Even MAGA is mad about Trump team’s 'Marie Antoinette' moment: GOP insider

US President Donald Trump makes a toast during a state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House in Washington, D.C., US, September 24, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

On Monday, a prominent GOP insider declared that the Trump administration is having a “Marie Antoinette” moment as it pushes “tone-deaf” messaging that clashes with the economic pain felt by its voters. This is according to longtime conservative political commentator Charlie Sykes, who noted that even MAGA was put off by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino’s weekend post of an AI-generated video showing him along with Eric and Laura Trump popping bottles of champagne and celebrating as golden confetti rained from above.

“Marie Antoinette, who lost her head over this sort of thing, would have blushed,” writes Sykes. “Even right-wing influencers were gobsmacked by the crassness of the thing. ‘You really have no shame, do you?,’ Conservative activist Carrie Prejean Boller wrote. ‘Many Americans can’t afford groceries, gas or their mortgage payment, and you post a tone-deaf AI video of you and your buddies partying at the People’s House.’” Another self-proclaimed Trump voter account expressed similar sentiments, musing, “Wow... This is really going to resonate with everyday Americans. They are so out of touch. It’s astonishing.”

According to Sykes, this is part of a wider trend in which the Republican Party abandons all sense of “shame” and “virtue” under the influence of President Donald Trump. Sykes points to other examples, like Trump’s use of taxpayer dollars to pay for an “unhinged new MAGA ad,” a Trump loyalist-turned-ambassador to Greece boasting about the engineered collapse of another government and a MAGA lawmaker taking to the Senate floor to freak out over “furries.” All of this, argues Sykes, is part of the GOP’s abandonment of “morality” the framers of the Constitution asserted was at its core.

“Until recently,” writes Sykes, “it wasn’t a matter of partisan dispute that character mattered — and that it mattered a great deal. This is not to say that we were always a ‘Republic of Virtue,’ because our polity has been filled with knaves, fools and crooks. But, at least until recently, we embraced the pretense that things like honesty and decency mattered. There were guardrails that held the grifters accountable; there were consequences for corruption — legal, moral and political. Many of the scandals of the past now seem quaint, but at one time we took them very seriously. They were followed by disgrace, indictment, defeat, ostracism, shame and sometimes impeachment. But then the folks who thought that ‘Character Mattered’ changed their minds and their stripes. Cynicism is the handmaiden of corruption, because it insists that everyone and everything is corrupt; and therefore, appeals to character are hypocritical eyewash and mere pious posturing. Demands to support the ‘Lesser Evil’ and ‘Whataboutism’ crowded out arguments about character and virtue.”

Now, as the Trump administration and its allies “riot and exult in their grift, the Age of Shame feels like ancient history,” concludes Sykes. “The devolution culminated with Trump.”

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