reddit MYGA writer from Kansas put it: “Trump’s campaign has rekindled the fire of American patriotism in my heart, and the sense of purpose in my life. Trump and all his supporters Make America Great.” For many, incipient notions of self-betterment are linked to love of country. “This group reaffirmed that by staying off of drugs, I was doing something to help our country,” Nathan told me. “And that by helping ourselves, we helped to make America great again.”
And bound up in patriotic obligation is the greater moral duty to fight political correctness. Again and again, I heard, Trump’s refusal to bend to the whims of “social justice warriors”—an all-purpose designation for liberals, feminists, professors and other identity-sensitive types—is the stance desperately needed for a self-indulgent country obsessed with its victimhood status. “So fucking tired of the political correctness that has stiffed this country,” one poster writes. “WRONG. That is the kind of attitude that has poisoned this country.” For many, it seemed, Trump’s triumph over and above the basic decorum of politics served as an analogue for their own self-confidence.
“No longer into sluts. Looking for a good Christian girl,” writes one poster, in a now deleted 4Chan post titled Trump has inspired me to change my life. A discussion in another post is revealing. Commenting in the discussion Donald Trump’s campaign has changed me, a user writes, “I see [Trump] as our last hope, standing up to degeneracy,” and posted a video that plays a depraved pop-song parody, “Like A Degenerate,” alleging liberal responsibility for cultural decadence. “You want to lay me? Get in line / Abort my baby, spend my time getting high,” a voice sings, as video images of women activists marching and public dancing flash onscreen. Later: “You’ve got this culture cowed / Be gay, get AIDS, be proud.”
The imperative of the strong to dominate the weak is the moral structure hiding in plain site on MYGA. “There are such things as shills, weak people, and losers,” one post reads, Life Tips I’ve Learned from Watching Donald Trump. “Weak people get in the strong people’s way. If you’re weak, work to be strong, don’t bring them down.” The male connection is not far removed here; Cantwell referred me to an essay, How Strength Training Saved Me From Being a Cucked Leftfag, a rambling synthesis of male self-loathing whose main conclusion, apparently, is that leftism is anathema to weight training. “It was right and proper that the weak feel shame if their weakness is of their own making,” the author writes of his time in the weight room. “It’s a small but important part of becoming the man that you are meant to be, not only physically, but in every other way as well.”
There’s no reason to think the entire high-energy MYGA crowd shares Cantwell’s obsessions with cuckoldry and weight training, but then again the young-male-righty Internet is a messy place, where personal chest-puffing can easily bleed into race resentment and misogyny. Whatever the motives, the subtext of the movement seems clear: Society taught us to behave one way. Then Trump came into my life. Now I can be a real man.
For all of MYGA’s motivational emphasis on positivity and energy, at bottom, the concept also reflects the mechanisms of hierarchy and submission that many find so unsettling about the Trump campaign. Much of our politics is spent convincing voters to think of politicians as fellow citizens, as amiable and approachable and responsive to the needs of citizens. Not Trump’s campaign. It’s the act of subordination to the alpha Trump—the same one he asks of rivals, of allies, of voters—that enables his followers’ narrative of personal renaissance.
***
This may be something new in American politics. For one, few have ever proclaimed—at least not in public acts of self-congratulation—how Obama inspired them to get back to the gym, or Martin O’Malley inspired them to take up banjo. Mitt Romney doesn’t drink, smoke or consume drugs, a point MYGA-maniacs readily acknowledge, but he never inspired obsessive fandom. MYGA may be Trump’s strongest, strangest constituency. In many ways, they need him to be president more than he does. Why?
Maybe it requires a Republican to offer the most cogent thesis, and one came from Republican governor Tim Leavitt of Utah in March, who complained that the primary campaign had become more an exercise in psychology than actual ideas and substance. “There is more sociology happening right now than there is politics,” Leavitt told a small symposium in Salt Lake City. Leavitt went on: “We don’t have sociology parties, we have political parties. We’re not going to be electing a chief therapist”—characterizing the appeal of Trump. “We’re going to be electing a president.”
I asked Jonathan Haidt, professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University and scholar of moral psychology and political tribalism, to make sense of MYGA—a collection of young men coming together to affirm the viability of themselves through a leader. He told me that it would be impossible to study empirically. But, he suggested, “it might link up with a general dispiritedness of young men these days.” He pointed to the work of Hana Marano, who has chronicled the cultural challenges facing young men in a post-industrial economy and new social equilibrium of female power.
This seems to line up. Trump is a bully, in point of fact. But the men of MYGA don’t view him that way. He’s a survivor who doesn’t apologize—and a man who holds out the possibility of getting the playthings and women you want by shouting your demands loudly enough. Above all, Trump is essentially a candidate devoid of politics—a practice whose requisite components are negotiation, compromise and, most of the time, failure. Much easier to summon middle school fantasies of “rugged masculinity” and self-reclamation as the prescription for not only one’s own ills, but the country’s. It seems hardly surprising that young men might want to rally around a candidate whose own psychosocial development, still at age 69—from publically lampooning a woman’s menstrual cycle, to impersonating someone over the phone to inflate his own ego—sometimes feels frozen in amber in his early twenties.
For the MYGA crowd, Trump’s influence really does appear to be helping them overcome hurdles—though it’s an approach that might prove less useful once they hit 35, or need to keep a relationship going. For the political world, the phenomenon is another lens through which to see Trump’s appeal. More than his attraction to the white working class; more than his allure to trade protectionists, white nationalists or misogynists; more than the dictators and regimes around the world who thrill to his antics, Trump’s campaign is based on an agenda designed to solve the problem of being a confused young man in your twenties. He has made numerous blunders that were supposed to cost him politically. But the core of Trump’s support is apolitical. It consists of people who—much like the men of MYGA—buy into rhetoric that seeks to turn the vulnerable into bullies; bullies into heroes; and their anxieties into certitudes, free of charge.