Trump is making America sad again

Trumpism thrives on the misery of its followers – and we are all unhappier for it.

Donald Trump is not a happy man. In nearly every photograph of him, he’s scowling. His speeches are more fire and brimstone than love and light. His followers are famously unhappy as well, although their lack of emotional well-being is more likely to be coded as “disaffected” or “dissatisfied”. Americans, on the left and right, are growing more miserable – and Trumpism may be both a symptom of that unhappiness and a driver of it. Making Americans happier, then, isn’t a matter of individual self-improvement but a political project. And it’s one that is at odds with just about everything Maga stands for.

According to the 2025 “World Happiness Report”, Americans are growing less happy: our national ranking has dipped, and society certainly feels anecdotally meaner, sadder and angrier.

Researchers generally agree on a few factors that tend to make for more happy people. The first is connection: people who have strong familial connections and social networks built on trust, rather than status or money, are happier than people who are less connected. Married people are happier than people who aren’t married. People who share meals with others are significantly happier than those who eat alone (the impact of meal-sharing on personal well-being is so large it’s comparable to unemployment and income). Americans eat alone. In one study, a quarter of respondents said they ate all their meals alone the previous day, a proportion that has increased by more than 50 per cent in two decades.

A second driver of happiness is a sense of meaning. People who believe their lives have purpose are happier than those who feel more adrift. Religious people and societies tend to be happier than non-religious individuals and secular cultures, likely because worship often happens in communal spaces, and religious belief offers a meaning for individual existence. Behaving generously and benevolently seems to contribute to happiness, as does living in a society where benevolence is the norm. Other happiness drivers seem to be more internal, including a sense of control over one’s life.

Trumpism both appeals to individuals who lack many of these happiness drivers and imposes a policy landscape that seems almost finely calibrated to spread the misery around. Trump’s strongest base remains the white male working class, and these are voters for whom unhappiness is pervasive. Women tend to be happier than men, and researchers believe this is in part because we are more social. People without college degrees tend to be lonelier than those with them: nearly a quarter of Americans who have not graduated from college say they have no close friends. By contrast, nine in ten college-educated Americans have at least one close friend.

College-educated Americans still marry at high rates, while marriage rates have bottomed out among the non-college-educated who make up the bulk of the working class. Better-educated people are also more likely to be civically engaged and active in their communities. Some of this is clearly tied to money – people with more leisure time and disposable income are probably more likely to socialise outside of their homes, but non-college-educated Americans are also significantly less likely to avail themselves of free public spaces, such as parks and libraries. And rural communities, where Trumpism thrives, simply have fewer people to support these kinds of shared public spaces.

Trumpism also tells its followers they are not in control of their own lives. When life is terrible, someone else is always to blame: immigrants, China, Democrats, wokeness. In other words, Trumpism tells followers a story about their own impotence and victimisation that only serves to further disempower them.

Trump’s emphasis on masculine entitlement in the last election campaign was effective: more than half of men under 30 voted for him. He reached out to many of these men online. Which indicates they weren’t spending as much time in the real world, making friends and dating and forging the kinds of real-life connections that are vital for human well-being.

We also know that people are happier in societies in which they trust both the people and the institutions around them. Those who are distrustful of the system tend to flock to the far right. Maga formed by fomenting distrust in the “deep state” and the systems that have kept the country functioning; arguably the most effective aspect of Trump’s second term has been his dismantling of government institutions and the gutting of the federal workforce, with Elon Musk’s Doge stripping government aid to the poor and cutting vital services – and then laughing about it. This leaves Americans with less trust in their nation, not more, and fewer services.

Conservative policies are often, at heart, profoundly antisocial. Yet conservatism as a movement for the miserable is somewhat surprising, given that conservatives have historically been happier than liberals: more likely to marry and go to church, and they don’t tend to worry themselves about vast social inequality, sexism and racism; liberals, and especially young progressive women, are more likely to internalise these problems.

Liberals aren’t necessarily getting happier. But conservatives, in the age of Maga, certainly seem to be getting angrier. And with the re-election of Trump, they might have just hurled all of us towards a much unhappier future.

[See also: Faith is a half-formed thing]