Will the MAGA Avengers Stick Together?
A Team of Rivals produces both good and bad outcomes.
It has long been said that change is a slow process. It takes time, we’re told, for certain outcomes to happen, for certain things to fall into place. There must be an aligning of the stars, the people that parrot this narrative say. We must constantly be searching, on the lookout, for a small foothold of incremental process, so as to not disturb this sacred process so much that we never move forward in an optimal and clear direction.
While there's a reason for this narrative, certainly, I’ve come to doubt it. Change happens at the pace of the change agents. If the people who want change truly want it to happen quickly, it will happen quickly. The same is true in the inverse. If people are wanting to make change slowly, it will happen slowly. It, like most anything else, is a question of desire and will. The type of person who makes things happen will, indeed, make things happen. The type of person who doesn’t, indeed, will not.
These two sides of the coin being laid out, it’s remarkable to see just how fast things have changed politically in the past five months. Ever since Donald Trump regained the presidency, America, from multiple angles, has done a total 180. Looking back on it, it’s like living in a fever dream. You don’t recognize how simultaneously awful and bizarre things are until it finally breaks, the toxins flow out of your pores, and you can see clearly for the first time.
However, before you can break a fever, two things must be tackled- how the fever attacks the body, and how the fever is broken. The fever itself was what Michael Shellenberger had accurately called the Woke Reign of Terror. This decade-plus-long cycle of authoritarian political correctness, which culminated in the disastrous presidency of Joe Biden, was enough to sicken the vast majority of the American population, as noted by the curb stomping of his running mate, Kamala Harris, through a county wide, Electoral College, and popular vote mandate not seen in 40 years.
The thing that broke the fever was Donald Trump. Trump, once tossed into the ether as politically radioactive after the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, was now the champion of the American electorate once again. He danced with the Village People. He appeared at UFC title fights. He worked the french fries at McDonalds. He made a fat joke about himself while driving a garbage truck. It was remarkable, and it worked.
Yet, the surprising thing was that Donald Trump was not nearly as aggressive, at least to my eyes, in his messaging as he was in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. Instead, he took the approach that Matt Walsh took while marketing his documentary What is a Woman? Walsh, the most vocal critic of radical gender ideology in the conservative movement, did not go shrieking at people in the streets about how morally-bankrupt and heinous it was to chop body parts off of children. Instead, what he did was simply have the people who did chop body parts off of children explain their folly for themselves, and watch them simply hang themselves with their own insanity.
This is exactly the strategy that Trump underwent during the 2024 campaign. Dubbing it with the now-famous line of a “Revolution of Common Sense”, Trump underwent the bold tactic- called out to the fringes of the American Left and Right and made them the populist middle. Trump recognized just how deeply the madness of our culture had set in- black was white, up was down, and nothing made sense. He knew all of the fools that called perfectly-normal people “extreme” and “weird” were not so at all.
The most evident way that Trump was able to accomplish this was in the assembly of his various alliances, ones most would have never thought possible. Tulsi Gabbard, his current Director of National Intelligence and the former Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, came out as a Republican and endorsed him at a rally. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s current Secretary of Health and Human Services who had once called Trump media ally Glenn Beck a traitor to the Constitution, rallied his entire campaign behind Trump’s “Make America Great Again” banner. JD Vance, once-comparing Trump to Hitler, was now his Vice President and heir apparent. Elon Musk, once a darling of the American Left for his stance on green energy, was his biggest donor. All of these wild people, who were called wild for all the wrong reasons by our elites and Ruling Class, were now the face of Trump’s franchise.
This was the boldest move in modern political history- making the Republican Party, a long-time Old Boys Club, into a big tent, multiethnic, working class populist nationalist movement. Bolder still, it worked, and it resonated. Particularly with the assembling of the coalition of people that Americans across party lines respected, Trump was able to craft a compelling vision for modern conservatism, something that the establishment swamp creature types had never come close to doing.
When this took place, pundits dubbed it the “MAGA Avengers” strategy. Like the famed superhero team popularized in Hollywood, the people assembled to save the day, on paper, had nothing in common. They were very different people, with very different upbringings, who had very different ways of seeing many things in the world. At face value, they had almost nothing in common. At face value, nothing between them would ever work.
But, like the Avengers, the MAGA Avengers have, for the time being, found a way to make it work between all of them. In fact, this has worked to such a degree that a level of fear and paranoia by their enemies has reached a fever pitch. Seen with their reactions to the deportations and defense of criminal gang members and the deconstruction of corrupt government organizations like USAID, our political Ruling Class are petrified of just how deep this new coalition will cut into their black book of secrets.
The fear of the MAGA Avengers, in addition, stems from the fact that all of them, to some degree or another, have been wronged. Kennedy was ostracized from a party his family had helped champion and revolutionize and slandered as a crackpot and a huckster. Gabbard was called a foreign agent and put on a terror watch list. Musk was called a neo-Nazi and was attempted to be bankrupted and intimidated by domestic terror attacks on his Tesla dealerships. Vance was slammed as a fascist and a misogynist.
Having been wronged, there has been a tinge of justice that has been sought by all of the MAGA Avengers, to some degree. Gabbard is now the head of the agency that put her on the terror watch list. Kennedy is now the head of the agency that once slammed him as a fraud. Vance is now our Vice President. Musk created the most influential new government agency in decades.
The American citizens, to a large degree, love the MAGA Avengers, to the disdain of all who want to disparage them. They love the fact that these destructive narratives are finally coming to an end, that clear-mindedness and sanity are now coming to bear once again. For the first time in a long time, politics is exciting again, something that people can look to as a pride point for themselves and for their country.
But yet, I have my doubts. The biggest doubt I have about the MAGA Avengers, one that has only increased as the administration has trudged along, is whether or not it will last. As we have seen, the speed at which they are working is blistering. They are not wasting any time at all. There are a lot of moving parts, balls in the air, and things to do that all seem, to some degree, to counteract one another. Along with that blistering speed is also much confusion.
This is a concern from multiple dimensions. The biggest concern, one that has already begun to bear fruit, is the impending division and split we’ve seen not just of conservative politics, but of within MAGA itself. Just like the normal Avengers, we are on the cusp of a potential Civil War. This is, in many ways, a good thing, just as it was with Abraham Lincoln’s famous Team of Rivals. Yet, the same thing that also makes a Team of Rivals a good thing is also what makes it a bad thing.
This also brings up a point by Doug Wilson, a notable pastor out of Moscow, Idaho who has been politically-vocal from a Christian point of view. On a recent podcast with my friend Zuby, Pastor Wilson made a provocative statement, as he’s been known to do- the progressive Left, as they’re currently constituted, has committed suicide. Trumpism, as of right now, is the law of the land, one that will largely go unquestioned if it continues to win popular support, which recent polling data indicates that it has.
However, this also brings up an interesting new problem, one that the MAGA movement has yet to fully face head-on. One of the defining themes of the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA is its opposition not just from the Left, but also from the Right, particularly on ideas of economics and foreign policy. If you pay close enough attention, you’re seeing this play out now Trump’s stance towards the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and his insistence on his tariff policy.
If the modern Left does commit suicide, which I think is a more real possibility than most believe, there is going to be something that steps up to replace it. Could it be a more moderate version of the Left, something that we’ve somewhat seen before? Possibly. But, what Wilson stated, and what I believe to be the more likely outcome, is that MAGA itself will split into a more conservative party and a more moderate party, which will define American politics for the recent future of generational American life.
Whether you think that this is going to happen or not, even if you’re not a fan of Trump and the MAGA movement, we need to be prepared as if it will. The only way you can handle something properly is if you’re realistic about the possibilities that come with it. With our ever-shifting and evolving political situation, particularly on the conservative side of the aisle, we always need to be fully-aware of what we’re stepping into.
For conservatives, we must understand the following- this is a good problem to have. It is always better to debate good ideas than bad ones. If we continue down this path, we will not have a good alternative should conservatives lose further elections. We must tackle this problem, and we must tackle this problem now. Doing the opposite isn’t a good strategy at all, and it’s something we should seek to avoid at all costs.
But, the GOP never fails to let us down- let’s see if that continues going forward.
Own the Day,
Sam