MAGA echo chamber fails to save Trump’s 'megalomania' bunker

Trump’s iron grip on his Republican Party remains unbroken, but some elements are starting to feel public fury at President Donald Trump’s $1 billion bunker, particularly as voters pay more at the pump and grocery stores.

“Republicans tell Punchbowl that the ballroom funding faces obstacles in the House, in part because it’s a tough vote for vulnerable House Republicans,” reports New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent. “As one put it: ‘A first-year poli-sci major would know not to ask members to take this vote, and we hope the speaker does too.’”

All of this, said Sargent, prompts questions about why Republicans in tough races are fearful about voting for the thing if the ballroom so politically toxic?

“In the wake of the shooting incident, pro-Trump and right-wing personalities pushing for the ballroom thought they’d struck propaganda gold,” said Sargent. “Many of them excitedly smeared Democrats who oppose the project as tacitly encouraging the assassination of Trump. At a meta level, the real MAGA game here was to get Democrats to equivocate in the face of MAGA rage, to bully them into genuflecting before Trump’s plan to build a Caesar-like monument to himself at the center of the nation’s capital — and by extension submit to his broader dictatorial project."

Sargent added that MAGA is asserting the power of fascist lies to remake political reality itself, but most Democrats appear to “grasp those stakes, continuing to vociferously oppose the ballroom even after the shooting incident.”

“They plowed right through MAGA’s fog of bullying propaganda and emerged on the other side unscathed. Result: The MAGA assault quickly dissipated and unceremoniously went poof. It’s a non-factor now — a big nothing," Sargent wrote.

The MAGA echo chamber is powerful and relentless, but Sargent said the enraging opulence of Trump’s gold filigree ballroom is driving public fury and sending it against a torn GOP. It’s also giving Democrats a very big cudgel with which to pound Republicans.

“In fact, the deeper subtexts of the ballroom tale — the corruption, the megalomania, the careless Gatsby-esque destructiveness, the Trumpian imperium — are surely a key reason it has broken through,” said Sargent. “It’s creating the type of meaningful moment in our politics that offers surprising political openings to the opposition.”