I previously wrote about the post-Trump GOP in what turned out to be my most-liked post ever. And – just to mention this as an aside – the fucking day I called him out for his Trump hypocrisy, George Will goes and endorses Harris. I’m not saying my post motivated him to do that . . . but I’m not not saying that, either.
But even as the likes accumulated, I suffered a case of classic post-Publish regret as I realized I had failed to address a point which was brought up many times in the comments – just what would happen to the current GOP after Trump? The Republican Party wasn’t going to disappear in some sort of infernal rapture . . . so where will those people go?
“Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.” - Robert Anton Wilson
Let’s understand one thing – Trump will endure as the head of MAGA. Not actual Trump, mind you – I don’t imagine he’ll be up to running in 2028 if he loses this time, just based on his obvious decline from 2020. I imagine the stress of losing, coupled with the stress of his legal woes, will exacerbate that decline, and he’ll be too far gone for even the most capable stage manager to get him through most basic of public appearances in a few years.
But the idea of Trump will endure. You know the shitty paintings where a muscle-bound Donald rides a giant eagle while holding an AR-15 in each hand? That Trump.
Honestly, MAGA’s been riding on the idea of that Trump for quite a while. The rest of us may wonder how they can watch him ramble, watch him wobble around on his ridiculous lifts, see the clear demarcation of orange paint against pale skin on the sides of his face, and still think the man is strong, vigorous, smart, etc. We may marvel at how anyone saw that debate and said, “yeah, Donald did great.”
Well, because they’re not looking at actual Trump. They’re looking at a myth. The mind has filters the smartest smartphone will never be able to match, and they have theirs firmly in place.
And that mythic Trump will continue as a leader of sorts. They’ll divine his intentions and preferences like they’re interpreting the hissing vapors of the Oracle at Delphi. They’ll read deeply between the lines of his tweets and “truths” (if those remain a thing) as they did with posts from Q.
And they’ll do so even when Trump is no longer posting them himself - that his kids or some other hanger-on will continue them in his name when Trump’s no longer capable is a given. Whether they post second-hand “what Trump said” messages or just co-opt his official account and pretend to be him is to be determined, but the outcome will be the same either way. Trump will be their kingmaker, their (throwing up in my mouth here) thought leader, and the dark heart of MAGA long after he no longer remembers what MAGA is.
And that’s true whether Trump is still in the country or not, by the way. Because let’s not forget that – facing legal problems and the (perhaps worse for him) public shame for being a losing loser, Trump might just run.
How shall a man escape from that which is written; How shall he flee from his destiny? - Ferdowsi
Well, a private jet sure helps. It’s not a stretch that Trump – perhaps at the urging of his children, who will almost certainly have their own reasons to be somewhere else – will simply flee the country after the election.
There’s a few non-extradition countries he might run off to. There are even a few governments that might genuinely be willing to shelter him for their own geopolitical ends. In either case, yeah, I expect his voice to still resonate through the MAGA movement.
It’s not like he needs to make personal appearances – they’d increasingly work against him, as his deterioration became harder to hide. He can just be a voice from the wilderness instead, the rightful king in exile, and the MAGA faithful will cling to him as surely as if he were still fumbling around in Mar-a-Lago.
Of course, he better pick his destination carefully. I imagine there a few despots for whom Trump is less “old friend” than “loose end,” in whose countries Donald and his entourage might find a very different kind of welcome once their plane was on the ground – not that I would expect the missives from “the real Donald Trump” to stop either way.
“Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy.” - Baruch Spinoza
But just because MAGA will all agree on Trump-worship, it doesn’t mean they’ll agree on anything else. Christians all revere Jesus, but the history of Protestantism shows they love nothing more than seceding from each other over minor doctrinal points.
And that’s despite the fact that at least many Christian leaders are sincere in their doctrinal disagreements. MAGA leadership, by comparison, is a boat full of grifters, clowns, and fools.
Each of these will try to carve out their own fiefdoms, vying to be the One True King or Queen. But if the recent Laura Loomer/MTG reality-show brawling is any indication, that scramble is likely to get so ugly even most MAGAs won’t be able to watch it long enough to agree on a winner – each will end up with a sliver of support and will either have to settle for crumbs or reinvent themselves entirely and move on to the next grift.
The truly sincere MAGA leaders will stay the course, and the ones that have never stepped out of line will fare better than those that have failed to keep the true faith flawlessly. In the end, though, MAGA’s very devotion to Trump will keep them from truly embracing anyone else. So long as there’s any semblance of Trump to hold onto, no one else will ever fully occupy the spotlight – the steward is not the king — and MAGA’s political power will decline as a result.
“Politics is tricky; it cuts both ways. Every time you make a choice, it has unintended consequences.” - Stone Gossard
As for the current GOP establishment, well, I laid out in that previous post how they’ve grown a base that they can no longer control. Like in bad sci-fi, where the supercomputer grows smart enough to wonder why it should be taking orders from humans, the MAGA base has been so conditioned to live in echo chambers that it will not accept contradiction from anyone – even a Heritage Foundation golem literally made of Koch-Brothers money.
The MAGA base has been baptized by Trump into overt xenophobia, misogyny, and a complete disrespect for law, tradition, and basic morality. The Never Trumpers and the craven alike may dream that they’ll go back to settling for the milquetoast, establishment version of conservatism - the kind where rich people’s taxes get cut, judges get appointed, and everyone keeps the ugly stuff in the closet so as not to alarm the majority – but that belief is just delusional.
Nikki Haley and DeSantis both fell humiliatingly in line on the assumption that they were biding their time until the Republican Party fell back together, but that day ain’t coming. The captive base has slipped its bonds, and the McConnel/Romney/Cheney version of the party is never going to bring it to heel again.
They can try to cater to it with empty rhetoric, of course – but the first time they hit a hill they can’t climb, whether it’s “actually deport all the migrants who are growing our food and building our houses,” “wreck the economy with dipshit tariffs,” or “overthrow democracy,” they ‘re going on the trash pile.
Acting civilly with political opponents, respecting the process, not pushing extreme policies to the breaking point – these are all now cardinal sins. It doesn’t matter who you were to them prior to that moment – the minute you say “no” to the often contradictory and shifting whims of their collective id, you’re a RINO.
“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” ― Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
So where will that newly feral base go? It’s likely a portion of them will disengage politically. There’s a component of MAGA that Trump drew into the GOP from fringe movements or from simple political apathy. A lot of them may return.
Another portion may likewise pull back from active politics, though likely not for several years, and immerse themselves entirely into the online forums as their sole political engagement. This segment will see themselves as defeated veterans, and they’ll still follow Trump’s posts and proudly wear their MAGA merch – and sadly, may pop up in lone wolf attacks or smaller hate crimes – until their personal fever breaks, if it ever does.
Yet another fragment will return to mainstream conservatism - but far, far fewer than the GOP leadership wants or needs. They’ll either slowly decompress back into reasonable people, or they’ll cause so many headaches the leadership may well wish they’d stayed gone.
As for the rest, I imagine we’ll see a spin-off party for a while – either MAGA leaving to form its own, or everyone else abandoning the party to MAGA and creating a “new” Republican Party. This MAGA Party will try to revitalize the movement, but it will flame out in a few election cycles – even in red states, hard MAGA can be a loser. This is especially true at the local level, where even conservatives expect government to actually work - competence is not on-brand for the sort of people who rise to the top in MAGA.
That this MAGA Party will almost certainly fragment further into smaller units is also a given – see above, regarding the fiefdoms of the post-Trump grifters. MAGA had some major points, but it was still a hodgepodge of ideas. You’ll almost certainly see sub-groups coalesce around their chosen favorites, to the exclusion of others.
Like a deadly virus rapidly evolving into just another cold strain, the MAGA party will quickly become yet another third party (or three or four third parties) of self-righteous idealists who barely register on the political landscape. Did you know there were something like 53 political parties substantial enough to have ballot access in the US? Excluding the Democrats and Republicans, can you name five of them?
That’s my point.
“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.” - Carl Sandburg
As for the GOP itself, well, let’s look at what will be left. Without Trump’s base, their numbers are much reduced. MAGA’s exit wouldn’t depopulate them entirely, of course – and in some states, the bleeding would be less than in others – but there would be an unquestioned depleting of the ranks.
They’d still have the donor class, and the country-club set – but by themselves, that’s a party small enough to hold its convention in an elementary school gym. How much of the working class rank and file would still show up is the question.
They can try to hold onto the non-MAGA working class whites, but a pro-labor Harris-Walz administration might make that harder – the voters of that group who didn’t go out the door with MAGA aren’t going to have a lot to keep them in a more rich guy-oriented GOP party.
They can try reinvention for broader appeal – i.e., finally following up on their 2012 post-mortem – but it feels like that ship has sailed. MAGA may have been the in-your-face, unfiltered version of old Republicanism, but those same ideas infect the upper crust of the Party as well. Any seismic change like that is likely to be both temporary and blatantly insincere. And don’t forget that establishment Republicans have their own factions – theocrats and Libertarians and oligarchists, any or all of whom may rend the already mutilated corpse of the GOP into still smaller pieces before it has the chance to even attempt an evolution.
In short, there’s no good outlook for what we think of as mainstream Republicanism. Their ideas suck, their policies don’t work, their biases put them at odds with everyone who isn’t them, and the base they had bred - the engine of their political fortunes – is about to abandon them.
They’re dying – and don’t think it can’t happen, no matter how long the Republican Party has been around. The Whigs went from winning the Presidency in 1848 (with Zachary Taylor) to a decisive loss in 1852 to extinction by the time the 1856 Presidential election came around.
With the recent shifting momentum, it’s sure starting to feel like we’re on the cusp of the GOP’s “decisive loss” part of that timetable. Maybe not this time – 2024 is likely to still be uncomfortably close – but I don’t see what chance they have in 2028.
That’s especially true if Republicans start to lose their grip on state-level politics. Gerrymandering and other game-rigging has been keeping their power inflated for some time – lock them into honest contests on ideas, and their decline goes that much faster.
“You can get excited about the future. The past won’t mind.” -Hillary DePiano, New Year’s Thieve
So that’s their likely future – what about the rest of us? A lot of people talk about how essential the two-party system is. Perhaps they’re right – though if the Founders had had their way, we wouldn’t have any political parties – but the tired, broken ideas of the GOP don’t have to be basis for one of them.
Imagine America with a Progressive Party vying against a Centrist Democrat (i.e., pre-Reagan Republican) Party. It’s not impossible – and a certain number of the moderate establishment GOPers could make a home for themselves in the latter. That kind of realignment wouldn’t be quick or easy – by definition, it would require the Democratic Party to go through its own schism, and we’d go through a chaotic period of multiple vying third parties and charismatic independent candidates – but the end result could be a stable political system where both parties are debating policies based in objective reality, and that sure would be a welcome change from the last 40 or so years.
Even if the GOP does manage, against long odds, to rebuild itself post-MAGA, it would have to be a more moderate party for the cycle not to immediately repeat. That could get us, however slowly, to that same Progressive vs Centrist scenario in the end. I just don’t know if they can shed enough of their core positions and bad data to make that kind of evolution.
But however it happens, the Frankenstein’s monster that the GOP built from Limbaugh on down will still be dead, politically. That alone is enough to be optimistic.
