While bathing in MAGA tears these last few days, we noticed a disturbing trend online: A subset of men are engaged in a feeding frenzy on women – an outright explosion of misogyny. Getting bitch-slapped by American voters of both sexes has triggered an eruption of anti-woman rage on the right unlike anything we’ve seen since the Salem witch trials.

The targets are not the liberal wine moms and Karens they love to hate, but their OWN women. Apparently, it didn’t matter that the women who signed up to serve Trump hobbled themselves in four-inch spike heels and underwent painful procedures to remake their faces and bodies into replicas of plastic blowup sex dolls.

The mere fact that these women were walking around the White House and the EEOB, or working in politics at all, has been grinding the gears of a subset of MAGA white nationalist men. And now, freed from having to pretend they’re cool with it, these self described “patriots” have completely lost their minds.

The firing of Susie Wiles was the bat signal that activated the MAGA XY-chromosome crowd to let loose.

Is she corrupt? Hell yeah. Wiles was incubated in the influence-peddling world of lobbyists and political strategists. Her proximity to that underworld was never a secret. She is a creature of the swamp, at home in the garden-variety sleaze that infects American politics, especially post-Citizens United.

But whatever Wiles was mixed up in pales in comparison to the epochal corruption of Trump, his sons, New York finance and real estate titans Howard Lutnick and Steve Witkoff and their families, and the rich fraudsters and donor class oligarchs that benefited from the mores of the shameless and unprincipled Dear Leader (see, for example, last week’s Freakshow on the Core Civic private prison windfall in Minnesota).

Wiles and other women in the Trump administration, most of whom were hired by the old man as disposable props, make excellent diversionary targets for the gobsmacked losers (watch Bannon on election night sputter, “That can’t be right,” when told that exit polls showed men abandoning Trump).

It turns out that hosting bloody fights on the White House lawn and giving the rape-Tate brothers safe haven in the USA was not enough to cement the old man’s hold on the hearts and minds of Gen Z males.

From what we can tell, the batshit misogynist feeding frenzy is being led by panicking older men, like the weaselly WCN “pastor” Joel Webbon, who opined: “I have a simple solution: Get rid of every woman in politics.”

On X, @TheBlakeElliott whinged: “Trump’s habit of picking women to do work they aren’t qualified for has been an unmitigated disaster in two different terms.”

Can we parse the delusional thinking of poor Blake Elliott? Susie Wiles did have administrative power, but she wasn’t the one running the war, the tariffs pump-and-dump, or the disastrous DOGE project. She was clearly unable to contain Trump’s rapacious corruption, even if she had the inclination, or that of his Commerce Secretary or Middle East envoy son-in-law, all of whose activities must soon be investigated and – if American law is to mean anything going forward – atoned for.

The popular trope that women suffer from “suicidal empathy” and can’t handle mass deportations is at the heart of this post from X nom de guerre Spartan Up North: “Get all the women out of prominent positions in the administration. They won’t be able to handle what needs to be done.”

These guys are claiming, with straight faces, that the corruption and incompetence of Trump 2.0 are due to the proximity of the “girl bosses” and “bitches.” Like this: “Ill [sic] never understand why he thought it was a great idea to hire a bunch of dumb bimbos to be in charge of everything.”

Most of these dudes hide behind their online “patriot” personas because, well, they might need to stay on the good side of the old ball and chain. But a few brave men are stepping up with it. On Sunday morning, MAHA lunatic Calley Means appeared on Face the Nation to outline what he claimed was Wiles’ long and devious attempt to serve her true masters – flavored-vape and processed-food corporations and Big Pharma – to block the great RFK Jr.’s anti-vaxx, woo, and ball-tanning science.

“I want everyone in the White House to know that Susie is executing a systematic strategy to throw President Trump under the bus,” he announced on X before making his TV appearance. (He also said we should pray for Stephen Miller to “exorcise” the effects of Wiles’ influence in the White House!)

To which we must ask: Wasn’t Trump already “under the bus,” having flung himself there with his own power?

On Face the Nation, Means hilariously announced that Miller – whose only policy interest has been scheming against Latino communities – is actually a corruption-fighter. “Stephen Miller, who understands the corporate capture of our political system is particularly, when it comes to health care, better than any, I would say, government official, that I’ve ever seen. Who wants to go hard against special interests…”

White Christian nationalist publisher Eric Conn seized on the opportunity of the election loss to flog his book: “I’ve got a copy of The Longhouse for Trump. He didn’t follow the rules for defeating feminist impulses.” He added a screenshot of a section titled “Be willing to make women cry.”

The post-midterms misogynist eruption is also giving previously coy dudes the overdue courage to speak up about Laura Loomer. Safety in numbers, guys! Enter Mike Benz, whose Foundation for Freedom Online purports to be fighting for “internet freedom” – aka the unfettered Nazification of X. Suddenly, he’s pearl clutching about a woman whose terrifying access to the president began destroying careers almost two years ago.

Where were these brave “patriots” when Loomer was lining up her influence operation in plain sight, a widely covered phenomenon, including by us here?

A Tweeter who goes by the handle @beachmuscles, Anthony Dream Johnson, celebrated the appointment of Stephen Miller with a statement that, it must be said, reeks of dried manly sweat on a moldy gym towel: “We need this exact energy to destroy feminism. It is the only way. Women are in open rebellion. They will get us all killed sooner or later. They are non-rational actors immune to reason and reality. We must do whats [sic] right and divorce women from government.”

@BasedSamParker thinks Susie “purposely abandoned White men.” Really? Last time I checked, there weren’t any brown faces around the Oval…

Perhaps the most ludicrous claim of all is that “women will get us killed sooner or later.” This, while Testosterone Kegseth puts servicemen (and whatever women he hasn’t managed to weed out) in harm’s way for no good reason at all.

@Peltman3 aka “TitanPatriotUSA” whined:”Trump needs to STOP picking Fing women and start picking more people like SoW Hegseth. I’d cringe each time I’d see him pick a female, except as Press Secretary… but I think there were males that could have done a much better job. It IS a man’s world.”

Stephen Walsh and Psalm Warfare had a hatefest of a colloquy before the results were even tallied:

Maybe our favorite tweet of all is this one from @ElectionMapsIF: “For all the talk in the media of Trump’s supposed sexism, his fatal flaw is actually the opposite - he hires too many women and they’ve all been disastrous … Find a new chief of staff who will hire patriotic White men.”

He posted that quoting a tweet celebrating the resignation of Harmeet Dhillon, the California lawyer and true warrior for Trump who turned the DOJ’s Civil Rights office into a DEI-hunt-and-kill operation.

Dhillon apparently – wisely – read the midterm results as a signal to GTFO while the getting was good.

Here at the Freakshow, we are not psychiatrists. We welcome armchair professional analysis on the DSM name for the syndrome in which men, and a few auxiliary women, develop an embarrassing need for a scapegoat to protect themselves from confronting the end of a delusion: that the orange guy in the blue suit and red tie, along with his toady minions in matching shoes, was on their side.

The truth is, these losers are flotsam in the wake of history.

Women did indeed vote Democratic in greater numbers than men, but plenty of men voted with them. And women once again made historic gains in representation – although 100 out of 495 House members and 15 out of 100 Senators is hardly anything approaching parity.

Those numbers make the woman-hater club’s panic even more laughable. It’s all pretty funny, except that it isn’t: In Washington, the Department of Justice read the GOP’s loss as a signal to double down on women and girls. A few days after the election, the DOJ announced it would join an effort to shut down what’s left of Planned Parenthood. The odious Ken Paxton had been spearheading this disgusting attempt to bankrupt the women’s health organization out of Texas. With his loss, the effort was left fatherless. Enter Todd Blanche’s DOJ to the rescue.

There is a lesson in this for the women in America. If you’re wondering what’s holding you or your daughters back in American law, politics and society, put a pin in this spasm from the right-wing basements.

Darkness visible, we have Trump to thank for that at least.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow