MAGA May Have Finally Entered the Death Phase Five Years After the Insurrection
But that doesn’t mean that it can’t take down the country with it
Opposite errors have appeared after each of Trump’s two presidential victories. Following his surprise win in 2016, many dismissed Trumpism as an anomaly—a cultural spasm that would fade—when we were actually embarking on a genuine political realignment. After 2024, perhaps the inverse mistake was made: many assumed his second presidential victory reflected MAGA’s enduring cultural resonance, when it may instead represent the final surge of an unstable ideological coalition that has already crested. If initially there was an underestimation of Trump’s ability to tap into deep cultural currents, now there may be an overestimation of his coalition’s capacity to outlast the man himself.
The Dispatch’s Kevin Williamson has his finger on the pulse: “I have a sense ... that the Trump movement already is over, and that what we are seeing today is only its death twitches before rigor mortis starts setting in.”
Death twitches. Rigor mortis. From Williamson’s keyboard to God’s eyes and ears. But is it true? Williamson himself does not provide much evidence. But there are indeed some twitches to be witnessed.
Cracks in the Coalition
Some were set in motion by the Nov. 4 elections in which Republicans were trounced in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and in a more recent special election for a state legislative seat in Georgia. The Republican Trump brand has become toxic in communities—like among Hispanics—where only a year earlier Trump had done remarkably well.
The reverberations of those electoral defeats are plainly being felt in Congress. With the 2026 midterm elections impending, the hitherto supine bodies—the Republican controlled House and Senate—are showing some signs of life. Both voted to force the release of the Epstein files, potentially exceedingly damaging Trump. After a special forces unit struck and then re-struck an alleged drug boat in Caribbean, blowing it to smithereens along with two shipwrecked men clinging for their lives, both armed services committees launched investigations. Although the Republican chairs of both committees ultimately backed Trump, the fact that they opened investigations at all is an improvement over completely sweeping it under the rug. Though it’s an obvious stretch to suggest that Trump’s lost his grip on congressional Republicans, the reality is that he no longer has an absolute hammerlock on their decisions.
What’s more, the Defense Department’s inspector general issued a report critical of Secretary Pete Hegseth for his role in Signalgate. In the words of Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, here and there are “sprouting shoots of accountability.”
The assassination of Charlie Kirk seems to have provoked a deep fissure in the MAGAverse between its Nazi and Nazi-critical wing. Major influencers like the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, and the antisemites Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, are forcing Republican politicians to choose sides. Ted Cruz has chosen an anti-Nazi stance. JD Vance is coyly courting the Groypers and their ilk. Donald Trump is attempting to straddle the fence. A leading MAGA politician, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has openly bucked the president, apologizing for her past role in our toxic politics and warning that “President Trump’s unwarranted and vicious attacks against me were a dog whistle to dangerous radicals.” The capture of Nicolás Maduro and the plan to “run” Venezuela is further fracturing the MAGA base. The tech-bros, meanwhile, have been at odds with the populists and nationalists since before the start of Trump’s second term, as Matthew McManus observed in these pages a year ago.
If these are death pangs, let them flourish in this new year—and beyond!
The Long Road to 2028
But the inescapable fact is that the death rattle, if that is what we are witnessing, will be protracted: no matter what happens, we have to endure over three more years of MAGA reign. Even if illness or dementia fells Donald Trump, it is Vice President JD Vance who is waiting in the wings. Things are only going to get worse—probably far worse—before they get better, if they ever do get better.
In the Big Beautiful Bill, Congress allocated $75 billion directly to ICE for its mass deportation horror show with another $45 billion for “detention capacity,” a euphemism for prison camps. With this ramping up, we have only seen the beginning of a campaign that is ripping children from their mothers, imprisoning pregnant women in horrific conditions, brutalizing immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, rendering immigrants to countries to which they have no connection or, worse, to foreign gulags. The evil Stephen Miller, one of the two or three most powerful personages in the country, pressed for 3,000 ICE arrests a day. Along the way, America’s proud tradition of offering political asylum to the downtrodden and oppressed has been erased; only white Afrikaners are eligible to claim the privilege.
Which bring us to the unadorned racism emanating from the highest office in the land. From the president’s own mouth, in xenophobic tirades, Somali Americans are being demonized and dehumanized as “garbage.” The countries of Africa and the Black Caribbean he openly calls “shitholes.” When it comes to racial discourse, we have returned to the era of the 1920s and the then-ubiquitous Ku Klux Klan. As the race hatred is coming directly from the president, it is in a key way even worse.
The rule of law, the pride of our democracy, has effectively been suspended. Trump has installed sycophantic incompetents to critical law enforcement slots across the Department of Justice and the top echelons of the FBI. The administration is now attempting to prosecute Trump’s critics on bogus charges. Arizona’s Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut and a former naval officer, is facing a possible demotion in his military rank or reminding military personnel of their oath not to obey illegal orders. The serial adulterer, alcoholic Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has launched proceedings against Kelly after previously securing pardons for accused war criminals. That is not the only abuse of the pardon power. Via influence campaigns, in exchange for cash, or thanks to MAGA election-denial ideology, convicted criminals are being let go left and right. The stage is being set for pardons in advance for anyone who commits a crime that brings Trump an advantage. Violent and armed Trump-backing militias like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers can roam unimpeded, secure in the knowledge that the president can hand out a get-out-of-jail-free card. Impunity is upon us.
Part of that impunity is corruption on a scale never before witnessed in this country. Tom Homan, Trump’s top border aide, was videotaped accepting $50,000 in a paper bag from undercover agents in exchange for promised government favors. But the bribery investigation of Homan was simply shelved. Yet $50k is small potatoes compared to the riches Trump and his family business are raking in. Billion-dollar cryptocurrency deals and arrangements with Middle Eastern potentates are being consummated in the open. Shamelessness is Trump’s superpower and unsecret weapon.
An antivaxxer occupies the highest public health position in the land. He has seeded the public health agencies with figures of his ilk. Already, under their tutelage, vaccine hesitancy has risen to new highs. And already among the immuno-compromised and the unvaccinated a deadly outbreak of measles is spreading.
The U.S. has been intensively pushing a “peace” plan for the war in Ukraine cooked up by the Russians. Trump seems determined to betray a democratic ally fighting valiantly for its existence. Nothing less than the balance of power in Europe is at stake. Yet Trump’s diplomatic emissaries are positively salivating at the business opportunities that await them as they strive to win the favor of the Kremlin just as they are in Venezuela after Trump refused to seat the duly elected government that may not cooperate with his plans to ravage the country for its natural resources. Over in the Western hemisphere, Trump seems ever more determined to seize Greenland from staunch NATO ally Denmark, effectively blowing up the NATO alliance.
Reinvigorated Resistance
Five years to the day after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, we face a different kind of insurrection—one conducted not by a mob breaking windows, but by officials wielding executive power to break the very machinery of democracy.
This only skims the surface—one could go on and on listing the depredations against democracy carried out by the Trump administration. Already a wing of the White House has been destroyed; a trashy palace—actually a mausoleum for democracy—is being erected in its place. With all due respect to the gifted Kevin Williamson, these developments are not the death rattle of the MAGA movement but rather may just be, as the next three years lie before us, the death rattle of the American republic.
To be sure, there have been some slim glimmers of hope. More may well be on the way. Tariff price hikes are going to bite and sway public opinion even further away from Trump than it already is. The truth about malfeasance is steadily leaking out of the FBI and the Pentagon despite all efforts to suppress it. If fair elections are held, Republicans are likely to get shellacked in this year’s midterms.
So now is not the moment to give up. It is the moment to redouble efforts to weaken the monster in the White House.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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Whatever overall MAGA does, JfK junior’s health Dept’s vaccine fantasies vs tested proven data on vaccines for children. will:
Make America Grieve Again
Vladimir Trump. Not just your average neighborhood crook.