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What happens after?
What happens when the magic that held MAGA together for so long finally breaks? What happens when their belief that they’ll win every battle is shattered? What happens to them when they stop believing in inevitability?
Most revolutions don’t end well. Honestly, they almost never do. They have a momentary flush of triumph and then tear themselves apart from the inside out. I don’t think MAGA is much different at this point.
For a decade, the idea that Trump was undefeatable, unstoppable, and always holding some secret master plan for victory informed every corner of their lives. And who could blame them? The man literally tried to overthrow an election with a terrorist attack, and within days the response from his own party was a collective shrug. His corruption and criminality were looked upon with envy rather than condemnation.
The great compromise Republican elected officials made during this long misery was that loyalty and obedience to Trump would protect them from a primary, and the primary was all that mattered. Now they’re learning a very different lesson. The primary wasn’t enough. Even redistricting that felt safe turned out not to be.
The trade was always hollow. But now... oh, now we’re entering the rats-in-a-bucket phase.
Being a Republican in politics, in consulting, or on social media over the last decade has required total commitment to the bit. It was a game of pretend in which nothing was ever wrong, nothing was ever your fault, and nothing was beyond the magical power of Donald Trump to alter reality as he saw fit.
The weird marionette on stage right now isn’t the Dear Leader of 2016. He isn’t even the comeback candidate of 2024. He is old. He is sick. And there is no natural successor to lead the MAGA movement.
Oh, they’ll fight over it like the aforementioned rats, but as of today not a single one of them fits the bill. Vance and Rubio have flaws so obvious you could see them from orbit. The rest of them, the rising stars and the influencers dreaming of escaping the digital ghetto for elected office, fall far, far short of Trump’s dark celebrity.
But let’s focus on the short term, shall we?
The short term is the narrow window of two months between Election Day and the seating of a Democratic majority in the House and, most likely, the Senate. That altered map, even viewed only through the congressional lens for now, is an object of terror for rank-and-file Republicans. In Washington and in the states, most of these people have never faced a truly competitive race or truly difficult circumstances.
With no leader and no agenda beyond broken-down culture war schlock, Republicans will spend the next year trying to invent an entirely new movement and new imaginary demons to campaign against for themselves while keeping the MAGA base alive on the greatest hits of the mid-2020s. I don’t like their odds.
Take John Thune, who I assure you is about to try to resume his old persona as an avuncular country-club Republican. He’ll be running a Senate minority where even JD Vance can’t ride to the rescue. And their eager dream of converting John Fetterman to the Republican Party will fall on deaf ears. Switching parties looks a lot less appealing to the opportunist senator from Pennsylvania when there’s no Republican majority to join.
Then there’s Mike Johnson, who is about to learn what a Speaker’s gavel is worth to a man who never cared whose hand was holding it. Johnson spent three years as Trump’s most obedient instrument in the House, turning the chamber into a rubber stamp and sending members home whenever the boss needed cover.
His reward will be a leadership fight he could easily lose. The Freedom Caucus crowd already thinks he’s soft. The survivors in swing seats will blame him for losing the majority. And somebody with sharper elbows is already counting votes for minority leader. Johnson will call Mar-a-Lago and wait for the cavalry.
It won’t come.
Trump doesn’t rescue losers. He sheds them, and he’ll be on Truth Social explaining that Mike was a nice guy who never really had it before the first ballot is even cast.
The blamestorming is already magnificent. I know one Republican state chairman who has spent the last 24 hours apparently without sleep, texting angry accusations that everyone else betrayed him, and that if only Trump had listened to him on the economy, and on, and on, and on. It’s not going well for him, or for hundreds of GOP elected officials and party leaders.
Victory, as you all know, has a thousand fathers. Defeat is the saddest, loneliest orphan. But they’ve lived in an epistemic bubble for so long where nothing is their fault that the necessary self-reflection after a colossal ass-whupping won’t happen.
I don’t think they’ll learn from this defeat.
Part of what the Trump era did to the Republican Party was infantilize it completely. Daddy Trump sat at the top as the eternal alpha, and as long as they obeyed, they wouldn’t be sent to bed without supper. Subordinating every belief they ever claimed to hold to Trump may have felt like liberation for a while, but when he failed, they failed. It sounds pathetic. It is.
Poke a Republican voter right now and ask what went wrong. They’ll tell you Trump started a war with Iran. They’ll tell you Trump raised the tariffs that killed their farms. They’ll tell you Trump built a ballroom while they were stuck in line at the food pantry.
If Republican candidates could acknowledge this, it might (and I score this as a very large might) buy them a sliver of grace with the voters who are about to expel them from their cushy jobs. But they can’t.
They’re terrified of the man they’ve worshiped for a decade and obeyed at the cost of their careers and certainly of their immortal souls. Even when he is the proximate cause of their downfall, they will never criticize him in public.
They will never tell their voters, “My God, I was wrong to follow this man.” They will never admit their roles as his enablers and cheerleaders. The way the Republican Party broke itself on the altar of Trump will go down as one of the most staggering own goals in American political history.
The nearest parallel, and frankly an insufficient one, is Richard Nixon after Watergate. For about a decade, no Republican would even whisper his name. And why would they? He was a spent force. His endorsement meant nothing. Whatever goes on in Roger Stone’s fantasy life, Nixon was a net negative.
But Trump is not going to slink off to San Clemente.
In two years, his fat ass will slither down to Mar-a-Lago, where he’ll hold court without end, tweaking the noses of the party he once led and picking fights with his betters. And even with the MAGA movement broken and failing, enough of Trump’s DNA will survive in it, for enough years, that these cowardly men will never reconcile themselves to what they’ve done, and never admit it to the public.
A Word From Our Sponsor — Because Smaug Doesn’t Just Slink Off, He Pivots
Reread what I just told you about Trump slithering down to Mar-a-Lago. Note what that actually means. It is not retirement. It is a pivot. The political grift becomes a retail grift. The donor shakedown pipeline becomes a scam-text pipeline. The meme coin becomes a protein powder, a supplement, a prayer app, an AI “defense” subscription, a Bible-signed-by-Dad, a $19.99-a-month “Patriot Insider” membership. The dialer and the mailer and the push notification keep right on firing at your family’s phones, from Palm Beach instead of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Got scam calls? The worst part hasn’t happened yet.
When scammers get hold of your data, they don’t just take your money. They sell what’s left — your name, address, phone number, the names of people close to you — to the next buyer.
Congress put a number on it: four breaches alone have cost Americans $20 billion. But the financial loss is round one. That same data is what anyone who means you harm uses to find you and your home.
The data-broker pipeline does not care which brand of grifter rents it. The MAGA Inc. list that bought your father’s phone number for the 2026 panic dial gets resold next quarter to the retail Trump-brand supplement scam, the fake “defend the Second Amendment” sweepstakes, and the “URGENT: 25 MINUTES LEFT” fundraising text that will keep running three months after the man is no longer president of anything but his own golf course. It is one economy. The rats in the bucket are still at the top of it.
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Take yourself off the list before Mar-a-Lago spins up the next operation.
Now, back to the rats.
The GOP is a dead shell of what was a party, now replaced by Trump and weird billionaires. It will never reform itself, never seek a better path, never stop defending the indefensible.
So what happens after?
For them, nothing good.
They’ll keep clawing at each other in the bottom of that bucket, waiting on a rescue from a man who has never rescued anyone but himself. Some will call it a rebuilding year. Some will call it a stab in the back. A few of the braver ones will whisper, strictly off the record, that mistakes were made.
Not one of them will say his name in the past tense.
As for the rest of us, it’s time to stop waiting for their reckoning. Stop waiting for the apology, the conversion, the Republican profile in courage who finally rises in the well of the Senate and says enough. That man doesn’t exist. He got primaried, or he retired, or he folded.
The voters will have spoken. Believe them, and don’t let anyone in Washington talk you into fishing these rabid rats out of the bucket.
Let them have it. We have a country to fix.
This post was brought to you by Incogni. The rats are still at the top of a retail grift economy. Take yourself off the list before Mar-a-Lago spins up the next operation. Get 55% off an Annual Plan with code RICK.
What a lovely description of the situation! Fingers crossed the massive loss happens! And all the best from Canada - we're watching!
Read the book The Nerd Reich. It will tell you everything they have in store for all of us if we don’t act and do it quickly. He was merely a symptom of a bigger disease and these nerdy billionaire boys have plans that are ludacris, but they’re all afraid of dying so they’re gonna subject the rest of us to their misery.