Douthat: No one controls MAGA — not even Trump

Apart from supplying endless fodder to journalists and Democrats, the White House’s attempts to put a lid on the Jeffrey Epstein affair provide a useful test for a question that will matter more the deeper we travel into Donald Trump’s second term: Namely, to what extent does MAGA populism exist as a political force distinct from the impulses and whims of its red-hatted leader?

The popular answer has always been that it doesn’t, that MAGA is just a cult of personality in which any ideological reversal will be tolerated so long as the Great Man sets the course.

But this confuses the personal bond between Trump and his core supporters, which is unlikely to be severed by any mere policy dispute, with his ability to persuade those supporters to actually change their substantive views, where his powers are more limited.

Potent avatar

The president is an especially potent avatar for the broad populist impulse across the West. But he did not create that impulse, and he doesn’t single-handedly decide what it demands or where it ends up. Instead, there is an ongoing negotiation between what the president would like to do and what his voters will accept.

In some cases, what MAGA wants acts as an ideological tether on Trump’s political impulses. You can see this especially on immigration, where the president’s personal restrictionism still leaves room for some kind of wide door in his big, beautiful wall.

Depending on which interest group Trump is talking to, that door could be open for farm and hotel workers, or for H-1B visa recipients, or for foreign college students hoping to have a green card stapled to their diplomas.

But what seems clear enough is that left to his own devices, the president would probably end up negotiating an immigration reform that pleases business executives more than Stephen Miller. Trump doesn’t actually do this kind of deal, however, because he knows Miller represents the purest form of anti-immigration sentiment, to which even MAGA’s leader must defer.

In other cases, what MAGA wants is discovered gradually, and the president follows along.

You saw this at work during COVID, where Trump was often one step behind the populist impulse. He treated the outbreak as a nothingburger while the online right was freaking out about it. He accepted lockdowns and restrictions just as the populist impulse began evolving toward anti-Faucian libertarianism. And then he took up the libertarian critique himself — but haphazardly, leaving Anthony Fauci in charge of big parts of policy. Similarly, Trump’s desire to celebrate the triumph of Operation Warp Speed was in persistent tension with grassroots vaccine skepticism, and his eventual embrace of “MAHA” and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a case of the grassroots mostly getting its way.

Then you have cases where what MAGA wants is just the perception of success, and so Trump’s ability to lead his base in one ideological direction or another depends on whether he appears to be succeeding.

I think this is what you see in his administration’s Middle East policy. When the White House was considering joining Israel’s war against Iran, you had would-be populist spokesmen like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon arguing that bombing Iran’s nuclear program would shatter his coalition, while more hawkish pundits insisted that real MAGA voters were Iran hawks.

But it might just be that any MAGA position on military intervention is entirely contingent on whether it seems quick and easy. So MAGA might have adopted the Bannon-Carlson stance if the Iranians had dramatically and successfully struck back — but because they didn’t, Trump was able to play the hawk without losing populist support.

Tail wags dog

Now back to the Epstein case, where you can see all three of these dynamics at play. The original promise to reveal the Epstein files was a case of MAGA leading Trump, since the president himself was never especially enthusiastic about the issue. His failed attempt to simply make it go away was an example of pulling against the MAGA tether and being yanked back, unusually hard. And the various forays since — unsealing the grand jury transcripts! changing the subject to Russiagate! interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell! — are bids to offer some kind of victory, some success to satisfy MAGA’s demand for a win over the Deep State.

But perhaps the most important dynamic, lurking just below the surface of the Epstein debate, is less about Trump himself than it is about the shared awareness that MAGA will continue to exist in some form once his presidency is over. And that form, no less than the current version, won’t be imposed by anybody’s fiat; it will be created by interactions between populism’s would-be leaders and the demands and expectations of their voters.

It might be that Trump is fundamentally a moderating influence, tempering the extreme and paranoid demands that under weaker successors will more completely dominate the populist agenda. Or it might be that without Trump as an avatar, part of MAGA will be reabsorbed into a more traditional form of Republicanism, leaving a paranoid rump of podcasters on the outside looking in. Or it might be that some future populist leader will create an unpredictable remix, a new MAGA for a different age.

But all of this remains to be created, invented, found out. And so the crucial action on the right, as the second term winds on, will involve contested explorations of that great undiscovered country: MAGA after Trump.

Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist.