The Coming MAGA Crackup

My piece for Courier Newsroom.

I’m happy to have a piece today in Courier Newsroom, a new model of publicly-funded media in the pro-democracy space that’s making a big impact in local communities where the news business has otherwise been killed off by Facebook and the Internet more broadly. They’re helping to offset the media landscape of Sinclair, private-equity slash-and-burn, and militant conspiracy trash taking over where news should be.

For all its seeming dominance in Republican politics, the MAGA movement is cracking up. 

For nearly a decade, MAGA has been the unstoppable force in Republican politics. With dear leader Donald Trump at its helm, the new breed of post-conservative Republicans believed in obeisance to Trump, owning the libs, and that the real enemy was inside the party: establishment Republicans. 

Even before Trump, conservative politicos and media outlets found a psychological exploit that worked like gangbusters with Republican voters, telling the most affluent and privileged generations of American conservatives they were an oppressed minority, the victims of Big Liberalism. They portrayed the opposition not as liberal but as evil. 

The confluence of Trump’s arrival on the political scene, social media’s algorithmic necromancy in the brains of conservative voters (“My cousin’s mother-in-law posted that Hillary is a cannibal pedophile on Facebook …it must be true!”), and the endless drumbeat of Fox’s agitprop detailing how we’re moments away from the apocalypse brought on by George Soros, Antifa, immigrants, Black Lives Matter, or the War on Christmas separated millions of Americans from rationality and clarity. 

As the nationalists, hyper-populists, isolationists, conspiracists, Putin fanboys, and way-too-online cranks replaced the old establishment, the MAGA party kept losing races but never losing the goal of purging anyone without suitable loyalty to Trump.

Donald Trump is not the formidable force he was in 2016 or 2020. He’s an angry, sleepy, and embattled old man stuck in courtrooms, not the swaggering strongman dancing and japing in front of 30,000 people at rally after rally. While happy warriors Joe Biden and Kamala Harries campaign across swing states, Trump’s political options are narrowing.

His fundraising is diminished; he’s lost over 200,000 small donors and even his most ardent supporters know their contributions aren’t being used to re-elect Trump but to pay his lavish legal bills. In April, Nikki Haley notched around 17% of the vote in Pennsylvania despite being out of the race for weeks. 

Trump lost the message reach he enjoyed before: stuck in the social media hinterlands of Truth Social, he reaches just 7 million people today, as opposed to the almost 90 million he had on Twitter before his ousting in 2021. In 2016, he was able to set and drive a narrative against Hillary Clinton, and millions of GOP voters amplified it. Now, that superpower is gone. 

Even Fox News is showing the strain of covering for him. Of course, they still can’t risk hosting him live on their air because they’re terrified of the pending Smartmatic lawsuits and stung from the multi-billion dollar Dominion Voting Systems settlement. 

The MAGA media ecosystem, from Fox to bottom-feeder weirdos like the Gateway Pundit, has seen cataclysmic drop-offs in their view counts online. Some of this is due to changes in the Facebook algorithm, but it goes beyond Mark Zuckerberg spinning the dials behind the scenes. Reasoned and principled conservative argumentation may be boring to some, but replacing it with Catturd and boomer MAGA memes might have been a mistake. 

After nearly a decade of breathless excuse-making for Trump and assertions about Democrats that routinely included treason, corruption, pedophilia, and global conspiracies to force us to all eat bugs, the bit is tired. When the Rapture never comes, the flock gets restless.

Finally, Trump is like the drunken uncle at the party; he’s increasingly embarrassing, even for many Republicans. They’re tired of making excuses, tired of explaining away the crazy, and tired of defending the indefensible. He’ll always have his base, but many in that base repel the more moderate Republicans and independents. The Dobbs decision and Trump’s boasting over ending Roe v. Wade have cut deeper into the more affluent demos in the GOP than he cares to admit. 

Republican elected officials, staring political mortality in the face, are starting to get it. 

Mike Johnson, whatever his reasons, decided not to take the blame for Russian tanks rolling in Kyiv and passed a bipartisan Ukraine aid bill. Mitch McConnell worked with Chuck Schumer and President Biden to roll up a much bigger win for the bill in the Senate than anyone expected. 

Just two weeks ago, we learned James Comer, the Savonarola of the endless House impeachment hearings against President Biden, told colleagues he wants to put it all behind him.

The MAGA political and media stars like Marjorie Taylor Green and Stave Bannon are howling with outrage, to no avail. If Greene could have taken Johnson, she would have. Bannon is in a fury that America stood with Ukraine over Russia, but the vote is done, and American arms are flowing to Ukraine. 

Unable to self-correct, they’ll scream louder instead of acting smarter. They’re terrorists holding unloaded guns.

Every political movement has an arc. MAGA’s arc is now on the downslope. 

The cracks in the machine’s armor are showing, still loud, still formidable inside the GOP, and still dangerous in intent and consequence. The internal contradictions, factions, and competing agendas are nothing compared to the loss of Donald Trump’s power and image. 

Can Trump still win in November? Absolutely. Would the consequences be a political and civic nightmare? Worse than we can imagine.

No one who believes in the Republic or representative democracy should take him lightly. Ask Hillary Clinton if you doubt me. 

But for all that, the movement he spawned is exhausted, shrinking, and high on its own supply. 

The MAGA crackup is coming. Be there. It will be wild.