I'm struck by how sore Republicans seem after the election they just won

I don't get it.

Over the past few weeks, I've seen a lot of smugness by Republicans on Reddit about the election. That's unsurprising: They won. What is surprising is how few of them seem genuinely happy about it.

Take today. I've read a lot of comments about Pete Hegseth, Trump's nominee for defense secretary. Hegseth will likely skate by after a pressure campaign got nervous Republican senators to fall in line. But for all the smug comments about Hegseth's prospects, only a few conservatives here actually seem all that happy about him. Instead, it's mostly a mix of taunting ("You [Democrats] deserve this") and crybullying ("You [Democrats] made us do this! If only you hadn't [X/Y/Z]!") The lack of genuine, happy enthusiasm isn't that surprising -- Hegseth is an unqualified, managerially incompetent alcoholic whose own mother accused him of abusing women -- but it's still notable.

And Hegseth's just the latest. At least you'd expect Republicans to be cheering on Trump's economic plans. But I've heard almost nothing from his supporters here about his tariffs.

Even on immigration, after the election, I wasn't seeing tons of "We're gonna kick 'em all out!" cheers from conservative Redditors. Instead, it was mostly phony outrage about how the lib-ur-uls want illegals to mow their lawns. (This was in response to people noting that deporting the illegal-immigrant workforce en masse would probably collapse the agriculture industry and cause home-construction costs to skyrocket.)

I think the one point of genuine positivity I've seen is around gender issues. Republicans are excited about Trump's plans to put the kibosh on "gender ideology" and stick it to the trans voters.

But otherwise, the post-election mood on the right, at least on Reddit, seems almost... bitter. Less celebration than grievance. It almost feels preemptively defensive. Contrast that with 2020, where Democrats were genuinely excited for the Biden administration.

And it's playing out in real life. In Congress, House Republicans seem determined to stab each other in the back. At Mar-a-Lago, Steve Bannon just called Elon Musk a "truly evil man" and said South Africans were the most racist people on Earth. Musk just tried to crush Mike Johnson, who turned around and kicked him in his weird tits.

My guess is that some of this is a lack of faith in the person they elected and the policies he might enact. As one Republican told me, "Trump was always a gamble, but" Kamala was bad. I get the sense that some Republicans were queasy when Trump picked Matt Gaetz, a policy and political disaster. I also think a lot of conservatives are aware that having Elon Musk buying himself the chancellorship while Trump pursues a massively inflationary trade policy might not work out well, especially when Trump is also undermining the "no more war" narrative Republicans ran on with his threats to invade allies.

I agree with those concerns, but I'm a Democrat. I'd just have expected to see more of that pre-election enthusiasm post-election.