MAGA in Twilight

Time wounds all heels

First, thank you all who came to see me talk about Glass Century in Philadelphia on Monday. I had a great time. I’m excited to announce that I’ll be in Portland, Oregon on June 3rd to read from Glass Century and be in conversation with Gabriel Kahane. We’ll be at Literary Arts; I’m pumped for this one.

The Glass Century promotional machine trundles on. I was in Lit Hub talking about what went into the novel (and taking a shot at Kirkus Reviews), and I’ve got some more interviews upcoming that I aim to share very soon. A gauche but earnest request: if you’ve read Glass Century and like it, review it on Goodreads. For dopey reasons, it’s nice to have Goodreads reviews—and you have to keep the spammers at bay—so I encourage you, if you’ve enjoyed the novel, to rate and review. I have a small publisher that couldn’t send out hundreds of free e-books to people (that’s how a lot of Goodreads reviewing happens) so I’ll need you, my readers, to step up.

And of course, buy the book! It’s available in all formats—Penguin Random House just did this nifty promo for the audiobook—and you’ll want to read a novel that the Wall Street Journal says is “charged with heart-in-throat suspense.”

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Before Donald Trump’s second term began, I wrote a column for New York Magazine arguing MAGA would never have it so good again. Without anticipating every bit of chaos Trump was going to unleash on America and the rest of the world, I believed, in early January, that the relative goodwill Trump had accrued would leak away. He would have to govern the country, and inflation and other economic woes he blamed on Joe Biden would become his problem. He’d own the economy, the immigration system, and everything else. If I underrated the degree of damage Trump would do in those first 100 days—the severity of DOGE was remarkable, and the attacks on free speech have been chilling—my thesis holds: Trump is steadily growing unpopular, and political gravity, over time, will keep tugging him down. He would undoubtedly relish becoming a genuine American fascist, but he simply isn’t. Not yet, anyway. Elections haven’t been canceled, public institutions, if cowed, are not blindly worshipping Trump, and the media still publishes freely. Trump has abused his executive authority in disturbing ways, but so did George W. Bush and Franklin Roosevelt when it came to locking up American citizens. Trump is eroding American democracy, but the nation is greater than him. Some of the damage he’s doing might be permanent—reputationally, in terms of America’s relationship with the world—but much of it, with another Democratic president, could be reversible. What is ruined by fiat can be rebuilt by fiat.

MAGA doesn’t have to consider life after Trump right now, but that life will come. Time is undefeated. Trump will be eighty-two when he ends his second term. He could try for a third, but it’s difficult to see, even if he pretends he won an election he competed in illegally—Trump as a four-time GOP nominee against a normal Democratic opponent would likely lose handily—how he’d subdue the military, the CIA, and the FBI in time to cling to power indefinitely as an unpopular monarch. On January 21st, 2029, would the American military really obey Trump and not the newly sworn-in president? Would ambitious Republicans who want to be president themselves want Trump lording over them into his eighties and beyond? Anything is possible. But anything doesn’t have to be likely. Trump will leave the Oval Office, one way or the other, and there will be an American republic after him. How flawed will it be is a fair question to ask. It will be here, though. Erosion isn’t destruction. If the Roman Empire dragged on for five centuries or so, the United States can at least range beyond 225 years.

In the short-term, Republicans will lose seats in the midterms next year. The operative question is how many. Given Trump’s unpopularity and the possibility that the Republican reconciliation package will impose draconian healthcare and social welfare cuts, Democrats will have much to campaign on in 2026. A repeat of the 2018 blue wave is plausible. I don’t gamble much, but I like the odds of Hakeem Jeffries as House speaker at the start of 2027. The Senate is a different story, with the Democratic slippage in rural states making the formation of a new majority quite difficult. If Democrats can’t become competitive in states like Iowa, Ohio, and Nebraska again, they’ll struggle to have a majority. At best, it seems, they can claw to a narrow 50-50 split or 51-49 advantage, and even that will not be straightforward next year. They’ll have to play defense in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Georgia (all winnable) and try to flip Maine, where Susan Collins has been quite durable, and North Carolina, where dream recruit Roy Cooper would have a chance to knock out Thom Thillis.

There is no reason to believe Trumpism, as a style and even policy preference, won’t outlast the man. Tariffs will probably lose their appeal because no other Republican is so protectionist and the stock market crash actually rattled the political class, but the GOP, on economics, seems to prefer the new populist flavoring to the decades of neoliberalism that peaked under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Robert F. Kennedy’s attacks on Big Pharma have fit seamlessly into the new Republican Party’s conception of itself. At the same time, it’s worth wondering how seriously one should take this new populist GOP. If they’re for the common man, why are they trying to gut Medicaid? What about DOGE? That’s all conventionally Republican, even libertarian. Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator, has come out against the attempted Medicaid cuts, but most of the other Republicans have defaulted to their old median. We’ll see how it all shakes out. Beyond 2025—and even beyond the Trump White House—it cannot be known how long MAGA will persist. What is it, after all? It’s less political machine than loose movement built around one man. Trump will leave a legacy behind, and he will have, without a doubt, wrenched the GOP in a direction that was unimaginable a decade ago. Will that wrenching continue when he’s out of office? I’m not sure.

MAGA has another three full years in power. In one sense, that’s a very long time. It’s enough of a window for an unhinged executive to continue wrongly deporting people, attacking academic freedom, and eviscerating federal agencies. It’s enough time to blatantly ignore court orders. It’s enough time to behave like an authoritarian and indulge in McCarthyite tactics. It’s enough time to be grossly corrupt. These will be rough years. Even if Democrats have the House, there will be little they can do to combat executive orders beyond filing lawsuits and protesting. That is frightening. It’s important, though, to not give in to either nihilism or catastrophism. As dark as the current moment might be, the United States has seen worse. The first Red Scare in 1919 and 1920 led to the rapid arrest of 6,000 people across 36 cities, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants with ties to left-wing causes. The second Red Scare extended throughout much of the 1940s and 1950s, obliterating countless careers across academia, media, and the arts, and outlasting Joe McCarthy himself. HUAC hearings roved from city to city, terrorizing Americans who held liberal political views. The CIA and FBI, through programs like COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS, spied on American citizens and infiltrated numerous civil rights, feminist, and student organizations. They harassed and intimidated almost anyone who dared to associate with a cause deemed too progressive. And, of course, there was the Bush administration, which erected a vast surveillance state and illegally detained hundreds of individuals at Guantanamo Bay without any due process. Much of what Trump is doing now he learned from Bush the Younger, who was responsible, collectively, for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings across the Middle East. It’s important not to forget this. I have two points to make, then: America is drenched in sin and America persists. America is not irredeemable; even now, I am proud to be a citizen, and believe in the promise of our Constitution.

To return to the humdrum of electoral politics for a moment, I will make the case, as someone never too enamored with J.D. Vance, that Vance is both the probable 2028 nominee and someone who may preside over the crumbling of MAGA. Trump lost an election but pushed onward because he was Trump: he is in possession of an inarguable magnetism, that black magic, which holds the project together. One cannot look away from Trump. But many can look away from Vance, who underperformed in his Senate race and lucked onto the 2024 ticket. He is a smart person, even a serious one, but he does not possess Trump’s charisma. It is difficult to imagine him presiding over a rally of tens of thousands unless Trump is there to first lure the GOP faithful into the MAGA tent. Hard, too, to conceive of how Vance will convince so many millions of casual, disaffected voters to head to the polls for him like they did for Trump. One can’t quite be a fan of Vance, can they? He’s not a WWE Hall of Famer. It wouldn’t be fair to count Vance out now, not when we don’t even know who the Democratic nominee in 2028 will be. The advantage Democrats will have, though, is that they won’t be the party of incumbency and Republicans will have little to run on unless there’s a great economic miracle in the next few years. In 2024, Trump benefited from pre-Covid nostalgia, and that playbook can’t be run again. The post-Trump GOP—or one held completely captive by the president—will have to find a new path to victory.

No single political figure in modern times has dominated a political party like Trump has. If the Reagan and Nixon eras may still be more significantly historically, the Trump era, which began the moment he descended the golden escalator ten years ago next month, rivals both for import. Assuming Trump remains healthy, he will have been president or running for president for more than thirteen years. He loomed over Biden’s presidency. Trump has, for younger Republicans, supplanted Reagan in their pantheon of political heroes. He is sanctified for all time. What this means, however, for the movement he leads is another matter. It is difficult to see how he becomes more popular, as president, from this day forward. Second term presidencies are a slog and Trump’s has already proved alienating to a wide swath of people, including those who decided, without great passion, to give him another shot in 2024. Biden’s popularity never recovered from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump’s fall into the abyss might have begun with DOGE or the “liberation day” tariffs that wiped out all the stock market gains of the last year. When he was running for president, Trump could always claim he presided over a booming 2010s economy with low inflation and nonexistent interest rates. Even though he was in the White House in 2020, most Americans thought of him as the last pre-pandemic president, and he exploited this to maximum effect.

The power of Trump’s personality permitted MAGA, to some extent, to not keep every promise to the voters who elected him. Trump winning and punishing his enemies was a form of deliverance. It feels, finally, that will no longer be enough. The U.S. economy is still robust, as world economies go, but Trump can’t readily tame inflation, fix the housing market, and kickstart a new national industrial policy to make his tariff proposals workable. He doesn’t think that deeply. There are feints in the direction of bona fide populism, like his executive order on drug prices, though it’s unclear how it will hold up in court. Trump, unfortunately, is not terribly interested in dragging the GOP-run Congress towards legislation that might make permanent reforms to the healthcare system. Biden, through the Inflation Reduction Act, allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time. Trump is not leaning on Mike Johnson or John Thune to expand Medicaid, introduce a public option, or tackle monopolization in the healthcare field. In fact, Republicans seem intent on undercutting the healthcare offered for working-class and poor Americans. Assuming they follow through—and Trump is a willing accomplice—MAGA will lose ground. They will have accelerated the inevitable: the occlusion of one era, and a slow march into an unknowable future.