The Incredible Shrinking MAGA

But Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deeply, deeply unpopular, including in the Fox poll. The result: Large swaths of even Trump’s most supportive constituencies have turned on him over immigration in general. Unfortunately, Republicans still hold an advantage over Democrats on the issue in the Fox poll, but Trump’s deep unpopularity gives Democrats an opening to seriously contest that—including, importantly, among the working class.

What about the Iran war? Here things get trickier. Certain MAGA figures have argued that it’s a betrayal of MAGA’s “America First” ethos. Trumpism, we’ve been endlessly told, represented a rebellion against warmongering foreign policy elites and their legacy of lies, hubris, and folly. But the idea that Trump and MAGA are antiwar in this sense has always been absurd. Trump’s quickness to embrace his own package of lies, hubris, and folly en route to his Iran debacle—and the spectacle of JD Vance, the ultimate self-designated antiwar populist, defending all of it—suggest that MAGA’s hostility to foreign adventurism was never very real.

Indeed, Trump and his propagandists have quite explicitly declared that Trump can simply decree what MAGA is for on any given day. Thus they’ve even described the war as a realization of MAGA’s highest aspirations. This is not wrong, in one sense. If anything, the Iran war is indeed faithful to many MAGA tendencies: the militarism, the bloodlust, the violent hypernationalist expansionism—and of course the contempt for international institutions and alliances, human rights, and the laws of war.