Is MAGA dead?

The MAGA movement dominated and defined the last decade of politics in the United States. And then on Tuesday, it crashed and burned so spectacularly that Mississippi is in play. Democrats didn't just win, this was the biggest congressional landslide in 50 years. President Trump, hours after this collapse that will define his legacy, talked about his ballroom for almost an hour. It's drone-proof, it's missile-proof, it's bullet-proof. If you're a MAGA Republican and you want to win an election ever again, you have got to figure something out. Today on Today Explained from Vox, can MAGA resurrect itself? And does anyone even want that? Or is the movement dead? Support for Today Explained comes from Anthropic, the team behind Clawed. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation founded on a hard question. That question is, how do we make sure AI goes well for people? They're working on it, publishing what they find, even when it's uncomfortable. There's hope in hard questions. Ask your hard question at clawed.ai.todayexplained. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot A-I slash Today Explained. Support for the show comes from Walmart. Walmart keeps prices low for 150 million Americans every week. They help families save on food, clothing, school supplies, and countless other necessities in every aisle. According to them, Walmart's great value product line saves shoppers up to 35% every year compared to national brands. This means families have more to spend on pizza nights, birthdays, and all the moments that matter. Because when Walmart says save money, live better, they mean it. Learn more at walmart.com slash save. money. This is Today Explained. I'm Andrew Prokop, senior politics correspondent, Vox. All right, so Republicans lost very, very big on Tuesday. You spent the day yesterday talking to conservatives. You looked at what was happening online. How's everybody doing? The blame? The blame? The blame? The game is beginning. And what's unfolding is actually something more akin to what I would call narrative warfare. Because after a surprising result like this, when a party gets such an unambiguously terrible showing, just a really brutal defeat, there's an element of genuinely trying to come to terms with what happened and what the voters were saying and what they wanted. But probably more important, there is a self-serving element of how can I use this to best help my cause, my faction, my own political ambitions in the case of politicians. The battle to explain, the battle for Republicans to explain to themselves why Republicans lost so badly. Because the answer to that question will help determine where the party goes in the future. So people have a lot of stakes in what that agreed-upon narrative turns out to be. If you were watching and listening what voters said when they exited the polls on Tuesday, I was watching a lot of that Tuesday evening, a thing that came up again and again was affordability. The price of gas, the price of everything, in fact. How are Republicans thinking about affordability and that very specific critique 24, 48 hours after this trouncing? I think pretty much everyone is ready to say affordability is a problem. We didn't do enough on affordability, but that is where the consensus stops. What exactly did Trump do wrong on affordability? And what should Republicans be doing instead? Those are the questions that people are already arguing over. And there is a split that we can already see in the party between two camps. You can call them the traditional free market conservatives versus the populist right. And the traditional free market conservatives, they are really putting the blame on the tariffs. They are saying, oh, look at these tariffs. They drove up prices. Deficit spending led to higher interest rates. What the Republican Party needs is to go back to, you know, the good old free market dogma, spending cuts, free trade and all that. It's time for Republicans to return to the principled conservative values that once defined us and that we've steadily abandoned over the last decade. Senator John Curtis, Utah. And so Trump's attempts to create a new economic policy for Republicans just ended up making things worse. On the other side, you have the more MAGA friendly national populists who are saying, OK, Trump didn't handle the tariffs perfectly. They'll admit that. But the impacts of the tariffs are exaggerated. The real problem is that Republican economic policy did not do, do enough to help middle class people, working class people. Because what did Republicans do with their majority in 2025? What was their big priority? It was just to pass a big tax cut, mostly for the rich, while paying for it by cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits. They did not really think creatively, try to do a sort of policy agenda that would actually, you know, help families. So instead of going back and rediscovering the free market dogma, we need to reject it harder. We didn't do anywhere near enough to actually address the problems that voters have. Hmm. One person you could imagine making that argument would be Vice President J.D. Vance. However, however, when he talked about the loss yesterday, primarily online, he blamed the Iran war. And a lot of people were shocked that he came out and basically subtweeted his own administration. The reason we lost is the war. If you'd like to. Argue it was worth it that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. Tell me about what position we see the vice president, obviously going to be a contender in 2028, taking right now. This is some real narrative warfare in action because J.D. Vance has long, been part of a group of Republicans who really hate the party's traditional hawkish foreign policy establishment. And Trump sided with really the more traditional hawkish faction of the party that is always saying, oh, we're not tough enough abroad. We can fight more wars. He sort of bought that argument. He launched the war in Iran. And now many months later, it's widely viewed as a debacle. So Vance's statement, in addition to perhaps, upsetting himself up for 2028 and trying to come up with an issue where he can sort of distance himself from the administration's unpopular choice, he is also continuing to fight this battle that he has long been fighting against his rivals within the party, the foreign policy hawks. One of the dynamics that we've seen over the past decade is that Republicans typically protect President Trump. So they will act like the tariffs are four dimensional chess. They will act like the, you know, Husted's ass thing is cute. I'm studying his body. I've never studied the body of a man before. It's not my thing. After this week, is anyone just coming right out on the Republican side, on the conservative side and saying Donald Trump is to blame here? There is still a lot of caution about criticizing Trump personally or even using his name saying Trump did this, especially among people. People who hope to hold elected office in the future. But what we are seeing is now more of an effort in some circles to reject what you might call Trumpism, all of the Trump specific changes to the way the Republican Party acts, the way they talk and certain things that it does. There's a post by the conservative commentator Eric Erickson that kind of summed this mind set up. He wrote, it was gas prices. It was the war. It was also the corruption, the incompetence, the tariffs, the playing nice with Russia, the impression of cruelty, the overly aggressive deportations, the accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic, the arrogance, the ballroom, the reflecting pool, the golf courses, the arch, the Qatari 747, the aggressive redistricting push, the threats against enemies. So he's really going all saying all of these things Trump did. And these are all very clearly Trumpy things. They have led the party astray. I think you can also look at Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. He, of course, ran against Trump unsuccessfully in the 2024 presidential primary. He may be preparing another shot in 2028. And he has been very vocal about the failures, in his view, of the administration that led to this electoral disaster. for the GOP. Let's just be clear about what happened last night. This is close to an extinction level event for Republicans in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last hundred years. He thought under DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the administration's approach to immigration just created unnecessary conflicts, these like pitched street battles in blue cities. And he also talked about corruption. This swamp here is the worst it's ever been. When I got elected to Congress in 2012, the first thing I did, I sold all my stocks. I've never traded a stock in elected office, not one time. And he's positioning himself, of course, as an alternative. He says, you know, he didn't trade any stocks while he's been in office. And he's lost a lot of money for that because because he said, I used to be. really good at trading stocks. But, you know, I'm so self-sacrificing that I did it for the country. And that's the kind of ethic we need to bring back. Yeah. And this is very interesting because a week ago, nobody was talking about Ron DeSantis. He was sort of a national has-been. And now you see analysis on TV. Everybody's eyes are kind of whipping over to Florida like, oh, DeSantis sounds good. So question being, how has Donald Trump responded to all this? He's getting it from all sides, maybe not, to your point, as harshly as he might have been expected to get it. But. But how's he responding to the critiques of Trumpism and MAGA? Well, he basically did a big press conference that talked about his D.C. beatification initiative. So, you know, he's focusing on what the voters really care about. Why does Trump spend time on the White House? Well, first of all, it's very little time. Second of all, I like it. It's good for me. It's relaxing for somebody else. It's the opposite. But for me, I love construction. On one hand, he's he's pretending not to be chastened. He's doing posts like if I was on the ballot, Republicans would have won in a landslide. And, oh, you know, all these people who lost, they were just losers. And but I think he does at other points sound pretty chastened and perhaps disappointed. We haven't seen a lot of defiance yet. I'm sure that will come, you know, when when the hangover wears off. But for now. He's not really engaging with much second guessing for what he did wrong, but he's not like being utterly defiant either. It was it was a pretty big and embarrassing defeat for him. That's Vox's Andrew Prokop. When we come back, the conservative writer who convinced J.D. Vance to get into politics on whether his friend and the MAGA movement have any kind of future. I'll see you next time. It's Anthropic, the team behind Claude. You've heard of Claude, right? From Anthropic. You've heard of Claude. From Anthropic. It brought Trump to power twice. I think there were some good ideas in MAGA, and certainly the old Republican establishment, the pre-Trump establishment, needed to go. But MAGA couldn't deliver on good government. And if you can't deliver on good government, it doesn't matter how charismatic the leader is, it's not going to work. And I think that there can be no doubt after this week's election that it was a complete referendum on Donald Trump, and he failed. And I think there can be no doubt after this week's election that it was a complete referendum on Donald Trump, and he failed. I think that Trump made decisions based not on rational calculation, by listening to expert advice, but on gut instinct. I think that the wheels began to fall off of the Trump train on April the 2nd, 2025. That was the so-called Liberation Day, when Trump announced these wide tariffs. They weren't thought out at all. He just came out of his gut. And that set a pattern, Noel, for the way Trump made decisions. Plus, he promoted people not based on competence, but based on loyalty to him, personal loyalty. And I think this administration has gone from one crisis to another because of that, because Trump doesn't have a theory or practice of governance. Note well, too, that when he came into office, he signed a bunch of executive orders. Some of them did things that I thought were really good, but he didn't turn them into legislation. Yet, he just sailed right along as if he was going to be president forever. And then, of course, this gets us to the Iran war, which was another gut instinct thing by Trump, which became the symbol for all of the disasters of Trumpism. Conservatives have to figure out what comes next, right? Oh, yeah. Can MAGA be divorced from Donald Trump? Can it exist without Donald Trump? No, MAGA is Donald Trump. Donald Trump himself said so. The challenge is going to be. How does the Republican Party rebuild and get and regroup for 2028 with Trump still in the White House? I mean, think about it. They're fighting a two-front battle now. They're going to have to fight the Democrats, who are energized, who are going to come in and make the next two years justifiably, I would say, about investigating Trump administration corruption. But they're also going to have to fight Donald Trump himself, sitting in the White House. He's not going to shut up. He's not going to do what is best. He's not going to do what is best for his party. He's going to try to salvage his legacy. Okay, so it's not. If we say MAGA is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump at the moment appears to be. Finished. Finished, right? What is the next conservative movement? Where do conservatives go from here? Well, the next few months are going to be really interesting in this respect. Till now, everybody on the right has thought that J.D. Vance, the vice president, is Trump's natural successor, even though he has. Hasn't announced whether or not he's going to run. I think that has now been called severely into question. And I say this as someone who's a personal friend of the vice president and would like to see him be president one day. Nevertheless, even though he strongly opposed this war, the Iran war, from behind the scenes, he and Marco Rubio and everyone else in this administration is tied to it and all the other failures of Trumpism. So who does that leave on the outside? I was very surprised in the past 24 hours to see and hear Governor Ron DeSantis, the outgoing governor. governor of Florida, who, as we all remember, ran against Trump for the Republican nomination, never stood a chance. He's not charismatic. He's super competent, but not charismatic. And so Trump won the 2024 nomination. Well, now DeSantis has already coming out, making strong, clear, rational critiques of MAGA and Trumpism. And I think that DeSantis could be the outside candidate who has the best choice because he's the only national Republican politician not tainted by Trumpism. J.D. Vance, a friend of yours, he's credited you with getting him involved in politics, convincing him to get involved in politics. You say you'd like to see him be president. I think a legitimate question following what we've seen over the past two years and then last night is why? Why do you want J.D. Vance to be president? Well, J.D. Vance has been associated with the national conservatism movement. As have I. The movement started by Yoram Hazony, which has been about prioritizing national sovereignty, national interest, a cultural conservatism that is also in favor of economic reforms to make it easier to raise families. J.D. Vance has been the avatar for that sort of conservatism. I see the bones of this kind of conservatism within Trump and MAGA, but it got completely crushed or moved. Decide by Trump's own obsessions. If J.D. can go back to the man I think he is deep down and start to champion this sort of thing, a more of an economic liberalism, pro-family economic liberalism with social conservatism and no new wars, if it's possible for any Republican to claim that now, then I think he could have a chance. I think he is a good man. I have criticized him publicly in print. He is a good friend for not separating himself from the bigots on the dissident, right, the anti-Semites and the white nationalists. This extremist crowd is going to make a bid for power in the rubble of MAGA. And I think whether it's J.D. or whoever becomes a Republican standard bearer is going to have to face them down. So we've talked about J.D. Vance. We have talked about Ron DeSantis. They represent different things within conservatism. Tucker Carlson represents something else within conservatism. I think it's something you don't like very much. And then there's Marco Rubio, who represents something that we were all familiar with from the early aughts. Marco Rubio is maybe a man without a place right now, but he could be a man with a place if conservatives made some choices. What do you think of these two other boldface names as we head into 2028? And is there anybody you think we're missing? Well, Tucker Carlson has beclouded himself. And it's really sad. As someone who used to be friends with him, I thought he was a sensible, interesting commentator who often said a lot of common sense things. But sometime in the last couple of years, he sort of lost his mind and became anti-Semitic and just a crazy conspiracy theorist. A lot of people are worried about his influence on the vice president because they've been close for years. Tucker was key in getting Donald Trump to choose J.D. Vance as vice president. I have no inside knowledge of that at all, but it worries me as well. I think J.D. is his own man. But it's going to be very hard for J.D. going forward to maintain a credible, maintain viability as a potential Republican Party leader until and unless he addresses the Tucker Carlson problem. I don't think Tucker's going to run for president. If he did that, he could only be a spoiler. And I don't think he actually wants it. I think that in Marco Rubio's case, he's been a real chameleon. He was against Chicago. He was the neocon's neocon for a while. But he has been a faithful servant and ex-executor of Trump's foreign policy. And it does, for some reason, it doesn't seem to have stuck to him the way it has stuck to J.D. Vance. I'm not sure why that is. But, you know, again, with all of these guys who have been part of the Trump administration, it's going to be very, very hard to cut that albatross from around their neck. In order to get things done in this country, Congress has to do something. Congress has to do something. has got to do its job to get things done. One of the dynamics that we've seen in the Trump era over the last decade is that Republicans in Congress don't want to stand up to Donald Trump. They don't want to cross him. So results are in. Once again, President Trump, it's not looking good. What should Republicans in Congress do? Should they finally grow a spine and say, look, we don't have to obey every single thing President Trump says? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, what do they have to lose now? never been loyal to anybody who's pledged loyalty to him. I noticed that Greg Abbott, the three-term governor of Texas who lost his bid for re-election, no sooner had the election been called than Trump put out a statement calling him a rhino, said, you lost because you were a rhino. I mean, Trump is not loyal. And so there is nothing in it left for Republicans to stick with him. He's not going to be a factor in 2028. Maybe they want his endorsement in the 2028 primaries. Really? After this? That would be the kiss of death. So Republicans are now, and Congress are now going to have to find a spine and stand up and establish some independence. If they had done that earlier, we might not be in the situation today. Rod Dreher, his new book is Weimar America, a warning for a decadent democracy. Hadi Mouagdi and Danielle Hewitt produced today. Jolie Myers edited. David Tatasciore is our engineer. And Gabriel Donatub, check the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.