Let us tempt fate. On November 5, Kamala Harris wins the US presidency after perhaps the most extraordinary race in the history of the republic, pushed over the top by victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, the second congressional district of Nebraska and the coveted state of Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump’s campaign, which has already filed pre-emptive lawsuits questioning the legitimacy of the election, swings into action from sea to shining sea. None of these legal petitions makes any headway.
Electoral officials are menaced; state capitols receive bomb threats. The FBI intercepts plentiful chatter indicating militia plots to converge on Washington DC on January 6, 2025, in a second pro-Trump insurrection.
This time, however, Joe Biden is in the Oval Office – and the federal government takes robust measures, including the deployment of the National Guard, to ensure that the nation’s capital is secure, as a joint session of Congress, with vice-president Harris presiding, certifies her election to the top job. Fourteen days later, she and Tim Walz are inaugurated – and the free world breathes a heavy sigh of relief.
Let us also say – and this involves a serious suspension of disbelief – that Trump holds to his recent promise not to run a fourth time if he loses. It is also possible, of course, that he will be in prison this time next year, if special counsel Jack Smith’s federal indictment of the former president on election subversion charges proceeds, and he is convicted.
Will MAGA die without its founding father? Will the Republican Party swing back to the mainstream conservatism of Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and Mitt Romney?
Absolutely not. First, in spite of many delusions to the contrary, there is no pendulum in modern politics. Power in the 21st century much more closely resembles the quantum universe of uncertainty, instability and fissile energy release than it does the predictable world of Newtonian mechanics. There is no intrinsic reason why the Republican Party should swing back to the centre.
Yes, there are those who hope fervently that it will do so, resuming its traditional role in American politics as the champion of limited government, military leadership in the world, and the rule of law. In What Would Reagan Do? Life Lessons from the Last Great President, published in April, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie declared that “our party and our country both need to return to the values that Reagan’s life and career taught us”. But this is personal nostalgia rather than the manifesto of a new caucus.
When Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy, he was a property developer-turned-reality show presenter, with a wild ambition to become president. In the intervening nine years, the megalomania of an individual has metastasised into a political and cultural force to be reckoned with – and feared.
Indeed, the movement is now explicitly greater than the orange man around whom it originally coalesced. As Steve Bannon, its self-appointed chief strategist, told David Brooks in a New York Times interview in July: “The MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump. They will look back fondly at Donald Trump”.
It is not only self-styled political guerrillas like Bannon who believe this. Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech tycoon who ran in the Republican presidential primary, is quite clear that MAGA “is bigger than Donald Trump, it is bigger than me, it is bigger than any one of us. This is a movement that will outlive Donald Trump”.
For a start, its control of the party’s infrastructure is now more or less total, a takeover symbolised by the ousting in March of Ronna McDaniel, Romney’s niece, as chair of the Republican National Committee, and the installation, as co-chair, of Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.
It will take more than defeat by Harris next month to break this grip, especially if the Republicans, as is entirely possible, prevail in the Senate. Control of the upper house will enable the GOP to thwart key elements of her agenda – notably her objective to turn the content of the overturned Roe v Wade ruling on abortion into federal law. In these circumstances, MAGA’s primary objective will be to wreck her presidency, even as it prepares to deny her a second term in 2028.
The movement is, in any case, much better understood as a cult or a quasi-religious cause than as a traditional political grouping. It has instincts – nativist, reactionary, isolationist – rather than a coherent ideology. It is bound together by a mythology that embraces the supposedly stolen election of 2020, the hostility of the Deep State and “fake news”, the alleged “invasion” of America by the criminal and the insane, the deranged notion that the pandemic was a drill for “globalist” totalitarian government, and the tropes of martyrdom that have been nurtured by the multiple indictments of Trump, and two failed assassination attempts.
To grasp how MAGA could survive and prosper without its founder, one has only to consider Scientology, which arguably peaked after the death of L Ron Hubbard in 1986. Even after his demise, the so-called “church”, established by the greatest religious charlatan of modern times, kept recruiting celebrities and raking in millions.
Defeat destroys conventional political campaigns. It frequently energises cults, by demonstrating the sheer scale of the demonic forces faced by the righteous and persuading them to redouble their efforts. In their classic work of social psychology, When Prophecy Fails (1956), Leon Festinger, Henry W Riecken and Stanley Schachter show, by studying a UFO cult in Chicago, that, in the right circumstances, the personal commitment of believers is often strengthened when their immediate expectations are dashed. If Harris beats Trump, his base will become – paradoxically – more rather than less confident of their mission.
The MAGA movement would, of course, still require charismatic leadership to recapture the presidency, and in politics, personalities of Trump’s star wattage come along very rarely. One only has to look at Ramaswamy, JD Vance and Ron DeSantis – all of whom have been touted as potential successors – to realise how wanting they are in comparison.
The key for MAGA is preserving Trump’s carnival ethos; not forgetting that his success was nurtured by treating politics as a branch of entertainment. Already, poll after poll shows that the voters are seriously put off by Project 2025, the 900-page plan for autocratic revolution that he has hastily and implausibly disowned. Quite apart from its heinous content, the scheme is precisely the sort of elite Washington project that MAGA was formed to oppose.
For those who go to Trump’s rallies, or watch them online, looking forward to the deranged jokes about electrocution and sharks, “beautiful sofas” and the “late, great Hannibal Lecter”, Project 2025 is a bit like buying tickets for a comedy gig and then being told to sit an exam. The true threat to MAGA is not electoral defeat, or even ethical revulsion, but audience boredom.
The point, however, is that the movement is now much more than a one-man show. It has achieved the resilience to survive Trump’s departure (or partial departure) from the scene, and – its adherents must hope – for another leader with his reach and panache to emerge.
The more immediate dilemma facing MAGA is how it defines itself now that it has fully colonised the party. A particular – and profoundly sensitive – question has been posed by Ramaswamy, which concerns the role of ethnicity and heredity in the movement’s future.
As he put it in an interview with the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro on September 22: “It’s been said recently, and I think it’s provocative, and I think it’s worth talking about, that America is not a credal nation. That people will not die for a nation solely founded on abstract ideals… But my own view is actually I do think that it’s just a fact of history that the people who fought the American Revolution did fight for a nation founded on a set of ideals”.
What made this attack on “the blood-and-soil vision of American identity” so pointed was that Ramaswamy was clearly referring to his friend and rival, Vance. At the Republican convention in Milwaukee in July, Trump’s running mate said that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
Vance spoke of the “small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky” where seven generations of his family were buried: “That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.” Thus, in the millennial cohort of the MAGA movement, ethno-nationalism is already vying with what Ramaswamy calls “civic nationalism”. I know which side my money’s on.
Growing pains or irreconcilable division? It is too early to say. What is certain is that the MAGA story has not run its baleful course. There is much more to come.
To tempt fate once again: the nightmare of a second Trump presidency may well be averted next month. The electoral arithmetic could easily deliver the free world from that terrible outcome. And Harris might be vindicated in her promise that “we’re not going back”.
The trouble is: nor are the bad guys.
