Why MAGA Acts Like It'll Never Lose Power
If you spend enough time on Bluesky,1 it won’t take long before you’re confronted with someone making some version of the following statement about the Second Trump Administration:
These are not the actions of people who expect to relinquish power — ever.
And then you’ll probably see a bunch of despondent and fatalistic replies to this portentous warning, usually along the lines of:
There won’t be free and fair elections in 2026 or 2028 or ever again!
And then you’ll feel tired, and irritable, and powerless; and you’ll wonder why the hell you ever use social media in the first place. And then, if you’re truly gifted with wisdom and self-control, you’ll put your phone down and take a little nap.
And after you wake up — but before you impulsively grab your phone to look at Bluesky once again — you may also wonder: Are they right?
Is that MAGA’s private rejoinder to every person who cries out against the President’s acts of hubris and corruption? That it doesn’t matter what popular opinion says, because we’ll never “have” to vote again?
Why else would the Trump Administration — very much including Trump’s over-mighty subject, Elon Musk — behave as if it were not susceptible to the normal rules of political gravity? Why else would they try to so hard to assert that Trump has powers that would make King George III blush?
It’s MAGA canon that Trump has never really lost an election; that his defeat in 2020 was a world-historic fraud. So I’m not going to say that anyone unsettled by these foreboding possibilities needs to calm down or touch grass.
I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump tried to remain in office after 2028.
At the same time, though, I don’t think we need to spend so much time trying to mind-meld with the current administration and its MAGA allies in order to understand why they act and talk as if their hold on power is permanent.
I think it’s enough to simply recognize that these people are hardcore populists, and that this kind of hubris is an inevitable consequence of the fundamental assumptions that undergird every truly populist movement.
Seeing Like a Populist
What are some of those fundamental assumptions?
Well, there’s the idea that the existing society’s elite are fundamentally self-interested, and that their claims to work for the common good are therefore inherently disingenuous.
And there’s the idea that some larger but politically weaker force — the People, the Working-Class, the Forgotten Man, etc. — are ignorant of their own latent power and consequently allow themselves to be exploited by this nefarious, cynical elite.
There’s also usually some version of the idea of “false consciousness” in this mix, some bedrock assumption that these people would be ready and willing to rise-up and overthrow their oppressors if only someone could activate them by yelling like Howard Beale.
You’ve probably noticed that little to none of this has anything to do with policy, per se.
That’s because populism isn’t defined by a commitment to any specific ideological or policy program; it can manifest across the ideological spectrum, as indeed it has throughout history. Huey Long was no more or less a populist than was Joe McCarthy, and Benjamin Netanyahu is no more or less a populist than is Recep Erdoğan.
On one level, this is part of what can make populist movements successful.
Public policy is often, at heart, a dispute about resources — who gets what. Almost axiomatically, therefore, any public policy question that is significant enough to gain widespread attention is going to involve a large number of people who feel they may lose something they consider important if they don’t engage in politics to stop it.
Populism, however, tries to avoid these potential sources of internal division by ignoring policy details altogether. That’s not to say that populists don’t campaign for or against specific policies; they do.
But rather than focusing their fire on the policies, populists tend to depict the policies they oppose as symptoms of a bigger problem: the wrong people — often, the wrong kind of people — have too much power.
Even by the standards of a populist leader and his movement, Trump and MAGA make this point with unusual bluntness. (Subtext is for cowards.)
On the “highbrow” side, you’ve got MAGA intellectuals waxing lyrical about the need for a “new elite”; on the Trump side, you’ve got countless declarations that the people who governed the country before he entered politics were “stupid people.”
As Trump’s career shows, this gambit can work. But the impulse to ignore or dismiss public policy brings risks as well as rewards. If the absolutely essential ingredient holding your political movement together is shared animosity, rather than mutual affection or a deeper sense of mutual interests, you have to keep those fires of antipathy burning.
Meanwhile, if you’re actually in power — and therefore, inevitably, in charge of making those “who gets what” policy decisions — you’ll eventually have to increase that negative solidarity in order to compensate for the loss of internal cohesion that is an inescapable consequence of policymaking.
Here’s how Jeremy Shapiro, Research Director at the European Council of Foreign Relations, described the dynamic on a recent episode of Pod Save the World when talking about Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s populist prime minister (emphasis mine):
I think she is more or less a traditional populist, certainly in when it comes to her immigration stance and when it comes to her anti-elite message and when it comes to her basic nationalism. But I think what she is above all is a very, very impressive politician.
And I think when you're Prime Minister of Italy, you have to balance a whole bunch of different considerations. And I think what we're seeing in Giorgia Meloni is not that someone who seemed to be a populist wasn't, but that power socializes you.
[…]
If you're an Italian politician, you have to have a good relationship with the European Union. You have to have a good relationship with the United States. So she has, I think, been quite deft in being able to stay true in a basic way to her populist roots, but also govern the country in a way that can conceivably deliver the goods.
And that's, that's moderated her from the standpoint of liberals in Europe and in the United States. I don't think she's exactly any different than she ever was, but I think she is finding that it's very easy to run [for office] as a populist; it's a lot harder to govern as a populist…
Populists don't really have governing programs, they have opposition programs. What she has done is demonstrate how you can change from an oppositional populist to a governing populist.
As Shapiro notes, Meloni has responded to the shift in incentives that comes with holding power by moderating, triangulating, balancing; by acting like a “normal” politician.
But as Shapiro also notes, that’s no doubt a consequence of her relative lack of power, as Prime Minister of Italy, when compared against the level of power of, say, a President Trump or President Putin:
Middle-sized European countries can't do anything everything they want. They have to deal with the European Union, they have to deal with the United States. They have to deal with a population that … once you're in power, isn't just interested in whether you like Russia or not; they're interested in you delivering the goods. And liking Russia is not a way of delivering the goods, economically.
These constraints have “socialize[d]” Meloni, as Shapiro puts it. But to state the obvious, there’s been no evidence — really ever, but especially during Trump’s second term — that Trump and MAGA are similarly willing to recognize reality’s constraints.
“Other People Don’t Mean Anything”
And that brings us back to our original question about MAGA’s tendency to behave as if the large swathes of the US population that oppose it simply do not exist.
Again, it could be because they have no intention of a peaceful transfer of power.2 But I think there’s something more fundamental going on here, something that has more to do with the essence of populism than with the specific individuals working in the Second Trump Administration.
It’s something that the professor and theorist of populism, Jan-Werner Müller, wrote about in 2019 in a London Review of Books essay that has mostly3 aged well (my emphasis):
Right-wing populists claim that they, and only they, represent what they tend to call ‘the real people’, or the ‘silent majority’. Rival contenders for power are dismissed as irredeemably corrupt: ‘Crooked Hillary’. Those among the people who do not fall in with the populists are said never to have truly belonged to the people in the first place – witness Trump’s condemnation of his critics as ‘un-American’, [Poland’s] Kaczyński railing against Poles with treason in their genes, or BJP politicians’ insistence that ‘division ... is just in the mind of certain politicians, but, as a society, India is one and India is harmonious.’ Populists talk incessantly about unifying the people, but their political strategy involves dividing societies and waging culture wars: whoever doesn’t want to be unified on their terms is cast out. As Trump put it in a campaign speech in May 2016, ‘the only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything.’
In other words, populism’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of its opponents is not simply a tendency or a rhetorical bent. It is the scaffolding that holds the rest of the populist project together. If you remove it, if you allow politics to be about something more than never-ending argument over who counts as “us” and “them,” the whole edifice collapses.
Without a target on which they can focus their animosity, the various factions within the populist movement — who often hate each other only slightly less than they hate their shared enemies — begin to fight.4
You can try to paper-over this inherent instability with patrimonial corruption; but eventually the bill comes due, and normal people — not just those with a privileged position within your populist party-state — notice their standard-of-living is deteriorating and demand, as Shapiro put, that you “deliver the goods.”
Someone less inclined towards magical thinking than Trump, or a version of Trump less surrounded by lickspittles who see their primary job as working towards the Donald, might well recognize complications that arise when the populist movement ascends to power.
But when party doctrine holds that “the other people don’t mean anything,” anyone making this argument risks being branded as a sell-out or a squish. It is not your job, as a loyal adherent of The Leader, to save him from himself. Your job is to let Trump be Trump.
So where does that leave you? With only one real choice: to double-down on the idea that, in a sense, you have no legitimate opposition — and that, as Steven Bannon once put it, “The Democrats don’t matter” because “the real opposition is the media.” And you can see how this plays out in the real-world by looking to places like Russia.
From the same 2019 Müller essay quoted above:
Opposition from within civil society presents a difficulty for populists: it potentially undermines their claim to be the sole representatives of the people. Their method of dealing with this problem is to follow a playbook perfected by Vladimir Putin (in many ways a role model for today’s right-wing populists): set out to ‘prove’ that civil society isn’t civil society at all, and that what appears to be popular opposition on the streets has nothing to do with the real people. Thus right-wing populist regimes have gone out of their way to discredit NGOs, representing them as the tools of external powers, and even (in Russia) insisting they declare themselves as ‘foreign agents’. Trump described as ‘paid-up activists’ the millions who came out against his proposed Muslim travel ban, and used the term again about critics of Brett Kavanaugh (for good measure, he also declared them to be ‘evil’).
I think this is the best way to understand MAGA’s increasing habit of describing anyone who doesn’t subscribe to its worldview as an “NPC.” And I believe it’s the reason why both Elon Musk and Trump insist that anyone who protests against them is likely a paid agent — or, as pro-segregationist politicians used to call them, “outside agitators.”
If they’re paid, then they’re basically actors. And if they’re actors, then they’re not “real.” They don’t represent a “real” constituency, or a “real” bloc of “real” voters. They’re a nuisance, a distraction, maybe even a psyop.
Whatever you want to call them, the one thing they’re not — within this warped mindset — is a potential future electoral majority. So there’s no reason for anyone who wants to remain in good standing within the MAGA world to behave as if the movement losing power is anything but a remote possibility.
And that, ultimately, is why the Second Trump Administration does so many things that make reasonable people — who are making the cardinal mistake of assuming that MAGA is also populated by reasonable people — think that this current administration must have some secret plans to hold onto power indefinitely.
It’s not because they do.5 It’s because they’re populists.
And, as populists, they can do no other.
Or, presumably, the left-leaning quarters of your social media platform of choice. I just happen to know Bluesky best because that’s where I do all my shitposting…
They’re 0-for-1 on that score thus far.
This line was a bit of a bunch to the gut to read from today’s POV: “But although patrimony is pervasive in the White House, Trump’s political family hasn’t extended very far: we have not seen the emergence of Trumpist oligarchs.”
This dynamic may be so congenital to populism that it helps explain why populist movements are almost always fronted by charismatic demagogues. A cult of personality in service of a “strong,” authoritarian leader may be necessary to keep the populist’s motley crew from engaging in not-so-friendly fire.
Though, again, they might!
One interesting thing that I have noticed recently is that metropolitan intellectuals who live on Bluesky seem to think that the threat from within is democrats feeling so defeated by the administration that they just give up. But as someone who lives in a smaller rural/suburban community in a purple state, what I see is that the people around me are taking way too much comfort in the fact that there will be elections in 2026 and 2028 despite reasons to at least have some doubts. I guess where you stand depends on where you live.
Your view about the nature of populists sounds right. But it does not discredit in any way the judgement that MAGA is acting as if their power is eternal because they will never concede elections. You have offered one broad reason why MAGA will likely never concede elections which undoubtedly exists along side other motivations, for instance simple desire for tribal power.