Donald Trump on the campaign trail in Las Vegas, Nevada June 18, 2016. REUTERS/David Becker
President Donald Trump has split his MAGA base so fiercely, one conservative commentator is predicting long-term negative consequences for Trump’s Republican Party.
“There are parts of the Trump coalition they presumed, after 2024, would always be there,” Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and head of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, said in a post on the social media platform X on Wednesday. “But if you were going to build a set of programmatic actions that would break them off the Trump coalition — start a war with Iran, raise tariffs, and destroy a huge part of the farming and rural economy in this country — all of those things have started to add up into a political chemistry that is not going to disappear tomorrow.”
Referring to Trump’s ceasefire with Iran as a “brief TACO,” referring to the acronym “Trump Also Chickens Out,” Wilson added that Trump’s voters realize “it's not going to be Barron Trump who goes to war. In fact, the Lincoln Project put out an ad about this today. It's not going to be Barron Trump who goes to war — it's going to be their kids who go to war. It's going to be their kids who fight on some desert battlefield in Iran, if Donald Trump doesn't stop doing what he's doing.”
He added, “So I think there's a great dysfunction inside the MAGA world right now, where their reflexive support of Trump — which has really been inculcated in them over a decade — has finally been challenged with something they can't explain away. They can't spin it, even to themselves, because you can't go to the gas pump and say, 'Oh, the gas doesn't really cost five dollars — right now it's $1.89.' You can't say that to yourself, no matter how much of a supporter of the president you are.”
Despite Trump hoping to heal the cracks in his base, Wilson predicted that “it's going to drag out much longer. And it has already dragged out to a point where the electoral damage is scaring the hell out of a lot of Republican elected officials.”
In contrast with Wilson, The Bulwark’s conservative commentator Tim Miller argued that Trump will need to inflict “real pain” on his own base for them to turn on him.
“The best case scenario economically is where we're at now, which is real pain for people to experience,” Miller said. “I don't think that 90% of the MAGA folks are going to stay with them. I really don't. It's hard to tell in the polls right now because there's a lag.”
A little later Miller observed, “Yes, self-described MAGA folks, 90% of them are supportive of Iran, but that's just people who are self-described MAGA folks. I mean, how many people in those polls don't self-define as MAGA folks anymore because of what's happening? As we are sitting here, literally as we are sitting here, the Marquette University law poll, which is like the gold standard in Wisconsin, they put out a poll today. Trump's net approval rating is minus 14%. which is, ‘the lowest net approval figure for him in both of his terms as president.’ I mean, these numbers are, who knows? They're catastrophic.”
By contrast conservative columnist Jim Geraghty told The Washington Post that he does not believe anything in the realm of possibility will convince Trump voters to leave their president.
“I would argue it’s more of a pugnacious attitude with a handful of immovable north stars (immigration enforcement, tariffs, disregard for multilateralism) and every other policy decision negotiable — up to and including the federal government taking an ownership stake and some degree of control over private companies,” Geraghty wrote for The Washington Post last month. As proof, he pointed to an NBC News survey in which 100 percent of self-described “MAGA Republicans” say they still support Trump; a CBS News poll put the number at 92 percent.
“Back in January, Trump boasted, ‘MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too,’” Geraghty said. “Other than a few exceptions such as the release of the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein files, that has been the case.”