Trump's Fall and the End of MAGA

Populism is dead, long live Nationalism.

Populism died, Trump killed it.

“They don’t know what the fuck they are doing,” President Trump gasped in frustration last month in reaction to the melee combusting between Israel and Iran, a proximity mine he detonated. The region, maybe the world, has been plunged into war by yet another weak-kneed president shamefully subservient to the rogue state of Israel.

Ironically, ending overseas wars was one leg of the MAGA triad that elected the Donald twice: stop forever wars, close open borders and deport illegals, and rebuild a deindustrialized economy. For long abandoned white Americans who rallied to Trump to take their country back after half a century of subversion and betrayal, the MAGA marketing gimmick is over. The tumultuous decade since Donald Trump descended the escalator inside Trump tower to shake up the national conversation, MAGA as a political movement has utterly collapsed. What comes next?

MAGA as a political movement has utterly collapsed. What comes next?

The Trump phenomenon is but another tempestuous act in the theatrical drama of American populism. Wave upon wave of populism has struck the political landscape since The Greatest Comeback propelled Richard Nixon into the White House in ‘68. Back then, as George Packer tells it, Nixon harnessed:

“a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.

George Packer, “The Fall of Conservatism“

The United States was just at the beginning of the Age of Pluralism, a revolution “imposed from above” by a Zionist intellectualism that insinuated itself slowly, like a tiny tumor whose malignancy spread irreversibly through the sinews of power. The sturm und drang that swept Nixon into power was supposed to arrest the Sixties cultural revolution; it did not.

Populist waves ebb and flow but inevitably fail to reverse America’s self-destructive course. Nixon eventually ended the Vietnam War, opened up China, and established détente with the Soviets but he also expanded Great Society programs, illegally bombed Laos and Cambodia, and suspended the Gold standard. Ronald Reagan - the Boomer savior - is credited with ending the Cold War, America’s military buildup, and spear heading economic recovery after 1982’s brutal recession. Predictably, Reagan also waged forever wars, financialized the US economy, blew up DC deficits (Grace Commission was DOGE before DOGE), and notoriously granted amnesty to millions of illegals, paving the way for tens of millions more to come. Then came populists like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, both attacked Rs and Ds for betraying average (white) Americans, both railed against NAFTA, both fell short.

The Tea Party was the only organic, scalable baby boomer push back against pluralism ever mounted, and a toothless one it was.

The Tea Party was the next populist movement to disappoint. Sparked by backdoored Wall Street bailouts and the election of Barack Obama who lost the white vote twice but won the presidency anyway, Boomers took to the streets. Fox News personality Glenn Beck among others fanned the flames and a new movement was born. The Tea Party staged massive rallies across the US, created local chapters, and swept Congressional elections in 2010, ousting a cohort of so-called RINOs. However, one election cycle later the Tea Party fizzled, fiscal hawks were silenced, and the DC landscape was completely unaltered. The Tea Party was the only organic, scalable baby boomer push back against pluralism ever mounted, and a toothless one it was.

A Tragic American Hero?

Things seemed to change spectacularly when Donald Trump arrived on the scene in 2015. In his gruff demeanor and incoherent outbursts he channeled the festering rage inside a vengeful electorate. His flaws: ill-preparedness, brash hyperbole, and supersized ego made him stronger because they flustered the corporate media and political gatekeepers unable to tame him. Trump flagrantly broke taboos and by doing so gave a brow beaten electorate permission to say what they really thought, publicly and at the ballot box. Unfortunately, as cathartic as it was to champion a man who spoke the truth, however erratically, Trump was never more than a carnival barker. Perhaps that is because Americans were just not ready for the real thing, yet.

Trump’s flaws are distinctly American ones.

Trump’s flaws are distinctly American ones. There was virtually no chance Donald Trump could salvage a Republic so completely bastardized it has no sense of itself. Ask average Americans the question Samuel Huntington posed before he died: Who Are We? and you’ll hear all manner of vague abstractions about constitutional principles, “a nation of immigrants”, or libertarian appeals to “sovereign individuals,” as if we were still living in the bucolic 18th century among Crèvecoeur’s virtuous farmers. Worse, most Americans, like Donald Trump, know very little about US history, culture or national identity. Some of that is deliberate, the result of re-education via propaganda, most of it is apathy and disinterest from benumbed consumers.

Most Americans could care less about immaterial things like identity and history because it has become so absent from everyday experience. Americans also tend to be forward looking rather than reflective, and so is Trump. Donald Trump promised to build a wall that Mexico would pay for in 2015, the first of an ever expanding list of ridiculous lies masquerading as policy promises only a country suffering cultural PTSD would believe. Donald Trump promised to end the occupation in Afghanistan, withdraw troops from Syria, prosecute Hilary Clinton, bring back manufacturing jobs, and deport millions of illegals, etc. In his Second Inaugural Address he promised the beginning of a new “golden age,” certainly the pinnacle of the Trump tower of lies he told over the last ten years. These and countless other fibs, misdirections, and exaggerations were marketing stunts, little else.

Trump: The Image

MAGA imbibed these fantasies because they wanted to believe them, and many still do. As I said in a video last summer, Trump is an illusionist, a character straight from the pages of Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. As early as 1962, Boorstin described it accurately, “The making of the illusions, which flood our experience has become the business of America.” Trump the populist was adept at smashing old illusions, Trump the salesman is expert at substituting for them his own megalomaniacal promos. Exposing the mainstream press was an accomplishment, as was giving voice to the frustrations of average white Americans, but deception to fight deception is not and never will be the answer. Boorstin’s solution is the right one:

“What we need first and now is to disillusion ourselves. What ails us most is not what we have done with America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.”

Daniel Boorstin - The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

The image of Donald Trump is breaking like a glass mirror. The fanfare of the November election, the hopium that surged markets and summoned elite supplicants to Mar-a-Lago, and the sense of victory that Donald Trump had finally overcome his detractors (perhaps his personal demons too) won him mass acclaim, the addiction he covets most. Public praise is fleeting as is Trump’s resurrection, which is now falling from the sky. Wavering on Ukraine, blowing up trade relations with the world, throwing fiscal restraint to the wind, and demagogic strikes on Iranian nuclear sites are merely the visible scars of a president “bludgeoned by fate.” There is a deeper, more Shakespearian tragedy afoot.

MAGA’s Compound Fracture

President Trump betrayed the MAGA base who elected him, especially key champions of the MAGA agenda. The compound fracture began early in the Spring with DOGE chief Elon Musk. Musk, an admittedly irascible narcissist like Trump, was nonetheless indispensable to his decisive presidential win and fiscal retrenchment. Musk’s combative tenure in the White House ended ignominiously and with it the chance for fiscal reform under DOGE died too. He then traded defamatory blows with the president on X, the platform that helped elect Donald Trump twice. Perhaps this is why Trump retreated to Truth Social where he can take puerile pot shots from his own digital “wilderness of mirrors.”

Another, perhaps more personal break has come with Tucker Carlson. Tucker has been an avid supporter of Trump for a decade. Both seemed to feed off one another in a mutualistic relationship of joint ascent. As Trump soared in popularity and agitated the DC establishment Tucker attacked corporate media, took on Neocons and became the number one cable news anchor. Their relationship was not to last after Tucker took a trip to the White House in February when rumors swirled that an attack on Iran was in the makings. Tucker has since tweeted against another Middle East war and eviscerated Senator Cruz for warmongering on behalf of Israel. Trump’s response was typically childish and defensive:

“Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.”

Donald Trump

Finally, there is Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi was selected by Trump specifically to restrain rogue intelligence agencies committed to perpetual war overseas. While Tulsi (and everyone else) has been forced to toe the AIPAC line, she contained Signal Gate, nominated MAGA picks inside the intelligence community, and kept Trump honest on Iran’s nuclear program. For her efforts, Tulsi was publicly rebuked by the President in the lead up to the Iran strikes and her America First hires were dismissed. So much for loyalty to the base.

While Tulsi, Elon and Tucker are just three personalities they represent the core constituency of MAGA, one way or another. Undoubtedly, Trump’s public temper tantrums guarantee the fracturing will be permanent and worsen overtime. Elon Musk actively fought Trump’s “big beautiful bill” and has floated the idea of a new political party. By blaming Trump for making war on Iran to placate Israel Tucker will pull America Firsters away from MAGA. Tulsi’s days in the administration are numbered and her influence as DNI has effectively been “frozen out.” Many Tulsi fans, like supporters of Musk and Tucker are off the Trump train. Who is left?

Where did it all go wrong?

Less than a year into Trump’s first term Steve Bannon said, "The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over." Bannon was the fall guy for the Charlottesville scandal that summer because Trump buckled under intense pressure to fire one of the few loyalists in his government, then or now. Trump’s perfidious character was exposed early but despite his persistent inability to lead MAGA or implement promised reforms, the movement lived on and continued to support him anyway. Striking Iran is a bridge too far even for a forgiving base. Why did he do it?

The millstone around Trump’s neck is Zionism.

The millstone around Trump’s neck and the claw at America’s throat is Zionism and its advancement by entrenched Jewish interests. Zionism has ensnared this country in a parasitic “special relationship,” which means, among other things, catering to Jewish billionaires like Miriam Adelson, appeasing Jewish pressure groups (AIPAC, ADL, SPLC), and appointing Jewish technocrats to key positions (Steven Witkoff, Howard Lutnick, Stephen Miller). Zionist third rail interests have disrupted every presidential administration for fifty years. Trump’s reckless attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities to advance Israeli interests may be the biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam.

MAGA’s Faustian bargain with Zionism has finally devoured its soul. Attacking Iran, a major power in the world and one that poses absolutely no threat to the United States has put average Americans and global peace in serious danger. Sure, Con Inc., AIPAC rubber stamped Congress, and Fox News will continue to shill for Trump but MAGA as a movement is over, and in truth it never really got off the ground. Like populist waves of the past MAGA is another exercise in sentimentality over reality, in reaction not reform, and, like its leader, it is an illusion. MAGA was really just Make America Feel Great Again (MAFGA) and feelings are mercurial, they often boomerang.

Radical, Simplification

Change comes from outside not from within systems. It is on the extreme edges where things happen, where minds open and imaginations roam free. Everyone in the middle is too inert, too embedded, too dependent on the status quo, one way or another. The masses, the establishment, the normies cannot comprehend 4th Turnings, masco-nationalism, or sex cycles until the unsustainable becomes catastrophic, when things go from bad to worse to unbelievably bad. For men in the city, however, there is a “radical simplification” solidifying like cement blocks and “Fire in the Minds of Men.” The revolutionary ideas of our time are becoming irresistible and the more normies try to repress them the stronger they become. What are these revolutionary ideas?

The first is that democracy has fallen. Who really cares who is elected anymore? Where is the evidence that elections have mattered anywhere in Western democracies for a generation? Sure - there have been marginal adjustments to tax policy, healthcare and regulation but the reality is democratic politics is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” MAGA’s ineffectuality has made it clear that voting to stop forever wars, demographic replacement, or broad-based national decline is not an option. Democracy cannot fix what ails the West, we need a new way forward, a new governing paradigm.

The second revolutionary principle is race realism. America is a white country as is Canada, and so are all Western nations. Denying this fact by erasing the clear line between citizen and non-citizen and suppressing national identity in favor of demographic replacement is provoking violence in the street. Race realism is seeping by like leaky pipes about to burst into mainstream consciousness. At this point, omitting race from political discussion is like trying to understand physics without gravity or electromagnetism. Race is the decisive issue tearing apart Western societies so ignoring it is simply no longer viable.

The thorniest issue for most is Zionist influence. A psychological rubicon has been crossed in the global psyche because of genocide in Gaza and Israel’s expanding wars against the House of Islam. As Alexander Dugin penned last year, Jews are no longer perceived as the victims of Auschwitz but the terrorists of Gaza. Israel’s status has shifted from victim to pariah state but it is America’s complicity and enablement of militant Zionism that has destroyed Trump and MAGA. Western hypocrisy has also confirmed the Global South’s doubts about the sustainability of a Western world order weaponized by a Zionist elite. A global fracturing is underway and a bloody one it will be.

Populists are conservatives with an edge.

The radical simplification above is paving the way for a convulsive pivot into something far more intense than populism. Strictly speaking populism is a mass protest by “the people against the powerful,” but it rarely flames into something revolutionary. In a sense, populists are conservatives with an edge. However, as western societies rapidly decay under the leadership of a hostile elite there is a sliding scale of agitation: first come the moderates, then the conservatives, then the populists, then the radicals, and eventually the reformers.

As I see it, populist movements from Nixon’s “silent majority” to Trump’s MAGA movement are dead and so are the politics that made them. What comes next will be something far more radical, something more revolutionary, some kind of mass mobilization. Such a nationalist movement will not be endogenous, it will be exogenous, it will not emerge via cult of personality as much as the network effect. I think it will be some blend of the Manosphere, Bitcoiners, the dissident right, alt-media, and other adjacent fringe movements yet to coalesce. Whatever form it takes the gerontocracy won’t know what the fuck hits them.

Welcome to the end of cycle.

Stay liquid, stay alert.