“No MAGA left behind.” So read the tweet sent by Donald Trump’s pardon attorney, Ed Martin, following the president’s pardon of former Culpeper County, Virginia, Sheriff Scott Jenkins. Jenkins was convicted by a jury in December and sentenced to 10 years for what the lead prosecutor, Zachary T. Lee, characterized as a “cash-for-badges” scheme in which Jenkins received $75,000 in exchange for appointing local business leaders as auxiliary deputy sheriffs. It was about as cut-and-dry a case of bribery as one might conjure up. Yet Martin’s tweet made clear that, however obvious Jenkins’s violations of the public trust may have been, he possessed the one asset that exempted him from justice: He’s a made man in Magaland.
Jenkins has been a consistent and vocal supporter of Donald Trump, who posted on Truth Social that the sheriff was “a victim of an overzealous Biden Department of Justice, and doesn’t deserve to spend a single day in jail.”
Naturally, there’s no evidence that Jenkins was in any way a victim of prosecutorial malfeasance, but there is ample evidence that the pardon criteria followed by the Trump administration are based primarily on one thing: loyalty—demonstrated either through one’s actions (including the commission of crimes on the president’s behalf) or, alternatively, by paying a high enough price to demonstrate fealty.
Elizabeth Fago, the mother of tax cheat Paul Walczak, did both—ponying up $1 million to attend a Trump dinner. She was also careful to note on her application for her son’s clemency that she’d raised millions of dollars for Trump’s campaign, while reminding them, too, of her efforts to publish the addiction diary of Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley. Walczak got his pardon. So have many others for whom Trump has expressed support—not because they were innocent, because overwhelmingly they were no such thing, but because they’re either MAGA members or tapped to join the club.
Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, had been sentenced to 18 years for his planning of the January 6 Capitol assault. He’s free after Trump commuted that sentence, much to the horror of Rhodes’s ex-wife Tasha Adams, who has accused him of being a serial domestic abuser and has called him a “danger to America.” Rhodes’s MAGA membership card not only got him clemency, but also the privilege of meeting with Republican lawmakers once he was sprung. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio did even better, getting to join Trump at Mar-a-Lago last month after being sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the January 6 attack. Tarrio reported that he and his mother had a “great conversation” with the president.
Meanwhile, visa holders like Rümeysa Öztürk and hundreds of others face different fates. They can be kidnapped off the street and imprisoned. Some, like Maryland resident Kilmar Abegro Garcia, makeup artist Andry José Hernández Romero, and scores of Venezuelans can all be sent away to a gulag in El Salvador without any due process, despite court rulings that indicate such actions are unconstitutional. Many thousands of others sit in American jails or prisons, including federal penitentiaries, because they cannot pay bail, or have drug addictions, or were the victims of systematic bias. Nothing is being done for them. Why? They are not MAGA members. They are not protected.
Just like any made man in the Mafia, to be a member of the MAGA Club you must vow allegiance to the group. The mob has omertà, its code of silence. MAGA has its own version—omaga, you might call it: Don’t ever speak ill of the president or question his motives. You must buy wholly into the MAGA narrative to be considered a full MAGA member. Like any multilevel marketing scheme, the more you pay into the cult and spread its gospel, the more privileges you earn. It’s why we see Cabinet meetings wherein department heads try to one-up each other in their praise of the president. Like any other gang of scheming capos, they’re trying to please the Don. They’re afraid of being turned out of the club.
There is a principle known as Wilhoit’s Law, deriving from a classical music composer who first posted it on the site Crooked Timber. It states, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
With Trump’s criminal syndicate running the show, the out-groups are various: liberals, Black people, single women, strong women, the LGBTQ+ community, undocumented immigrants, most other immigrant groups, environmentalists, and anyone who doesn’t drink at the Fountain of Trump. The president has no intention whatsoever of representing these people, even if they make up relatively half of the country. His goal, instead, is to elevate MAGA members above them.
Most of those members will stay with him, he’s realized, even if he takes away vital government services they need, such as Medicaid and protections against hazardous foods and unrestrained monopolies, because he has empowered them. Critically, he has given them the very commodity they desperately crave: social status and a feeling of belonging. Democrats are a nuisance because they make people reflect upon things; Trump makes them part of the in-group, in on the joke and entitled to special consideration.
Because the gospel of the MAGA Club must remain whole and cannot be challenged, universities and journalists (the ones outside of the right-wing propaganda network) will always be enemies of the Magaverse as well. For all their faults, the overwhelming majority of universities still practice the scientific method and value objective observation and free discussion, even if they may falter in the execution of both from time to time. And those journalists who cannot be quelled into subservience will always be the bane of liars, opportunists, and bullies.
This club membership mentality represents a stark break from the politics of the recent past. Presidents have generally looked to convert naysayers to their cause and unite Americans behind their agendas, to build support. Even Nixon, who railed about the press, created an enemies list, and wasn’t beyond accusing people of being Communists throughout his career, was also capable of expressing sympathetic understanding for those who disagreed with him, including Vietnam protesters whom he said shared his good intentions and wanted to save American lives. He vilified some, but craved the support of the majority of the nation—the “silent majority,” as he called it.
Trump, on the other hand, has never expressed any sort of sympathy or magnanimity for those who disagree with him. He calls protesters “terrorist sympathizers” and characterizes them as violent extremists. In his first administration, he even threatened to shoot them. And yet he set the actual MAGA terrorists that attacked the Capitol on January 6 free from prison en masse, no questions asked.
Even Trump’s social media posts—his incessant trolling (including, recently, a posting with alt-right hate symbol Pepe the Frog)—are intended as signals to club members. Membership has its privileges, including up-to-the-minute updates on whose eye Trump is poking, be they the libs, antifascists, “alien invaders,” or the critics who dare to question him. That party will never end, so keep your club membership!
His recent post about Biden being replaced by a robot, for one, could only have two possible explanations: Trump is stupid enough to believe it (not ruling that out) or he’s signaling once again to his supporters that their club—the “in” group—is mocking and humiliating the outsiders. He made sure to continue to tell his supporters not to feel sorry for Biden, despite his cancer diagnosis, and to continue to attack him because he’s a “vicious” person. He wants to make sure they’re still empowered to be callous.
The entire point is to expand the ideology behind Wilhoit’s Law to a national and perhaps international scale, pitting the aggrieved against their perceived adversaries. Naturally, Trump did not invent this system of ideological rewards and punishments; he has merely built upon groundwork laid by Fox “News,” Salem Media, and a vast right-wing network of conservative talk show hosts, influencers, and podcasters who have been beating the jingoistic drum of division for decades, positing (as practically every authoritarian regime throughout history has done) that the true greatness of the nation has been undermined by saboteurs from within.
Here, he does not finger corporate titans for blame, but rather the poor, the underrepresented, and the maligned classes who have historically been disinvited from elite circles. The privileged want to retain their privileges, the bullies among them yearn to bully again, and neither want to be questioned or criticized. It’s why their version of free speech includes an absence of consequences. Consequences only apply to those without power. Life in the big MAGA club is consequence-free.
