I spent the Labor Day weekend in Chicago, America’s greatest summer city. Sunday afternoon in particular was glorious. The temperatures were moderate, the skies were clear and the tourist sections of the city were teeming with happy Pearl Jam fans who’d just attended Saturday’s concert at Wrigley Field. My wife and I took our grandchildren to Navy Pier to visit the Chicago Children’s Museum, and as we walked back toward Michigan Avenue we saw the same sight we see every time we visit Chicago — an impressive, towering skyscraper with the name “Trump” emblazoned in immense letters across the building’s facade.
I was reminded once again that Donald Trump is a singular figure in American politics. There is no one like him, and that means that no one can replace him. While it’s always perilous to make predictions about American politics — or anything else about the future — here’s one that I’m almost certain is correct: If Donald Trump loses in 2024, MAGA will fade. He is the irreplaceable key to its success.
Last month, I wrote a column that generated intense blowback on the right because I argued that as a pro-life conservative I am voting for Kamala Harris. That was controversial enough, but what really seemed to make people angry was one of my stated motivations: that I am voting for Harris to try to save conservatism from MAGA. Defeating Trump, I said, gives conservative Americans a chance to “build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.”
The MAGA response was, in essence, you’re fooling yourself. Trump or no Trump, we own the party now.
In fact, this argument is one way that MAGA keeps other Republicans in line. Like it or not, they say, this is the modern Republican Party. You can choose it, or you can choose the Democrats, but don’t think for a moment that a different party is possible.
But is that correct? We’re nine years into the Trump era of the Republican Party, and we can see a different reality: attempts to mimic Trump succeed in Republican primaries and deep red jurisdictions, but they fail in swing states and purple districts. Trump is MAGA’s most popular figure, and if he loses, then MAGA has nowhere to go but down.
Let’s look at the electoral record. The 2022 election should have been a red Republican wave. Inflation was close to its post-pandemic high, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a bloody disaster, and Russia had invaded Ukraine. High costs and global chaos are usually a recipe for an electoral catastrophe for the incumbent party.
But MAGA snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. In swing state after swing state, Republicans nominated hard-core MAGA candidates, a collection of cranks and conspiracy theorists who went on to lose race after race. Most notably, Kari Lake lost her race for governor of Arizona; Georgia football hero Herschel Walker lost his Senate race; and the Democratic candidate in the Pennsylvania race for governor, Josh Shapiro, crushed the MAGA-fied Republican, Doug Mastriano, by almost 15 points.
What makes those MAGA losses even more notable is the success of more conventional establishment Republicans. Brian Kemp substantially outperformed Walker in Georgia, winning his race for governor by more than 7 points against a very capable opponent in Stacey Abrams. In Ohio, hyper-MAGA JD Vance won his Senate race, but he underperformed Gov. Mike DeWine, an establishment Republican, by almost 19 points. Vance won his race by slightly more than 6 points; DeWine won by 25.
If the early polling numbers are any indication, this trend will continue in 2024. The race between Trump and Harris is too close to call in each of the seven swing states. At the same time, however, other MAGA figures underperform. In North Carolina, 538 gives Trump a very narrow lead, but the polls show hyper-MAGA Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, trailing by between four and 11 points. In Arizona, Trump also has a very narrow lead, but most polls show Lake trailing her Democratic opponent for the Senate, Ruben Gallego, by a decisive margin.
Trump is peak MAGA, and even peak MAGA hasn’t been able to achieve Mitt Romney’s share of the 2012 popular vote. Stronger turnout masked this reality, but Trump has never achieved even 47% of the total votes cast.
If Trump loses, there is no ready heir to his MAGA crown. Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, would be saddled with at least partial responsibility for Trump’s loss, and the American people already view him unfavorably. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida seemed poised to offer a perfected version of MAGA to Republicans — all of the Trump culture war and none of the Trump corruption (and he actually substantially outperformed Trump’s 2020 Florida margin in his 2022 reelection). But he’s a diminished figure after his disastrous presidential primary performance.
It turns out that Republican primary voters deemed MAGA as already perfected, in the person of Donald Trump.
The rest of MAGA is a weird, scandalous mess. Just last week, Tucker Carlson — arguably the most popular media figure in MAGA America — interviewed a fringe right-wing history podcaster who claims that Winston Churchill is “a chief villain” of World War II, which led to days of debate in the online right about — believe it or not — the relative merits of Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler.
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice released an indictment of two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, charging RT and its employees with having paid millions of dollars to an American company, identified by news outlets as Tenet Media, with the intent of spreading the Russian government’s messaging.
Tenet Media’s website, which is a platform for content creators, lists popular right-wing influencers, including Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, as its “talent.” Pool, Johnson and the other purported beneficiaries of Russian largesse pleaded ignorance, but even the most cursory review of their content indicates why Russia would want to amplify their voices. Pool, for example, recently proclaimed that “we should apologize to Russia” for supporting Ukraine, and that Ukraine is “the enemy of this country.”
In August, MAGA celebrated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump, yet RFK Jr. is popular with only a tiny fringe, and he might be one of the more bizarre politicians in American public life. This is a man, after all, who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park. That’s one of his strangest scandals, but hardly his most consequential. He’s a veritable font of dangerous medical misinformation and may well be America’s most influential anti-vaccine activist, attacking not just the COVID vaccine but also the common childhood vaccines that have also saved countless lives.
And let’s not forget, if Trump loses, he’s highly likely to face federal juries in both Washington and in South Florida. (If he wins, he can order the Department of Justice to drop the cases.) If he loses one of those trials (much less both), then MAGA’s central figure won’t be able to mount a fourth run for the presidency. He’ll almost certainly be in prison. The rule of law will have done its work.
I know very well that Trump is just as scandalous and corrupt as many of the people I just talked about, but he succeeds where they fail in part because of the very thing I highlighted in the first paragraph. Before he was a politician, he was a monumental celebrity who built his brand on the notion that he was one of the most successful, astute and entertaining executives in the United States.
We know his actual business record is less sterling than his reputation once suggested. He has too many bankruptcies and too many failures to be treated with the reverence we saw on “The Apprentice,” but Trump’s preexisting celebrity was indispensable to his success.
Trump’s MAGA imitators replicate his scandals or his pugilism (sometimes both), but not his celebrity. DeSantis is arguably MAGA’s most successful politician not named Trump, but even he couldn’t replicate (much less replace) Trump’s appeal. As Noah Millman argued Thursday in The New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s persona has been the essence of his appeal,” and if Trump claims that he “alone” can fix our nation, then how can he ever actually pass the baton?
I’m under no illusions that defeating Trump will resurrect Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party — or John McCain’s or Mitt Romney’s. I’m also under no illusions about the fate of Never Trumpers in a post-Trump GOP. Many of us are seen as traitors and won’t be welcomed back into the fold, even if the Republicans finally do turn the page on Trump.
But the personal drama of the small band of Never Trump Republicans is meaningless compared with the national necessity of a healthy Republican Party. A two-party democracy is inherently fragile if one party is fundamentally broken. If Trump loses, MAGA will fade. It will not go away, of course. Reactionary populism is a permanent fixture of American politics, but don’t believe MAGA’s hype. Its national success depends on one man.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.