Is MAGA Devouring Itself?
Democrats are not the only ones with a taste for cannibalism
Donald Trump has absorbed blows that would finish most politicians: two impeachments, the January 6 insurrection, the Covid pandemic, a lost presidential election, an assassination attempt, a cascade of damning lawsuits, and the incandescent hatred of tens of millions of Americans. None of it stopped him. If anything, each attack made him stronger.
But now, for the first time, the chaos isn’t just swirling around Trump. It’s consuming his coalition from within. This is dangerous, as it gives voice to people who are genuinely crazy. It is unavoidable political cannibalism, given the nature of the MAGA coalition. And it may be a cause for hope.
Gilded Age Optics
Trump is hemorrhaging support on his signature issues. In February, most Americans backed his deportation policies. Today, a majority opposes them. His tariffs poll even worse—voters directly blame them for inflation. Among independents, his approval has cratered to 25%.
These aren’t normal second-term headwinds. This is a collapse.
Moreover, Trump has lost control of the imagery. He cut SNAP benefits and increased healthcare premiums by $1,000 per person while building an unpopular Gilded Age ballroom in the White House, hosting a Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago, inviting the princes of Wall St. to dinner, and announcing plans to schmooze at Davos with the very elites he promised to crush. Conservative Andrew Sullivan declared: “The visuals are…less William Jennings Bryan than Marie Antoinette.”
But Trump’s core problem is not hypocrisy or lousy optics; it’s woke MAGA, a movement fueled by transgression. Norm violation isn’t just a tactic for MAGA—it’s the oxygen that it breathes. It feeds a fire that inevitably escalates, creates its own weather, and intensifies first in online forums, then in daily discourse.
Up From the Sewer
Witness Tucker Carlson’s attempted rehabilitation of Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi troll that even Ben Shapiro condemns as “odious and despicable”. Or White House communications that read like 4chan memes. Or the Heritage Foundation, which struggles to distinguish traditional conservatism from the deranged neofacist performance art of the online right. The result is not simply a resurgence of the scourge of anti-semitism. To quote Sullivan once more:
“We have Laura Loomer and the DOJ going after James Comey’s daughter — a federal prosecutor who handled the Epstein and Maxwell cases — because in authoritarian regimes, you punish the families of dissidents as well. And let’s not forget Trump’s insane pardon machine, which is gutting the rule of law in a frenzy of partisanship and corruption. Many of those freed are already back to committing crimes, including child sexual assault and plotting to murder FBI agents. The woke right, in other words, could do to the GOP what the woke left did to the Dems.”
The woke right — its conspiracism, its purity tests, its epistemic certainty — is turning inward on itself and threatens to consume Trump. Just as evangelical leftists made governance impossible for the feckless Biden and Harris, they are now cornering Trump from the opposite ideological direction.
Armed Cannibals
Trump’s policy failures mean that his detractors are fully armed. They care little that his tariffs are strategically incoherent, economically suicidal, and constitutionally dubious – they know for sure that they are very unpopular. Trump’s lust for a Peace Prize has somehow expanded his “America First” foreign policy into a web of foreign entanglements — in Gaza and the broader Middle East, in Europe, Russia, and Ukraine, and in attacks on Venezuela and Iran that are more reminiscent of Cheney-style neoconservatism than nationalist retrenchment. Trump has even muddied immigration, the issue that normally unites MAGA, by expanding student visas and wobbling on visas for farmworkers and tech engineers.
This turn of events should surprise nobody. Since the French Revolution, as populist political movements have radicalized, they have devoured their leaders. These cannibalistic appetites arise in part because radical movements thrive on purity tests, whether Jacobin, Maoist, Bolshevik, or MAGA. It is also because governing requires tradeoffs, which radicals view as betrayal. Finally, when grievance and transgression are the primary sources of political energy, a movement either escalates or it looks weak or compromised. Ask Robespierre or Lenin how this works out.
For these reasons, the most significant pushback against Trump now comes not from hapless Democrats or the mainstream press but from MAGA’s own radicals. When a reliable, if conspiracy-minded, MAGA mouthpiece like Marjorie Taylor Greene accuses Trump of gaslighting the public and forgetting the meaning of America First, it’s a sure sign that MAGA is cracking up.
Meanwhile, the one thing Trump could once claim to command — the economy — isn’t delivering for the voters who need it most. Voters thought that groceries and health care costs were too high before Trump cut SNAP and health insurance subsidies. The sudden and massive shift to AI has left both workers and investors anxious about the future. And Trump now admits the obvious: his tariffs have raised prices without hurting Chinese exports. His populist promises are finally colliding with economic reality.
MAGA is forming its circular firing squad amidst an obvious structural vulnerability: Trump has built the GOP around his persona so entirely that there is nobody to lead the cult when he exits the stage. Without a successor who shares his charisma or appetite for chaos (and JD Vance does not come close), factional warfare, purity contests, and accusations of weakness are all but inevitable. There is no MAGA without Trump at its center, so as MAGA boils over, Trump becomes a target.
Good News? Or Very Bad.
Self-radicalization may be performing the same function for the right as it did for the left: revealing the limits of performative purity as a governing philosophy.
Oddly, the return of the laws of political gravity is reason to feel — cautiously, conditionally — a little more hopeful. For the first time in a long while, the future doesn’t feel like an inevitability. It feels like an open question.