Photo by Gage Skidmore via WikiMedia Commons
Donald Trump in 2016
Donald Trump in 2016
The MAGA movement has grown to such an extent that it’s now more powerful than Donald Trump—and it’s become one of the former president's biggest threats, an analyst wrote in the New York Times.
The groundswell coalition that he started has evolved and developed its own issues and policies, wrote Ezra Klein. And they're not fully in line with him. Trump is losing his grasp on it—and it's becoming aFrankenstein monster its creator has little control over.
“Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is,” Klein wrote. “But MAGA is whatever his movement becomes.
“This is why J.D. Vance has been a political liability to Trump’s campaign: Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved—esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online—unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment.”
Project 2025
Klein wrote that MAGA had led Trump into associations with Project 2025, a policy started as a way to clear out the old school of government and replace it with loyalists.
But it morphed into a movement of extreme conservatism which Trump is now trying to disassociate himself from, but which has become emblematic of his movement.
“The MAGA coalition—particularly its elected officials and Washington staffer class—has grown beyond Trump. It has more views on more issues than he does,” Klein wrote. “It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he has. It is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be.
“There is a great gap,” Klein continued, “between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.”
And Trump is now so associated with it that it could be what brings him down. “By all accounts, Trump and his campaign are furious that Project 2025 has been hung like a millstone around his neck,” Klein wrote. “Trump’s problem in the 2024 election is that he can no longer run as if he is a man alone. Everyone knew Mike Pence did not represent Trumpism. But Trump chose Vance to be the heir of the MAGA movement. A Trump administration would be full of people like Vance pursuing the agendas they believe in.”
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