'Three circles of MAGA' that keep Trump going: analysis

Ahead of Election Day, The Atlantic's Adam Serwer has laid out his recent discovery of the "three circles of MAGA" that support Donald Trump's presidential aspirations.

"The innermost circle comprises the most loyal Trump allies, who wish to combine a traditional conservative agenda of gutting the welfare state and redistributing income upward while executing by force a radical social reengineering of America to resemble right-wing nostalgia of the 1950s," Serwer submits.

This circle, The Atlantic staff writer notes, includes "House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act," as well as "elite backers such as Elon Musk, who hopes to use his influence to inflict hardship on Americans by dramatically cutting the welfare state so that he can reduce his own tax burden."

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The second circle, Serwer writes, is a "slightly larger circle around this first one, comprising devoted Trump fans. These fans are the primary target for a sanitized version of the 'Great Replacement; theory, which holds that American elites have conspired to dispossess them of what they have in order to give it to unauthorized immigrants who do not belong."

Serwer notes that "many of these true believers would be unlikely to support the Project 2025 agenda—or at least not much of it—but here they are so isolated from mainstream news sources that they believe Trump’s claims that he has no ties to it, and that he has their best interests in mind because 'he cannot be bought' by the same elites they believe are responsible for their hardships."

The "outer circle," Serwer writes, includes "Americans with conservative beliefs who may be uneasy about Trump but whose identification with conservative principles and the Republican Party mean they wish to persuade themselves to vote for the Republican candidate."

He adds, "They do not believe everything Trump says; in fact, their approach to the man is dismissiveness. These are voters who fall into what my colleague David Graham calls the “believability gap.” They don’t like Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric but also don’t think he will follow through with it."

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Serwer's full article is available at this link subscription required).