Trump is Destroying His Own Coalition
The Republican Party is in as much serious trouble as the Democrats
Last November, Donald Trump was sent back to the White House on a wave of revulsion and desperation. There is no need to go into the Biden Administration’s abysmal track record on all things working class.
It is sufficient to say that the Democrats’ message of feeling the joy for the nomination of a giggling, authoritarian prosecutor just because she was a she and happened to have both African and Indian ancestry fell flat.
Trump won primarily because of four things:
He cast himself as the peace candidate, promising to end the Ukraine War and not to entangle the United States in foreign alliances, which are seldom in the interests of working class Americans, and his track record during his first term seemed to demonstrate he really meant this.
He promised to deliver aid to ordinary Americans in places like North Carolina and Los Angeles who had been devastated by disasters, and to somehow create lots of jobs for everybody.
He promised to dismantle the permanent bureaucracy commonly known as the Deep State, and to shift the money saved from them to ordinary Americans.
He promised to seal the borders against illegal immigration.
He easily delivered on #4 by a simple policy change, disproving Democrat claims that doing so was impossible. Other than that he has demonstrably failed.
The Ukraine War drags on. Trump could have ended it by now simply by cutting off military aid to Ukraine, but somehow it just keeps on flowing.
Instead of avoiding entangling foreign alliances, Trump has mostly embraced the one with the genocidal apartheid state of Israel, going so far as to start a very ill-advised war with Yemenis armed with excellent drone and missile technology, from whom the Navy was forced to ignominiously retreat.
His equally ill-advised and chaotic tariffs only serve to drive up prices, disrupt supply chains, and to make things even worse for ordinary Americans.
The much ballyhooed DOGE dismantled a lot of politically unpopular NGOs and a tiny sliver of the Deep State, but did absolutely nothing to cut federal spending after Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget is factored in, a fact that was noticed and opposed by some principled libertarian Republicans like Thomas Massie of Kentucky.
Trump reacted in exactly the wrong way. Acting like the authoritarian CEO that he is, he channeled his character on The Apprentice and demanded that Massie should be fired for daring to defy him, which is the exact same thing he said about Federal Judges who ruled against the flagrantly unconstitutional actions by his minions in the Department of Homeland Security.
As many Trump voters said on social media, those are the actions of a small and petty man, unworthy of either respect or admiration.
Massie remains defiant because he is that rare politician who actually has some principles, and he represents a very large and important part of the MAGA base. They, like Massie, are not the members of a cult of personality as liberals like to charge, and they’ve stuck by their principles for decades so they’re not going to change now for Trump’s benefit any more than they did for Mitt Romney’s.
That same portion of the MAGA electorate, and then some, are also very vehement defenders of the Bill of Rights. It’s one of the things I like about them, and one of the things that will dissolve Trump’s base of support even more.
Trump’s been terrible on civil liberties. He has arrested people and deported them to foreign gulags without even the benefit of a court hearing. He has backed blatantly unconstitutional bills which would criminalize any political speech an insignificant and monstrously arrogant foreign country does not like. He has said he didn’t know if he was required to obey a ruling against him by the Supreme Court.
There is one loud and significant fraction of his base who blindly support these things, but they are in the minority of Republican voters according to the both the polls and my own personal experience. There certainly are not enough of them to allow the Republicans to hold onto the majority in Congress if their more libertarian wing declines to vote.
Finally, there’s this.
A dead child lying on a cold floor, on top of even worse images the Israeli genocidal maniacs themselves have livestreamed directly to all of our phones. Paid for by the USA. Paid for by all those dollars Trump said he would be bringing home. Defended by AIPAC, the Zionists with whom Trump has surrounded himself, and worse, by Trump himself.
Trump could have stopped this on January 20th. He could stop it right now by simply suspending arms shipments to Israel. He refuses to do so, and that may well be the greatest of all of his domestic political blunders.
If Massie is the chisel that will fracture the Trump coalition, the Gaza Genocide is the sledgehammer. Most registered Republicans already disapprove of Israel, and the longer Trump allows the genocide to continue, the less likely they are to show up at the polls in November 2026.
Trump himself may not care about the future of the Republican Party any more than I do. He’ll be 79 next month, knows he can’t run again, and let’s face it, Trump voters, Donald Trump’s #1 priority has always been Donald Trump.
And he’s sure shown it this time around, hasn’t he? Accepting a gold-plated Air Force One from Qatar isn’t exactly something either George Washington or Abe Lincoln ever would have done now, is it? It’s tacky, tasteless, and eminently impeachable, not that the Democrats would ever impeach him for anything real.
But it does make him look...small. Petty. A greedy, grasping little man with no integrity who only cares for himself. Not a good look at all. Just one more bad look in a growing sea of bad looks.
Over the next few months, as more of them are hit in their pocketbooks by Trump’s Billionaires First policies, many Republicans will abandon that political party just as many Democrats abandoned theirs after they rigged two primaries just to keep Bernie Sanders out.
There will be opportunities to build some real working class solidarity in the months and years ahead. The real anarchists and socialists do have a lot of common ground with the MAGA base, and vice-versa. There is no such common ground to be had with the liberal elites or their brain-dead cultish followers, but there is with a large part of MAGA.
If enough of us realize that and come together to build a movement to make some real gains for the working class, we can win some victories that might just make our lives, not to mention the lives of people around the world ground down by the Empire, a lot better than they are now.
We can start that by supporting congresscritters like Massie or Marjorie Taylor Greene, who refused to support a bill to make “anti-Semitic” speech criminal because it violated the First Amendment, when they do stand up and do the right thing.
The things we have in common are greater than our differences. We are all Americans, after all, and we’re all tired of being screwed over by sociopathic and parasitical elites. The future is ours, not Musk’s or the WEF’s, but only if we reach out and take it. Together.
Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.
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I agree: if we can get past our differences, we have much in common. like a Venn diagram. I have many progressive friends who have a hard time seeing it. It boils down to: real people - working class, working poor, retirees, veterans, CHILDREN - in the "richest country in the history of the world" are suffering while our tax dollars go to a genocide and defense contractors. We don't need to do this. We don't need Lockheed, Boeing, Starlink. A golden dome!? JFC. Feed people. Educate. Allow them time to raise their children! Pay them sufficiently. Ban stock buybacks. Access to health care for all. (We lost that batttle when we tied health care coverage to employment.) Treat people with respect. Stop the compete or die mentality. Ah, well. I'm an old woman. I can dream.
Very good article. As a socialist (a Canadian one though not American) I know I have a lot more in common with MAGA than shit-libs. I always liked Massie. He seems like a man of principle and that's a rare thing to find when your talking about politicians.