Why You Shouldn't Gloat (Even When It Feels Good)

There is no polite way to gloat

Gloating, as it’s popularly understood and practiced, requires someone to direct your gloating at, and the desired result is to make the other person feel bad. Gloating to a friend after his team loses a football game to your team is only mildly annoying—it’s just a game, after all—but politics in 2023 actually means something to everyone.

As weird as it is that some nobody in Ohio would feel a personal, emotional connection to a national political figure, they do. There are well-funded, efficient networks of public relations experts, tech moguls, political insiders, and foreign intelligence agencies working 24/7 to make that happen—to get people to feel an emotional attachment to political figures they’ll never actually know anything genuine about—and to make people hate others who feel differently.

People tend to vote, join political parties, and form opinions based on how they feel, not what they think. This is true across the map. It’s true of people who like Donald Trump, people who like Joe Biden, and people who like Bernie Sanders.

If you’re thinking, “Good. Supporters of Trump should feel bad. They’re awful,” maybe you’re right. They would say the same about you, I’m sure. I can only imagine the gross celebrations that would unfold in some circles if they (meaning the GOP) ever actually succeeded in locking up Hilary Clinton. But you can’t do anything about other people. You’re better than they are, right? To steal a line from Michelle Obama (who I’ve apparently been manipulated into respecting and liking), “When they go low, we go high.”

If gloating is a way to make yourself feel satisfaction about the fact that someone you hate is suffering, you’ve probably succeeded today. But you haven’t actually done anything worthwhile. Chances are you’re only reinforcing the sense of tribal identity that keeps us at each other’s throats.

An alternative to gloating

“Going high” in this context would involve actually trying to change people’s minds. The reason I don’t like Trump, and I’m happy he’s being charged with over 30 felonies, is because I disagree with his political goals and the way he conducted himself in office. I think the country would be vastly worse off if he were elected again. This is why I’m more committed to changing people’s minds than to making myself feel good about a “victory” over someone I will never meet.

If you’re trying to get your MAGA uncle to consider maybe not voting for the worst human being in American political history, gloating is counter-productive. Psychologists who study how people actually change their minds point out that making yourself into the enemy (i.e. gloating) is the worst thing you can do in that regard.

As David McRaney, author of the 2022 book How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion told Time, “If you communicate that they should be ashamed, or that they’re stupid or gullible, they’re going to push against you in a way that ruins the possibility of moving forward to a conversation that would actually change their mind in some way or get them to reevaluate the matter.”

The actual keys to productive mind-changing are pretty much the opposite of gloating: remaining calm, using empathy, finding common ground, and inviting introspection are much more effective means of getting people to come around to your point of view (or at least become too discouraged to bother voting in 2024). It’s a much harder thing to do than to calling someone a sucker, but it could work. Theoretically. Or so they say.

There’s a good possibility you are celebrating prematurely anyway

Trump being indicted sends us into historically uncharted waters. No one has any idea how this will play out. Maybe it actually will help his chances in 2024. Maybe it will sink them entirely. Maybe he’s the best possible candidate for Biden to run against. Maybe it’s the beginning of a new civil war. We don’t know anything right now, and uncertainty is nothing to celebrate.

We don’t even know specifically what Trump is being charged with. Many legal experts surmise that the case against him is based on an untested legal theory, and that makes a conviction anything but a done deal—and even that’s all speculation until the charges are released. It’s well within the realm of possibility that Trump will walk from this case and go back to posting on Truth Social about the conspiracies arrayed against him. He might not end up facing charges from the grand juries looking into his election meddling, stolen documents, or efforts to incite an insurrection either. There are just too many unknowns.

He might be tried, convicted, go to jail, and win a presidential election anyway. There’s no law that prevents that. It’s an unlikely scenario, but a transparent conman like Donald Trump becoming a national political figure in the first place was unlikely too, yet here we are.

It’s just too soon to take a victory lap, and there’s nothing worse than walking back a gloat. Picture the look on your red-capped cousin’s face at Thanksgiving if Trump winds up leading the country from a jail cell. You’d literally never hear the end of it.

If you really must gloat…

Being happy that something bad is happening to one of the most onerous humans alive is natural and healthy. But the best way to gloat is to do it privately. Take a lesson from the president: Joe Biden has steadfastly avoided making any public statements about Donald Trump in favor of doing his job, He’s keeping it quiet, focusing on being the change instead of blathering. Still, I’d bet money all his friends are blowing up his phone with Trump-in-prison memes. (There are, admittedly, a bunch of good ones going around.)