MAGA Is Misreading Its Mandate
Credit…Illustration by George Douglas; source photographs by Peter Dazeley, Keith Marshall and Heritage Images/Getty Images
I’m growing increasingly amused by the overreaction to Donald Trump’s election.
I’m not talking about genuine concerns over Trump’s authoritarianism, incompetence and malice. His conduct during his first term gave Americans ample cause for alarm. He may well be the most unstable and dangerous person our nation has ever elected as president.
I’m talking about something else. As we watch chief executive after chief executive pay homage to Trump and MAGA, with Apple, Meta, Amazon and OpenAI making identical $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration, either through their chief executives or their corporate accounts, there is a sense that his election signals some sort of sweeping ideological “vibe shift,” a triumph of right-wing populism over all its foes.
It is no such thing.
The truth of the matter is that we don’t know whether Trump’s second victory will have an enduring ideological impact on American politics at all. If Trump fails, then all the ideas he supposedly vanquished, from “wokeism” to neoliberalism to Reagan-style conservatism may well come roaring back.
But that doesn’t mean that any competing movement is waiting in the wings, either, ready to step in as the ideological (or counterideological) heirs to Trumpism. The future won’t belong to the populists, the progressives, the liberals or the libertarians. It will belong to the competent, and the first movement that actually meets the practical demands of the American people is the movement that will establish an enduring political future.
History is instructive here. Ever since George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, we’ve been in a period of unusual political instability. Many Republicans believed Bush’s re-election heralded a new era of Republican political dominance — right up until the Democrats swept Republicans out of power in the House and Senate in 2006 and took back the White House in 2008.
Barack Obama’s victory, combined with his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, represented a moment of Democratic triumph. At long last, the emerging Democratic majority — described by Politico as “a left-of-center coalition of minorities, young people, women and knowledge economy professionals” — was asserting itself and transforming American politics.
That consensus also lasted all of two years, until the libertarian-minded Tea Party revolution wiped out the Democratic majority in the House and gave Republicans immense confidence that Obama would be a one-term president.
But then, in 2012, the emerging Democratic majority reasserted itself and Obama won re-election. Then Republicans routed Democrats in 2014 and Trump won a narrow victory in 2016. Democrats defeated Republicans in the House in 2018, won a narrow presidential election in 2020, and performed better than expected in 2022.
We know what happened next. Trump came roaring back in 2024, winning the Electoral College decisively and giving Republicans their first (albeit narrow — a 1.5-point margin) presidential popular vote victory since 2004.
For those keeping score at home, by Trump’s inauguration, the presidency will have changed party control four times over the past 20 years, control of the House has also changed four times, and Senate control has shifted four times also.
Perhaps more significant, for the first time in more than 120 years, the incumbent president or party has lost three consecutive presidential elections.
Contrast this instability with the enduring party dominance of the recent past. Between 1968 and 1988, Republicans won five of six presidential elections. Democrats held the House for 40 straight years, from 1955 to 1995.
Those aren’t the only periods of party dominance in American history. Republicans had a stranglehold on the presidency after the Civil War, winning eight of the next 10 presidential elections. Shortly thereafter, it was the Democrats’ turn — after the stock market crashed in 1929, they won seven of the next nine.
What does all this mean? As a matter of political analysis, ideology is overrated. Do we really think Americans have been that erratic over the last 20 years? That they’ve lurched between pro-life and pro-choice, socially conservative and socially progressive, libertarian and statist that many times?
Both parties have high floors of support, and the few voters who flip back and forth (and decide presidential elections) aren’t embracing new ideologies; they’re rejecting the person or party they believe has failed to achieve the results they want.
Neither party has found an enduring answer to American discontent. Lincoln’s Republican Party solved the problem of Southern secessionism and earned the right to govern for decades. Democrats had the more effective response to the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt was indispensable to America’s triumph in World War II.
Another way of putting it is that when a party is seen as solving or addressing the key challenge of a generation, then it earns a generation’s worth of political success. Fail, and your rule is fleeting — no matter how decisive your initial victory.
What is our generational challenge? It’s a debatable question, of course, but I’d argue that it’s rooted in a national sense — cutting across races and classes — that our country just doesn’t quite work any longer, that a nation once capable of greatness is stagnant, mired in failure and incompetence — incapable of sustaining the American dream and handing it down to future generations.
Polling demonstrates an overwhelming sense of pessimism about our nation’s future. A 2023 Pew poll found, for example, that 66 percent of Americans believed our economy will be weaker in 2050, 71 percent believed we’ll be less important in the world, 77 percent believed we’ll be more divided, and a staggering 81 percent believed that there will be a wider gap between rich and poor.
It’s not just the big shocks (a lost war, a financial crisis, a deadly pandemic) that have shaken American confidence, it’s death by a thousand cuts. Why is it so hard to build new housing in so many American cities? Why can’t we reliably secure our southern border? Why are hundreds of thousands of people homeless in what is, despite everything, the world’s most prosperous and powerful nation?
I think often of my colleague Ezra Klein’s 2021 column lamenting the failures of California progressivism. Read it now, and it’s every bit as fresh as it was then. The state is struggling to address homelessness. It’s poured billions into a high-speed rail project that’s a textbook example of government waste, inefficiency and failure. Its complex regulatory environment renders even the most simple construction projects unnecessarily complex and expensive.
And this doesn’t count California’s response to the horrific fires in Los Angeles. It’s too soon to pronounce definitive judgment on the state’s competence, or lack thereof.
Time and time again, good intentions are swamped by regulatory complexity and political horse-trading. Yet no one should think that the Republican Party (especially the national Republican Party) has done better.
Yes, red states are pulling residents from blue states — in part because local Republicans tend to limit taxes and regulations, rendering their states more business and builder-friendly. But they also benefit from blue state largess. Many Republican states are poorer than Democratic states, and they receive far more financial support from the federal government than they provide in tax dollars to the government.
Nine of the 11 states that receive the highest proportion of federal dollars relative to how much they pay voted for Trump last year.
At the presidential level, Americans have been frustrated with Republican and Democratic presidents alike, punishing Republicans for the Great Recession and the quagmire in Iraq, and Democrats for inflation and chaos at the border.
Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday was further evidence that Trump doesn’t understand the reasons for his own victory. The Pentagon is a vast bureaucracy, and the military is facing a complex strategic problem in responding to a rising China, an aggressive Russia, and a wounded Iranian regime that may well try to race to assemble a nuclear weapon.
To address that problem, Trump nominated a man whose chief qualification appears to be that he’s the most prominent (and loyal) MAGA veteran on television. The nation desperately needs competence, but, as The New Yorker reported, Hegseth was forced out of previous jobs for mismanagement, excessive drinking and “sexist” misconduct.
His probable confirmation is one of the most remarkable examples of “failing up” in modern American history. MAGA is mostly oblivious to this reality, in part because its single-minded focus on vengeance and culture war has shaped its definition of “competence.”
MAGA wants people who are competent at political combat — rooting out D.E.I., for example — but the nation needs people who are competent at strategy and management. Eliminating D.E.I. modules from annual training requirements won’t solve the nation’s shipbuilding bottleneck, prepare the military for the new era of drone warfare or address the shortcomings of our defense industrial base.
In fact, when you look at Trump’s nominees, he’s not replacing D.E.I. with meritocracy, but with something that looks a lot like a pure political spoils system, where the main qualification for high office is loyalty to Trump and hatred for his enemies. That is not an upgrade over D.E.I.
Many of his key nominees are almost laughably erratic and incompetent, and none are worse than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services. His deranged views about vaccines alone have already been actively destructive to public health. The damage could be incalculably worse if he gains the power — and the bully pulpit — of the nation’s most powerful health department.
At the same time, Trump’s social media feeds demonstrate his economic ignorance, his commitment to personal vengeance and his bizarre trolling of allies. No, Canada is not going to merge with America. Denmark rejects the idea of selling Greenland. We’re not going to seize the Panama Canal. Why are these ideas part of the national conversation?
Make no mistake, it’s easier to aspire to competence than to achieve it — especially when partisans will actively block political solutions rather than permit their opponents to take credit for success.
One of the most recent (and shameful) examples of pure partisan obstruction happened last year when the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, blocked the bipartisan border bill negotiated by a Republican senator, James Lankford of Oklahoma, with his Democratic Senate counterparts.
It would have represented the toughest border enforcement bill passed in decades, and it also contained vital reforms to the nation’s broken asylum system. But rather than give Joe Biden a political victory in an election year, Johnson — at Trump’s demand — blocked the bill.
There was nothing subtle about the right’s reasoning. As Senator Lankford told The Times, “I did have several folks, one just more blunt than others, saying: ‘I’ll destroy you if you do this. Because though I like you, I like President Trump better, and he’s got to be elected for the future of the country, and you can’t take this issue off the table.’ ”
Read that again.
That’s exactly the kind of reasoning that perpetuates our national crisis of confidence. It’s hard enough to secure a long national border when millions of people are desperate to cross it. It’s even more difficult when one party actively impedes a partial solution to the crisis, all for political gain.
There is only one way for Trump’s victory to herald a true American political realignment: He has to succeed. He has to be able to swallow his thirst for vengeance and tame his erratic mind enough to actually begin to restore American confidence.
If he won’t (or can’t), this MAGA moment will end the way every supposed realignment of the last 20 years has ended — in the agony of political defeat.
