Make America Great Again hat in support of Donald Trump at a rally at Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona. // Gage Skidmore
President Donald Trump did not create the spirit of “MAGA,” which is at the core of his Make America Great Again movement, but he did “recognize the sentiment, brand it, and give it a rallying cry,” according to an opinion piece in The Hill that suggests that when Trump is gone, MAGA will remain.
“The slogan didn’t invent a movement; it catalyzed one,” wrote Colin Kelly. “It pulled together a fragmented set of conservative circles and gave them a single banner. In that sense, MAGA didn’t emerge from Trump’s imagination — Trump emerged from the cultural terrain MAGA had already shaped.”
Trump’s MAGA slogan “suggested that electing Trump was the only path to restoration,” Kelly also wrote. “And it offered something more personal: supporting Trump would make you great again, too.”
He warned that because the MAGA movement has “intensified” without expanding its base of supporters, “our politics increasingly resembles a kind of rhetorical civil war.”
Kelly says that MAGA’s concerns — including the erosion of the traditional family, undocumented immigrants, the economic decline of rural America, and “the sense that Christian religious values are increasingly dismissed in public life” — are “real.”
He suggests engaging with the “most reasonable” GOP voters, whom he described as those “who may feel culturally displaced but are not committed to perpetual conflict.”
Kelly concluded by writing that acknowledging the concerns of these voters “does not require abandoning the pursuit of civil rights, justice, or equal participation in our system, but rather, it “simply means recognizing that a healthy democracy must be able to hold multiple priorities at once.”