Coyocan Trump’s idea of a Christmas present for his base is a dozen Tomahawks fired from a Navy ship in the Gulf of Guinea, striking two Islamic State camps in Nigeria’s Sokoto State. Supposedly, the rational for this action in Africa is a story being pushed by his Christian nationalist base that the Nigerian government is not doing enough to top Islamic militants from persecuting Christians. Trump has not specified which attacks on Christians he was referring to, nor has he cited evidence for the claim, made by his political allies, that Christians in Nigeria were facing “genocide.” In a country where roughly half of the population is Christian and half Muslim, that claim is likely a stretch, especially from the same voices extolling Israel’s devastation in Gaza.
As a columnist pointed out in a glass-half-full look at the president over the last year, as he slips and fades, he becomes dangerous when he is desperate as he is now. This kind of military gift to his extreme base is a good example of an ill-considered, crazed Christmas day gift in blood to them.
On the other hand, there was a Christmas gift of sorts to the rest of us by an editor of a Catholic literary publication, making the argument that we are now seeing the “death of MAGA.” The recent disputes and divisions at the Turning Point convention is where Matthew Walther makes his case, as follows:
MAGA’s internal contradictions can no longer be ignored. The movement that had promised an end to foreign adventurism has found itself torn between an alliance of ideological noninterventionists and realists and a hawkish national security establishment. Trumpism promised a revival of domestic manufacturing, yet neither the president nor his advisers have decided whether this means tariffs, industrial policy, reviving organized labor, environmental deregulation or mere nostalgia. MAGA also promised immigration reform but has oscillated between showboating deportations and a deference to pro-visa allies in Big Tech and corporate agriculture. At the same time, American support for Israel has become a contested issue on the right for the first time in decades. Some opponents have been accused of antisemitism; others simply announce it. The result of a decade of these upheavals has not been consolidation of the Trumpist position but a series of existential questions to which no one seems capable of providing a definitive answer.
No question, there is big trouble in the MAGA paradise. J.D. Vance’s post-event attempt to paper over the divisions in a one-big-tent plea went almost unnoticed.
Walther goes harder on the unchecked rot seeping through the MAGA movement, saying
MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building. There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune.
You can’t cure crazy, and Walther is persuasive in stating the obvious. Unchecked and unaccountable, the MAGA movement is having its guts torn out, despite Trump’s daily harangues and executive orders to placate different parts of these subcultures.
Any celebration would be premature, and ignoring the legitimate grievances within the MAGA base would be equally disastrous. But, Walther reminds us that, “Coalitions organized around symbolic enmities and ideological absolutes rather than shared material interests are prone to sudden collapse.”
No sense looking this gift horse in its mouth, reports of MAGA’s demise are still a Christmas gift worth cherishing, even if we’re clutching at straws.