Where is Trump’s heir? It’s over for MAGA

Credit must go where credit is earned. The Democrats deserved this landslide victory — at least so sayeth America’s hollow-headed punditocracy. Even President Trump opted for gracious concession yesterday, saying the Democrats had “worked very hard for it” — a move of almost unprecedented good sportsmanship that allowed him to avoid acknowledging any personal blame for his party’s historic trouncing at the polls.

There is a problem with giving the Democrats too much credit for the shellacking the GOP just received, however. It’s a tremendous misunderstanding of American politics.

At a time like this, one must be reminded that America’s modern political system is little more than a two-party cartel masquerading as a liberty-loving democracy. When things go wrong — which, over the last quarter-century, has been more often than not — there’s only one lever for US voters to pull: blue or red. Or, as an Iranian embassy mocked earlier this year, Coke versus Pepsi. One choice is more feminine and multiculturalist, the other more masculine and nativist. But for all their ostensible differences both parties are captured institutions that pursue the ruthless economic agenda of their wealthy donors under the cover of culture-war pyrotechnics.

Not since the fall of the New Deal coalition in the early 1970s has either party genuinely resembled a political organisation representing the people. Let’s be frank: both parties have been corrupt as shit for the entirety of Millennials’ and most of Gen X-ers’ lifetimes. They paper over their economic Caesarism with moral-economy crusades enabled lately by social media’s divisive algorithms. It’s a testament to the powerlessness we all feel that this perverse situation is thought of as “just the way things are.”

But history tells us that eventually, the delicate fabric holding a zeitgeist together begins to fray. We’ve seen that potential in the protests across France and much of Europe over the last month. America is on the verge as well — but in a manner more characteristic of its general political passivity.

We all know our politicians are servants of the one-percenters. Most of us live with only modest hopes. Mainly, we wish that a few sizeable crumbs will fall off the ruling class’s table every now and again. However, under Trump’s second term, the GOP took advocacy for the one percent to Lex Luthor-like levels. And there’s no better example than how Trump and the GOP have addressed the economic ill effects not only of the war in Iran, but of the data-centre gold rush and the trillion-dollar AI buildout that runs adjacent to it. Literally no one — except vested interests — wants data centres built anywhere near their locales, yet the GOP made protecting this industry and resisting all AI regulation their top priority.

Only two days into his second term, Trump stood in the White House with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison to bless Stargate, a half-trillion-dollar data centre project, having already torn up the Biden administration’s AI-safety order. Soon after, Trump installed a tech billionaire, David Sacks, as his “AI czar.” Then the GOP leadership padlocked a 10-year federal ban on all state AI regulation onto Trump’s first signature spending bill — drafted so that state laws greasing the buildout could remain legal. Meanwhile, any laws restricting a data centre’s power draw or water use become unenforceable. The Senate then, rightly, stripped it out 99-1.

Trump’s response was simply to sign an executive order seeking to preempt the states’ AI laws anyway, a decree which then collided with a surge of state-level data-centre regulation laws throughout blue, red, and “purple” states alike.

James Carville might be a tool of the Democratic establishment, but his catchphrase, “It’s the economy, stupid”, is as true as it is cliché, and it’s the core reason for the GOP’s flop. If you get outside the Beltway or the New York media circles, you quickly realise Americans still hate the Democrats. But they now hate Trump and the Republicans even more.

A choice between two, though, is only one more than none. It’s a fact that makes American politics entirely simple. People didn’t like the “Biden economy”, so they pulled the red lever two years ago. They didn’t like what the red lever bought them, so they again pulled the blue lever. If the middle class continues to erode under the Democratic president that might be appointed in 2028, they’ll eventually pull red again. MAGA, though, is dead.

The magic and absurdity of Trump has always been the audacity of his billionaire-populist carnival act. It was the greatest act of class ventriloquism in American politics since the rise of Andrew Jackson and his notorious “Jacksonian Democrats.” For the last decade, through his rambling P.T. Barnum performances, Trump gave America’s poor and working class the feeling of having a leader who understood what took place in their lives. Trump of course never understood working people’s daily dilemmas — but he detested the same people they did. During the mania of “Woke 1.0,” that seemed important.

For all his flaws, Trump also really understood branding. His followers all got an immediately recognisable uniform and it only cost $34. It didn’t matter that their red hats were actually made in Bangladesh. People gave Trump continual leeway because they hated the woke scolds that much. At the beginning, it also didn’t matter that the billionaire donor class got every single tax carve-out it wanted. Everyone was so tired of the identity-based victimology that burst to the surface under Obama’s administration. They wanted that moralising control-freak tripe out of their lives, and Trump promised to deliver.

At Trump’s demotic rallies, everyone went home feeling like they finally had a president who wasn’t part of the HR mafia making their work lives miserable. Because Trump talked like them, they assumed he was like them. They were willing to give it time. A public figure who was that hated by the woke mobs earns a long leash with the poor and working class. But patience with their Cheeto Jesus saviour was ultimately measured in grocery bills and rent increases.

This week, his time ran out. Over the last two years, voters witnessed the same gaslighting betrayals they had already endured during Obama’s obscene handling of the bank bailouts in 2009 and 2010, then Biden’s paternalistic Covid mandates. The gaslighting became all too familiar over the last two years. Trump was not just “one of the boys” after all. Rather, he was just management in working-class costume.

The signs of GOP disaster have been present for months. In mid-August, manosphere comics Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, and Ari Shaffir appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and began talking about the need for “another Teddy Roosevelt” who would take on big business and super PACs. Rogan stated it plainly: “We thought he [Trump] was going to do it, but it’s clear he’s not going to do any of those things.”

That was the moment everyone should have known it was over for MAGA. For months now, nearly all the Trump supporters I know have been reckoning with a profound sense of shame. Their buyer’s remorse is palpable. They fell for a con man and most of them accept it now.

We must also admit that 21st-century Right-wing populism is an abject failure. Too many populist-adjacent intellectuals hitched their wagon to Trump’s confidence man act. Everyone should have known better, yes. But their excitement to see wokeness get its comeuppance obscured their better judgment. Often, though, the enemy of our enemy is not in fact an ally, much less a friend; at least not when it comes to taking on the greatest system of organised wealth in human history.

Because of Right-wing populists’ ill-fated choice to support Trump, not only JD Vance but any GOP nominee’s chance of retaining the presidency in 2028 is extremely low. There will now be lots of bad-faith “Oh yes, please run her” takes from the Right about the prospect of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez standing as Democrat presidential candidate. But wise observers know AOC has the charisma and the support from the base to win. In the social media age, Americans prize youth and beauty above nearly everything. Anyone who thinks Ocasio-Cortez is too young or inexperienced to be president is naive. This is her moment — just as 1960 was Kennedy’s and 2008 was Obama’s.

Only a true populist like Marjorie Taylor Greene could potentially save the GOP’s chances in 2028. That is presuming she and Tucker Carlson don’t go through with their recent threats to start a new political party. Regardless, Greene is probably shrewd enough to sit the next election out. All of which means that whether it’s AOC or some other Democrat taking the Oval Office in 2029, wokeness as an ideological imposition is far from dead. The NGO class and the DEI administrative apparatus will ride back into power on the Democrats’ surrogate economy — and Trump will turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to the anti-woke cause.

This is more serious than it sounds. Since Trump’s infamous 2015 ride down the escalator, anti-wokeness has been the magic elixir holding a disparate coalition together. All that’s over now. Voters won’t forget that, when twice given the opportunity to govern, Trump betrayed the middle class, both domestically and abroad. Worse, he used his Roy Cohn-taught tactics to shift the blame for all the economic pain Americans feel onto imaginary enemies. And since the Democrats cannot get significant legislation past Trump’s veto, the GOP will continue to absorb the disaster of today’s AI-driven economy for two more years.

To compete nationally again, the Republicans will have to do more than rail against wokeness and “shitlibs.” They need what the Democrats needed after their years in the wilderness: a Bill Clinton-like figure. Recall for a moment what Clinton’s New Democrats actually did in the early Nineties — they shed the social libertinism that working-class voters blamed for the crime waves and chaos of the Seventies, and then paired a renewed appreciation for social traditionalism with the appearance of economic moderation. That it all ended up as a massive neoliberal con doesn’t change the lesson.

The party rebuilt itself by giving abandoned voters the one thing they’d stopped believing it offered. The GOP needs the same remake, but inverted. It needs genuine economic populism — against the data-centre land grab, the AI buildout, the donor class that profits from both — paired with the anti-progressive cultural instincts it already owns.

Will it happen? Every honest observer knows the odds are long. A party remake like that means breaking with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and the rest of the tech-lords — the very men now writing the party’s cheques, boosting its top media operations, and building massive data centres in counties that never wanted them. Without anti-wokeness, Wall Street, and tech-billionaire money, who even is the modern Republican Party?

And if the GOP refuses its medicine, the future will belong to another fusion: the AOC-and-El-Sayed “New New Democrats” pairing of the economic populism Americans want with the NGO-designed progressivism they’ve learnt to tolerate.

These are desperate economic times. No one should underestimate that pairing’s durability. Voters will hold their noses and swallow the DEI pill — and maybe even renewed mass immigration — if it comes wrapped in anything resembling the New Deal.

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