The emptiness of MAGA

The financial markets are having another terrible day, in the wake of Donald Trump more or less assuring them that he was going to continue to foment the conditions for a recession, for The Good of America.

Financial markets are not the economy as a whole, but the economy as a whole is going to be hurt badly by the wild unpredictability of tariffs on today and off tomorrow, and the disruptions caused by random mass layoffs across the federal government, as well as Elon Musk’s other idiotic whims, presented in the guise of a business genius making everything more efficient.

The cause for optimism is this: The MAGA movement is every bit as shallow as it is ubiquitous. It’s an ideological ocean that’s an inch deep, and the capacity of Trump’s base to endure their own pain — as opposed to other peoples’ — for some future goal can be calculated as being close enough to completely non-existent as no matter.

Noah Smith, in a very interesting post on a number of matters, captures this well:

Trump’s movement has been around for a decade now, and in all that time it has built absolutely nothing. There is no Trump Youth League. There are no Trump community centers or neighborhood Trump associations or Trump business clubs. Nor are Trump supporters flocking to traditional religion; Christianity has stopped declining since the pandemic, but both Christian affiliation and church attendance remain dramatically below their levels at the turn of the century. Republicans still have more children than Democrats, but births in red states have fallen recently too.

In Trump’s first term, the attempts at organized civic participation on the Right were almost laughably paltry. A few hundred Proud Boys got together and lost some brawls to antifa in the streets of Berkeley and Portland. There were a handful of smallish right-wing anti-lockdown protests in 2020. About two thousand people rioted on January 6th — mostly people in their 40s and 50s. And none of these ever crystallized into long-term grassroots organizations of the type that were the norm in the 1950s.

For a very few people, the first Trump term was a live-action role-playing game; for everyone else, it was a YouTube channel.

And in Trump’s second term so far? Nothing. Even the rally numbers are way down. National conservatives who might have gone out to meet each other in 2017 are hunkering at home alone in their living rooms, swiping back and forth between X and OnlyFans and DraftKings, pumping their fists in the air as they read about how Elon Musk and his band of computer nerds are firing air traffic controllers or Trump is cutting off aid to Ukraine.

“You can just do things”, except almost zero of Trump’s supporters are actually doing anything except passively cheering for their notional team. Unless you’re one of the tiny group of nerds helping Elon Musk dismantle the bureaucracy, the thumos is all secondhand.

The MAGA movement, you see, is an internet thing. It’s another vertical online community — a bunch of deracinated, atomized individuals, thinly connected across vast distances by the notional bonds of ideology and identity. There is nothing in it of family, community, or rootedness to a place. It’s a digital consumption good. It’s a subreddit. It is a fandom.

And it’s a very precise form of fandom: the front running fan, who supports his team for exactly as long as its winning, and loses all interest as soon as it’s losing.

The idea that Trumpism can survive as a political movement in the wake of a recession so obviously caused by Trump’s own reckless is extremely questionable at best. Yes a certain hardcore of fascists and cultists are immune to reality, but assuming we actually have elections in 2026, that hardcore is going to be woefully short of big enough to protect anything like Trump’s current political power.

We just need to get from here to there in more or less one piece.