The president remains at the center of the right, but some of the satellites around him, like Greene, are beginning to spin out of orbit as his gravitational pull weakens. If you had to bet on whether that pull will regain strength over the next three years of lame-duckery or continue to gradually lose force, it’s obvious which way you would wager. The “sense” Kevin and Friedersdorf are having, I suspect, is that the political entropy we’re seeing at the moment will continue apace on the right and eventually pull the MAGA solar system apart.
If Trump-centric postliberalism really is experiencing its early death twitches, why is that?
Priorities.
It’s because the president, strangely, doesn’t share the priorities of either of the two factions of his MAGA base.
One faction is right-wingers who strained under Biden-era inflation and embraced the hype about Trump’s ability to turn things around. They’re fine with postliberalism, but for them it’s more of a side dish to the main course of economic revival—or, perhaps, a means to that end, with Trump wielding authoritarian powers like a wand to work his supposed magic on the cost of living. Replacing an out-of-touch Democrat with a populist strongman who champions “the forgotten man” could only help with affordability, right?
It hasn’t helped. And not only hasn’t it helped, the president can barely be bothered to pretend to care. The Washington Post has a story today about conservative pollster Mark Mitchell visiting the White House recently to urge Trump to refocus on the “pragmatic economic populism” that his base wants, only to have Trump steer the conversation around to … golf. “To the extent to which we were talking about the economic populism message, he wasn’t as interested as I would have hoped,” Mitchell complained.
Of course he isn’t interested. Inflation was an irresistible line of attack for Trump as a candidate, but it’s forever an afterthought in his economic agenda. Lay aside the obviously inflationary policies he’s pursued, like pushing various forms of stimulus or browbeating the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates: No one who cared a lick about affordability would have chosen 2025 as the year to start the trade equivalent of a nuclear war.
A traditional politician would at least seize the moment to do a bit of Clintonian pain-feeling, but our president is spiritually incapable of empathy, as America was reminded yet again on Monday morning. Instead Trump has reverted to his usual tactics of defensiveness and denialism, encouraging MAGA to be happy with less and insisting that his economy should be graded an A+++++ despite consumer confidence falling below Great Recession levels.
He thinks, or wants Americans to think, that the affordability crisis is a “hoax” manufactured to hurt him politically. But even some of his fans can’t swallow that lie, with 4 in 10 Republicans telling CBS News last month that the president is making prices and inflation sound better than they really are. (Across the entire public, 60 percent said so.) As GOPers grow disillusioned and lose faith in Trump’s economic acumen, MAGA is weakening and starting to twitch.
The other faction of his base is what we might call culture-war populists, people drawn to the president not because they’ve been seduced by the economic wonder of Peronism but because of his willingness to use state power against their cultural enemies. These are true postliberals, keen to expose and dismantle the “hidden hand” of the old establishment that’s supposedly causing all of the country’s problems. To them, “drain the swamp” means much more than just reducing the influence of lobbyists in Washington.
The wrinkle is that Trump no longer agrees with them about who and what “the swamp” consists of.
Three cultural hobby horses have consumed far-right media this year. One is the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the second is the murder of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and the third is Israel’s influence over the U.S. government. In all three cases, Trump is on the wrong side of the chud-o-sphere. He did everything he could to discourage the release of Epstein material; he hasn’t commented on the insane conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination being pushed by Candace Owens; and he remains a staunch ally of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu, to the dismay of the Carlson-Fuentes right.
He just doesn’t matter much anymore to the stuff culture-war populists are most interested in.
Things might be different if Democrats controlled at least one chamber in Congress, redirecting those populists back toward partisan warfare. Because the GOP has a trifecta in Washington, however, a stridently anti-establishment postliberal faction finds itself in the awkward position of being aligned with the establishment itself, with no “hidden hand” to rally against. The obsessions with Kirk’s murder and Israel are an obvious attempt to fill that void in the same way that QAnon was during Trump’s first term, giving a paranoid revolutionary faction something to revolt against at a moment when it’s not allowed to revolt against the government that the president leads.
“A movement based on entirely negative deliverables,” as Kevin put it, really needs an enemy to hold it together.
Absent one, go figure that the, ahem, intellectual energy among postliberals has shifted away from mindlessly defending Trump and his agenda and toward their disputes with each other, with predictably crankish results. “The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts,” right-wing activist Christopher Rufo warned recently. “If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.”
The audience has been the equivalent of a Third World click farm for years, but the fact that even someone like Rufo who dines out on it has begun to notice and worry is significant. Trump is no longer the chief preoccupation of many of the media barnacles who rode his ascendance to fame and fortune, leaving them free to let their freak flags fly—and now that they have, those flags are freaky enough to alarm even some of the other freaks. That too feels like a death twitch.
The future.
Miraculous recoveries have been known to happen when someone is nearing death, of course.
A blue wave next fall that hands Democrats a House majority for the last two years of Trump’s term might hit MAGA like a jolt from a defibrillator. At some point, Hakeem Jeffries’ caucus will move to impeach the president and the right will dutifully rally around its leader, no matter how impeachable his conduct might be. That could boost Trump’s gravitational pull the same way that being indicted did in 2023.
There’s also a chance that he’ll connive to run for a third term in 2028, although it’s less likely than it was six months ago. Between his declining health and declining public confidence in his economic know-how, it’s hard to imagine there’ll be much enthusiasm for Trump 3.0 outside of the most diehard cultish right-wing circles. But one never knows: There’s nothing that makes postliberals hotter under the collar than a show of strongman bravado aimed at some seemingly invulnerable law or norm. The right might rally behind the president less because they’re eager for four more years than for the sheer nihilistic transgressive thrill of flouting the Constitution.
But as I said earlier, if you had to bet, you’d bet that MAGA will grow less devoted to Trump as time wears on. He’s unlikely to reverse course on tariffs or to embrace any of the key conspiracies that have captured his fans’ imaginations, after all, so a political comeback will depend almost entirely on whether he lucks into an economic rebound. Even if he does, his health might be sketchy enough come next year that supporters will begin discouraging the “third term” talk anyway, fearing a replay of the Biden disaster if Trump persists in running in 2028 and then melts down a few months before the election.
Another way to consider the staying power of MAGA is this: What will the point of this presidency be over the next three years?
It feels strange to ask that question about an executive who’s consolidated power more aggressively than any predecessor since Franklin Roosevelt, but I do think his base might soon face a crisis of meaning. What will Trump supposedly be raring to do when he gets out of bed in the morning (or the afternoon, I should say) between now and 2028 that might reasonably cause postliberals to make their politics Trump-centric again?
The correct answer to any question about galvanizing the right is usually “immigration,” but immigration seems like a problem that’s both solved and unsolvable. The president’s biggest policy success since returning to office has been ending the ingress at the southern border, but now that that crisis has eased, the issue no longer enjoys the same salience. (Just check the results of special elections lately.) “This is the paradox of politics,” Peggy Noonan wrote recently. “Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal.”
It’s not the border that’ll preoccupy Trump’s immigration agenda for the rest of his term, it’s the task of meaningfully reducing the population of illegals who are already here. But that mission is, to some extent, impossible: ICE is still far below the quota of daily arrests that the White House has set for it, and the bad press it’s generating by focusing on nonviolent migrants has already begun to alienate some right-wing fellow travelers. If the president tries to rally his base by getting more aggressive with deportations over his final three years, his policy will almost certainly involve more brutality, more cases of mistaken identity, and do more economic damage as illegal workers leave the labor force en masse. And that will damage him politically on balance.
So immigration probably isn’t the key to a Trump political revival that ends the MAGA death twitches. And if that won’t do it, what will?
He remains keen to broker peace in Ukraine and beyond, but his base isn’t very interested in foreign policy, and insofar as they are, the president is going awfully easy on the one country his supporters have traditionally been eager to contain. Beyond that, he’s mostly focused on passion projects—building ballrooms, putting his name on federal agencies, demagoging Somali immigrants, making America white again, threatening dying cable news networks, accusing people who question his health of “sedition,” and of course sticking his thumb in as many pies as possible.
Every good Republican wants their president to get fabulously rich off of his office, to be sure, but that’s not much of a cause to sustain the next three years.
We’ll know in 11 months just how deadly these recent twitches are, I think. More spasms will happen between now and November—let’s see how many right-wingers conspicuously don’t share Trump’s fury if the Supreme Court strikes down his tariff authority, for instance—but it’ll take a midterm blowout to trigger full-on MAGA death convulsions. Even then, the patient might pull through: Some Republicans will treat the results as further proof that the party can’t win without Trump on the ballot and therefore rallying around the president as Democrats prepare to take the House gavel is essential.
But if you’ve spent the last decade praying for the right to decide that it’s time at last to move on from Trump, a midterm bloodbath next year a few months after he turns 80 is as close as you’ll get since January 6 to having your prayers answered. There will be lots of chatter in the aftermath about “Trump fatigue,” the future, and the impending 2028 cycle, and stakeholders ranging from Trump diehards to radical postliberals to traditional conservatives will all begin clustering to form their own centers of political gravity as the MAGA solar system pulls apart. Entropy always wins eventually.
