MAGA is coming apart at the seams. The general election earlier this month, with blowouts of Republican candidates across the country, signaled an existential threat to their party come next year’s midterms.
But rather than course correct, the White House went into denial mode: There’s no inflation, the economy is in a “Golden Age,” the polls on Trump are wrong, and there’s nothing to see in the Epstein files.
Trump’s stubborn denials of reality were made worse, at least in MAGA’s eyes, by his recent disastrous interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham, during which he took the side of H-1B visa holders and 600,000 Chinese students on international visas.
MAGA heads were not finished exploding before he waged war against one of his fiercest loyalists, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had refused to remove her name from the discharge petition for the Epstein files. Trump called her a “traitor,” while his minions allegedly threatened her safety. But she persisted, even implying today that Trump is the real traitor—someone who serves foreign governments or himself.
Trump beat a retreat and has now called on Republicans to vote for the release of the Epstein files, essentially conceding it’s a fight he can’t win.
And this is just the start of MAGA’s problems. The consequences of the GOP’s legislation will hit home soon, with the largest impacts affecting its own base.
Is it too early to write MAGA’s epitaph? Perhaps. Yet some big voices on the right are already sounding the death knell. So it’s useful at this point to understand where they are coming from, and how Trump sowed the seeds of MAGA’s implosion with four key promises, all of which he has since broken.
Promise No. 1: “America First”
Trump was supposed to be the “America First” president. While there isn’t any single understanding of what that means precisely, the America First movement has historical roots in a xenophobic worldview from the 1910s and 1920s that sees “foreigners” (whether here as immigrants or in their own countries) as not the United States’ concern. From this, the movement advanced economic nationalism and an isolationist foreign policy as twin pillars.
Economic nationalism, generally speaking, prioritizes American goods and manufacturing at the expense of foreign investment and imports. Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs to send a clear signal that America didn’t need those imported goods—or at least would prefer to manufacture them here. To support this move, he lied to his base, telling them that other nations would bear the cost of the tariffs, when in fact those costs would be borne by U.S. importers and mostly passed along to U.S. consumers (more on that later).
Tariffs against foreign nations aren’t enough, however, to provide a true sense that Trump is “sticking it” to foreigners. There is a pervasive belief among his base that jobs are being taken by immigrants, a false narrative that Trump and the GOP have advanced to explain why many are underemployed or stuck in low-paying positions without much hope for advancement.
Trump has failed to prove his bona fides on this economic nativist plank.
First, he issued contrary positions on the question of undocumented farm and hospitality workers after companies complained that the raids were affecting their bottom line. “I’m on both sides of the thing,” Trump said on the Fox Network. “I’m the strongest immigration guy that there’s ever been, but I’m also the strongest farmer guy that there’s ever been. And that includes also hotels and, you know, places where people work.” His hedging on this issue angered immigration hardliners, who saw Trump as waffling on a key pledge to crack down on all forms of illegal immigration.
Second, and perhaps most damagingly, he took the side of H-1B proponents, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, even claiming that the U.S. did not have the talent to fill those jobs. If there was any moment that revealed Trump’s betrayal of “America First” principles, it was his Ingraham interview, during which Trump claimed we don’t have talented people here in America to fill those positions.
Add to that his defense of allowing 600,000 Chinese students to remain here on visas—possibly part of conditions laid out by President Xi during their negotiations—in order to prop up our colleges and universities, including HBCUs. No, really.
The picture soon became one of a president caving not only to the high-tech firms and the Chinese but to the elite “woke” institutions that he’s taught his own base to despise. Rep. Greene, the OG “America First” representative, had this to say recently about Trump’s betrayals:
Trump’s recent behavior has not allayed concerns. While the government was shut down, he went on a jaunt to Asia, where he was fêted, flattered and favored with gifts. On his return, he hosted foreign leaders, including leaders from Central Asia, Hungary and even the new President of Syria, who was once one of America’s most wanted as a leader of Al Qaeda.
Asked to explain why he was spending so much energy focused on foreign affairs, Trump replied, “When you’re president, you really sort of have to watch over the world because you’re going to be dragged into it.” As the New York Times noted, this was a big shift from someone who argued in his first term that the U.S. could no longer be a “policeman of the world.”
Yet Trump now seems bent on being the world’s policeman, despite the second core plank of “America First”: to keep us out of foreign conflicts and wars, particularly the Middle East. But in Year One of his second term, Trump reneged on his promises and expanded attacks in Yemen and Iran, risking a dangerous escalation of hostilities.
More recently, the U.S. positioned a significant naval force in the waters outside Venezuela. Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, we proceeded to flagrantly violate international law by destroying civilian vessels that the Trump regime claims, without evidence, are trafficking drugs. Our forces have murdered dozens of foreign civilians on the high seas, and the leader of the Southern Command in charge of the operation has now tendered his resignation.
It is not “America First,” which values American non-intervention, to rename the Defense Department the Department of War, nor is it “America First” to prepare for a full-scale invasion of another country. That war is not only unauthorized by Congress, but is built upon false pretenses (i.e., “narco terrorism”) with the real objective of gaining control of rich oil deposits.
We have seen this movie before in Iraq, which became a costly, bloody and seemingly never-ending campaign.
Promise No. 2: Bringing down costs on Day One
Inflation was President Biden’s bugaboo, and the rising cost of basic necessities such as groceries and rent caused an erosion of support for Democrats in 2024. Trump took advantage of this by promising to bring down prices on Day One.
Who can forget this awkward moment during the campaign? “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,” Trump declared in August 2024 while surrounded by packaged foods, milk, meats and eggs. But instead of keeping this promise, under Trump the prices of many foods have risen sharply, driven by his own imposition of tariffs on things like coffee, ground beef and bananas. Those items are up, respectively, 18.9%, 12.9% and 6.9% this year.
The White House only recently appeared to admit the truth of “It’s the tariffs, stupid.” Trump announced a rollback of tariffs on specific food items, including coffee, ground beef and bananas. This isn’t likely to drive prices down any time soon, but it is an admission that inflation is directly linked to his tariffs.
When it comes to messaging on inflation, the Trump White House apparently learned nothing from the Biden administration’s failed efforts to message to consumers that things were actually fine and they weren’t feeling any pinch. The official Trump White House position is that we are in a “Golden Age” of economic prosperity, even boasting to McDonald’s franchisers yesterday that he has “normalized” inflation.
As the New York Times reported, Trump is basically “denying there is a problem at all”:
“This is also the golden age of America, because we are doing better than we’ve ever done as a country,” Mr. Trump said. “Prices are coming down and all of that stuff.”
With beef prices approaching $10 per pound, the president’s attempt to wave away cost concerns may fall flat for low- and middle-income Americans, many of whom are struggling to afford fast food, including the Big Macs that Mr. Trump favors.
It doesn’t help that while Trump claims to be focused on “affordability,” he actively stopped food assistance for millions, including his own base of voters. He appears preoccupied with building a $300 million gilded ballroom while throwing lavish “Great Gatsby” themed parties at Mar-a-Lago. The optics are terrible, and his actions are not only tone deaf but cruel.
Then there is the ticking time bomb of healthcare costs. Trump and the GOP delivered a one-two punch by refusing to extend ACA premium subsidies while slashing Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over the coming years. This is already resulting in spiking insurance costs for those who purchase coverage in the ACA marketplace, and their abandonment of those plans will drive insurance costs higher for all.
Exit polls conducted by ABC News showed that roughly half of Virginia voters in the recent election cited the economy as their top issue, and they supported the Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger by more than 24 points. The story was the same in both New Jersey and New York City, with voters concerned about the economy now strongly favoring Democratic candidates. In short, under Trump and the GOP, the economy has flipped from a red to a blue issue winner.
Promise No. 3: Immigration and mass deportations
Another of Trump’s signature issues during the campaign was his pledge to crack down on illegal immigration and to conduct mass deportations. While the “mass” part of the promise necessarily implied the rounding up of millions of undocumented immigrants, Trump convinced a high number of directly impacted communities that he would focus on actual criminal elements, not otherwise law-abiding residents.
That, of course, has proved completely false. It was never going to be possible to meet Stephen Miller’s goals of detaining 3,000 undocumented people each day without going after ordinary hard-working residents whose legal status was at best unclear.
The brutality with which the Department of Homeland Security, through CBP and ICE, has conducted raids and arrests has shocked much of the nation. But no bloc that had swung so heavily for Trump and the GOP in 2024 has been more traumatized than the Latino community. Many had crossed over to vote for Trump on his promises of lowering prices and focusing on criminals. But now their daily lives in neighborhoods across the country have become a mix of dread, fear and anger as anyone with brown skin or who speaks Spanish is now a potential target for harassment, detention and deportation.
This is no less than political suicide for the GOP. Latino support for Trump has plummeted about 32 points since he took office, far exceeding the gains he made going into the 2024 election. On immigration, Latino voters had trusted Kamala Harris only slightly more than Trump in 2024, by just two points. Today, Trump’s approval rating on immigration among Latinos has collapsed to 38 points negative.
“Latinos despise—hate—Donald Trump,” CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten remarked. “He is doing something absolutely wrong when it comes to immigration.”
The consequences of this massive shift are now becoming clear. Enten reviewed data from heavily Latino counties in New Jersey and Virginia to see how strong the shift was from the 2024 presidential election to the 2025 gubernatorial ones. The results left him flabbergasted.
Union City, New Jersey had shifted a whopping 52 points toward the Democrats. “I’m laughing because you never see numbers like this,” Enten declared during an on-air rundown of the numbers. In Virginia, Enten also noted, the Latino-heavy county of Manassas Park shifted a sizable 22 points toward the Democratic candidate.
But couldn’t Trump’s crackdown on immigration and his draconian detention policies play well with his racist white base—enough to offset the loss of support from Latinos? That doesn’t seem to be panning out either. On Trump’s signature issue of immigration, he is now underwater, as he is on every issue. A recent ABC-Ipsos poll shows that more than half of voters disapprove of Trump’s immigration policies generally.
While the shifts among Latino voters are occurring in an off-year election, the same dynamics are likely to play out in next year’s midterm elections unless Trump and the GOP somehow improve their standing among these voters. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards. The GOP is now caught in a cycle of its own making. The kidnappings and detentions will likely only grow worse as ICE doubles its agents through an infusion of billions under the GOP’s budget and as more detention facilities are constructed to hold detainees.
The shift among Latino voters is so pronounced that the redistricting efforts of the GOP in places like Texas and now Florida may run headlong into them, flipping GOP seats that Republicans intentionally had made more vulnerable in order to gerrymander more aggressively. This practice, known more derisively as a “dummymander,” will be put to an important test next year. That’s when Latino voters have a nationwide opportunity at the ballot box to express their collective rage toward the Trump White House and the GOP.
Promise No. 4: Releasing the Epstein files
To Trump’s great dismay, a lot of ink has been spilled lately over the Epstein files, particularly after the House Democrats released damning examples of Trump’s knowledge and apparent participation in Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s pedophile ring.
Rather than rehash this news, it’s helpful to zoom out a bit and review a brief history of why the Trump White House’s handling of the Epstein files has been so disastrous. At every turn, its strategies and decisions have only made things worse for Trump and the GOP and driven what were early MAGA suspicions into deep mistrust and outrage.
This series of unforced errors by the White House began with a DOJ memo, first reported by Axios, that claimed there was no Epstein “client list,” there was no need for further investigation, and no one else would be charged. That was the very opposite of what was supposed to happen once Donald Trump returned to office, Kash Patel was running the FBI, and Pam Bondi, who had promised full transparency and the release of all the files, was head of the Justice Department.
Trump was caught off guard by the fury of his own base, who had been led to believe, per the QAnon conspiracies, that he would personally take down the pedophiles at the top of government. Trump proceeded to label the whole matter a Democratic hoax and called those who believed it “weaklings.” In short, he attacked his own MAGA faithful for buying what he and his FBI Director had been peddling for years.
More implausible denials followed. Trump claimed the personal signed note, reported by that famously liberal rag The Wall Street Journal, that he apparently sent Epstein for his 50th birthday was a forgery. This, of course, makes no sense for anyone to have done at the time. Trump also claimed he never used the kind of language that appeared in the note, but examples soon abounded and spread across social media. It all sounded like Trump was hiding something.
To make conspiracy theorists on the right even more frothy, Trump dispatched his lawyer, Todd Blanche, to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell and then had her moved to a minimum security prison as some kind of reward for cooperating. She’s getting extra special treatment and apparently working on a commutation request, all in exchange for making claims that are demonstrably untrue.
Then it came out that Bondi had told Trump his name was in the files and had ordered a top-to-bottom review of the files, pulling some 1,000 FBI agents over to flag and record any mention of Trump. When asked by Congress about this effort, both Bondi and Patel grew defensive and combative and refused to provide details or confirmations of what they knew.
By this point, the average third grader could probably deduce that Trump was hiding something from the public, and that it was probably pretty bad. But to put an even finer point to this, the White House launched an all-out campaign to stop a discharge petition on the Epstein files, even sequestering hold-out Republicans such as Rep. Lauren Boebert in the Situation Room to get her to change her mind.
If you’re a MAGA voter who cares about the Epstein files, there’s only one side that has been consistently trying to prevent or delay their release. There’s only one side that has labeled it a hoax, threatened those who want transparency, and feigned ignorance about their contents until it could no longer sustain the denials.
As I wrote earlier this week, the narrative is collapsing, and MAGA pundits are now in serious cope mode. They are now arguing absurd theories about how Trump must have been an informant on Epstein, how Democrats must have had Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre killed, and how it’s really not pedophilia if we’re talking about 15-year-olds rather than 8-year-olds. These coping mechanisms may work with a subset of MAGA world, but they can’t stop the widespread attrition.
Trump now understands that. Over the weekend, he threw in the political towel, telling House Republicans they should vote for release of the Epstein files. This is a complete 180, a full retreat. But it arrives far too late to undo the damage that months of concerted efforts to prevent the files’ release have inflicted upon MAGA suspicions.
And really, it’s still just a punt—either to the Senate, where the GOP must now decide whether to kill the bill with a filibuster and be forever known as pedophile protectors, or to his own desk, where Trump must decide whether to sign or veto the bill. He is no doubt scheming with advisors, even now, on how to stall or prevent the release of the Epstein files in some other way and buy more political time. For example, the sham investigations the Justice Department has launched at Trump’s request into Democrats named in the recently released Epstein e-mails could serve as a basis for refusing to release further Epstein files due to “active investigations.”
One key takeaway: The pressure upon the House GOP to vote for the bill must have been so overwhelming that even Trump could not bully the conference into protecting him any further. That is a real and concrete sign that Trump’s sway over his own party is waning and that they are beginning to look out for their own distinct political futures.
Knowing that Trump’s base has begun to turn its collective back on him, for all the reasons discussed above and then some, no doubt made that decision to vote for transparency far easier. After all, these GOP officials stuck with Trump in the past to avoid being destroyed by the MAGA base. Now they were ready to break with Trump to avoid precisely the same fate.
And when a yarn like that unravels, when a dam like that cracks, there’s simply no returning to the way things were before. MAGA has come undone. The question now is what damage Trump and the GOP will cause in their seriously weakened state.
Two points. First, before Biden left office the Republicans had agreed to a much needed immigration reform bill. Trump killed it only because he wanted to run on the issue. People should demand that bill or something close be brought back and passed so the insipid current policies on immigration can come to a merciful end. Second, current Epstein investigations are a complete sham because the statute of limitations on any wrongdoing has long since passed. Do not accept this as an excuse for nondisclosure because it’s nonsense.
Love your compilation of how things have gone so terribly wrong for trump with MAGA, Jay. It does feel like the dam is breaching. We know more havoc and cruelty remain before this is over...but it's looking more likely that the midterms will provide the decisive win Democrats need to turn this ship around. Hard work (and fingers crossed) remains to get us there.