There is an emerging conventional wisdom that MAGA is eating itself alive with internecine warfare between various politicians, pundits, thought leaders. People also point to the diminution of Trump as a tired, spent force as a reason for celebration. They want hope in a time when there seems like none, and this jockeying for the crown even as the king falls asleep in his chair while his minions fawn over his vitality and vigor seems to offer it.
Conservative powerhouses Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson are at each other’s throats over Israel. Open antisemite and fascist Nick Fuentes (who hates Shapiro and the late Charlie Kirk) is quickly becoming a mainstream enough thought leader to be a subject for The New York Times, while Rolling Stone proclaims that Fuentes has “won.” At the same time, disgraced alt-right and self-proclaimed ex-gay Milo Yiannopoulos has accused Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson of being gay.
Some will point to Republican politicians bucking Trump as a reason to believe that the whole circus tent is about to collapse. Marjorie Taylor Greene is leaving Congress, and it is rumored that Nancy Mace (who seems to be struggling with mental health issues) will soon follow. There are Trump’s health concerns, and the obvious vying by Cabinet members like JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio to be seen as the natural successor to the president in the MAGA movement.
However, this does not mean that MAGA is disintegrating. What defines MAGA is still there, and won’t go away for the foreseeable future. If you reduce the equation to the simplest terms, you have the Trump voters who pay attention to the chaos and those who don’t. No matter how you slice it, neither group is going to suddenly start voting for Democrats, regardless of which monkey wins the poo-flinging contest.
When you look at the element of MAGA that pays attention to the likes of Carlson, Fuentes, Kirk, Matt Walsh, etc., they are dyed-in-the-wool true believers. The only real difference between them is that when they discuss which groups of people should be loaded into a rocket and fired into the sun, some of them would put Jews on the rocket with the transgender people and immigrants, and some of them wouldn’t. Effectively, there aren’t a lot of foundational differences of opinion between them, other than which of them should ideologically rule the country after Trump nods off for the last time.
Then you have people like my parents. I doubt either of them would recognize any of these far-right figures except Tucker Carlson, and that’s only because he was on Fox News. I fully expect my father to expire in his Barcalounger with Fox News (or Newsmax, or OANN) playing at 120 decibels in the background. My parents have also made it perfectly clear that they’d rather never see their kids or grandkids again than see a Democrat in office and are rather proud of not voting for one since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Trump’s greatest political ability was to get low information, low propensity voters out to vote for him. People who don’t have accounts on X and couldn’t tell you who we’re about to go to war with, much less find Venezuela on a map. They couldn’t tell you what riders were in the National Defense Authorization Act or even figure out why their medical premiums just went way up. Like my parents, they’re just stimming on the vibes.
For them, Trump is just cracking down on criminal illegal immigrants and blowing up drug runners. If they do hear about what is happening to transgender people, they are likely to support it without understanding the extent and meaning of it. To them, this is good. They have no idea how tariffs work. They just see Trump’s defense secretary and Health and Human Services secretary doing pull-ups and think that this is way more energetic, masculine, and entertaining than Joe Biden and his band of LGBTQ+ weirdos and DEI hires.
If they do see Trump being showered with gifts by foreign leaders, they view it as a sign of respect, rather than arriving at the (slightly) deeper analysis that foreign leaders do this because they know he is weak-willed and susceptible to both flattery and bribery. The media ecosystem has become so polluted by Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department and the legal system that it is increasingly unlikely they will encounter anything that contradicts the narratives that the White House is attempting to spread.
They have no idea what it looks like to live in a country without a functional government, where it’s not safe to drink tap water or they must watch people all around them get measles, mumps, whooping cough, and polio and, as a result, suffer lifelong health consequences. They’ve been told for decades to “do their own research” and not to trust the experts. That somehow their uninformed “gut” feelings are the best way to deal with any given situation, whether it’s health care for trans people, immigration, or double-tapping survivors of a military strike while they cling to the wreckage of their boat.
In this way, they’re just like Trump, who never trusted experts and trusted them even less after his first term, when their expertise clashed with what he wanted to do based on his gut. When you look at who might succeed Trump, every last one of them is poised to make the same calls to the lowest common denominator in public sentiment.
Trump’s biggest vulnerability is the economy, because that will affect at least some of his voters. If his successors can keep sentiment about the economy at arm’s length (Not my fault, I wasn’t president, I’ll do it differently and fix everything), while tapping into the same nativist and transphobic sentiments that propelled Trump to a second term, Democrats will face a nasty surprise as the low information, low propensity voters once more turn out in droves for the Republican nominee in 2028.
