According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday, March 19, less than 10 percent of Americans favor using ground forces in President Donald Trump's war against Iran —which so far, has been an air offensive. Yet among Trump's hardcore MAGA base, Trump's Iran war still has plenty of supporters, according to polls. Although the Iran war has some high-profile MAGA opponents — from former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) to ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson to former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent — Trump still has his share of hardcore MAGA voters who trust his judgement.

According to a Politico poll, 81 percent of Trump voters who identify as MAGA "back strikes against Iran."

But in an article published on March 20, Politico's Erin Doherty wonders how much longer the "unwavering trust in the president" among MAGA diehards will last as the Iran war rages on.

According to Doherty, "there are signs" that "Trump's hold on them "could grow tenuous as he intensifies military action" in Iran.

"Trump voters are more split on backing the war if it results in more lives lost," Doherty explains. "The president has called the strikes a success, but America's increasing military build-up in the Middle East has spurred fears that the intervention will involve ground troops and result in a much longer conflict than expected. The war has drawn searing rebukes from prominent anti-interventionist voices within the MAGA movement, including Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, prompted the resignation of a Trump official earlier this week and fueled concerns over rising oil and gas prices ahead of a midterm election set to hinge on the economy…. And yet, Trump has retained deep loyalty from his supporters on one of the most consequential decisions of his second term."

Republican strategist Barrett Marson warns that the Iran war could hurt Trump with GOP voters if it drags on too long.

Marson told Politico, "The president has to be careful. If things turn just a little bad or if during the summer we are still entangled, those voices will not only get louder but there will be more of them. Trump needs to stick to his four to six weeks, which is fast approaching."

Another GOP strategist, Jeff Burton, told Politico, "MAGA is locked in for Trump. The bigger issue isn't about him or even Iran, it's that foreign conflicts expose a real fault line between more hawkish Republicans and a rising isolationist wing. That tension is only going to grow as 2028 gets closer, and it's going to be a defining challenge for whoever tries to take the MAGA mantle."

President Donald Trump's second administration, unlike his first, hasn't had a lot of turnover — as Trump has made a point of surrounding himself with ultra-MAGA loyalists this time. But a far-right MAGA Republican, Joe Kent, sent shockwaves through the administration when, on Tuesday, March 17, he expressed his disdain for the Iran war by abruptly announcing that he was leaving his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

In his resignation letter, Kent wrote, "I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby…. I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives."

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on March 18, journalist Andrew Egger stresses that the importance of Kent's resignation goes way beyond Kent himself — as it underscores a "revolt against the MAGA establishment." And much of the revolt, according to Egger is coming from younger American First Republicans.

"The more interesting point now is that (Kent) sees political promise in turning on Trump at all," Egger argues. "For a while, it's been clear that Trump — for all the chaos of his administration and for all his explosive hatred of the liberal establishment — now fully embodies a GOP establishment of his own. These days, your median empty-suit Republican congressman is more likely to make embracing Trump his entire personality than actual internet-poisoned true believers of the MAGA base are. Now, we're starting to see the corollary development: shades of MAGA countercultural revolt against that MAGA establishment."

Egger continues, "With a few exceptions — Tucker Carlson being the most obvious —you see this primarily among younger, smaller stars in Trumpworld. If you have a small right-wing following and you're looking to make it a big right-wing following, and most especially if that following is concentrated among young right-wing people, it's no longer the case that backing Trump to the hilt is the only move."

The Bulwark journalist notes that Carrie Prejean Boller, a MAGA influencer who Trump appointed to his Religious Liberty Commission, "tripled her social-media following after provoking Trump into firing her" by "demanding to know if other commissioners thought her anti-Israel positions made her an antisemite."

"There's no reason to believe that the MAGA base broadly opposes Trump's war in Iran; Trump's voters have always been more blandly fine with Trump's wars than the doves in MAGA media would like to believe," Egger adds. "But the anti-war and anti-Israel types, who are disproportionately young, have established a beachhead in the Republican coalition. Joe Kent won't be the last would-be right-wing star to flee Trump in a play for their support."

President Donald Trump “defends the Epstein class” and is taking the entire Republican Party down with him, warned a former Republican lawmaker and ex-staunch Trump supporter on Wednesday.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Wednesday slammed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Mark Levin, Laura Loomer and other Republicans for what she called “leading Republicans into the slaughter before the midterms.”

“I never changed,” declared former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on a social media post on the platform X. “Trump and the GOP betrayed their voters and took in the trash we threw out of the party.” Singling out supporters of the Iran war like influencer Laura Loomer, radio host Mark Levin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Greene said they “are the BEST political consultants the Democrat Party could ever imagine!!!”

Mentioning that Florida Democrats recently won a special election in a Republican district where Trump himself happens to live, Greene added that overall Democrats have flipped 12 state legislative seats in special elections throughout 2025 and 2026. When Greene resigned from Congress to protest Trump and what she claimed was his destruction of the Republican Party, she said that she would not “fight for Trump and the Republican Party that defends the Epstein class, wages pointless foreign wars, and pursues America LAST.”

Earlier this month Greene told CNN’s Pamela Brown that Trump had committed a “complete betrayal” of his MAGA base by going to war with Iran.

"It makes absolutely no sense, Pamela, going into midterm elections," Greene argued. "Let's remove Donald Trump out of it. Let's just put any president in there. Why would an American president lead his political party into the midterms, waging a full-scale major war, completely unprovoked on Iran, on behalf of Israel? And that's the way most Americans see it. They see this is for Israel, not for America."

Greene concluded: "Why would an American president do that, which is forcing gas prices to hike right here going into spring break, where families are going to be driving out of town, going into summer? Declaring and waging a major full-scale war that seems to have no end in sight. That is not de-escalating. It's escalating every single day. And it just doesn't make sense... I went to, I can't even tell you, countless rallies all over the country for President Trump, campaigning for him and Republicans, because we wanted to win. And we said on every single rally stage, no more foreign wars, no more regime change. It's time to put America first, and this is a complete betrayal of those campaign promises."

Greene is not the only MAGA Republican to claim Trump abandoned the values for which he stood during the 2024 election. In February Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told NOTUS that he too is loyal to the values Trump ran on in 2024 rather than what he has done since starting his second term.

“My constituents already know I’m ‘America First,’ I’m not for starting another war,” Massie argued. “I’m not for deficit spending. And I led the charge to expose a bunch of rich and powerful and politically connected men in the Epstein files. Those are the areas that I’ve differed with the president. So where I differed with the president, my constituents understand why I’ve differed with the president.”

Similarly, after Trump invaded Iran in March, right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan admitted that a lot of Trump supporters felt “betrayed” by his flip-flop on the issue of staying out of wars.

“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan argued. “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

President Donald Trump was not manipulated into the Iran war by Israel, a prominent columnist explained on Wednesday — but it will be difficult to avoid an upsurge in anti-Semitism because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did indeed play a critical role in persuading Trump.

“For those who suspect that Israel manipulated America into war, the resignation of Joe Kent, Donald Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, surely seems like confirmation,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote on Wednesday. Yet because Kent’s narrative “taps into old antisemitic tropes about occult Jewish control,” it is bound to become potent in American politics.

Of course, Trump’s own bungling of the war effort has not helped matters much.

“This conflict, whose timing and purpose Trump barely bothered to explain to the American people, was probably always going to increase anti-Jewish animosity among Americans, especially when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gloats that he’s ‘yearned’ for such a war for 40 years,” Goldberg wrote. “But the more it drags on, the more I worry about a full-blown American ‘dolchstoßlegende,’ a modern version of the stab-in-the-back myth that German nationalists used to blame Jews for their humiliation in World War I.”

Goldberg pointed out that this myth will be harder to dispel in the case of the Iran war because officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have bragged about working closely with Netanyahu to persuade Trump.

“Given Israel’s deep involvement in almost every aspect of this war, it takes care and subtlety — both in short supply in our politics — to tease out the difference between reality and conspiracy theory,” Goldberg wrote. Yet she said perhaps the key detail is that Trump was not uniquely influenced by Israel in terms of his warmongering. Trump was just as bellicose during his first term and always seems susceptible to persuasion by strong-willed people around him, not just when it comes to Israel and Iran.

“A major distortion in Kent’s letter is that it presents Trump as a naïve victim of the Israelis rather than an eager collaborator,” Goldberg wrote. “Trump has always been more hawkish than the isolationists in his orbit admit; he ordered more drone strikes in his first two years in office than Barack Obama launched in eight. It wasn’t Netanyahu who made Trump abduct the president of Venezuela, an operation that seems to have both whetted his appetite for foreign adventure and convinced him that war can be easy.”

She added, “This week he boasted that he can ‘take’ Cuba and ‘do anything I want with it.’ Long obsessed with military might and displays of masculine aggression, Trump was enamored of the idea that he could rid the world of the anti-American regimes that bedeviled his predecessors. He went to war in Iran for his ego, not for Israel.”

Nevertheless, Goldberg ominously warned that the anti-Semitism problem in the Republican Party will only get worse from here.

“Kent is slated to appear on [Tucker] Carlson’s show this evening, and then at a gala alongside Candace Owens, one of the most nakedly antisemitic figures in American public life, tomorrow,” Goldberg wrote. “We can expect him to tell them that based on his view from the heights of American power, they were right all along.”

Writing in a piece for The i Paper published Wednesday, U.S. commentator Simon Marks pointed out that the recent resignation of Joe Kent as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center reveals on a deeper level that Trump cannot continue to hold together his MAGA coalition.

"The White House must now regret expending significant political capital last year to drag his nomination across the finishing line," Marks wrote. "On Tuesday, Kent became the most senior figure in Trump’s inner circle to betray the President. In doing so, he spoke for the substantial number of core 'Make America Great Again' and 'America First' supporters who believe that by waging war alongside Israel against Iran, Trump has lost the plot, if not his mind."

Similarly acclaimed historian Timothy Snyder commented that Trump’s inability to hold together his MAGA base on the Iran war jeopardizes his seeming attempts to seize power illegitimately during the 2026 midterm elections.

“Kent never should have been the director of the national counterterrorism center” in the first place, Snyder observed, writing that “he had no qualifications for this position” and indeed had “anti-qualifications,” including his sympathies for Russia and overt hate for Jews. Yet he was chosen because of his staunch MAGA loyalty, and his resignation “signals a certain clash within the pro-Trump elite between people who are out and out antisemites and people who are so-called Christian Zionists.” While the former simply hate Jews and Israel, treating the two as interchangeable, Christian Zionists “think that a war in the Middle East might be a good thing” because it could usher in a Biblical apocalypse.

“If Mr. Trump is going to succeed in breaking the November election in order to stay in power, he’ll have to have around him a tight, cohesive elite that really sincerely believes – for whatever set of bad reasons – that it’s worth sacrificing the republic for this person,” Snyder argued. The schism over the Iran war will make it harder to do.

In 2024, voters who favored Donald Trump over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris ranged from his hardcore MAGA base to independents and swing voters who were frustrated with then-President Joe Biden over inflation and decided to give Trump a chance. Now, many polls are showing that independents are still frustrated — only now, they're frustrated with Trump — while most MAGA voters continue to support Trump. But according to The Guardian's Eduardo Porter, even some MAGA voters are feeling "angst" and losing patience.

"The political consequences of Donald Trump's policy mayhem are now coming into view: 'MAGA' America is getting pissed," Porter explains in The Guardian. "It has been a sight to see how every one of the president's policy initiatives has sabotaged some core constituency or other. From farmers and rural Americans to manufacturing workers and every American struggling to make ends meet, Trump has torched pretty much his entire political base. For all his efforts to rig the midterm elections in his favor, it's as if he is daring the 'MAGA' faithful to drop him."

Most of the "MAGA faithful," according to Porter, haven't abandoned Trump yet. But discontent is growing among MAGA voters, and that discontent, the journalist notes, is evident in a new Harris Poll survey conducted for The Guardian.

"About 56 percent of respondents who identified as members of the MAGA coalition said they were either having trouble meeting their debt payments or worried they would be struggling soon," Porter observes. "The same share admitted similar troubles meeting housing payments. 57 percent said the same about affording healthcare costs. 58 percent claimed the same about their utility bills, 61 percent about affording groceries, 63 percent about paying for gas. Many of these stressors stem from Trump's policy preferences."

Porter adds, "Trump's decision to end government subsidies is largely at fault for the rising cost of health insurance. The rise in energy costs and rebound of inflation since March are direct consequences of Iran's throttling of the Strait of Hormuz."

Nonetheless, Porter points out that Trump still enjoys more support than opposition among MAGA voters.

"MAGA voters have not abandoned the president," Porter observes. "By recent counts, 62 percent of rank-and-file Republicans identify as MAGA, up from only 38 percent in September of 2022. 57 percent of them trust that the government considers the affordability crisis a top priority. And 69 percent believe the government is capable of fixing it. Still, misgivings are creeping in: just over a third of MAGA faithful think the government has made it worse."

Porter continues, "Beyond the growing angst among Trump's most loyal followers, what should most worry the president is the brewing discontent outside the borders of his base — which is still a minority of the overall electorate. If MAGA Republicans are finding themselves at odds with their leader, other voters — including many Republicans — have an even more jaundiced view of his endeavors."

President Donald Trump’s “harebrained” approach to the American armed forces is in the process of destroying the military, an Army veteran explained on a conservative website on Thursday.

“You know, you get somebody like Secretary Hegseth in charge of the Department of Defense, and that's what you get,” Margaret Donovan, a lawyer and Army JAG veteran, told The Bulwark’s William Kristol on Thursday. Donovan was describing how the military in Iran killed 120 schoolgirls during a botched bombing. “You get this harebrained operation, and the very first strike, something that, nearly every former military lawyer, probably current military lawyers, if they could speak freely would consider a war crime, or otherwise unauthorized under the law of armed conflict. You have that, and lest you thought that was a fluke, that sort of rushing into an operation ill-prepared and not fully thought out in terms of your legal basis. We have February 28th, and so that's the opening of the Iran War.”

Donovan later elaborated on how Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has blatantly politicized the military at Trump’s behest. Among other things, she said it is eroding the military’s revered meritocracy by rewarding soldiers based on their political preferences.

“It is completely unusual for the Secretary of Defense to go by name down a list of potential promotions and decide I'm just going to pick a few people that maybe he read about on his X feed or God knows what else, and pull them off,” Donovan told Kristol. “It undermines the entire system that the military is built on, which is that you are promoted based on merit, based on your experience, and based on your capabilities. And not because, who knows what's informing Secretary Hegseth’s men and most of the rest of the cabinet, it's whatever they see on their ex-feed that day.”

She concluded, “So it is very disruptive, I think, all the way down the line, because particularly when you see these officers that people owe their lives to, excuse me, quite literally, who have been to combat with these men and women, and seeing them get sort of picked off because the strong implication is that the secretary has deemed them politically dislikable. And there's just virtually no evidence of that in their military careers. It's extremely disruptive.”

When Kristol asked Donovan about the broader impact on the military, Donovan said that she is “extremely” worried.

“I'm as worried as any other military veteran who's looking at this and is just kind of horrified by what is going on and hoping that everybody that is still in uniform is holding the line,” Donovan explained. “And standing up for the principles and remembering the oath they took, whether they were an officer or enlisted.”

She added, “I mean, the other troubling piece to that, and I know we don't have to go into detail about this now, but I worry about the promotions. I also worry about the military justice. When I wasn't overseas doing strike cell stuff, I was a military prosecutor back in the United States when I was domestic. You know, what I have seen especially with the sort of aviation misconduct over the past couple months, is if you are doing something that is deemed MAGA, or you are doing a flyover past Kid Rock's house, then you're fine. You're not going to get in trouble, and there's no military discipline for you. But there's a different standard for everybody else.”

In a separate report in July, The Daily Mail reported that the military is so politicized that top officials, including Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, are accused of not relaying troops’ observations to the president.

“Two MAGA-connected Republican lawmakers, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, have shared their concerns about Trump's military leaders,” the Mail reported.

Also in July, macroeconomist Dean Baker deduced that the military’s request for $1.5 trillion to prosecute the Iran war will cost every household an average of $4,600 each. In February Joseph Bosco, who served for President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, warned that the military is losing its greatness under Trump. For him, it was how Trump’s transactional attitude toward foreign policy has led to betrayals of longtime allies like Ukraine and Taiwan.

“History will brand the U.S. failure to ensure Ukraine’s victory and prevent Taiwan’s fall as the time when America fell from greatness and her ‘cunning’ but miscalculating enemies plunged the world into a new global conflict,” Bosco wrote in The Hill.

President Donald Trump is in a kind of last stand where a failure to convince his MAGA base to vote for Republicans will likely push him to become more volatile, according to The iPaper's Jessie Williams.

In a Friday column, Williams explained that Trump's aggressive behavior will grow worse in the last two years of his administration regardless of the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections.

"Increased instability and growing divides in American politics are probable, analysts have said. Trump could intensify restrictive immigration policies, issue controversial pardons and even escalate military action to try to oust regimes in Iran and Cuba that have so far denied him quick foreign policy victories," Williams wrote.

He also warned that Trump could challenge election rules and use talk of an unconstitutional third term to dominate the 2028 succession fight.

“[Trump] is someone who increasingly is showing signs of completely being unfettered in the way in which he approaches politics, life, business, corruption — a whole variety of different things,” Professor David Dunn, at the University of Birmingham, told Williams.

While Democrats are expected to take back the House in November, the Senate is up in the air.

There is a concern that Trump is already laying the groundwork to meddle in the elections and that his Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act is part of that. After the legislation didn't pass, Trump crafted his own version through an executive order. It is being fought in court and isn't expected to survive. Still, Trump is trying to use his authority over the U.S. Post Office to restrict mail-in voting and even threatened to withdraw federal funding from states that refuse to cooperate with his demands.

If Democrats continue to win in 2028, Trump could escalate more in his final months with another Jan. 6-style event.

The disruption “may even take the form of him instructing people in Congress not even to sit, not to accept the result. You may have a constitutional crisis,” Dunn cautioned.

Dunn also thinks that due to some of the redistricting battles and Trump's involvement in GOP primaries, what's left of moderate Republicans will likely be replaced by Trump loyalists. It applies to many states, but especially in Texas races.

"But it means actually both houses of Congress after the midterm elections will be the most pure MAGA Congress in terms of the Republican element of it that we’ve ever had," said Dunn.

It means less opposition to Trump's demands.

“So what we should expect in the post-midterm period is an intensification of the divisions and the strife at the heart of American politics,” Dunn added.

It's the same thing that former Trump administration official Miles Taylor fears will happen in the final two Trump years. He wrote earlier this week that "the worst is yet to come."

A prominent Republican influencer, who frequently supports President Donald Trump, used his podcast and X on Wednesday to argue that the GOP leader risks alienating his base by appearing “impotent.”

Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator who went from opposing Trump in 2016 to endorsing him in both 2020 and 2024, talked on his podcast about how voters perceive Trump as failing to help them with their economic problems or winning the Iran war he chose to wage. The pundit even questioned whether Trump’s struggles in Iran are due to a munitions shortage, and added that even Trump’s attempts to prosecute his perceived political enemies have overwhelmingly fallen short.

“When you keep claiming you can do stuff that you really can't do, you eventually instill in your base that you're impotent, and they'll seek out someone else,” Erickson warned on X.

Erickson is not the first commentator to use the term “impotent” to describe Trump’s current term. In June Nick Catoggio from the conservative publication The Dispatch used Trump’s failure to renovate the Reflecting Pool as a symbol of his perceived impotence.

“Between the war on algae and the war abroad, Trump has never looked more pitifully impotent than he does right now,” Catoggio argued. “The perfect metaphor for his first year back in office came when, without warning, he demolished the East Wing to make way for his precious ballroom. That episode captured the political zeitgeist of 2025: Americans had elected a caudillo who cared not a bit about the country’s civic traditions and would bulldoze them—literally—to get what he wanted, whether the other branches liked it or not.”

He added, “The reflecting-pool idiocy is the perfect metaphor for his presidency in 2026, coinciding as it does with our national humiliation in Iran. Postliberalism promises effective problem-solving through energetic authoritarianism, but as things stand, not only can’t the authoritarian in chief forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, he can’t even successfully clean a public pool in D.C. The zeitgeist has flipped.”

In 2025 Editorial Board editor John Stoehr similarly argued that the president has displayed his impotence, on that occasion by failing to quell ongoing accusations that he sexually assaulted underage girls with his longtime friend, the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

“As far as MAGA is concerned, every question about the Epstein scandal is downstream from the fact that Trump didn’t use the power he was given to do what he was supposed to do,” Stoehr wrote. “Even if Trump manages to paper over the scandal – by getting convicted child-sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to say nice things about him, for instance – he still can’t explain his impotence. Indeed, the more he papers it over, the more he deepens the appearance among his own people that he’s weak.”

Also in 2025, conservative commentator Joe Perticone from The Bulwark said that Trump’s control over the House of Representatives had rendered House Speaker Mike Johnson into someone politically impotent.

“Mike Johnson’s speakership is somewhat different from all these,” Perticone opined. “His overriding project has been to cede whatever power and decision-making he can to the White House, and this has, in turn, given shape to an unusual legacy, one defined by impotence.”

He continued, “In recent months there has been a strange spirit of bipartisanship among frustrated House members, who have relied on the previously rare tactic of discharge petitions to circumvent Johnson. The latest such bill directly pushes back on the Donald Trump administration in a policy area the MAGA movement finds particularly divisive: aid to Ukraine.”

With the 2026 midterms only four and one-half months away, President Donald Trump continues to suffer from low approval ratings in poll after poll — including an American Research Group poll that was conducted June 16-20 and found his overall approval at only 30 percent. Trump's MAGA brand, according to Salon's Chauncey DeVega, is collapsing — which, he warns, makes the president more dangerous, not less.

"Trump stores are closing across the country," DeVega explains in Salon. "In Philadelphia and Crystal Lake, Illinois, shops that sell MAGA merchandise are shutting down due to a lack of interest. The Trump Truth Store + Hangout in Crystal Lake has only been open for several months. But in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, the owner explained the difficult decision she made to temporarily close the location, saying that President Trump's war against Iran was the immediate cause of the collapse in business…. The closure of these stores points to an undeniable fact: Donald Trump is deeply unpopular."

DeVega continues, "His precipitous decline in the polls — which show key parts of his base, including white working-class voters, fragmenting — is much deeper than a single issue such as the economy or Iran. A growing number of Americans are rejecting what Trump and MAGA — a development that is a much greater political problem than winning the day or week of the election cycle."

In the past, DeVega observes, MAGA was "one of the most successful brands in American history."

"A successful brand creates a deep emotional connection between the consumer and the product," according to the Salon journalist. "To that point, modern branding is less about the function of the product, and more about identity and the self. This is especially true in the era of social media, hyper-individualization, personal branding and micro celebrity. As a brand, MAGA achieved rare semiotic unity…. Eleven years after its launch in 2015, that brand is in crisis."

But Trump, DeVega warns, will not quietly fade away as his brand continues to tank in popularity.

"In politics, a damaged brand is often an increasingly desperate and reckless one," according to DeVega. "This makes Trump and MAGA more dangerous — not less. In an attempt to recapture the earlier energy of the MAGA movement, when Trump's transgressive nature, norm-breaking and personal insults were still shocking — and grossly titillating for his MAGA followers and others attracted to his banner — he is testing new slogans on his Truth Social platform.... But I am now increasingly certain that most supporters of this version of Trumpism and MAGA will pretend they were not associated with it. Toxic brands have few defenders."