By rssfeeds-admin 
Nine months into Donald Trump’s second term, MAGA appears more powerful than ever. Trump’s war on the pillars of civil society have scored real victories. Several elite universities have been cowed; so have the highest echelons of the legal profession. The federal government shutdown is being used as a pretext for mass layoffs in the civil service. And the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last month has seemingly united the right with a fury. His memorial service in Glendale, Arizona, was attended not just by Trump and other high-ranking officials in his administration but also by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh, vigilante-turned-celebrity Kyle Rittenhouse, and even erstwhile Trump advisor Elon Musk, who used the memorial as an opportunity to publicly reconcile with his former boss.
For all the seeming signs of unity, the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination illustrates deep insecurities within Trump’s coalition.
Yet despite these spectacles of unity, the MAGA coalition is showing signs of strain. Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, the flagship paleoconservative magazine, told me in a recent phone call that he is concerned that Trump is “just running a theater state” with regard to immigration and may not be meaningfully committed to lowering overall immigration rates. Deportations lag behind the highest levels under Obama. On Mills’s view, even ICE’s aggressive deployments in major U.S. cities are less a serious attempt by the administration to deport undocumented immigrants than a way to antagonize and intimidate urban liberals. While Mills expressed satisfaction with Trump’s trade policies—the one area where both MAGA supporters and critics overwhelmingly agree the president actually cares about policy—he also said that he believed that America First and the tech right are headed for a direct showdown over influence in the administration.
In fact, for all the seeming signs of unity, the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination illustrates deep insecurities within the MAGA coalition. Some key supporters of MAGA in 2024 are now openly expressing anxieties about what happens if the movement fails, or even saying it is failing. Tech right political blogger and neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin has suggested that he is contemplating fleeing the country. “Everyone involved with this revolution needs a plan B for 2029,” he wrote recently, because if the Democratic Party recaptures the White House, or even Congress in 2026, it will enact wholesale “vengeance” on Trump supporters:
The second Trump revolution, like the first, is failing. It is failing because it deserves to fail. It is failing because it spends all its time patting itself on the back. It is failing because its true mission, which neither it nor (still less) its supporters understand, is still as far beyond its reach as algebra is beyond a cat. . . . the vengeance meted out after its failure will dwarf the vengeance after 2020. . . . Politics is fundamentally about power. In power, large things are easier than small things. . . . For the Trump administration to use its tiny, marginal power to try to punish its enemies, one by one, is so futile as to be barely worth trying—though it would certainly help if they prioritized this over “bread-and-butter governance.” . . . Getting rid of all the liberal judges is easier than getting rid of [one] liberal judge. Getting rid of all the judges is easier than getting rid of all the liberal judges. Getting rid of the whole legal system is easier than getting rid of all the judges.
Walsh did not go as far as Yarvin, but he too expressed anxieties about the challenges facing the right while guest-hosting The Charlie Kirk Show a few days after Kirk’s death. He called for putting aside “our squabbles [and] family feuds . . . for now” in favor of “uniting” the right. (At one point he invoked Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction, saying, “The people who will mourn your death are your friends, the people who will dance on your grave . . . are your enemies.”) But the language Walsh used—speculating about his own potential assassination and who would mourn or celebrate his death—betrays a profound sense of weakness and fear about the ramifications of the right’s internal feuds. Political theorist Matt McManus has emphasized that there is a shared commitment across the U.S. right to a basic point articulated by economist Friedrich Hayek: human equality is a myth and there are demonstrably superior groups in society. But beyond agreement on this premise—a rejection of universalism and egalitarianism—the MAGA coalition does not have a common consensus on who, precisely, is superior.
Nowhere is this split more politically fraught than on economics. A few days before Trump’s inauguration, Christopher Rufo tweeted that despite skyrocketing housing costs, the economy was basically at full employment. “The Panda Express near my house is offering $70k/yr plus benefits for the assistant manager. You can make $100k/yr working at Chipotle for a few years and working up to store manager.” Costin Alamariu—the political philosopher turned manosphere influencer better known by his pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert and whose PhD dissertation begins with the line “The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market”—took umbrage at the idea that ambitious right-wing young men should debase themselves by working at Chipotle. “Maybe you’ll care to also give them advice on manning up and marrying a local sweet girl/highschool sweetheart,” he sneered.
The divide on who, precisely, constitutes the favored economic in-group is at the heart of the rift between the paleoconservative-influenced America First wing of the MAGA coalition and the tech right clustered around Silicon Valley through figures like Musk and Peter Thiel. Since resuming office, the Trump administration has been careful to service both wings. America First has gotten its broad tariffs that are purportedly aimed at reshoring manufacturing and reducing trade deficits, if not also projecting American toughness. The tech right has gotten exemptions for computer chips. So far, Trump’s protectionist moves have neither spooked the markets nor threatened to splinter MAGA’s tenuous coalition—although the Supreme Court, almost certainly to reassure Wall Street, temporarily blocked Trump’s attempt to remove a Federal Reserve governor. But a sustained economic downturn would almost certainly lead to open splits between economic elites and the White House.
Another emerging fissure concerns the administration’s response to the Kirk assassination itself. Trump and key political allies—most notably J. D. Vance and Stephen Miller—have openly called for retaliation against their political enemies. “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them,” Trump proudly proclaimed at Kirk’s funeral. And yet the administration’s more naked power grabs—first the attempt to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air, then further deployment of National Guard troops—have been criticized by some conservative pundits and influencers, ranging from Joe Rogan to George Will, who worried that the FCC pressure against Kimmel could lead a future Democrat to reinstate the fairness doctrine repealed by the Reagan administration.
Beyond agreement on a basic premise—the rejection of universalism and egalitarianism—the MAGA coalition does not have a common consensus on who, precisely, is superior.
Perhaps the most disquieting sign for the future of the MAGA coalition are emerging fissures on Israel. Republican voters themselves are split—55 percent approve of the Israeli government, with 41 percent disapproving. That is quite a different situation from the Democrats, where the main rift pits voters—72 percent of which believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and 65 percent “strongly support” imposing sanctions on the Israeli government—against party elites and donors. This reflects a fundamental irony: MAGA became hegemonic in the Republican Party in large part because Trump, as Mills put it, almost instinctively understood in the early 2010s that the paleoconservatives—long critical of the U.S. special relationship of Israel, the Iraq War, and the Global War on Terror more broadly—were right. (This is why Trump famously called Buchanan in 2011 to apologize for calling him an “antisemite” and “Hitler lover” who “doesn’t like the gays” when they ran against each other for the Reform Party nomination for president in 2000.) The America First faction has a broad base of support within the GOP and counts a significant number of prominent media figures and influencers—most notably Tucker Carlson—within its ranks. Part of the reason is that Trump’s evangelical Christians are also a tremendously important faction within the MAGA coalition, and evangelicals remain overwhelmingly Christian Zionists who support Israel unconditionally for eschatological reasons. Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel remains, in terms of membership numbers, the largest pro-Israel organization in America. Both Carlson and Mills have been outspoken in their condemnation of the war in Gaza and Trump’s attack on Tehran in June—Mills told me that “I am glad Trump won again but I am very unhappy with the direction this administration has gone since June.” But at the grassroots level the coalition is shifting. Kirk’s assassination has spawned a whole new genre of conspiracy theories on the right alleging that Israel was behind his assassination because Kirk was poised to criticize Israeli influence on U.S. politics. Meanwhile, polls of evangelical Christians are increasingly showing a generational divide, with younger evangelicals both less likely to support Israel politically and less likely to center Jewish control over the Holy Land in their eschatological beliefs.
If these fractures are going to be exploited to end GOP rule—and achieve something better than what Democrats have delivered that got us here—there has to be a compelling alternative a large majority will rally behind.
This appears to be at least in part rooted in genuine concerns over Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. But this also appears to be rooted in the revival of Christian antisemitism on the America First right. Last May, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who became internationally notorious for claiming that “Jewish space lasers” were responsible for the outbreak of wildfires in the West a few years ago, voted against the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism by the Department of Education to enforce antidiscrimination laws. The definition, which labels any criticism of Israel or Zionism as antisemitism, is indeed deeply flawed, but Greene justified her vote rather that the act “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” Carlson, for his part, in his remarks at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, compared Kirk to Christ before remarking that “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus” were responsible for the crucifixion, a barely coded dog whistle about Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. While Trump is currently doing a victory lap over the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas—and bloviating about how he deserves a Nobel Prize for his efforts—violations are already happening. And for that matter, the new deal does nothing to address the underlying causes of the war: the decades-long occupation of Gaza and the West Bank by Israel and the system of racial apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide that the Israeli state has created. What does all this portend? The Reagan revolution of the 1980s offers a useful point of comparison. Reagan’s election not only vindicated over fifteen years of political organizing by conservatives after Barry Goldwater’s humiliating landslide defeat in 1964; his presidency offered conservatives an opportunity to slash federal spending, roll back long-hated New Deal and Great Society programs, and reverse the key gains of the civil rights movement. But as Reagan entered his second term, conservatives were openly uneasy. “What,” asked conservative historian George Nash in 1986, “has fundamentally been accomplished?” Social Security, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were all still on the books. Right-wing disenchantment with the Reagan revolution reached such a point that Reagan brought in paleoconservative stalwart Pat Buchanan as White House communications director, in an unsuccessful bid to placate the conservative coalition. From the politics to the celebrity, Trump is very much the heir to Reagan’s GOP and the natural continuation of the messy coalition of twentieth-century American conservatism. Never Trump conservatives who departed the GOP in a huff in 2016 failed to understand that the MAGA GOP looks, in most respects, a lot like the old GOP, with its emphasis on tax cuts, deficit spending, and slashes to entitlement programs. But the extent of Trump’s personality cult, and his Nixonian emphasis on personal loyalty not just from his immediate subordinates but from the Republican Party as a whole and now the administrative state writ large, makes ideological contortions and inconsistencies easier for the MAGA coalition to process. The MAGA line ultimately revolves around the president’s whims. The cult remains strong enough that Trump was able to survive the potentially catastrophic fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal over the summer, the only area where MAGA diehards have appeared reluctant to follow the party line.
All this makes it hard to predict exactly what Trump is going to do through 2026 and up to 2028. But it also makes vigorous and meaningful resistance all the more necessary. If these fractures in the GOP are going to be exploited to end Republican rule—and achieve something better than what the Democrats have delivered that got us here—there has to be a strong and compelling alternative that a large majority will rally behind. The large mobilizations at last weekend’s No Kings protests suggest how much discontent is out there, waiting to be captured electorally. But right now, at a national level, the Democrats still aren’t cutting it. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
The post The Conservatives Who Think Trump Isn’t Going Far Enough appeared first on Boston Review.
Discover more from RSS Feeds Cloud
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.