The Future of MAGA after Donald Trump

You wouldn’t have thought that the first real rebel under the reign of Donald Trump would be a pro-gun, pro-white men, pro-life, ultra-Christian, anti-Muslim and antisemitic MAGA-proponent and mother of three who in the past has claimed that the world is controlled by a network of satanic paedophiles funded by George Soros and assisted by Hillary Clinton. But it was exactly this rabid US-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene whose challenge to the US-President in a powerful 11-minute video laid open the subterranean fissures of the right-wing movement – and raises the question what future there is for MAGA after Donald Trump. 

The different strands of the MAGA movement have been there for a while, but only recently have they risen to the surface: the American Firsters who do not like President Trump’s foreign policy, be it financial aid to Argentina or war ships to Venezuela, let alone Israel and Iran; the tech-moguls who are asking for the facilitation of foreign highly skilled workers whilst the White House runs a violent campaign against all sorts of immigrants; the remorseful conservatives who now speak out against the movement’s tolerance for openly fascist and antisemitic influencers in the right-wing blogosphere; and the growing number of MAGA-supporters who have started to notice that they too have to pay the price for Trump’s erratic and harmful tariff policies.  

And above all, there is the increasingly vicious infighting about the publication of the “Epstein Files”, the documentation of scandalous elite behavior in a network of paedophiles and hangers-on, Republicans and Democrats alike - with Marjorie Taylor Greene being only the most consistent voice calling for the publication of the complete “Epstein files”. 

So where did MAGA come from and where is it likely to go? Many of its right-wing positions have been around for decades formulated by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley Jr or Allan Bloom and translated into political campaigns by fringe Republicans like David Duke and Pat Buchanan in the early 90s. Then came George Bush’s costly “forever wars” of the early 2000s, followed by the financial crisis of 2008.  Increasingly, the social costs of globalization and cultural intrusions into the traditional way of life were perceived as economic and political failures of neoliberalism, with the “problem” of mass migration on top. It was this prevalent but politically unaddressed disenchantment which first the Tea Party and then Donald Trump exploited with populist vigour and political acumen. 

In “Furious Minds”, her fascinating book on the recent intellectual history of the US-Right, Laura K. Field maps the many factions coalescing into the MAGA movement: the so-called “Claremonters” from a think tank of the same name who are attached to the American founding myths; the mostly catholic “Postliberals”; the Christian nationalists, and the techno-futurists of Silicon Valley. Trump’s genius lay in recognizing the changes in media, the economy and political culture, and in branding all these old and new strands of right-wing politics into the MAGA movement to channel the public’s discontent.  

The most recent NBC-poll shows that 30% of the US-public still identify with the movement Donald Trump thinks he owns. Asked in a recent TV-interview about him changing his mind on conservative doctrine and talking points Trump replied: “Don’t forget MAGA was my idea. MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else”. But with this claim of “MAGA c’est moi” - what will it become without the King? Or, putting it in political terms: when the President is now under fire from opposition and internal forces and when Congressional Republicans no longer slavishly follow his orders, the question arises - what next for MAGA under a lame duck President in the White House. 

There is more than one way of looking at MAGA’s success and brittleness. One is to compare it to traditional republican thought and call the conservative movement “brain dead”, as Jonathan Chait does in “The Atlantic”. Another is to stress its intellectual energy over the last decade and compare it favourably to a missing liberal answer, as George Packer does in the same magazine. The author and culture critic Marc Lilla lists three interpretations of the MAGA phenomenon: as “apotheosis of the conservative movement, as “betrayal of traditional conservativism”, or as “coeval emanations of a violent cultural storm that swept across the West, laying waste to the achievements of centuries”. Yet all writers point out the movement’s contradictions and agree that MAGAs political success comes at the price of moral decay and the dehumanization of its adversaries. 

Any movement like MAGA needs an ideology, but with its leader in the White House turning and twisting to adjust reality to his whims and wishes concepts like nationalism or nativism, isolationism, protectionism or techno-feudalism lose its meaning and confuse or disappoint the respective factions of believers. Just look at MAGA’s divisions “over the promise and perils of AI”, which according to the “Economist” “may be the most consequential one”. Whereas the “accelerationists” of Silicon Valley demand the total deregulation of artificial intelligence, the “decelerationists” fear not only job losses but also a moral degeneration of traditional American society. 

As a result of those divisions, the adherents of the MAGA movement keep running into the problem of what or who to defend: their beliefs or their leader. Whilst Trump is running out of time Republicans must decide where in the open field of future conservative politics, they should position themselves.  And this positioning of political hopefuls becomes more urgent with each defeat Trump suffers in Congress or in the courts. It is what you see in the resignation of Marjorie Taylor Greene from her House seat and in the vying of possible presidential contenders for the sympathies of the current Vice-President who, they assume, will be the most powerful Republican during the descent of Donald Trump. It will also be interesting to watch how MAGA supporters will move from the world of conspiracies, abstract tenets and wishful thinking back to a multifaceted, multicultural American reality. If at all. Realign with reality or radicalize? What are the odds? 

For some Leaving MAGA will be a long and torturous path as Richard Loges can tell you. This former promoter of MAGA’s promises needed years to come to terms with his political aberration. In his own words it was “the steady diet of MAGA media” that had led into the conservative abyss. And it was “the diversification of his news sources” that finally helped him to realize that he was “losing his humanity inside MAGA”.  

Not every member of the MAGA cult will own up to his or her ill-thought radicalization. Most disappointed MAGA voters might move into political abstentionism since Democrats have not exactly found a convincing story to offer to those who have left the rightful way of bipartisan politics. And the ongoing take-over of legacy media organisations by right-wing billionaires will make the propagation of such a liberal counter-narrative even more difficult. 

Some former or current MAGA hardliners might try to concoct a new populism combining “America First” with more progressive social policies cutting across traditional political lines, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon have started to do. There might even be some common ground with politicians from the left who are also trying to combine isolationism with economic populism because you won’t be successful in American politics without addressing the so-called “affordability crisis”. 

Other extremist voices from the blogosphere might try and hitch a political ride with the white, Christian nationalism associated with Vice-President J.D. Vance. Yet it is difficult to imagine a Republican Party dominated by this faction winning at the ballot box. They would need to further destroy Democratic institutions before they can determine the future of American politics, not a totally unthinkable but a very unlikely scenario. But until 2028 they could still cause a lot of damage to the body politic. 

Only one thing is certain in the fluctuating political sphere under a shrinking President. After Trump there won’t be a return to the old politics from before, neither for Republicans nor for Democrats. The “Grand Old Party” will have to totally reinvent itself after its capitulation to Donald Trump and his gang of criminal and corrupt cronies.  Whereas the Democrats will have to find ways of rebuilding but also reforming the severely damaged institutions so that “the state” becomes more efficient and acceptable to all its citizens. Yet beyond a more forceful defense of the rule of law and public institutions Democrats will have to address their own past failing of not recognizing people’s quest for respect and belonging.

Yet, the most important and difficult task in post-Trump politics will be to reign in the culture of cruelty, rage and bigotry, of degradation, violence and dehumanization in on- and offline politics. And to be honest, currently nobody knows how this can be done.