Two reasons why MAGA is dead without Trump

As long as there was a Democrat in the White House, the rightwing media complex, which is global in scale, had something solid to push up against, allowing internal divisions to fade into the background.

Now that Joe Biden is gone, however, and now that his successor is slipping further into incompetence and incoherence, the maga media unity that vaulted Donald Trump to power seems to be coming apart.

The cracks looked especially apparent during the last gathering of Turning Point USA, the hate group co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

Ben Shapiro accused Tucker Carlson of befriending antisemites, like Nick Fuentes. Candace Owens had implied that Israel assassinated Kirk. JD Vance called for unity, saying that “in the United States of America, you don't have to apologize for being white anymore." (To be clear, not one American has been forced to apologize for being white.)

Such fractures, however, were always evident, according to political historian Claire Potter, publisher of Political Junkie. “There has always been a broad streak of antisemitism in the maga movement and, at the same time, strong support for Israel among rightwing Christians like Mike Huckabee and Jewish media figures like Ben Shapiro,” she said.

Claire told me that this combination has meant the maga coalition was inherently unstable from the start. Kirk’s murder didn’t reveal cracks so much as “create a new focus for antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

If it’s true that rightwing media personalities are cannibalizing themselves, what does that say about the future of maga? Can it outlive Trump? Is JD Vance the heir apparent? Will the GOP quit pretending to believe in equality and openly embrace fascism?

In this first of a two-part interview, Claire explains that the GOP will probably evolve into something that echoes maga without actually being maga. As for the vice president, however, there is no future.

“He has real deficits, in the sense that he is interracially married, he has no charisma or stage presence, and he projects very little authority,” Claire said. “Also, frankly, he just isn’t mean enough.”

The murder of demagogue Charlie Kirk appears to have divided maga media personalities. Do you think it's an opportunity for Donald Trump's opponents or is it just squabbling among siblings?

I would start by pointing out that these siblings were always an uneasy coalition. There has always been a broad streak of antisemitism in the maga movement and, at the same time, strong support for Israel among rightwing Christians like Mike Huckabee and Jewish media figures like Ben Shapiro. Recall, for example, that Candace Owens has always trafficked in antisemitic conspiracies, and that hostilities came to a head in 2024, as she and Shapiro clashed over the October 7 attacks on Israel launched from Gaza.

That resulted in Owens being fired by Shapiro’s Daily Wire, but it long predated Trump’s return to the White House or Charlie Kirk’s death. What Kirk’s murder did was create a new focus for antisemitic conspiracy theories: Owens, Milo Yiannopoulos, and others have floated false theories about Israel’s involvement with Kirk’s death, for example, while Tucker Carlson and groyper Nick Fuentes (who any number of people thought might really have been involved with the assassination) jumped into that space for their own clicks.

And now, the president of the Heritage Foundation’s support for Carlson – and refusal to condemn Fuentes – has sent prominent conservatives running off to Mike Pence’s project. So, while Kirk’s murder may have been the tipping point, these fractures were there already.

I also think that Charlie Kirk was probably more broadly liked in retrospect than he was during his lifetime. I knew several maga influencers who saw him as an opportunist, someone who was suddenly sucking down millions in donations that had previously gone elsewhere. Once the narrative of Saint Charlie was established however, you didn’t hear those criticisms.

What will be interesting to see is whether Erika Kirk’s power play in expanding the organization’s presence, particularly in Texas and Florida high schools, creates a possibility for a maga future without Trump, QAnon, and the fringier elements of the coalition — something more corporate, along the lines of the Campus Crusade for Christ or Young Americans for Freedom.

Vice President JD Vance seems to be positioning himself for a post-Trump future as heir to the maga movement. Is there a maga movement without Trump and if so, does Vance have the juice?

No, JD Vance will not be the next president. He has real deficits, in the sense that he is interracially married, he has no charisma or stage presence, and he projects very little authority. Also, frankly, he just isn’t mean enough. He tries to be mean on X, but just ends up sounding like a cluck, whereas Trump’s cruel and incoherent ravings have a kind of weird charm for the maga faithful.

I also think Vance is a terrible campaigner and a mediocre fundraiser, and working for Trump will not have made him more than marginally better at these things. He barely won the primary for his Senate seat, and only because Trump jumped in and pushed him over the top and Peter Thiel gave him millions of dollars.

But I don’t think there is a maga movement without Trump. It will be something else, something that bears a relationship to it, much as many of the rightwing or explicitly fascist parties in Europe have evolved out of the fascisms of the interwar period, coyly gesture to that history but also disown it. AfP, for example, bears a strong resemblance to Nazism, but of course, since Nazism is illegal in Germany, it has to gesture at it rather than be explicit about its genealogy. Georgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, was steeped in Italian postwar fascism. She is a fascist and she governs as a fascist, even though her party is euphemistically called the Brothers of Italy.

There’s another problem. Like all fascisms, maga is a nostalgic movement, imagining a nation that strayed from an “original” America that was white, virtuous and Christian. This produces two problems. One is the profound unease many magas have with the fact that JD Vance is married to a brown daughter of immigrants and that he has mixed-race children. The many photos of Vance embracing Erika Kirk, who I think is going to have real problems hanging on to the very male-centered TPUSA, have anointed her as a potential “office wife.”

But the second problem is that Trump’s nostalgia, when translated into economic policies, is driving the nation into debt at an accelerated pace, at the same time as he is cutting as many Americans loose from the social safety net as he can. This is going to drive the United States into a social crisis that the Republican Party will not survive in its current form. It’s why we see so many GOP office holders streaming for the exits. It’s not just the 2026 midterms: it’s that they understand that there is no Vance presidency in 2028 — nor a Rubio, DeSantis or Abbott presidency.

The rightwing media complex is vast and powerful. And it's getting bigger. Can you imagine a future in which Republicans shed all pretense to equality and outwardly embrace bigotry?

I think those tendencies were there from the beginning. Part of what is so startling about the maga movement is the reemergence of a variety of bigoted, authoritarian tendencies in American politics that for the first half of the 20th century expressed themselves in the Democratic Party as the Klan, the Anti-Immigration League and White Citizens Councils, and in the Republican Party as America First, McCarthyism, and conservative Catholicism. All of these tendencies had fused in the New Right by the 1970s — a movement that looks shockingly tolerant from our perspective, but it really wasn’t. It was just more polite. And those tendencies survived, not just in politics, but among ordinary Americans. People don’t start hanging Confederate flags in their 60s.

But it wasn’t until rightwing media — whether Fox or YouTube or major publishing houses marketing rightwing books — that these views go mainstream. Remember that the Tea Party was born, not just as a racist reaction to Obama that was willing to express itself in explicitly racist language, but as a movement designed to take over the GOP. Tea Partiers weren’t fringe — they understood themselves as “real” Americans, as opposed to the guy with the funny name born in Hawaii.

And that’s where the idea that America has been usurped really goes mainstream on the right. If you look at Ann Coulter’s 2015 book, ¡Adios, America! The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, it’s all there. And remember that she breaks with Trump because he didn’t carry out the deportation agenda he promised, didn’t build the wall, didn’t eliminate birthright citizenship. If you listen to Coulter today, she says: “This is the President I voted for.”