What Comes After Trump?
Something I’ve been thinking about the last couple of days – what happens to MAGA post-Trump? When we look at the rough history of the MAGA movement, it begins, in general terms, with Sarah Palin’s vice presidential nomination.
At the time, the young governor was almost unknown outside of Alaska, but she offered some positives to a flagging McCain campaign: she was young, female, charismatic, and folksy. While Palin had little to no command of basic facts about American governance or history, she had no trouble taking on the traditional VP “attack dog” role. She accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” She lied frequently and without compunction about “death panels,” about her record, about Obama, about pretty much anything. The McCain staffer who led the push for her selection once ruefully called her a “serial liar.”
Whether Palin believed her own lies or not is irrelevant. What matters is that she recognized that the modern political audience does not care about truth so much as they care that the views presented comport with what they believe the truth to be, or what they wish it to be.
Palin was among the first national candidates to make wide use of Facebook, which gave her an unfiltered platform to say whatever she wanted without niggling fact checkers wagging their fingers at her every misstatement, half-truth, and lie. The base ate Palin up, propelling her to heights of popularity that, at times, overshadowed the senator on whose ticket she was running.
When McCain lost, Palin’s “Mama Grizzlies” transferred their energy to the burgeoning Tea Party movement, a supposedly “grass roots” campaign to stop the new president’s healthcare plan. The Tea Party was always a loosely aligned, shambolic movement funded by deep-pocketed reactionaries like David Koch; the group’s highwater mark occurred when Tea Party candidates rode popular discontent to massive victories in the 2010 midterm elections, which Obama famously described as a “shellacking.”
As the Obama presidency found its footing, the Tea Party movement ebbed, and by 2016, it had found a new champion in Donald Trump. It was Trump who took the Palin sonic amplifier and turned it up to 11. Flanked by liars and the greasiest of political operatives, Trump refashioned the old Tea Party into MAGA, packaging old-timey white resentment into a pugilistic, unapologetically crass political movement best described by the Trumpies themselves as “Fuck your feelings.”
Trump has led the MAGA movement through three elections and innumerable scandals. But his criminal conviction last week has presented the movement with a fresh challenge. How does the “law and order” presidency of Donald Trump reconcile the fact that its champion is now a convicted felon?
Of course, the Trump playbook is to dismiss the entire case as “rigged,” which the true believers will take on faith, but I’m starting to think “the world is out to get me” act is growing stale. Do most Americans truly believe that the entire judicial system has been arrayed against Donald Trump, along with the electoral system, the military, academia, and the intelligence services? Is there really a shadowy Deep State cabal pulling the strings against Donald John Trump? Or does Occam’s Razor apply even to Trump? In this case, the simplest explanation for his myriad troubles is that the serial sexual assailant who surrounds himself with liars, grifters, and crooks is, in fact a crook himself.
While the Republican base continues to support their man, it’s hard to imagine that there aren’t many in the MAGA movement already casting their eyes towards the next Great White Hope. Trump is 77, a felon, and deeply unpopular among a majority of the country. Even so, he retains a realistic chance of regaining the White House. Imagine if the MAGA movement could harness the Trump energy minus the Trump problems.
From its inception, MAGA adherents always recognized their candidate as a flawed human being, but they embraced him because he Sarah Palin’d them; he lied and lied and they loved the lies because the lies told a story about themselves that they wanted to believe: the nation is being overrun by immigrants, crime is out of control, American carnage, and all the rest of it.
There was some truth in his lies, of course, because the best liars always convey some truth. His overall message – that the system is rigged against ordinary white Americans, particularly men – has some truth. The world has changed in profound ways that have impacted the white middle and working class. Greater cultural liberalization really has shaken white men from their roost. The nation really is becoming more secular, which is of no import to Trump himself, but gave him an entry into the vast white evangelical Christian population.
Left unsaid in Trump’s rants is the deeper truth, that it’s plutocrats like Trump and his cronies who have run the nation’s working class into the ground. It’s the oligarchs who are making life more difficult for the bottom 90% of American wage earners, not the immigrants. But the story Trump told, of radical leftists, drug mules, and fiendish dark-skinned foreigners is a lot easier to digest than the less palatable truth.
Win or lose this November, Trump’s days as a political figure are waning. He’s almost eighty, a convicted felon, and clearly not as mentally agile as he once was. Rather than turn their backs on him, the Republicans are pressing his flesh ever closer to theirs, setting up a scenario in which Trump eventually bequeaths the MAGA movement to somebody younger, haler, and with all the prerequisite sociopathy.
From the inception of MAGA and its sister cult, Q*Anon, flinty-eyed Republicans have been fantasizing about a Trump-like candidate who doesn’t have his baggage. Such a candidate will be hard to find, since sociopathy by its nature creates baggage. At first, we saw MAGA acolytes trying to ape Trump’s style. Remember Marco Rubio at an early presidential debate insinuating that Trump has a small dick. DeSantis tried it in Florida but couldn’t take his game national. Vivek Ramaswamy is the polished turd version of Trump, the too-slick-by-half motormouth candidate so off-putting that he managed to alienate every single one of his rivals. Nobody’s new MAGA act has taken root to date, but somebody’s going to crack the code.
Because the thing about the Lunatic Right is that its power is growing, not shrinking. Since the days of the Tea Party, they’ve lost many more races than it has won, but, in losing, they have remade half of the American electorate in their image. It already controls the Republican party, the Supreme Court, and several cable news outlets. The ascendancy of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and the rest of the MAGA Circus Caucus is proof positive that MAGA isn’t going anywhere. Over on the Senate side, the atmosphere is more staid but you’ve still got sycophants like Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and Ron Johnson scrambling to fill Donald’s oversized clown shoes.
Somebody, almost certainly a man, probably from the South or Southwest, is going to figure out the next iteration of lunatic American conservatism. That person will lie with a smile on his face, he will attack the media, he will ingratiate himself with the Christian right, he’ll promise to “get tough” on crime and immigrants with a smile on his face and a knife behind his back. He’ll almost certainly win.
I must believe, in my heart of hearts, that somewhere in the nation are good and decent young men and women who will defy the current political models and actually try to help make things better and unite and not divide us. If MLK Jr could have a dream, so can I.
So well written, Michael. This is all a bit terrifying, thinking of which maniac will come next and take the reigns from the odorous felon.