Inside the bizarre motivations of MAGA’s anti-alcohol movement

When it comes to beverages, President Donald Trump is known for two things: (1) consuming huge amounts of Diet Coke, and (2) having a passionate aversion to alcohol — which, Trump has said in interviews, stems from his late brother Fred Trump Jr.'s battle with alcoholism. Fred Trump Jr., who died in 1981, was the father of psychologist Mary Trump — an outspoken critic of her uncle.

But Donald Trump isn't the only MAGA Republican who favors temperance. Others in the MAGA movement, from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, swore off alcohol as well.

Journalist David Infante examines the motivations of MAGA teetotalers in an article published by The New Republic on April 28.

"Since the Trump administration retook control over the federal public health establishment," Infante explains, "it has cleared the road of serious regulatory threats to the industry from liberal institutions. Paradoxically, this victory has coincided with a curious cultural loss for Big Booze. Like never before, the upper echelons of America's contemporary right wing — traditional allies in the fight against odious concepts like 'science' and 'society' — not just are abstaining from but are speaking out against alcohol. And it's not a problem lobbying can fix…. These broadsides against booze draw from some common principles: alcohol is unhealthy, decadent, unproductive, and, above all, not masculine."

Infante adds, "The strains of logic — and some of it is strained — have reinforced one another over time. Alcohol culture is 'woke,' alt-right influencer Mike Cernovich tweeted in 2023."

Infante looks back on the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s and the social conservatism that surrounded anti-alcohol views in the past.

According to University of California, Santa Barbara history professor Lisa Jacobson, "It's a strange view of masculinity…. Anti-Prohibitionists were very much about connecting alcohol to pluralism, to a kind of cosmopolitan secularism, to…. a new vision of sociability in which men and women drank together."

Jacobson said that during World War 2, the alcohol industry equated alcohol with "the values we are fighting to defend…. that separate us from the fascist enemy."