Draymond Green could be modern America’s most effective politician.

I’ll back up. With five minutes left in the second quarter of game three of the 2016 NBA Western Conference Finals, Green drove to the basket and kicked Oklahoma City Thunder center Steven Adams in the groin. Set aside the foul call and whether the Golden State Warriors’ star should have been ejected–this was classic Draymond, whose career has been defined not just by high-IQ defense, but also egregious fouls, trash talk, and a knack for driving opponents crazy.

It’s not clear how much Green’s antics affected Adams’ performance that night. The Thunder center did attempt just eight field goals combined in games three and four–after recording 16 points and 12 rebounds in game one and a near-double-double in game two–before taking 11 shots, making only four, in the pivotal game seven. So, the top-line numbers suggest a slight drop-off.

My point, however, is not that Green’s crotch-kick was the reason Golden State won the series. After all, Adams’ raw state lines in games one and two (pre-kick) aren’t night-and-day different from his stat lines the rest of the series (post-kick). Perhaps Green’s extracurricular activities had no impact; maybe his eight All-Defense selections, tied for sixth-most in NBA history, are solely a function of his defensive mechanics and basketball intelligence.

But I think there’s more. Green has been employing trash talk and dirty plays to anger opponents for over a decade, using these tactics to slow down not just Steven Adams, but also LeBron James, Damian Lillard, and Paul George. He’s famous for them, uniquely adept at sparking emotional responses.

My thesis is that Green angers players and throws them off, perhaps only slightly but enough to affect performance. An elbow from Green in the post, for instance, might inspire an angry opponent to heave up an ill-advised shot. Targeted trash talk might lead an opposing player, blind with rage, to drive hard into Green’s chest, letting off steam but drawing an offensive foul call in the process.

A caveat: these are simplifying examples, and they ignore the glaring downside that Green often can’t control his own emotions. In December 2023, for example, he was suspended indefinitely after slapping Phoenix Suns center Jusuf Nurkic all the way back to Bosnia. This was just a month after he put Minnesota Timberwolves big man Rudy Gobert in an MMA-style headlock during an in-game brawl. Green’s style of play, before and after the whistle, has hurt the Warriors, perhaps as often as it has helped them.

Still, I think there is much to learn from Green’s antics, not as much for other basketball players but for those in a different realm: politics.

Consider the ads you will see during this 2024 election cycle. Some will be positive spots emulating Reagan’s “Morning in America” from 1984, but most will be dark and emotional. One Biden ad tells the story of a young couple in Texas who couldn’t get an abortion despite having a miscarriage at 18 weeks. Three days later, we learn, the mother was in the ICU with sepsis. The departing line: “Donald Trump did this.”

It’s sad, but I don’t think it’s meant to inspire sorrow. Sad people don’t vote–but angry people do.

Similarly, Trump’s campaign will showcase Biden administration failures–the Afghanistan withdrawal, runaway inflation, student loan giveaways–as a narrator pithily explains why the last four years have been pure hell.

These ads–and the campaigns behind them–are focused on evoking emotions, especially anger. When would-be voters watch replays of the Capitol attack or hear about couples torn apart by draconian abortion laws, Democrats hope they will be so head-swellingly angry that they can barely think straight. Similarly, Republicans pray that those reminded of Biden’s letdowns will be outraged–years of high gas prices, a world on fire, an overflowing border, and no sense of leadership or responsibility from the White House: what has he done for us?

Both campaigns will try to evoke fury–not just to convince people to vote for them, but to persuade people to donate.

Small-dollar donations, after all, have proliferated in the 21st century, to the point where a well-managed political operation must rely on them for financial support. From 2006 to 2020, the total number of individual donations to campaigns increased from 5.2 million to 195 million–but the average size of contributions fell from $292 to $60. Donations have become tinier; the people who are increasingly opening their checkbooks are now disproportionately everyday Americans angry about politics, not top-dollar donors with houses in the Hamptons and direct lines to the Clintons.

On the surface, this would seem like a positive trend: more donations equates to more voice and more democracy. Backing a candidate monetarily is another way of signaling support, and isn’t it great that $10 donations allow regular Americans to have some sway? Would it be better if only Bill Gates and Peter Thiel could affect elections?

My argument is that the rise of small-dollar donations is not a positive development, because small donors are more likely to be driven by anger and more likely to be politically extreme.

First, the point about political extremes. In 2022, House Republican candidates who voted to reject Biden’s 2020 victory received an average of $140,000 in small-dollar donations, compared to $40,000 for those who voted to affirm the election results. GOP hard-liners and Trump die-hards raked in cash, often using false claims to do so. But radicals on both sides of the aisle have gotten in on the fun. Here is a table showing far-left and far-right candidates in the 2021-2022 cycle:

Candidate	Total raised (millions)	Amount from small donors (millions)	Share of total from small donors
Bernie Sanders	$38.3	$26.9	70.3%
Marjorie Taylor Greene	$12.5	$8.6	68.3%
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez	$12.3	$8.3	67.7%
Matt Gaetz	$6.4	$4.0	62.2%
Jim Jordan	$14.0	$8.1	58.0%

Love them or hate them, these are politicians on the ideological extremes. They do more bomb-throwing than legislating: Ocasio-Cortez and Jordan, for instance, have never sponsored a bill that subsequently became law. Taylor Greene thinks eclipses and earthquakes are signs Americans need to repent.

Second, consider the practice of “rage-donating,” a term popularized in the aftermath of Trump’s election. Whenever someone gets angry browsing the news or reading about politics, he donates to an entity he believes in, which could be a nonprofit but is often a political campaign. This behavior seems democratic and voice-enhancing, but there’s a fatal flaw: does anyone make good choices when they’re angry?

Would you want to make a major life decision immediately after someone cut you off in traffic? Of course not–so why encourage such behavior from donors, who fill up candidates’ coffers in fits of apoplectic frenzy?

The points are connected, of course: rage-donating disproportionately supports ideologically extreme candidates, because it is easier for Matt Gaetz to stir up constituents with talk of stolen elections and the Biden Crime Family than it is for Mitt Romney to do so with ads promoting moderation and bipartisanship. Small donors might seem like a positive democratic development, but they too often lack the expertise to make good decisions; they are too often driven by short-sighted animosity.

They are, in other words, just like Draymond Green’s opponents, often stymied by the Warriors’ star’s unique defensive techniques but sometimes rendered ineffective simply because he induces rage. Crotch-kicking, elbowing, chokeholds, trash talk–these are the moves of a mental tactician who uses emotional gamesmanship to toss NBA stars off-tilt. Green, then, might look to politics for his post-basketball career–because his unique ability to inspire anger is exactly what modern political campaigns are looking for.