This is one of those thread titles that might age like milk. Two years from now, as I’m sitting in an ICE detention facility awaiting deportation to Sweden, I might look back at this, laughing at how foolish I was to think MAGA was nearing its end.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s decision to walk away from the House is said to herald many such resignations in the coming weeks because Republican politicians are fed up. According to one unnamed senior Republican in the House, “The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened.” There’s also some ire directed at Mike Johnson for allowing this to happen. It’s true, Johnson certainly allowed it to happen, but Republicans in Congress have mostly abrogated their responsibilities as an equal branch of the government to do the bidding of the Executive.
Why have Republicans suddenly had a change of heart? They knew who Trump was when they supported his campaign and his behavior cannot be a surprise. The only thing I can think of is they’re fearful of losing their own seats or the majority. Is it that simple?
MAGA implosion? I doubt it. Even if a few of the players like MTG quit, they’ll just be replaced by someone else that will take their spot as a loyal member of the MAGA cult. The rank and file, when asked about any now former players, will do what they learned from Dear Leader and say “MTG? (or whoever the person in question might be) I’ve never heard of them”.
I think it’s too early to tell whether anything has fundamentally changed, but this seems pretty consistent with the patterns we’ve seen in the last few presidential administrations, including Trump I. New president comes into office with a wave of momentum, a trifecta, and seemingly solid support from his coalition, and embarks on an ambitious agenda. It turns out that not everyone likes the ambitious agenda; cracks and infighting start to appear in the winning coalition, and members of Congress from the president’s party start to defect. Meanwhile, the opposition unites, organizes, and gets poised to break the trifecta in the next midterm election. The only way this administration seems any different is that people are surprised by it.
IMO, the only way for the president to win in the short term is to have an external crisis that temporarily unites everyone, and that only works for as long as the president is perceived to be handling the crisis well, as GWB eventually found out. In the long term, presidents “win” if the opposing party overreaches and becomes perceived as the unreasonable ones, but that can really only happen after the opposing party wins a Congressional majority (Clinton, Obama).
I have long thought that the Dear Leader would cause a massive and possibly irreparable rift in the GOP, but it’s hard to envision MTG leading anything.
Not that I’m fully buying into the idea of an implosion or revolt, but to the extent one is possible or exists, Carville got it right over 30 years ago.
You can talk policy or agendas or whatever and come up with a just-so story, but it’s very simple - people are instead checking their grocery and energy bills and their job security and not liking what they see.
Paul Krugman said that most political analysts underestimate how deep the belief was that Trump was going to expose some kind of Democratic trafficking operation:
Many political analysts, I suspect, don’t fully appreciate the extent to which many members of that base truly believed that Trump was protecting the world against Democratic pedophiles, and the degree to which they have been shaken by the growing realization that they may have gotten their heroes and villains mixed up.
Maybe MTG (and others) was really a true believer in the Q-Anon junk and really thought there was a bunch of seriously bad actors on the Dem side and Trump was going to ride in and save the day. Now that it’s clear that’s not the case, their eyes are opening?
I’ll partly disagree. My hypothesis is that what happened to Clinton in 1994 and Obama in 2010 wasn’t a backlash against perceived overreach. It was anger at their under reach that got them in trouble. They both had 2 years of a solid majority and all they accomplished was a failed attempt at healthcare reform (Hillarycare) and a modest success with Obamacare. No other major accomplishments due to a seeming “let’s do one thing, and one thing only, at a time, and then we’ll move on to the next thing” approach. Whatever Trump’s faults are, and they are numerous, that isn’t one of them. As such, he isn’t going to have a disappointed base staying home because he failed to deliver.
It’s a real fight, just not for a reason that indicates that things are getting better. It isn’t about MTG abandoning Team Authoritarian. It’s about MTG thinking that she knows better than Trump about what plays Team Authoritarian should be running.
I think it’s not so much imploding as dividing. It’s moving toward MAGA vs America First. America First ranges from full-on anti-semetic to just anti-aide-to-israel.
Let me know when one of these fed up Republicans takes their spine out of mothballs and stands up to Trump, rather that scurrying home to a cushy life as a pundit or author.
Honestly, I’m a little baffled that ten years in there are still people who believe Trump is some kind of master schemer concocting intricate secret plans to fool everyone, and not just an idiot with no brain-to-mouth filter.
You would need to conduct a seance / use an Ouija board / etc. to bring back the ghost of John McCain to find someone like that. It’s not going to happen any time soon.
Then of course the trouble for the Democrats (after they win) will be, what can a Democratic president do about this in the short term (two years before the mid-term elections)? Democratic policies generally are healthier for the economy, but they take time to work, and they are not cut and dried in a way that the great unwashed will be able to notice. This is especially true of the delicate balance between inflation and job growth.
Over the last decade, Republican politicians as a whole have demonstrated they’re abject cowards. MTG and the others are running rather than making an effort to fix the mess they helped correct.
I think it’s the support among rank & file Republican voters that continues to baffle @Smapti. It baffles me as well.
Though I read his comment differently than you did, it’s not hard to understand the support for Trump. STOP getting information from your usual sources – entirely – and start getting your information strictly from right-wing sources – Fox, Newsmax, OAN Network, and RW blog/social media sites.
I think there’s something to “who gets attracted to that kind of narrative,” but once you get past that, I’m not sure it’s any more complicated than that: profound tribalism and near perfect confirmation bias.
I don’t see how MTG and a few others quitting signals a MAGA implosion. I imagine most if not all of them are from solidly red districts, and that whomever Trump handpicks will win and blindly support the fuhrer.