“Rage bait” as Word of the Year? It’s a reason for hope

At first, I was sad to see that the linguist team at the Oxford English Dictionary had picked “rage bait” as the Word of the Year. But there’s no doubt it was the right choice.

As the wordsmiths explained in their Dec. 1 press release, rage bait is “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.” While they never use the term “MAGA,” there can be no doubt that they’re talking about the decentralized, mostly online propaganda that has created the movement and given so much power to Donald Trump.

A major form of rage bait is the endless stream of videos, photos, stories and memes — many outright fabricated — that are gobbled down by gullible Trump voters, keeping them in a constant fury at liberals and feminists and immigrants and queers. Their leaders’ goal is to keep them in a perpetual state of ignorance and hostility, ready to destroy American democracy just so they can stick it to these people they’ve been told to hate.

It’s so effective that churning out rage bait has become the primary focus of MAGA leadership. The main gig of conspiracist Laura Loomer, the president’s unofficial top adviser, has always been generating misleading content to convince her anger-addled audience that liberals are crazy conspiracists. The late influencer Charlie Kirk’s campus “debates” were held primarily to create clips of progressive students as hate objects to be dangled for his audience. Trump himself spends a shocking amount of time on his own Truth Social account, reposting memes and outright lies meant to whip his followers into a frenzy of loathing for his opposition — all so they can avoid thinking about his failure to improve the American economy and their lives.

MAGA’s rage bait is depressing to think about. But ultimately, I was heartened to see that Oxford made this choice because putting a name to a problem is often the first step toward solving it. While the term has been around for awhile, the Oxford team notes that its usage has increased threefold in the past year, showing that far larger numbers of people are starting to understand how folks are being brainwashed on social media and what effect it’s having on our politics. As experts told me for my recent article investigating the rage bait YouTube show “Whatever,” the best way to prevent the far-right brainwashing is for people to understand that they are being manipulated, so they are better equipped to resist the temptations of rage bait.

This choice also comes at a time when the behavior of both the Trump administration and their sycophantic social media influencers suggests that they’re starting to worry that rage bait isn’t quite as effective as it used to be. The volume of hyperbolic rhetoric and the sheer amount of posting is dramatically rising on the right, and it resembles how addicts have to keep increasing the dose to get the same high. The comparison is apt, since rage bait is very much the MAGA drug of choice. But chasing behavior is never good, and it speaks to how desperate Trump is getting as his political foundation starts to show serious cracks.

There are two kinds of MAGA rage bait, and both have been getting weirder and louder in recent months.

First, there’s the kind meant to send right-wing people into a fury: Stories, real or fake, of immigrants committing crimes. Or of “political correctness” on campus. The favorite on social media, which has been perfected by influencers like Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok, is the “look at this liberal, don’t you hate them?” posts. These are mostly clips of random people saying foolish things or being taken out of context, which are held out to falsely imply they are representative of progressives as a whole. 

The second category is the “trigger the liberals” content, which is meant to provoke a reaction from progressives so the provocateur can claim they’re being “canceled” or that their critics are “snowflakes.” This is a favorite Trump tactic used to regain control of the political conversation. For instance, after the No Kings rallies were a smashing success, Trump posted an artificial intelligence video that depicted him dropping raw sewage on the heads of the millions of protesters. This week, as the scandal over the almost-certainly-illegal boat bombings of Venezuelan boats has heated up, Trump let loose with racist attacks on Somalian immigrants that are shocking even by his basement-level standards, calling them “garbage” and declaring they “want to kiss our country good night.”

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The tactic has long worked because it changes the topic of conversation from material concerns — such as the growing opposition to the president and concerns that he’s trying to drag us into a war with Venezuela — to a discussion about civility and language. MAGA feels the latter is more favorable to them because, as nasty as feces and racism are, movement leaders can still frame Trump’s reactions as a contest between free-wheeling First Amendment fans and knuckle-rapping censors.

But it’s telling that the amount of heat Trump has to bring to get a reaction is rising precipitously. The sewage video was such a low that it’s hard to imagine he can find a way, outside of dropping his trousers on camera, to top that in terms of grossing people out. As for using racism to get attention, well, he’s scaling up so fast that it nearly feels he’ll be resorting to the N-word before the year is out.

Perhaps his apparent health problems are causing disinhibition. But whether that’s a contributing factor or not, it does seem he’s getting more frantic to do whatever it takes to get a rise out of people. On Monday night, Trump posted over 160 times on Truth Social over the course of three hours — basically a post a minute. Nearly all of it was rage bait, either aimed at riling up his base or his opponents in obvious hope that something would be provocative enough to shift the conversation away from Venezuela and toward something he likely considers less politically damaging, such as a debate over how racist he is.

The sweaty desperation suggested by this behavior does seem justified. Despite the machine-gun approach to changing the subject, most of Trump’s offerings did not stick. His rancid racism against Somalian immigrants did catch some attention, but it wasn’t enough to knock the boat bombing out of the headlines. Instead, his posting frenzy backfired and served to draw even more attention to another story Trump really does not want the public attention focused on, which is how old he’s getting and how demented his trolling — and behavior — is becoming.

While there is no objective measurement, it does seem there are signs that Trump’s rage bait of both sorts is losing some of its power. The strains that pander to MAGA bigotries took a big hit recently when X owner Elon Musk, clearly ignorant about the make-up of the social media platform’s dwindling user base, turned on a feature showing the geographic location of posters. Suddenly the MAGA masses were forced to confront the fact that the hot young women calling themselves things like “MAGAMomTX” and posting about trans people in bathrooms or immigrant criminals were, in fact, based in Africa or South Asia. Even after years of deliberately brain-rotting themselves, many on the right were a bit rattled by the realization that their baseless obsessions are so predictable that teenagers from foreign countries could make up lies that American Republicans would eagerly retweet.

Just as importantly, it seems that Trump’s ability to get people on the left to take his bait has dramatically receded. It’s not that people are ignoring him when he posts a sewage video or uses racist rhetoric that even David Duke knew better than to repeat in public. But he’s not getting the same flabbergasted, outraged reaction that he once used so well to convince his base that he has a unique talent at “triggering” liberals.

Put another way, Donald Trump cannot surprise the left anymore. Instead, he’s getting laughed at or, worse for him, regarded as a demented old man who can’t control his mouth —and likely other bodily functions, which he inadvertently made people think of with his feces video. People seem to be identifying his behavior as rage bait, and they are increasingly refusing to respond with the anger Trump desires. Instead, the eye roll is proving to have power. The immune response to provocation is building, and it’s robbing Trump of what was once one of his most effective political tools.