What a sugar-cookie recipe taught me about quiet resistance

Let me tell you about the cookies I baked last weekend. They called for ½ cup softened butter, 1 cup of white sugar, 1 egg, ¼ cup milk. ½ teaspoon of vanilla, 2 and ¼ cups flour and 2 teaspoons of baking powder. If you’re reading this and thinking, “No brown sugar? No salt? A measly half-cup of butter? These cookies sound terrible,” well, you are correct. This was pure grudge baking, and even if the result tasted like sugary drywall, it felt great.

The recipe came from TikTok user Nick Ruyter, a painter and former pastry chef who resembles the Minnesotan cousin of Carmy and Richie from “The Bear,” and who posts deadpan video clips about funding abortion. A week or so back, he posted a yellowed, handwritten recipe with this explanation:

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while. My mom voted for Trump. I just know she did. So here is her most closely guarded secret recipe. She has only allowed two women, in the entirety of my life . . . to have this recipe . . . If she’s making cookies and this part is out, you’re not allowed in the house unless you’re family. They’re gonna look lighter than you think they should look, but they make the most delightful, soft, almost cakey cookie. Frost ‘em however you want.”

Two weeks later, the clip has more than 160 thousand shares and almost 22 thousand comments from appreciative fans of both cookies and democracy, many of them requesting that Ruyter pass along their compliments (“Tell her I’m buying all the ingredients with EBT right now”; “Let your mom know that the lesbians from Delaware said thanks so much”) In a follow-up post, he pretended to be talking to his aggrieved parent: “Ma. Ma! Calm down, it’s just a recipe. People are dying, all right? No, I don’t care about inheriting some modern [Nazi] memorabilia . . . fine, Precious Moments. Whatever you call ‘em.” He hangs up. “Anyway. Y’all want a frosting recipe?”

The purposeful degeneration of truth and progress that’s central to Trump 2.0 — the setbacks in science and research, the dismantling of education and critical thinking — is bleak. Organized resistance is crucial, but sometimes you’ve got to lean on pettiness to get you through. And finding ways to be petty without being cruel is an ongoing project for anyone who wants to fight back without fighting dirty. Loudly hoping that GOP voters get everything they voted for is one thing; celebrating when their children were swept away in floodwaters is quite another. Daily living has become stingier and meaner; how can it not when one political party’s entire legislative agenda is driven by owning the libs, and conservative culture warriors think caring about other people is weakness? It’s satisfying to be petty, but it’s even more satisfying to be specifically, constructively petty. Hitting back at a broadly inhumane agenda without replicating its inhumanity, as Ruyter demonstrates, is often a matter of going small.

One classic act of constructive pettiness is the shownation. In 2016, after Mike Pence was elected vice president, Planned Parenthood reported that at least 20 thousand donations had been made in the name of the ghoulish former Indiana governor. In 2017, when Speaker of the House Paul Ryan couldn’t say enough about his enthusiasm for repealing Obamacare and defunding Planned Parenthood, the shownations picked back up, as they did a few years later when talk-radio extremist and legendary hypocrite Rush Limbaugh died and people celebrated with generous gifts in his honor. Memorably, art imitated life when “Succession”‘s Cousin Greg was informed by his grandfather that his expected inheritance was being rerouted to Greenpeace — something the nonprofit wisely amplified with a tweet reading “[Y]ou can piss off one of your own relatives by making an early #GivingTuesday gift right now!”

Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

I’ve heard this called “spite philanthropy,” but I’m not sure the phrase is accurate. Simon McCarthy-Jones, author of the 2021 book “Spite: The Upside Side of Your Dark Side,” has written that there’s a revolutionary dimension to the truly, full-throatedly spiteful, the person who is “willing to bear a cost to inflict a cost.” The past decade has seen the MAGA movement embrace spite with an almost religious fervor, voting away their own health and security because harming someone else is more important to them. Social media is full of stories in which people warning families and loved ones that their votes will boomerang right back are ignored or brushed off. There’s no reasoning, there’s just bracing for an impact that those loved ones can’t see coming. Knowing that they freely and knowingly voted for the Leopards Eating Faces Party doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch those faces being eaten, or to witness the collateral damage to families and communities. whose departments were wiped out by DOGE, immigrant Trump supporters sure they’d never be rounded up by ICE goons until they were.

It’s worth contrasting spite with constructive pettiness because the latter isn’t done for the benefit of either of the parties directly involved. People shownating to Planned Parenthood aren’t bankrupting themselves to do so; the cost they bear is outweighed by its benefit to others. Likewise, Ruyter’s act of pettiness doesn’t disempower or weaken him; it’s just the best tool for the job — the punch hits the only target it’s meant for, and everyone else gets cookies. Posting the secret recipes of bigoted relations is a time-honored form of constructive pettiness, and Trump Mom Cookies joins an ever-growing list of revenge recipes that have circulated online for years, like Tumblr’s storied  “F*ck You Buffet: Secret Family Recipes of Kids Betrayed by Their Homophobic Parents.”

As much as I applaud Ruyter’s act of resistance, though, I kind of suspect the main reason his mother kept this recipe a secret is because it’s just so freaking basic. (I reached out to Ruyter in hopes of finding out more, but didn’t hear back.) They’re meant to be frosted, but are also so tasteless on their own that they kind of have to be frosted. As fellow TikTokker and baking-degree holder @thatdemonicbaker noted, other than some ingredient percentages, the only way this “secret” recipe differs from a literal textbook recipe is that the textbook calls for salt.  These are cookies that can’t really stand on their own. What they, and their defiant appearance on TikTok, do instead is confirm a few things that are also not a secret about the MAGA mindset.

For instance: Treating a thumpingly bland cookie recipe as so special and unique that it must be guarded like a rare and delicate treasure is very on-brand: After all, what is a member of the MAGA faithful but someone who insists on gatekeeping mediocrity and preserving tradition for no other reason than that it is tradition? Another confirmation: An incredibly narrow worldview. Trump Mom, I’m guessing, is not an outwardly hateful person, just one who clings to the familiar not because it’s great but because it doesn’t require reckoning with the unknown and untested. There’s no curiosity about exploring other ingredients — Cream of Tartar, nutmeg, lemon zest — even if they might add something to the recipe. Finally: Can I confidently say that Trump Mom believes brown sugar has no business mixing with white sugar? No, but I can defer to Betty Crocker and Martha Stewart, both of whom recommend using the pair of them for a cookie that’s both crisp and chewy, with a depth of flavor that can’t be achieved via just the white.

In other words, the secret of Trump Mom’s secret recipe is not that it’s tastier than others. It’s not that its history is more distinguished. It’s not that it contains any ingredient or process that would actually make it unique. The betrayal is not that her cookie recipe is now online for all to see — it’s that now everyone knows it was never special to begin with.