MAGA didn’t win on policy. It won on pain—on telling working-class Americans someone else took what was theirs. It told veterans they’d been forgotten. Farmers they’d been cheated. Parents they’d been replaced.

And then it offered revenge instead of repair.

That’s how you get a movement where birthright citizenship is a bargaining chip and DEI programs are the enemy. Not because they’re broken—but because they’re visible. Because they mean someone else might get what you were told was yours.

But pain is not a platform. And resentment is not a strategy for governing. It’s a strategy for burning things down.