Uncommon Knowledge: Exhaustion, Not Rage, Is America’s Po...

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A country that spends its nights arguing online is spending its mornings tired. This week Oxford University Press declared “rage bait” its Word of the Year—defining it as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage”—after more than 30,000 people voted and usage of the term tripled over the past 12 months. The pick felt like a diagnosis for American politics in 2025, and within hours, media outlets tied it to President Donald Trump’s communication style, perhaps hoping to gain from a little of the rage-bait effect themselves.

It's tempting to see rage everywhere—from the Oval Office, to online communities, even to families divided over political beliefs. But anger isn’t actually how most Americans feel about politics. Exhaustion is. In a substantial Pew survey in 2023, 65 percent said they “always or often feel exhausted” when thinking about politics, compared with 55 percent who said “angry.” In December 2024, an AP-NORC poll found nearly two-thirds have cut down on political and government news because of “information overload” and fatigue. And the research organization More in Common has described an “Exhausted Majority” comprising roughly two-thirds of the country, whom it described as "fed up with the polarization, often forgotten in public discourse, flexible in their views."

So this is more than about just Trump. The country is tired of being tired.

Common Knowledge

To some observers, Trump’s political communication is precisely engineered to bait opponents into amplifying him. As Axios put it in a much-cited analysis of his media tactics, he built a “mind-numbing media manipulation machine”—provoke with a post, then ride the wave of outrage.

From the left, the counsel of late has been strategic nonengagement. “Responding to every stupid thing Trump does won’t help,” The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff argued, warning that meeting daily provocations with daily indignation feeds the very loop opponents claim to hate.

Against this is the copycat effect—most notably California’s Gavin Newsom, who has spent much of 2025 mirroring Trump’s style to get under his skin and into his head space. Newsom’s team rolled out a “Patriot Shop” full of parody merch—caps reading “NEWSOM WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!,” a “TRUMP IS NOT HOT” tank, even a cheeky $100 “Bible”—and bragged about booming sales. He also began posting ALL-CAPS missives in a Trumpian register. The point was not subtle: to bait the baiter.

Trump, for his part, keeps supplying case studies. In the past 72 hours he unleashed a five-hour Truth Social blitz—160 posts in a night—so prolific that Jimmy Kimmel built a wall of screenshots to make it more tangible.

Uncommon Knowledge

Regardless of the merits of these strategies, the public mood is not mainly angry. It is mainly drained. Pew’s figure—65 percent exhausted—appears to have held remarkably steady even as the temperature goes up.

That makes sense when you see where the incentives are. A study in PNAS found that out-group animosity—posts attacking the other side—drives engagement more than any other language feature. Another study this year in PNAS Nexus went a step further: relative to a chronological feed, X/Twitter’s engagement-based ranking amplifies emotionally charged, out-group-hostile content—even though users say it makes them feel worse.

That’s why “rage bait” is a better descriptor of the supply of content than the demand for it. The public doesn’t want to be furious; but fury is spread more efficiently.

Sometimes rage bait conceals problematic facts, if reflection replaces rage. That came into sharp relief after the Washington, D.C., shooting that killed a National Guard member near the White House. Trump seized the news to declare Afghanistan “a hellhole on earth,” promising to reexamine Afghan entrants who came under the 2021 evacuation.

The formulation was classic rage bait—designed to provoke. But it also referenced a country that is, by any measure, in dire straits. This week, Taliban authorities conducted yet another public execution in a sports stadium—the 11th since 2021—drawing condemnation from the U.N. Around 22.9 million Afghans—nearly half the population—need humanitarian assistance. Afghanistan has banned girls’ secondary and higher education, leaving 1.5 million out of school. That could also be a source of rage, in addition to Trump's intemperate wording.

If America’s true political currency in 2025 is exhaustion, then the winning strategy may belong to whoever figures out how to pay people back their attention—with fewer stunts, more reality, and the occasional refusal to take the bait.

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