MAGA division widening as Trump and MTG feud escalates
President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement has been a large part of U.S. politics since Trump came down that escalator in 2015. But as his second term continues, there appears to be more rifts forming within the movement.
“If you think about the MAGA movement, there are a lot of contradictions,” Nolan McCarty, politics and public affairs professor at Princeton University, told Straight Arrow News. “There are lots of elements in that coalition that have very, very different priorities, whether it’s economic populism or conservative economic policy, or whether it’s Christian nationalism versus progressive anti-Semitism, or social conservatives versus tech.”
Majorie Taylor Greene
The clearest divide in the last several weeks comes from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA.
We’ve come a long way from that photo taken during former President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last year.
Trump and Greene are now in the midst of a very public fallout following her support of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
“Her attachment to MAGA was that [Trump] was on the right side of certain conspiracy theories that she held very dear,” McCarty said. “And then the reckoning that he may have other priorities in mind, rather than being as transparent as possible about Epstein, became important.”
In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump called the congresswoman “wacky.”
“Conservative people are thinking about primarying Marjorie in her District of Georgia, that they too are fed up with her and her antics and, if the right person runs, they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support,” Trump wrote.
Greene said she never thought pushing for the release of the Epstein files, something Trump promised to do on the campaign trail, would cause a rift like this.
“I never thought that fighting to release the Epstein files, defending women who were victims of rape, and fighting to expose the web of rich powerful elites would have caused this, but here we are,” Greene wrote on X.
She also said she’s now receiving threats as a result of Trump’s attacks on her.
“Now that President Trump has called me a traitor, which is absolutely untrue and horrific,” Greene posted on X. “Mark Levin has been calling me a traitor. And so have other prominent likely paid social medial activists. This puts blood in the water and creates a feeding frenzy. And it could ultimately lead to a harmful or even deadly outcome.”
Other MAGA divides
Several other topics have caused internal disagreements within the MAGA movement, including a recent interview between Tucker Carlson and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Many members of the Republican party denounced platforming someone as bigoted as Fuentes, but Trump defended Carlson’s interview and has hosted Fuentes at Mar-A-Lago in the past.
MAGA was also split on the Israel-Iran conflict, including Greene and Carlson who both voiced anger that the U.S. was getting involved in a foreign conflict even as prices continued to rise here at home.
“Part of his coalition is America first, isolationist, stay out of foreign wars,” McCarty said. “And then there’s another part of the coalition that wants to defend Ukraine, but also another faction that wants to be very aggressive toward Venezuela and Maduro. And those are really three separate factions really trying to get the upper hand in those debates. And there’s really almost no way that the President can thread the needle and make all three of those groups happy simultaneously.”
More recently, some conservative influencers have called out FBI Director Kash Patel and the use of a private jet to attend his girlfriend’s events. That led to Patel’s girlfriend filing lawsuits against some of those influencers, which was also not received well.
“Kash Patel has to step down,” Candace Owens wrote on X. “This is excruciatingly embarrassing. He’s a teenager in love representing the Federal government.”
What’s next?
McCarty believes part of why we now see these cracks widening within MAGA is because of what happened in the elections earlier this month, with Democrats sweeping most of the big races.
“The disastrous elections a few weeks ago makes it more likely that the Democrats will pick up the house by a lot of seats and may even put the Senate into play,” McCarty said. “And so, the Republicans are perhaps seeing him not just as a lame duck, but as kind of an active liability.”
There have been previous rifts within the MAGA movement, such as during Trump’s first term, when his former Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe.
Trump forced him to resign, and MAGA moved on.
“He’s glued things back together before,” McCarty said. “But he’s always glued them back, in large part because he had a political future, and that he could bring people back in the line, either through carrots or sticks.”
Despite Trump floating a third term, that seems extremely unlikely. Which is why his usual playbook of primarying opponents, like he has threatened to do with Greene, may not work as well as before.
“If we go through an election cycle where he can’t do anything to Thomas Massie or Marjorie Taylor Greene, if they survive, and then lots of other kind of his supporters lose general elections, I just don’t think he has anything left, you know, in the toolkit,” McCarty said.
Which brings us to 2028, raising the question of who will be the Republican presidential nominee, and potential internal rifts, which things like the Carlson/Fuentes interview have exposed.
“One presidential aspirant, J.D. Vance, defended Carlson. And then another, Ted Cruz, went after not just Carlson, but went after Vance for supporting Carlson,” McCarty said. “So, you actually see people who are jockeying for position now, whereas if the election in November had not been so disastrous, I think that would have been put off for another 12 months or so.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
