Being attacked is hard when you are singled out. However, being attacked because of your affiliation with some group can reinforce the bonds between said group and you.
With that, from Jonah Goldberg:
Remember the story about Donald Trump’s Twitter team deliberately misspelling words in his tweets because they concluded that getting attacked for spelling like a “real American” worked for him?
Some staff members even relish the scoldings Trump gets from elites shocked by the Trumpian language they strive to imitate, thinking that debates over presidential typos fortify the belief within Trump’s base that he has the common touch.
Last month, I wrote a column speculating that Hillary Clinton’s false tweets about Brett Kavanaugh’s view of birth control — which already had been widely debunked by fact-checkers after Kamala Harris floated the same argument days earlier — was a deliberate attempt to get attacked by the “right people.” Newt Gingrich almost won the 2012 primaries because he brilliantly and unrelentingly turned almost every question against the media (foreshadowing Donald Trump’s tactics to come). Many Republicans loved Newt because he hated the media and the media hated him.
Similarly, I’ve been told that some political consultants think it is advantageous for Republicans to “accidentally” offer racially tinged “gaffes” — such as Ron DeSantis’s “monkey” comment — not to “dog whistle”at racists, but to goad the media and liberals into unfairly attacking Republican candidates. (Note: There’s no evidence that this was actually DeSantis’s intention; I just use it by way of illustration because that’s exactly what happened with him.)
I think this is a phenomenon begging for nomenclature, and I'd like to nominate a word that has been begging for a definition: covfefed.
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