The 'death of Trumpism' may be just around the corner: expert

“The Lamp” editor Matthew Walther writes in the New York Times that the seeds of MAGA’s breakup appear to be planted.

In 1935, English journalist George Dangerfield published a book-length obituary for the British Liberal Party, despite that party nabbing one of the greatest victories of all time only a few decades earlier. Dangerfield’s central argument holds true for the modern MAGA movement: Coalitions organized around symbolic enmities and ideological absolutes rather than shared material interests are prone to sudden collapse.

“Not long ago, the Make America Great Again movement was ostensibly a right-leaning response to neoliberalism. Its bugbears were free trade, immigration, postindustrial decline, institutional inertia and the cultural condescension of an elite managerial class,” said Walther. “… Former Tea Party voters, paleoconservatives, Christian culture warriors, foreign policy realists and a small but decisive number of disaffected Democrats in the Midwest: All could be part of MAGA because its enemies (the establishment, the swamp, the media, globalism) were external and vaguely defined.”

But that state of affairs was “always bound to be temporary,” said Walther. “A year into Mr. Trump’s second term in office, MAGA’s internal contradictions can no longer be ignored. The movement that had promised an end to foreign adventurism has found itself torn between an alliance of ideological noninterventionists and realists and a hawkish national security establishment. Trumpism promised a revival of domestic manufacturing, yet neither the president nor his advisers have decided whether this means tariffs, industrial policy, reviving organized labor, environmental deregulation or mere nostalgia. MAGA also promised immigration reform but has oscillated between showboating deportations and a deference to pro-visa allies in Big Tech and corporate agriculture. At the same time, American support for Israel has become a contested issue on the right for the first time in decades.”

Nothing can coalesce amid this kind of failure, and Walther said MAGA figureheads are similarly not delivering the goods.

“MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate,” said Walther, while adding that there is a “related problem.”

“The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune,” said Walther. “The disappearance of the informal gate-keeping function once performed by conservative luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr. is probably permanent. In the absence of such authority, informed argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering, self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.”

Meanwhile, slowly, almost imperceptibly, Walther said Trump “has begun to recede from the movement he created” and the Republican Party has been remade “in a looser, more chaotic approximation of his style,” but without the personal authority that “once held its factions together.”

“Whether we are about to witness a ‘strange death’ of Trumpism remains an open question. But Mr. Dangerfield was an astute pathologist, and the symptoms he cataloged nearly a century ago are now unmistakable. They may also prove terminal.”