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The last election shattered the complacency of the ruling class. For the first time in a long time, the men and women who believed that the future belonged to them, no longer did. The culture war, they began admitting in the post-election moratoriums, had gone against them. They had not just lost an election, they had fallen away from the zeitgeist into their own echo chamber.
And no one wanted what they were selling.
The Democrats and the larger movement around them has stumbled trying to make a comeback. But they have had a consistent strategy beyond the clumsy efforts to revive the BLM riots as the ICE riots or to file endless lawsuits that even liberal Supreme Court justices are growing tired of, and that is to fracture the successful coalition that President Trump built.
Ever since Trump took office, the media, which acts as the ideological attack dog for the movement, has been trying to find wedge issues. Some have been conventional economic ones meant to split away the emerging working class base, but others are ideological wedge issues targeted at dividing MAGA, first around foreign policy, and then around Jeffrey Epstein.
The issues themselves are less important than what they reveal about Democrat tactics.
The Left has closely analyzed the Trump coalition, found weak points and is running information operations to exploit those weaknesses and, when successful, playing divide and conquer. It belatedly figured out that MAGA, unlike past Republican coalitions, was virtually invulnerable to external criticism, shaming and moral blackmail because it was unconcerned with respectability.
Shaming Trump supporters no longer worked because MAGA did not care what the media or anyone outside the movement thought. Or at least that was supposed to be how it worked.
But the Trump coalition was a big tent and was a mass of agendas, some contradictory, quarreling factions, and personalities who were more opposed to things than for them. Once Trump began governing, he would have to pick and choose, make decisions and take sides. The question was how the movement would cope with these internal disagreements.
Early on it became obvious that the ‘leak’ problem that had pervaded the first Trump administration was far from gone. The media enjoyed no shortage of leaks, many of them coming from a Koch libertarian faction that had tried to seize control over foreign policy and has now spent months trying to drive out Secretary of Defense Hegseth after he fired the leakers.
Beyond the anonymous leakers from inside and outside the administration, certain named personalities have taken to texting the media their criticisms of President Trump and his administration. These figures want the mantle of MAGA even as they aid Politico and the New York Times in attacking the administration. Rather than elevating themselves by aiding the media, they’re demonstrating their untrustworthiness to be leading figures in the movement.
Still all of this was small potatoes until a small group of leftists, libertarians and far-righters began vocally claiming that there was a ‘split’ among MAGA on Israel and Iran. Polls pretty clearly showed that there was no split, but as long as the media could keep on quoting influencers like Tucker Carlson and a handful of more obscure figures, along with leftists like Joe Rogan who had briefly glommed on to MAGA, they could manufacture stories about a split.
Epstein was more damaging because it was and is a legitimate split. The sense of anger and betrayal is real, and while it’s misdirected at Trump, it damaged the movement, sabotaged the legislative agenda and depending on the electoral outcome going forward, that may make the difference between national survival and national destruction. And it was also the first time that the losers of 2024 felt like they had won a culture war victory and had a pathway forward.
Democrats, including those who had previously shown no interest in the Epstein saga, embraced it because for the first time they had hit a vulnerable point. They keep calling for the ‘release of the Epstein files’ not because they have any concern about Epstein’s victims, because they care about what’s in the files or because they even know anything about the subject, but because it’s the first line of attack that legitimately hurt President Trump.
And it hurt Trump by splitting the MAGA movement.
That is the larger objective here. And it is important to be aware of that strategy in play because while some of the concerns and debates on various issues are legitimate, some are being advanced by paid influencers and operatives, along with bot armies, to split the movement.
The leftist strategy contains an enormous admission. And the admission is that they have no way forward as a national movement except by splitting the MAGA movement. It’s not a competition, but a zero sum game in which the Left does not have enough room to grow because its message has become fundamentally alienating to even sections of its base.
But at the same time some of the same forces that helped build MAGA threaten its long term survival. The movement embraced controversy and shock tactics, but some influencers were not using shock tactics to achieve something bigger, but to get attention by being contrarian. Stirring up controversy, hurling accusations and sabotaging everything is all they ever do.
Some of those who went MAGA because it was shocking are turning against MAGA because it’s the next ‘shocking’ phase in their attempt to stay relevant. Others saw MAGA as a one-time chance to build their own brand and are splitting off in the hopes of building their own movements. (That is another reason why third parties don’t work. Once you splinter, new splinter groups keep forming. And there’s no longer a good argument against them.)
MAGA naturally attracts individualists and many of them resist larger agendas, but the only way Trump can succeed is if he’s given elbow room to pursue a larger agenda. Previous conservative movements resolved conflicts through inaction and so nothing got done.
President Trump leads MAGA. What he wants to do, right or wrong, becomes the strategy, and he is the reason that things are actually getting done. The House Republicans have already shown us how useless a leaderless or a movement of weak leaders can be. And that’s the alternative. Infighting has never worked for MAGA. It can only work against it. The entire leftist strategy is to create and exploit divisions because they either bring the second term machine to a halt or they force a breach in the movement. And thus far, they are making inroads.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for debate or lobbying for one approach or another. Those who believe President Trump is making the wrong decision on an issue should say. But when leftists hop on their bandwagon, they should get off, and they should never cooperate or coordinate with leftist media operations. That’s no longer an argument: that’s treason.
