Who Are the AWFULs? Trump Hates Them, So They’re Doing Something Right |
Nomenclature is potent. Donald Trump loves a nickname, and there is power in naming things. Once a thing has a name, it can be categorized, judged, explained, and perhaps satirized and belittled. Over the last decade, Trump has had wild success with giving names to his rivals. Most are on about the eighth-grade level, but they have often subsequently flattened these rivals, sucked their power right out of them—Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe. This naming phenomena wasn’t limited to individuals. Groups often gave themselves nicknames: the KHIVE (Harris supporters), Pantsuit Nation (Clinton Supporters), MAHA (RFK Jr. supporters), and of course MAGA (Trump supporters).
And sometimes these groups were given pejorative nicknames: Karens (humorless women), and now AWFULs (affluent, white, female, urban liberals). The first time I saw someone use the acronym to describe this group was on election night 2024, when Internet commentator Erick Erickson tweeted: “Affluent White Female Urban Liberals. The AWFULs radicalized a lot of people against them. Nichole Wallace, Rachael Maddow, and most of the rest of the women at MSNBC really have played a powerful role in what is happening tonight” (misspellings Erickson’s, not mine).
He was blaming Kamala Harris’s loss on the women of MSNBC, which he decided had radicalized viewers against Harris—a statement that seems inadvertently hilarious considering the channel reaches less than five million people in a country of 330 million. Besides, the people who watch MSNBC (or MS NOW as it’s now called) are largely the people who agree with it.
As an AWFUL myself, I can absolutely attest to it being true that educated white women have always been a problem for Trump. The really rich among them may delight in the tax cuts, but for many educated and merely well-off women, the crass sexism that Trump and his base delight in disgusts us. We may be living in a cycle of backlash to backlash, but those of us who were born in the late 1970s with more rights than our own daughters currently have understand what we’ve lost with the overturning of Roe.
Even onetime MAGA stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene