By Sean Dempsey
February 12, 2026
Today’s Republican Party often resembles an 11-year-old boy’s action-figure fantasy. Many in the GOP base, predominantly angry men, are acting out a macho daydream – blustering about “toughness” toward enemies foreign and domestic. They thump their chests about cracking down on Iran, putting the boot on the head of illegal aliens, and backing brute force by ICE agents or the military. This performative toughness, however, is all smoke and no fire. Snarling at the world doesn’t equal courage or effective policy. In fact, holding a hostile opinion is no braver than advocating for peace. Tough talk is not the same as real toughness. And as I describe below, the GOP’s embarrassing descent into chest-beating theatrics is clearly caused by an (over)reaction to real slights; nevertheless, it’s a recipe for political irrelevance.
From the Left’s COVID Hysteria to the Right’s Naked Fury: How the Right Became Enraged
What turned the neocon segment of the Republican base into this seething, reactionary crowd? Well, I believe a major catalyst was the COVID-19 era (2020–2024), during which a huge swath of conservatives were “unpersoned” and gaslit by political elites and mainstream authorities. Good people were told to stay home, mask up, get multiple vaccine doses, and essentially “sit down and shut up.” President Biden, for instance, openly demonized unvaccinated Americans with comments that would help cement a bifurcation process which would fester and boil for many years to come. In a 2021 speech he accused nearly 80 million holdouts of “causing a lot of damage… making people sick and causing people to die,” warning them, “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.” Such cruel and shameless rhetoric (essentially painting dissenters as selfish public enemies instead of conscientious objectors to heavy-handed, totalitarian, and unscientific policy decisions) left deep, festering resentment for millions.
At the same time, the base saw a clear and present woke agenda being forced down their throats. Traditional values were mocked, gender ideology became a household term, and social norms seemed to shift overnight without their consent. “We’re fed up with wokeness and all the other colors of the rainbow being shoved down our throats in the name of tolerance,” as Abby Johnson, mother of eight kids, wrote in the Fox News Opinion column. For years, conservatives felt they must accept every progressive edict, whether about pronouns, bathrooms, or “anti-racist” curricula, or be silenced as bigots. “You couldn’t question anything about COVID… It is pure propaganda,” recalled Kari Lake, a Republican who jumped into politics on a wave of anti-lockdown backlash. The entrenched liberal establishment lied to them at every turn… about pandemic science, about what their kids are taught, about who is virtuous or villainous in society. They did this with immunity, all while sneering at their concerns and condemning 50% of the population as ‘deplorables’.
This experience bred supercharged anger. Being lied to, demeaned, and culturally subjugated for years, the right-wing base became extremely angry (rightfully so)… yet this caused the pendulum to swing hard in the opposite direction. Having been told for so long that their opinions “didn’t matter,” they now shout those opinions with fury and defiance. Anyone perceived as an opponent… whether that be Mexican immigrants, Muslims, non-English speaking citizens, Iran, China, Gaza, Venezuela, or even the unsuspecting country of Greenland becomes a target to “own”, dominate, punish, bomb, or destroy. In essence, the Party Members (newly in control of the steering wheel of power and influence) are now lashing out like frustrated kids, trying to reassert control over a world that grew unwielding and unrecognizable. The result is a politics driven less by principles or policies than by ire and a lust for cathartic domination.
Immigration and ‘Toughness’ Theater
One arena where this childish macho posture plays out is immigration. To hear MAGA die-hards and pundits tell it, being cruel is being tough. They applaud hardline ICE raids and border crackdowns with a vengeful glee, as if killing socialist protestors proves manliness. Any compassion or nuance is scorned as “weak.” It’s pure theater – a way to act tough without actually solving anything.
The right’s rage has grown so blinding that it has begun to collide with many of its own once-held sacred principles: the Second Amendment. When Alex Pretti, a concealed-carry permit holder, was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, many conservative officials rushed not to defend gun rights but to rationalize the shooting. FBI Director Kash Patel went on television and declared with a straight face, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want,” despite Minnesota law allowing exactly that: licensed carry in public and at demonstrations.
The contradiction is glaring: a movement that has spent decades insisting that lawful gun ownership is an inviolable right suddenly echoed arguments historically used by gun-control advocates, simply because the armed individual was confronting federal immigration agents. Thankfully, many excellent gun-rights groups on the right reacted with alarm, warning that such rhetoric created “a dangerous precedent” for undermining the very freedoms conservatives claim to defend. In their fury toward immigrants and anyone seen as opposing federal authority, parts of the modern right have become so emotionally driven that they are willing to erode the very constitutional principles they once treated as untouchable, proving that rage-based politics can blur ideological lines faster than any liberal argument ever could!
Consider also how right-wing media figures respond to reports of brutality by immigration agents. Rather than condemn abuses, they flatly deny or justify them. You’ll hear that any horror stories are “fake” and that enforcers are just doing what must be done. Tim Pool, a commentator who often panders to this crowd, recently exemplified this attitude on his show. People called him a “bootlicker” for cheering armed agents rounding up protesters and immigrants, but Pool proudly embraced the label. “No, no, you misunderstand,” he said with a smirk. “It’s my boots. It’s mine. I voted for them. I’m wearing the boot. I’m stomping on the ground… I hired the boot. I’m paying their bills and clapping for them!”
So, in Pool’s view, state force is a toy for the right to play with (“we’re all wearing the boots” now, so cry more, libs!) He explicitly celebrated DHS and ICE agents being “armed” and cracking down, insisting that’s simply “the will of the people” at work . If some innocent children get caught in the dragnet? Pool waved it off: “mistakes are made… but we’re going to do what our laws say.” In other words, tough luck – we’re finally in charge and we’ll enforce the rules with gusto. This is the swaggering ethos: might makes right, as long as it’s our might.
Yet all this macho posturing has yielded very little in terms of results. It’s telling that Donald Trump, avatar of “tough on immigration” bluster, deported far fewer people than Barack Obama did. Despite Trump’s menacing rhetoric and high-profile ICE raids, his administration removed fewer than 932,000 illegals so far (which includes his first four years in office as well), whereas Obama’s administration deported 3.1 million illegals over eight years (including a record 407,000 in 2012 alone)! The Right won’t admit this, but Obama was many times tougher and more effective on managing immigration than Donald Trump. The self-proclaimed ‘toughest hombres’ didn’t even match the deportation numbers of a liberal Democrat! Yet the GOP base largely doesn’t know or care about that statistic; what matters to them is the performance of toughness. They cheer images of ICE agents in tactical vests arresting individual illegals at gunpoint. They celebrate the brutal and senseless killing of liberal protestors by masked agents of the state. They race to defend the undefendable and senseless heavy-handedness on display in 4K. With savage sneers of satisfaction, they vicariously take hold of the ineffective sledgehammer when a scalpel would have been far more powerful and gotten far better results. It’s all symbolic dominance, playing “border war” like kids playing Army during recess.
Because it’s painfully clear that smoke and mirrors currently are far more important to MAGA than actual results. Donald Trump himself has repeatedly softened the absolutist “mass deportation” rhetoric when confronted with the slightest pushback. In multiple interviews and campaign stops, he has relented, stating many illegals are “good people” who have worked in the United States for years and that any enforcement effort would need to be “humane” and “practical.” During his presidency so far, deportations have not come close to approaching the sweeping scale promised on the campaign trail, and Trump at times floated proposals for guest-worker programs or pathways that would allow certain long-term workers, particularly in agriculture and hospitality, to remain because, as he put it in 2017, “We have some very good people here… and we have to be careful” when removing workers that employers rely on. Reporting from outlets like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Reuters has repeatedly noted pressure from business lobbies, especially farming, construction, and hospitality, to avoid large-scale workplace raids that would disrupt labor supply. The result has been a persistent gap between Trump’s maximalist rhetoric about mass deportations and the more cautious, ineffective show the American people have received instead. This only serves to underscore how much of the modern immigration debate is driven by performance and signaling rather than the logistical or political feasibility of carrying out campaign promises.
What is obvious is that the actual hard work of immigration reform or efficient policy – the unglamorous grind of legislating better systems or actually deporting illegals en mass – gets completely ignored. Tough talk is far easier than tough solutions. The MAGA base, it would seem, prefers to see violence and headlines rather than the promised mass deportations of illegals that would actually bring about meaningful change and enforce the current laws on the books.
War Posturing and Brinkmanship
The same juvenile machismo pervades the right’s approach to foreign policy. Today’s GOP base and its media champions love to play warrior on the world stage – so long as they themselves never leave the safety of their studios and Facebook feeds. They thump their chests about Iran, China, Russia, Hamas, Venezuela, you name it, indulging in brinkmanship that would make Dr. Strangelove blush. It’s foreign policy by way of Xbox: all grandstanding, no grasp of consequences.
We see this in the gleeful “bomb-’em!” rhetoric from neoconservative pundits. Mark Levin, for example, could barely contain his excitement when the U.S. recently launched strikes on Iran’s innocuous nuclear sites. Levin – a talk host with a direct line to Trump – bragged on air about pushing for those attacks. “There were a handful of us who encouraged this night,” he said, revealing that he and other hawks had egged Trump on behind the scenes. Levin lavished boot-licking praise on Trump as “a brilliant, brilliant man” who “instinctively knows what to do” in unleashing military force. In Levin’s mind this was a Biblical clash of good and evil: “When you’re talking about a free democracy in Israel, and… an Islamist death cult that Iran was… The enemy is never dead. These people never stop… Good versus evil is forever.”
In short, permanent war! Levin actually celebrated that America was dropping bombs, insisting that forever war is just the natural state of things – “good versus evil is forever”. Such absolutist, apocalyptic framing is ludicrous, yet it’s become standard fare in right-wing media. Complex geopolitical conflicts are reduced to a binary: a simplistic morality play, with pundits like Levin cosplaying Churchill facing down Nazi Germany – except this time the supposed “Hitler” is in Tehran, Gaza, or Caracas.
Likewise, Ben Shapiro relishes a bit of tough-guy saber-rattling. He mercilessly mocked anyone (even fellow conservatives) who warned that striking Iran could spiral into a larger war. When Tucker Carlson cautioned that attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities might trigger World War III, Shapiro sneered in response. “What unbelievable lack of faith… Are you out of your damned mind?” he ranted, insisting Trump would never bungle into a quagmire. After Trump went ahead and struck Iran, Shapiro hailed it as “the bravest action I’ve seen from a U.S. president, and the most successful foreign policy move of my lifetime” . This is how over-the-top the theatrics have gotten – dropping bombs is “bravery,” and anyone uneasy about it is a coward or traitor. Shapiro proceeded to excoriate more cautious voices as “neo-isolationist, Howard Zinn, blame-America trash,” smearing them as unpatriotic fools for not applauding military adventurism. In this chest-beating narrative, restraint is weakness and restraint is treason. Only cheering for maximum aggression proves you love America.
Of course, this militant swagger is cheap when you won’t personally bear any cost. It hasn’t escaped notice that most of these war-pundits have never fought in any war, nor do they intend to. Tucker Carlson pointed out the hypocrisy. “Mark Levin was at the White House… lobbying for war with Iran. To be clear, Levin has no plans to fight in this or any other war. He’s demanding that American troops do it,” Carlson quipped on X. That hits the bullseye: the GOP’s loudest warmongers are essentially 11-year-olds playing with toy soldiers. They’ll passionately urge sending other people’s sons and daughters into conflict, while they remain safe at home, thumping their chests on cable TV. It’s all make-believe machismo.
From Tehran to Caracas, this pattern repeats: lots of fist-pounding rhetoric, very little careful strategy. International issues become venues for the right to channel its primal anger vicariously. The U.S. military and nukes are their playthings now, or so they fantasize. It’s a dangerous kind of geopolitical LARPing. And if anyone dares suggest that bragging about war might backfire or require sacrifice, they are mocked and shouted down. This isn’t foreign policy; it’s foreign pantomime, performed by people who mistake volume for strength.
Cheering On Brutality – No Matter What
Perhaps the most morally grotesque display of the right’s tough-guy act has been its response to the Israel–Palestine conflict. Even as Israel’s hardline government waged a devastating military campaign that many around the world condemned as indiscriminate or even genocidal, the GOP’s loudest voices could only scream for more violence. To them, supporting Israel unconditionally, especially during its harshest reprisals, is a matter of tribal machismo. They revel in the “toughness” of backing an ally’s war to the hilt, humanitarian concerns be damned.
Take British neoconservative writer Douglas Murray, who has become a minor hero to the American right. In the aftermath of Hamas’s horrific terror attack, Murray essentially urged Israel to prosecute the war in Gaza with zero restraint. Calls for cease-fire or moderation were, to him, naïve and intolerable. “All I know is that Israelis cannot live beside Hamas,” Murray pronounced, arguing that anyone advocating a pause in the fighting before Hamas is completely destroyed “is not being serious about this.” In Murray’s view, “No Israeli can live beside Hamas, just like no Jew can live beside a Nazi… It’s totally intolerable. Totally intolerable.” . By equating Hamas with Nazis outright, he justified total war on Gaza – a license for unlimited force. Murray’s stance mirrored a broader right-wing refrain: that Israel must be allowed to do whatever it wants militarily (“no more Hamas,” as he put it bluntly ), and any criticism is essentially siding with terrorists.
Indeed, figures like Murray have gone so far as to accuse the media of exaggerating Palestinian civilian casualties or dismissing them altogether. Murray claimed much of the concern over Israel’s bombing was “lies” or “Holocaust denial in real time” – flipping reality on its head by suggesting that those decrying the carnage are the ones distorting truth. This Orwellian twisting of language, labeling calls for mercy as “pro-terrorist,” demonstrates how the right’s tough-talk culture sacrifices basic compassion. Any show of empathy or nuance is ridiculed as weakness. The morally correct stance, in their mind, is to cheer louder as the bombs fall.
Ben Shapiro, for his part, has long espoused this kind of belligerent zeal regarding Israel. (This is the same man who once infamously wrote that Arab nations “value murder” and Palestinian Arabs “live in open sewage” – rhetoric he later walked back, but which reveals his disdain. During the recent conflict, Shapiro’s commentary was reliably hawkish. He insisted that Israel’s harsh military response by definition was justified and that if civilian casualties mounted, the blame lay solely with Hamas. When some in the international community urged de-escalation or pointed out the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Shapiro sneered that “now is the worst possible time” for such hand-wringing, and that “nothing would be more destructive” than restraining Israel. In his telling, showing any concern for Palestinian lives is simply falling for “pseudo-patriotic” anti-Israel propaganda. It’s an all-or-nothing, with-us-or-against-us posture. It’s the kind of short-sighted “policy” that transforms a political conflict into a holy war in the minds of the base.
This blind cheerleading extends to any context where “our side” is inflicting pain on “bad guys.” Whether it’s Saudi Arabia pummeling Yemen or the U.S. aiding crackdowns elsewhere, the pattern holds: the louder the explosions and the tougher the talk, the more the right-wing pundits pump their fists. Nuance is for sissies; empathy is for the weak. The base has been conditioned to believe that endorsing cruelty = toughness. Thus, even witnessing what many would call atrocities, they respond not with sorrow or reflection, but with satisfaction. It’s the mindset of someone watching an action movie, rooting for the “vicious hero” no matter how messy the fight gets or how many women and children he kills in order to shoot his target… except this isn’t a movie, and real lives are being lost.
The insanity of this rhetoric is that it mistakes inhumanity for strength. Supporting whatever violent measures “our side” employs even if it means cheering on what much of the world views as war crimes or collective punishment is seen as a quasi badge of honor. It’s as if the GOP base has convinced itself that being morally outraged on behalf of victims is some kind of liberal weakness, whereas moral indifference (or outright glee) in the face of suffering is proof of iron-jawed resolve. In reality, it’s proof of lost humanity. They have, in effect, regressed to an ethical code of playground bullies: always side with the bigger bully if he’s your friend, and call it righteous!
Tough Talk vs. Tough Results: A Reality Check
At the end of the day, all this bluster and fury has proven to be no substitute for a governing vision. Being the loudest, meanest voice in the room might feel empowering and cathartic, but it doesn’t solve problems or improve people’s lives. The GOP’s obsession with performative toughness, such as the shouting, the stunts, the endless chest-thumping, has yielded remarkably few tangible victories for their constituents. It’s all veneer, no substance. As podcaster Tim Pool inadvertently admitted in his “boot” rant, much of the right is now content with wearing the boot for its own sake. They’ve become what they hated: the arbitrary enforcers of power, “stomping on the ground” just to show they can. But being the boot isn’t a policy; it’s a tantrum.
Look at some hard metrics. Republicans talk a big game about “law and order” and crushing illegal immigration, but where are the results? As noted earlier, Trump – for all his bravado – deported far fewer people than Bush Jr or Obama. The reality is that simplistic “toughness” solutions (build a wall, ban Muslims, unleash ICE with zero accountability, tariff China, bomb Iran, etc. etc. etc.) frequently flop or backfire! But rather than adjust course, today’s GOP just doubles down on the rhetoric. If the world isn’t bending to their will, they assume they just haven’t yelled loudly enough or swung the figurative baseball bat hard enough.
Internationally, the consequences of this mindset are even more stark. The cheerleaders of the Iraq War 20 years ago (many of them the same neoconservative voices now egging on new conflicts) promised a cakewalk and got a quagmire. Trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lost lives later, Iraq showed that tough talk without wisdom is catastrophic. Yet here we are again: the war posturers learned nothing. They measure success in how intimidating our threats sound on Fox News, rather than in strategic gains for American security. In June 2025, when President Trump ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the right’s pundit class was ecstatic, calling it “spectacular” and “a long way to erasing this horrible threat.”
But what came next? Iran certainly didn’t surrender; if anything, such moves risk long-term blowback that empty bravado can’t fix. “Insurgent math” prevails and 10 – 2 = 40. We galvanize our enemies with this (endlessly attempted) failed path and only succeed in making America less safe via our actions. Einstein perhaps once said that insanity is defined by doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If this is so, our failed Elites in government and the neocon hoard who guide them are all truly insane. For toughness is not judged by the first punch you throw, but by whether you can actually win and secure peace. On that count, the new right shows no plan beyond “hit harder” and “yell louder.”
Crucially, true toughness isn’t about picking fights to vent your rage. It’s about resilience, discipline, and results. It’s the grit to buckle down and do the boring, necessary work: negotiating deals, crafting policy, admitting mistakes, making trade-offs even when no one is applauding you. Real courage in politics can mean defying your base’s lust for vengeance to do what’s actually wise. It can mean pursuing peace when war is popular, or showing mercy when cruelty is fashionable. The current GOP base has mistaken cruelty for strength and volume for victory. It’s a tragic error. As their favorite insult goes, they have become “all talk.” And talk, no matter how tough-sounding, doesn’t build roads, balance budgets, secure borders, or win wars.
If the Republican Party wants to be relevant and effective again, it must drop the act and get serious. Anger is not an agenda. Grievance is not a governing philosophy. Dressing up in rhetorical camo and pretending to be Captain America might feel good in the podcast studio, but it doesn’t translate to success in the real world. As it stands, too many on the right are busy owning the libs or fantasizing about kicking foreigners’ asses, while offering zero constructive solutions to actual national problems. They are, in effect, still those 11-year-old boys in the backyard, smashing action figures together and calling it glory.
It’s time for the GOP to grow up. Macho posturing got us nowhere except perhaps on the brink of more needless conflicts and a coarsened national soul. The party of Lincoln and Reagan (leaders who, for their flaws, understood the importance of substance and strategy) has been hijacked by performers and provocateurs. These pretenders think wearing “the boot” (to use Tim Pool’s term) is an end in itself. But a boot that kicks aimlessly will eventually hit a steel wall. The GOP can either keep on this self-defeating path, or it can rediscover genuine toughness: the toughness of facing reality, reining in destructive impulses, and working tirelessly to deliver results for the American people. Maybe one day those in power will truly seek to make America First instead just have it be an empty slogan.
In the end, playing tough is not the same as being tough. The former is a show for the echo chamber; the latter is a grind in the real world. Until Republicans learn the difference, their roar will remain a hollow one, and their action-figure bravado will continue to look infinitely more silly than strong.
Sources:
- Badger, Doug. Heritage Foundation. Critique of Biden’s divisive vaccine mandates and rhetoric .
- Johnson, Abby. Fox News Opinion. Describing parents’ exhaustion with “wokeness … shoved down our throats” .
- Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. The New Yorker. Reporting Kari Lake’s quote on not being allowed to question COVID (pandemic propaganda) .
- Timcast IRL (Tim Pool). Transcript of Pool embracing being “the boot” and applauding ICE crackdowns .
- Syracuse TRAC Data via USA Today. Comparison of Obama vs. Trump deportation totals (3.1 million vs <932k) .
- Iran International. Mark Levin praising Trump’s 2025 Iran strikes and framing it as eternal battle of good vs evil .
- Mediaite. Ben Shapiro lauding Trump’s Iran strike as “bravest action” and slamming war skeptics as un-American .
- Mediaite. Tucker Carlson (via X/Twitter) noting Mark Levin “lobbying for war” despite not fighting himself .
- Reuters. John Bolton’s “5,000 troops to Colombia” notepad signaling tough stance on Venezuela (2019) .
- Poris, Aaron (Interview with Douglas Murray). Ynet News / The Media Line. Murray rejecting Gaza ceasefire, equating Hamas to Nazis (“totally intolerable”) .
- Ynet News. Douglas Murray emphasizing media “lies” and need to eliminate Hamas completely .
