Mike Starkey writes: During the 2018 Centennial of World War I, Donald Trump was scheduled to visit the Aisle-Marne American Cemetery in France. The relentless rain made helicopter travel to the Cemetery impossible, but aides informed the President he could be driven instead. Trump’s response, according to accounts from a senior Defence Department official, was that he didn’t want to visit the cemetery, as it was ‘filled with losers’.
On the same trip, Trump reportedly said the 1,800 US marines killed in the World War I Battle of Belleau Wood were ‘suckers’ for being killed. When reports of Trump’s dismissive language about dead American service personnel appeared in the Atlantic magazine, a media storm erupted. Trump denied the reports, but in 2023 his former Chief of Staff John Kelly confirmed that Trump had, in fact, used both slurs on the French trip.
What is beyond doubt is that the language of losers and winners has long been Trump’s characteristic benchmark for evaluating humanity, the trumpian equivalent of Jesus’s sheep and goats. In interviews, social media posts and rally speeches, loser has been his insult of choice.
On the campaign trail in Iowa, Trump said of Senator John McCain (a former prisoner of war in Vietnam), ‘He lost, so I never liked him as much after that because I don’t like losers’. London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan was a ‘stone cold loser’; presidential rival Hillary Clinton was ‘the biggest loser of all time’; former Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci was ‘a loser who begged to come back’. The mainstream media was not only a dispenser of fake news, it was full of ‘losers’.
Trump’s playground-style slurs are given context by his niece Mary Trump. In her 2020 memoir of Trump’s dysfunctional family background, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, she reveals that Donald’s father, Fred Trump Sr, operated with a cruel, black-and-white framework for life. Trump Sr held that life was a zero-sum game – in which there could only be one winner, and everybody else was a loser. Kindness was weakness; to be seen as a ‘killer’ was the ultimate compliment; no mistake or oversight should be apologised for.
Trump Sr ran his family along the same lines as his businesses. Mary’s father (and Donald’s brother) Freddy Jr, was sensitive and softly-spoken – so was deemed weak by his father. Donald, on the other hand, modelled the amoral tough guy persona his father admired. According to Mary Trump, Donald learned from childhood that kindness and empathy were weaknesses of character, the traits of losers.
Trump rose to fame in 14 seasons of reality TV show The Apprentice. At the end of each episode he would point to an unsuccessful participant and spit out his catchphrase: ‘You’re fired!’ Trump built his public persona identifying and humiliating losers.
Dudes Posting Ws & Ls
Winning and losing isn’t a framework unique to the Trump presidency. But it is a distinctively US framework, so normalised in North American culture that it has become the default language of insult and accolade – from the taunts of ‘loser!’ in teen movies to the flood of motivational memes from the gurus of positivity:
‘Winners train; losers complain.’
‘Winners focus on winning; losers focus on winners.’
‘Winners see the gain; losers see the pain.’
‘Winners make it happen; losers let it happen.’
Digital playlists are compiled to inspire a ‘winning mindset’, with tracks such as Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger, Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, Katy Perry’s Roar, and David Guetta’s Titanium. These memes and songs are offered as motivational aids with wide-eyed earnestness and lack of irony.
When I first ventured onto the social media site Twitter (since renamed X), I was baffled by posters with names such as Dudes Posting their Ws. I had no idea what a W was, or why a dude might want to post one. I discovered it meant posting their ‘wins’, or personal successes. By contrast, posting your Ls meant posting ‘losses’ or personal failures, as well as exposing other people’s poor decisions. Twitter/X and other social media users routinely express positive outcomes, in characteristically American style, as winning, and humiliation as losing.
Manosphere & Incels
The language of winners and losers is at its starkest in the manosphere, the world of online male influencers – where it verges on self-parody. The manosphere operates with a binary, ultra-competitive language of winners and losers, with masculinity narrowly defined in the vocabulary of financial markets and sporting achievements.
Winners are dominant Alpha males, financially successful and emotionally distant, dedicated to self-improvement and superiority over women and weaker men. Losers are weak, unassertive Betas. Society is an emasculating Matrix that reinforces a man’s status as a loser and must be resisted. Levelling up is the conscious shift from lower-status loser to high-status winner.
The mirror image of the manosphere is the world of the incels, ‘involuntary celibates’. They share the same binary language of winners (those with sexual access to women), and losers (those without it). Incels are resigned to remaining hopeless losers, because the basis of attraction is inborn traits they don’t possess, such as conventional male good looks and being tall. They resignedly claim that the dominant 20% of men, dubbed chads, attract 80% of the women. The result is a profound self-loathing. They, the hapless incels, may as well LDAR (Lie Down and Rot).
Ironically, one thing unites manosphere influencers and incels: a deep misogyny. The former think they should dominate women; the latter are fuelled by resentment towards women. Either way, women end up as accessories in the male psychodrama of winners and losers.
Pentecostal Winners
Another world where talk of winners and losers is used motivationally and unironically is Pentecostal Christianity, particularly African Pentecostalism. The Nigerian megachurch Winners Chapel International emphasises prosperity, success and signs and wonders. Its Faith Tabernacle in Ota, Nigeria, has a 50,000-seat capacity, with a new 100,000-seat stadium currently being built, and the church has members in 147 countries. It defines winners as overcomers: people of faith destined for success, supernatural breakthroughs, and a life of continuous victory. Church is described as a Winning Camp, and a Family of Winners.
When I was a vicar in south London, we shared our church building with independent Nigerian and Ghanaian Pentecostal churches. The language of winning was frequent – and frankly made me squirm. At the same time I felt it wasn’t for me, as an affluent white Brit, to condemn a poor West African for aspiring to a better life, materially and spiritually.
In any case, it’s inconveniently true that some verses in the Hebrew Bible do imply material rewards for faithfulness:
Honour the Lord with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine. (Proverbs 3:9-10)
In addition, it’s historically undeniable that spiritual revival has often led to improvement in material conditions, as people start to reorder their lives and priorities. This happened with the early working-class Methodists in my own family history. I may feel personally uneasy with African Pentecostals’ emphasis on material winning, but in their context it’s at least understandable.
I’m a Loser, Baby
A more playful, ironic take on losers and winners can be found in popular music. By the mid-1960s, John Lennon was increasingly influenced by Bob Dylan and listening to melancholy, introspective Americana. His song I’m a Loser on the 1964 album Beatles for Sale is about losing in love, and the hypocrisy of keeping up appearances:
I’m a loser, and I lost someone who’s near to me.
I’m a loser, and I’m not what I appear to be.
In 1976 Steely Dan’s Deacon Blues, from their iconic album Aja, celebrated the underachiever who knowingly settles for a mediocre life. Steely Dan songwriter and vocalist Donald Fagen later reflected that the song’s narrator embodies the idea that ‘nerds and losers’ should be memorialised too:
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose.
In 1993 the experimental US singer Beck released his hit Loser, widely seen as a wry commentary on the apathetic, underachieving ‘slacker’ culture of the 1990s:
I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?
The Dark Side
Beck’s suggestion that losers may as well be killed off is clearly ironic, the unhinged rambling of the song’s narrative persona. But there is a darker tradition that takes the elimination of losers with utter seriousness.
In the late 19th century, the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer applied Darwin’s biological survival of the fittest ideas to human societies. Some people-groups were seen as winners, others as losers. Conquest was dignified as something nobler than mere greed or chauvinism: it was an engine of progress and enlightenment. Claiming evolutionary biology as a moral foundation, it held that strong and developed nations were right to prosper, while the weak and underdeveloped were legitimate candidates for elimination.
Social Darwinism lent pseudoscientific legitimacy to eugenics, imperialism and ultimately Hitler’s ‘final solution’ for the Jews. If nature, history and fate had decided a group of people were losers in the human race, who were we to prolong their miserable, inferior existence and allow them to hold back progress for the rest of us?
Yardsticks of Winning & Losing
This begs an important question. When Trump and others today use language of winners and losers, what measure is being used? By what yardstick do we decide that winners are winning and losers losing?
In the world of sports, the answer is uncontroversial. One person wins a running race or tennis match; one team wins a game of football or hockey; others lose. In economics, there is legitimate study of which groups ‘win’ or ‘lose’ when particular economic policies are followed. The neutral use of ideas of winning and losing helps factual analysis.
When a poor Nigerian Pentecostal sees himself as a winner due to his new-found faith, or an insecure teenager in Ealing feels her confidence boosted by singing that she is titanium or a roaring lion, it would be churlish to object. Again, the language of winning here is relatively uncontroversial.
But when a bully calls a classmate a loser, when a manosphere influencer writes off other men and most women as losers, and when a President calls enemies and critics losers, darker forces are at play. There is a knowing belittling and dehumanising, a stripping away of value and dignity. It’s language that inhabits a tradition that goes back through the Third Reich and Herbert Spencer to ancient empires that saw neighbours as inferior and uncivilised barbarians, and invasion or elimination as a moral duty.
To lash out and describe another human being as a loser, online or in person, is creepy and abusive. The point of the labelling is to discourage, demean and dehumanise. It’s delivering a cruel and chilling verdict: that losers deserve to lose.
Trump, Cyrus & Jesus
Donald Trump’s Christian base makes great play of his redemptive role under God, a claim encouraged by Trump himself. In recent weeks Trump has compared himself to Jesus, and has been compared to Jesus by his spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain. In addition, Trump is compared by Christian and Israeli supporters to the 6th century BC Persian King Cyrus the Great. Cyrus is seen in later biblical tradition as an ‘imperfect vessel’, who was nonetheless anointed by God to bring about good.
But are comparisons with Cyrus and Jesus remotely legitimate? The role of Cyrus in the biblical narrative was to free the people of God from Babylonian captivity, protect them and allow them to return home. His legacy was about liberation and dignity.
Jesus in the Gospels turns conventional wisdom about losing and winning on its head. Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for his sake will find it. Jesus sought out and dignified the losers and the lost of his day: tax-collectors, lepers, prostitutes, the ritually unclean. The only true loser, according to Jesus, is the one who gains the world but loses their soul.
A repeated emphasis from Jesus, as well as in the New Testament letters of Paul, Peter and James, is that the God-honouring life is lived in humility. Later, the early church shockingly embraced and dignified the ‘losers’ in the culture of their day – including slaves, women, and the unwanted babies abandoned in remote places and left to die. Little surprise that a cluster of Jesus’s most potent parables is about lost things—a sheep, a coin, and a child.
In the upside-down kingdom of Jesus, the script of winning is flipped, the lost are found, the humble raised, and the meek inherit the earth.
Mike Starkey is a London based writer and ordained Anglican minister. He regularly contributes to BBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought, and writes features on culture and faith at Flaneur Notes.
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