MAGA learns that Trump isn’t really one of them

It’s been a strange week in Trumpland: rather than leaving Democrats sputtering with outrage, he has been sending convulsions through the MAGA-verse.

It was understandable that Trump and Zohran Mamdani traded barbs throughout the New York Mayoral campaign. Mamdani is a Democrat who identifies as a Democratic Socialist and is also a Muslim. Trump, like Republicans of all stripes, abhors socialists. Name calling ensued. Trump called him a “nut job” and “communist lunatic” while Mamdani labeled him a “despot.”

So, it was just a wee bit surprising that the two would meet in the Oval Office last Friday.

I expected another cringy horror show like the Trump-Vance berating of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Even Fox News billed this as a “socialist showdown.” This meeting was sure to delight the MAGA fans who love nothing more than to put lefty liberals in their place.

Instead, the president and the socialist came out of their meeting all smiles. Trump cheerfully declared that “we agree on a lot more than I thought.” He went on to say, “I feel very confident that he can do a very good job.” In fact, they looked so chummy that a Fox & Friends host quipped, “I think J.D. Vance is jealous.”

Wait, what?

We all know this these sorts of friendly moments can quickly turn sour with Trump, but on Friday, this left the MAGA world dazed and confused in what the New York Times called a “break-the-internet moment.”

It would be unfair to say that MAGA is just coming around to realizing that Trump has no ideology let alone ideological consistency. The Republican Party has twisted itself around his whims and a massive network of right-leaning journalists and influencers have fashioned themselves into a formidable echo chamber. Everyone was poised to jump on whatever indignity Trump threw at Mamdani. Afterall, a “socialist” is a ridiculously clear and unifying target for any American on the right, not to mention quite a few on the left.

Allow me a brief political science interlude before I proceed: the U.S has what we call “big tent” parties. Meaning, that a political system dominated by just two parties requires them to unite voters with differing ideologies, religion, ethnicity, age and socio-economic status behind candidates in order to garner enough votes to win.

Former DNC Chair Howard Dean put it succinctly during one of his visits to Spain: parties in parliamentary systems form coalitions after the election has taken place. Parties in presidential systems form coalitions during the campaign. So, Spain’s somewhat smaller political parties can be a lot more ideologically consistent but to govern, at least during the past decade, they’ve had form coalitions. As we’ve seen, these coalitions can be damned hard to hold together.

Trump’s coalition is no different.

The white working-class men, some “classic” Reagan Republicans, the populist right and the evangelicals. More recently, they have been joined by young men as well as Hispanic and Black men.

These people don’t easily hang together yet Trump himself has been the glue rather that one overarching policy goal. So, it doesn’t help when he fraternizes with socialists since that’s one of the few things that they can all agree is not ok.

Yet, Trump’s enormous ego blinds him to his own limits, and so he seems to think that he can jump all over the place ideologically and that his followers will jump around with him. The problem is that this takes a lot of keeping up. This is part of what makes political parties useful, they give citizens shortcuts to deciding where they should land on the myriad of issues we face as a society.

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently touched on this phenomenon in a piece ominously titled “Imagining What’s in Trump’s Brain.” In it, he examines a set of characteristics that can be found in authoritarian leaders put forward by the Italian Swiss writer, Giuliano da Empoli.

Unpredictability is among them, something that Trump is especially known for. Brooks writes, “Any technocrat can do the expected thing, but the wolf [authoritarian] is the master of reckless action: Putin invades Ukraine. Trump declares a trade war on the world [. . . ] The human brain is programmed to focus on the unexpected, so you can never turn away.”

So far, this unpredictability worked out quite well for Trump in keeping the world fixated on his every move. Yet trade is a great example of how this can backfire: raising tariffs goes against Reagan Republican orthodoxy, but the average person doesn’t really understand trade and tariffs all that well. Therefore, he has mostly gotten away with it. Until this week when he’s proposed to send a $2,000 tariff check to Americans as a fix for the high cost of living.

Senate and House Republicans have finally hit their limit and gave a hard no to the $2,000 tariff checks. Also, a no to Trump’s demand that they remove the filibuster.

And then there are the Epstein files. As I wrote back in July, Trump has spent years encouraging his more conspiracy minded followers that there is vast ring of pedophiles made up of global elites, an all-powerful cabal of Satanists. The problem is, Jeffrey Epstein is monstrously real, and he and Trump were friends during his heyday of parties with the young girls he trafficked.

Trump did everything in his power to derail the release of files from the Epstein investigations. Yet, the famously die-hard Trump fanatic, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, defied him and stuck to the promise they had all made to voters to release these files. Along with Republican representatives Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, the three women forced a vote and finally all Republicans except one voted with Democrats to release the files.

On Saturday, Greene again defied Trump by announcing her resignation. In the face of name calling and threats from the president, she gave a blistering speech stating that “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

It might be just a bad week, or Trump is becoming a “lame duck” well ahead of the midterms which usually mark the diminishing of presidential powers in second term. Either way, as the country hurtles towards the 2026 midterms, congressional Republicans facing elections will be under more pressure to vote according to the wishes of their districts rather than the whims of Trump. I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.

This is the English version of my column, La Globalista, in El Español.