MAGA is a dead battery that can't run the GOP anymore

Attendees pray during AmericaFest, the first Turning Point USA summit since the death of Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 20, 2025. REUTERS

The nationwide sentiment that powered President Donald Trump’s cult-like MAGA movement is still there because Americans are still looking out for their own incomes and comfort, but the movement is a dry well for the GOP, say New York Times columnists Robert Siegel, E.J. Dionne Jr. and conservative Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney.

As indicated by their colossal midterm wallop, Republicans assumed Trump’s MAGA followers were also their followers. Apparently, they’re not, said Carney, and they never were.

“The Trump vote, the working-class white vote that Trump brought into the party, never became reliably conservative and Republican. These people weren’t made into Paul Ryan acolytes who love the idea of reforming Social Security. And frankly, they’re not the Ted Cruz vote from 2016,” Carney told Siegel and Dionne during the New York Times’ Saturday morning podcast.

Carney said analysts can reliably chart by county where people were more likely to go to church every week in the 2016 primaries — and these were the places voting for Sen. Ted Cruz, who could be the closest GOP alternative to the decaying Trump.

“[But] the places where you had the white evangelicals who don’t attend church, they were more likely to be the Trump voter. So, the less religiously observant, the less fiscally conservative — that was the Trump vote,” said Carney, “and the Republicans cannot rely on them now that Trump is leaving the stage.”

But, sadly for the GOP, Carney said the party has been selecting for loyalty to Trump, and tossing the less cultlike rejects. This means the party has not been selecting for more durable things like “conservatism or quality of candidate — and that also hurt the party.”

“So going forward, the Republicans, there’s no juice left to squeeze from MAGA. And if anybody tries to be a mini-MAGA — if JD Vance says, ‘I’m going to be the next Donald Trump’ — you can’t be the next Donald Trump,” Carney added.

Carney thanked God that Trump was one of a kind, and there was no other like him. However, this one-of-a-kind leader broke the GOP by blowing “up what existed before the consensus — the Reagan consensus that lasted for a while — but nothing has filled that space.”

And what’s tried to fill it is the bottom of the barrel, said Siegel, primarily because the party has been selecting for loyalty over intelligence or talent.

“I just want to underscore what you said about candidates. I was thinking, ‘boy, a lot of Senate Democrats who won Senate elections were lucky to have a terrible opponent,’” said Siegel. “And then it occurred to me: it’s not luck that you get Herschel Walker running for the Senate, only because loyalty and fame have been elevated to values that dwarf every other talent that a candidate might have.”

Carney said he has spoken to conservative Republican circles who want to, “get the old [genuine conservative] band back together,” but he warned that the idea of re-nominating somebody like Romney and riding him all the way to victory is “a perfidious pipe dream for conservatives” now in a populist political atmosphere.

“I think that MAGA is dead as such, because it was always rooted in a contradiction,” said Dionne, explaining that Trump paraded “his ties to very, very wealthy people,” as well as his “obsessions with things like the ballroom,” and the voters responded by “just walk[ing] away.”

“Now, does it mean that a strongly conservative wing of the Republican Party is gone? No,” added Dionne. “There’s always been that. The Tea Party, in many ways, gave birth to the MAGA movement. So, there will be a right wing of the Republican Party, but MAGA specifically defined by Donald Trump — and this odd contradiction of policies that often help the wealthiest people, but rhetoric that was directed to working people, usually using tariffs as his way in — I think that just will not work anymore.”

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