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If you ever wanted proof that political coalitions are fragile and messy affairs, look no further than the Republican Party in the era of President Donald Trump.
Last year, the GOP was ebullient. With Trump in the lead, the party won unified control of the federal government and had a mandate to govern. On his way to a second, nonconsecutive term, Trump won 312 electoral votes, the most by any Republican since President George H.W. Bush’s landslide victory in 1988, and delivered the GOP its first national popular vote win since 2004.
This monumental, realigning victory was due in no small part to an eclectic coalition that was full of contradictions. On the one hand, it featured traditional Republican constituencies that had cut their teeth in the former President George W. Bush and the Tea Party eras and cared mostly about low taxes, aggressive foreign policy, and a business-friendly posture, as well as social conservatives who had consistently voted Republican over issues such as abortion.
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But it also featured an array of newcomers, many of whom, as recently as 2016 or even 2020, had voted for the Democratic Party or were entirely disengaged from politics. Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” managed to bring along Silicon Valley technology innovators, such as Elon Musk and his acolytes, who feared that continued Democratic rule would stifle innovation and expand a regime of censorship.
It included a whole cadre of politically disengaged young men who followed apolitical “podcast bros” such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Andrew Schulz, but had come to view Democrats as scoldish hall monitors who sought to police any joke that may have pushed the bounds of political correctness and smear anyone who found it funny. It was a coalition that included working-class Hispanics, who, until recently, had been devoted Democrats but were concerned about the cost of living. And it included the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement, spearheaded by now-Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It is safe to say that, if you wanted to find a group within the coalition that elected Trump to the presidency to identify with, you very likely could. In that sense, there was something for everyone in the MAGA tent. But this also meant that there were fundamental tensions within that coalition from its inception. Now, a year removed from that historic election, it is becoming all the more clear that the electoral coalition Trump assembled was nothing short of miraculous.
It is hardly hyperbole to suggest that without Trump, the coalition would not exist. Much in the way that the Republican Party was remade in the Ronald Reagan era, the Trump revolution has fundamentally reshaped the GOP for the future. Yet, as he nears the end of his first year back in office for his final term, the group that he assembled is full of fissures.
An ongoing row within MAGA, largely centered on Tucker Carlson’s decision to hold a softball interview with Nick Fuentes, a loudmouth personality with an affinity for antisemitism, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin, is only one part of the picture.
It is a bare expectation to condemn Fuentes’s smug and vile tirades. But at the same time, his following, while somewhat significant, is also irrelevant as a political force. He spent the entirety of the 2024 election countersignaling the Trump campaign, urged his followers not to vote for the president, and unleashed a campaign of unvarnished racism against Vice President JD Vance because his wife, second lady Usha Vance, is from a family of Indian immigrants.
But what initially began as a legitimate concern about a growing antisemitic influence in certain circles on the Right (most notably regarding Fuentes and his audience) has expanded to a broader, and increasingly nasty debate over what the conservative movement stands for and what the future of the MAGA coalition is. And as messy as it is, it needed to happen.
A recent letter penned by Christopher Long, the former president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and former ISI chairman Thomas Lynch exemplifies these fissures within the conservative movement. The letter took issue with ISI’s engagement with and platforming of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, known for his book Why Liberalism Failed, and neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin.
The letter, which calls for the firing of ISI President Johnny Burtka for his engagement with them, decries Yarvin and Deneen as espousing ideas fundamentally opposed to American ideals because of their implicit or explicit rejection of post-war conservatism and the classical liberal interpretation of the founding. The letter also tries to tie the two of them to Fuentes, saying, “Traditional conservatives who believe in America’s Founding principles and look back at the Reagan Revolution as a step in the right direction need to wake up and understand the battle currently underway.”
While for most people this attempt to gatekeep a certain brand of intellectual from conservative institutions reeks of inside baseball, it comes at a time when the question of “What comes next?” as Trump’s January 2029 exit from the White House comes further into view becomes more and more pressing.
“The battle currently underway” is one that began the moment Trump executed his hostile takeover of the GOP, but will far outlast him. This time next year, the midterms will be in the rearview mirror and Republicans with ambitions of sitting behind the Resolute Desk will be launching their presidential campaigns, each with an eye towards inheriting the coalition that Trump created. The Republican Party, and indeed the conservative movement at large, will have to decide which parts of the Trump coalition can be kept and which ones will be cast aside.
The political movement supported by working-class voters will have to decide whether Trump’s peace with blue-collar labor unions, such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, will continue, even in the face of opposition from business-friendly Republican voters who have long taken a skeptical and hostile stance toward organized labor and unionization.
It will also have to decide whether it will cater to those same working-class voters who joined the GOP because of the promise that tighter trade restrictions and tariffs would bring back jobs lost to foreign economies, or if it will revert to its corporate-supported pre-Trump consensus of free trade with anyone, at any time.
MAGA has been the home for social conservative principles on life, marriage, and family, and will have to decide whether it can continue to make peace with an army of tech bros who see human flourishing through the lens of a computer screen, artificial intelligence, and robotics that they believe can deliver a utopia.
The movement that has been the home for the anti-abortion movement and achieved its most important victory with the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 must decide whether it can coexist alongside other members of the coalition that have opposed abortion restrictions and felt comfortable voting for Trump precisely because he moderated on the issue.
The coalition, now largely alone in its support for Israel, will have to decide whether it can reconcile a wide range of factions that have differing views on foreign policy. Whether it be the more liberal Jews who joined MAGA after being horrified by the unchallenged rise of antisemitism on the Left; the interventionist hawks who have cheered U.S. engagement overseas; the foreign policy realists who believe the United States is far too entangled with other nations, including Israel; or Theo Von, Rogan, and the other podcasters who have either said that the Israeli military campaign in Gaza was genocide or platformed people who did.
And will the Make America Healthy Again faction have a place in the post-Trump future? Or will the libertarian economic impulses within the movement discourage the aggressive oversight of Big Pharma and food companies that Kennedy has spearheaded at the HHS?
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The fight for the future of the conservative political project is as much a fight over ideas as it is whether or not the Trump MAGA coalition, with all of its internal contradictions, will continue to exist in its current form.
In the end, the glue that holds together this coalition of contradictions may be the failures and radicalism of the Left and the Democratic Party. After all, this was the catalyst that helped form it in the first place. But to be honest about this coalition means being honest about its conflicts and letting those ideological battles take place.