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. Nicolle Wallace, Rachel 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 complained about the “MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization,” telling The New York Times, “I believe how women in leadership present themselves sends a message to younger women. I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts.” Young men may love the hyper-sexualized look of your typical Mar-a-Lago female habitue, but I wouldn’t want that for my own daughter or for myself. There are class elements at play here too, as Trump has always been a faint mimeograph of a wealthy person.
As an AWFUL who is also a mother, I readily admit that we often feel bulletproof, protected from the kind of traffic stops and police violence that our nonwhite counterparts are subjected to. Conservative pundit Will Cain charged on Fox News the other night that we possess “a weird kind of smugness in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority.”
Oh well; sticks and stones, as they say. But this—the aftermath of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good—is different. This is the first time they’ve strenuously defended their right to murder one of us. “I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement—a lunatic fringe—against our law enforcement officers,” Vice President JD Vance told a press pool last Thursday. This was akin to chastising a sexual assault survivor for believing in premarital sex. Her last words were, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” She was then shot three times at point-blank range.
White women are for Trump’s purposes actually two distinct groups separated by an important split, which is not actually the “urban” in AWFULs. Rather, it’s their educational level. There’s a diploma divide between white women with a college degree who are more likely to be liberals and white women without a college degree who are more likely to have voted for Trump. AWFULs refers to the college-educated variety of white women who have wandered into the MAGA crosshairs and now find themselves MAGA enemy number one. How we got here is no great mystery. Ever since the 2020 George Floyd protests, we’ve seen some white women use their (somewhat) protected status to ally themselves with their protesting brethren and sistren.
The trope of white women being of a (relatively) more protected class than other members of the DEI consortium is certainly true. But this is relative. More protected, but still subjected to any number of punishments and inequalities, including domestic violence, which complicates the idea of a protected status. Last weekend, social media was filled with the Margaret Atwood quote, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
But some of these white women seem to be using their protected status to face off with (often masked) ICE agents. In two different recent videos, a masked border patrol agent warns a white woman not to “make a bad decision,” and in another he says, “have you all not learned from the past couple of days?” And so these women, a group so coveted by advertisers and media companies, find themselves deemed AWFULS by MAGA.
You might think that killing an unarmed mother crosses a Rubicon of sorts, and polls would say you were right. But one of the weird truisms of Trumpism is that Trump tends to only care about governing for the base, which is why one of their most common moves is to double or triple down on controversies. We saw this with Trump’s rhetoric after Venezuela. We see it now with respect to Greenland. And we saw it in Minneapolis, despite very poor polling (only 28 percent of Americans think ICE agent Jonathan Ross was “justified” in putting three bullets into the mother of three).
It’s pretty unusual to see numbers like that, especially if you factor in that 35 percent of voters are these intractable members of Trump’s base who will sign off on almost anything MAGAworld desires. Trumpworld was out defending the indefensible full throttle, starting with JD Vance, followed by Tom Homan telling Kristen Welker that Good’s “hateful rhetoric” was the cause of her murder, and finally capped by Customs and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino telling Sean Hannity: “Hats off to that ice agent. I’m glad he made it out alive. I’m glad he is with his family.”
They can carry on like that all they want, but what happened to Good may be a breakthrough moment. There is something uniquely disquieting about the murder of a mother in her car—and, let’s face it, of a middle-class white mother. It is one of those things that’s not supposed to happen in America. It echoes other killings that broke through, that pierced the membrane. The murders of four college students committed more than 50 years before at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when Ohio national guardsmen shot 13 unarmed college students protesting the war in Vietnam. Four of the kids died, and one was paralyzed.
College kids were supposed to be a protected class, but they were shot dead just like anyone else. Instead of quieting dissent, these murders unleashed an inexhaustible rage. Kent State was a moment that set into motion a sea of protests, waves and waves of students started a nationwide strike. Part of the problem with living through history is that one never knows what will matter and what will disappear.
We’ve never lived in an America where the government is defending the murder white mothers. The thinking here, the lie the administration is selling, is that somehow this mother was a radicalized leftist. The idea that someone’s political beliefs could render them undeserving of due process, indeed of life itself, is something we haven’t seen from our government in a long time, not since wartime. Trumpers may consider these women awful, but educated urban women are the structure holding up much of American life, and they’re definitely deep in the fight against Trump. The fact that Trumpworld is so threatened by them means they’re probably doing something right.
