OH, LOOK, IT'S TIME FOR THE DOWNFALL OF TRUMPISM (AGAIN)

The Trump administration has infuriated the GOP base by failing to release incriminating documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case. David French believes that the anger we're seeing now heralds the eventual death of MAGA:

This moment ... allows us to peer into the future of MAGA and see its potential crackup. After Trump is gone, this movement could tear itself apart. Its very existence is premised on a series of fantastical assertions about America and American government.

This means that MAGA influencers are constantly deceiving themselves, one another and the right-wing public. It’s an ecosystem that operates in a constant state of crisis and grievance, and MAGA supporters are so convinced that the worst possible stories are real that they’ll turn on anyone not named Donald Trump who dares to tell them the truth — or who deviates in the slightest bit from the stories they tell themselves.

But why would that be a problem in the future? There's no risk that any influential voice on the right will ever tell base voters the truth. Right-wing messaging is all propaganda. It's been all propaganda for decades, and it will be long after Trump is gone. Republican voters don't believe "stories they tell themselves" -- they believe stories they've been told. That won't change, and the stories won't become more truthful after Trump is gone.

French continues:

Once Trump leaves office, there will be no one left to end the internal arguments and direct everyone to fall in line....

Remove that man, and only the grievances remain, and many of MAGA’s grievances are against other Republicans. The G.O.P. coalition contains pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine factions, internationalists and isolationists, normie Republicans and wild conspiracy theorists.

Yes, but pro-vaccine Republicans eagerly vote for anti-vaccine Republicans, internationalists eagerly vote for isolationists (who usually aren't genuine isolationists, as we saw when Trump bombed Iran), and with a few exceptions (such as Mark Robinson), normie Republicans flock to the polls to vote for conspiracy theorists (Kari Lake, for instance, lost the Arizona governor's race in 2022, but by less than a percentage point).

And it's odd that French credits Trump with the ability to "direct everyone to fall in line," because only a few paragraphs later he writes:

Trump himself isn’t immune from attack. As part of his divorce from the MAGA movement, Elon Musk has claimed that Trump and his longtime ally Steve Bannon are in the Epstein files. “How,” Musk posted on Tuesday, “can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”

By Saturday evening, Trump had enough. He posted a long screed on Truth Social that declared his support for [Attorney General Pam] Bondi — he said she was doing a “FANTASTIC JOB!” — and then bizarrely claimed that the Epstein files were written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration.” In a pointed reference to [FBI Director Kash] Patel, he said that the F.B.I. should be focused on investigating “Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, the Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting thugs and criminals,” rather than “spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.”

Judging from the early response online, MAGA is not satisfied.

That's because Trump doesn't always determine what MAGA believes. MAGA turned against vaccines long before Trump did -- he continued to speak favorably about the COVID vaccines that were developed during his first administration until booing crowds persuaded him to stop. Trump also followed other right-wing influencers on subjects such as DEI and trans rights (recall that in 2016 Trump said that Kaitlyn Jenner could use the bathroom of her choice in Trump Tower, a few months before he waved a Pride flag at a campaign rally).

The Republican base defers to Trump on most things, but not everything, and Trump doesn't have a monopoly on the development and nurturing of right-wing grievances. That's because the right-wing grievance machine predates Trump's entry into politcs by decades, and will exist long after he's gone.

I'm not sure who precisely will decide what right-wing voters believe on most issues, but the decider won't necessarily be a politician. After Ronald Reagan left office, Rush Limbaugh and other radio talkers determined the party line. Newt Gingrich picked up the slack in the early 1990s, and then Fox News seized control of party messaging, along with radio talkers and Matt Drudge, all of whom shared messaging control with the George W. Bush administration for most of the following decade. Once Barack Obama won the presidency, Fox and the talkers controlled the message along with the new Tea Party.

Trump seems to have been the party's sole leader for a decade, but he actually shares the leadership role now with the likes of Chris Rufo, Charlie Kirk, Chaya Raichik, and the Heritage Foundation, and the messages are channeled through Fox (for old people), purely ideological podcasts such as Steve Bannon's War Room for the middle-aged, and bro podcasts and social media posts for the young.

And all this is bankrolled by billionaires who largely stay out of the public eye but ensure that culture wars steer voters to the GOP and the GOP directs money into their pockets.

There's no crackup coming. Whoever hates "the libs" most and articulates lib-hate in the most energizing way will take over MAGA, whether it's still called MAGA or is rebranded. (The Tea Party was a rebranding for a disgraced GOP in the post-Bush era, and MAGA was essentially a personality-cult rebranding of the Tea Party.) What comes next will be extreme, but normie Republicans will dutifully go along.

Republicans don't really fight one another. They hate us too much to do that.