Everything we were led to believe about American politics proved (again!) to be sublimely counterfeit on the evening of Nov. 8, 2022. The midterms were supposed to be the crucible of a fiery MAGA rebuke to the Biden/Harris mandate. A campaign apparatus built upon delusional transphobic panic and a near-fetishistic obsession with the so-called “crime wave” would whip our citizenry into a frenzy and carry Republicans to the Senate and the House. The momentum would then be strong enough to prime the pump for a Trump 2024 crusade—the prodigal president emerging from the recesses of Mar-a-Lago, soggy and aggrieved, the saddest possible latter-day facsimile of Napoleon’s return from Elba. That obviously did not happen. The Democrats barely lost the House and actually gained a seat in the Senate, in the best evidence we’ve seen in years that Americans are a lot more normal than conservatives would like them to be. In the aftermath, I—and so many other progressives—engaged in one of our favorite rituals of this confused young decade: Seeking out the delectable catharsis afforded only by the consumption of raw MAGA cope.
Yes, “cope.” As in, “coping.” In years past, the word was used sympathetically, to describe anyone’s attempt to steel themselves through psychic or physical pain. You might “cope” through stress, or a breakup, or a nasty rolled ankle. But over the last couple of years, and especially in 2022, “cope” has taken on its own distinct meme-world definition. Today, if one is “coping,” they are stinging from some sort of monumental social or political snub—perhaps after a regrettable indulgence in Icarian overconfidence—and are now being forced to examine, via the harsh audit of the public square, what went so wrong. So, when the bottom fell out on MAGA in November, the cope flowed like wine. In fact, I’d argue that the most crucial element of cope, in its modern syntax, is that it must be performed in front of a loud, jeering audience. Dr. Oz lost, so did Kari Lake and Herschel Walker, and my timeline blew up with dunks on the most befuddled Fox News agitators and Newsmax scions who couldn’t comprehend how quickly their platform had disintegrated. Screenshotting and quote-tweeting, we feasted on the schadenfreude like kings.
I first heard the word “cope” used in this context during the 2020 election, right around the time Trump was launching his world-historic temper tantrum. The internet archivists at KnowYourMeme connect the spread of the term to an image of Pepe—the cartoon frog who became the shorthand mascot for the alt-right in the 2010s—hooked up to a ventilator labeled “copium,” which spread through the wildlands of 4Chan as it became increasingly clear that Biden was headed to the White House in the months before polls opened. It is not hard to understand the illustrator’s point. Rather than handle a possible presidential loss with moral dignity, the most enthralled Trump supporters were desperate to cling onto anything—hacked voting machines, alternative elector slates, galactic treason orchestrated by Mike Pence, and so on—to create their own reality where the MAGA regime would remain in power. In other words, they were coping. And after four long years of the circus, it was uniquely gratifying to see the worst people in the world under pressure.
“Cope” was quickly synthesized into the broader internet lexicon. A Twitter account called @RightWingCope appeared in the aftermath of the election and immediately gathered nearly 350,000 followers as it dutifully documented various stages of MAGA grief. The account is currently having a field day with the latest midterm debacle, happily lapping up vintage sour grievances from guys like Charlie Kirk and Stephen Miller. More recently, cope users have diversified beyond the Trump/Biden binary. When Russia’s military initiative stalled out in the Donbas, a memer replaced the image of that intubated Pepe with—you guessed it—Vladimir Putin. (This time, the barrel of copium he’s huffing from is taken from “the Czar’s private reserve.”) These days, you can also reliably see cope being used in apolitical situations, usually in response to someone overcompensating for a blatant insecurity. When some weirdo on the internet claimed that large penises were a sign of “western degeneration,” while a 3-to-4-inch schlong denoted “aristocratic blood,” I was not surprised to see someone respond by simply saying “pure, unadulterated cope.” (She isn’t wrong!)
In many ways, you can interpret “cope” as a political reflection of the verb “seethe,” which was frequently deployed by the energized class of MAGA YouTubers and podcasters to roast rank-and-file liberals who were horrified by Trump’s buffoonery and malice throughout his administration, and to celebrate their impotent anger. (This picture of a young woman screaming in agony at the 2016 inauguration became something of a stand-in for the typical seething Democrat.) “Seethe” was the perfect invocation for a political project defined solely by rude Reddit threads and epic YouTube thumbnails; to command someone to “seethe” was part of owning the libs. But the libs themselves have slowly started to appropriate the confrontational, 4Chan-poisoned language of a post-Trump internet—we currently inhabit a country where sitting senators are sharing Dark Brandon memes—so the Cope Era could be read as either a perversion of our institutions or, more favorably, a sign that Democrats are capable of taking the gloves off when the time comes.
I consider myself a fairly ordinary American, which is to say that I’ve spent much of the last six years totally appalled by our political environment. So, after Trump lost in 2020, I spent days trawling through the most deranged MAGA forums I could find, washing myself clean with the pungent cope of my enemies. I did the same thing after the midterms, because no drug can match the rapturous high of Kari Lake dead-enders believing they can convince the government to issue a “do-over” on the Arizona Senate race.
This is how I’ve learned to process politics now: a winner-takes-all bloodsport where ownage is the only currency and coping in public is the ultimate disgrace. You might believe that to be a shallow perspective, but in a world where Congress is doomed to be stuck in eternal gridlock, where the sole achievement on the docket is a one-seat majority in the Senate, where every step forward is haunted by the shadow of Kyrsten Sinema—in that world, interpersonal vengeance, meted out at a distance, is all we can really count on. No substantial structural reforms are on the horizon; single-payer healthcare is in the political Arctic, minimum wage increases are a non-starter, and a revanchist vanguard in the Supreme Court is dedicated to rolling back the last century’s worth of civil rights benchmarks. It’s bleak, but at least I can still point to the scoreboard.
Perhaps someday there will be an inflection point in American politics that will bring a change that will allow us to dream bigger. My participation in our democracy will amount to more than a few weeks of me gorging on the animus of the MAGA base—deep-scrolling @RightWingCope until it reinvigorates my body and soul, then feeling all of that euphoria drained away the very moment Washington gets back to work. Until then, please, let the ashen Benny Johnson takes and acrid Sean Hannity clips fill the air as the Trump losses continue to mount. After all, that’s the only way I can cope.