MAGA is ending. In conservative circles, the debate over what comes next is heating up.

By Peter Laffin

Left-of-center news outlets have spent the past decade asking readers to consider how the “MAGA base” of the Republican Party feels about any given story.

How is Trump’s war in Iran playing with the MAGA base? Is the MAGA base upset about the lack of transparency on the Epstein files? Who is the MAGA base’s preferred candidate for 2028?

But all variations of this question are growing obsolete. MAGA is a declining force in electoral politics.

Polling data suggests that MAGA is shrinking as a percentage of the Republican electorate. It’s no coincidence that the faction is fading as the Trump era fades; Trump holds the faction together, not ideology.

There will be no MAGA faction without him. No one will “inherit” his movement.

And with Trump’s exit looming, a fierce battle over the future of the Republican Party is underway.

As a senior editor at a center-right news outlet, the Washington Examiner, I’m intensely interested in this factional struggle for control of the GOP — one playing out in real time, mostly outside the spotlight of the daily political press.

To that end, I’ve spent the past several months running a think tank symposium series featuring essays by the most influential intellectuals representing the many factions of conservative policy. Over four installments, the series — titled “Right Way Forward” — has served as a forum for the most consequential debates of the looming post-Trump conservative movement.

So far I’ve commissioned and edited more than 50 essays from the biggest names in conservative policy. They argue passionately about the state’s role in the economy, the true nature of American national identity, and the United States’ role in the world.

Everyone involved understands the once-in-a-generation opportunity in front of them, and they are fighting with everything they’ve got to advance their agenda and secure influence in the post-Trump GOP.

The outcome of that fight will have enormous consequences for the party — and for the country.

Democrats have always struggled to understand the MAGA phenomenon: what it was, why it happened, what it meant. This partly explains their inability to defeat it — and why they are already struggling to position themselves against what is forming in its wake.

On the left, the term “MAGA base” is often used as a rhetorical prop — turning the movement into a caricature that fails to communicate much of value. This exercise made progressively less sense as Trump’s coalition grew more diverse, culminating in 2024 when Trump won roughly half of the nation’s Latino voters and a clear majority of the working class — many of them former Obama voters who’d crossed over in 2016 and never crossed back.

One reason MAGA was so difficult to define was that its followers had little in common beyond a favorable view of the Trump political project. Hawks and isolationists. Free marketeers and protectionists. Deficit hawks and pro-entitlement populists. Pro-family Christians and tech-right libertarians. Factory workers and corporate executives. MAGA contained all of this.

Faced with a coalition that made so little intuitive sense, the left reached for the simplest explanation: that MAGA was a cult of personality.

There was some truth to that. A certain element on the right continues to afford Trump a highly intense and uncritical loyalty. They often appear less like political followers than disciples — even when, perhaps especially when, his worst impulses surface.

But this faction was never as large as Trump and his adversaries suggested it was — each for its own reasons. For Trump, a fanatical following was proof of his strength: A leader who commands blind loyalty seems more powerful than one who commands mere political support.

For his adversaries, it was both a mobilizing tool and fund-raising gold. Democrats came to rely heavily on the specter of a radicalized MAGA movement and ran campaigns organized more around alarm than affordability or fixing the border. The unrelenting focus on the threat of MAGA came at the expense of developing a compelling policy agenda — a failure that lingers as the socialist wing remakes the party in its own image.

So if not a cohesive ideological coalition or a cult of personality, what was MAGA?

It was, to use a Trump word, something of a deal — an alliance of convenience, not conviction, between a man and a growing chunk of the country that had come to despise the ruling Establishment for squandering a generation of American prosperity, power, and social cohesion.

They didn’t all love Trump. A meaningful share of his 2024 coalition didn’t even like him. A September 2024 CBS News/YouGov poll found that among voters who disliked him personally, 21 percent would vote for him anyway — four times the rate of Harris dislikers who still backed her.

They didn’t vote for him out of love or loyalty but because they believed the former businessman would tame inflation and improve the economy. And they hoped he would strike a blow at the political and media Establishment while he was at it.

The war on inflation hasn’t gone very well. But Trump does have the old guard on the left and right wandering in a kind of exile.

That isn’t to say voters are happy with his efforts to replace them. Today, Trump’s approval ratings hover around 40 percent, and approval ratings for his key initiatives — the Iran war, tariffs, and mass deportations — are even more dismal. Trump’s second term has been unpopular and disorienting, characterized by an incoherent whipsaw agenda with no fixed moral or intellectual center.

Would Americans restore the old Establishment if given the chance? Maybe, maybe not. Approval ratings for the institutions Trump has steamrolled continue to run far beneath his.

Trump’s exit — and yes, he will leave the stage for good no later than January 2029 — will leave a hole in American politics that only a handful of presidents have ever left: Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, figures who so thoroughly dominated the national psyche that politics simply couldn’t be imagined without them until it had to be.

Both parties are having an identity crisis as a result. One built itself around Trump, the other built itself entirely around opposing him. Without him, both parties are staring into the same void.

A variety of factions are fighting to define the post-Trump GOP. Their differences are rarely tactical or strategic — they are over principles and aims.

Take the issue of national identity. On one side are the “creedalists” — especially scholars from the American Enterprise Institute — who believe the United States is fundamentally a creedal nation, founded primarily on the principles enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.

On the other side are the “particularists” — represented by scholars from the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute — who say America is more than an idea on a page. Rather, it’s a particular people with a shared history, culture, and often faith. Reduce America to a creed, they argue, and you get a country with no reason to hold together at all.

These visions are not merely opposed but irreconcilable. And the stakes couldn’t be higher: From whichever principle wins out, highly consequential policies will flow, particularly related to immigration. If the particularists win, immigration ceases to be a question of assimilability and becomes one of cultural compatibility — thereby justifying sharp cuts to legal admissions, longer naturalization periods, stricter assimilation requirements.

There’s an equally fierce fight shaping up over the size and shape of government in the economy. The free marketeers of the Cato Institute and Advancing American Freedom, former vice president Mike Pence’s rapidly growing upstart, maintain that markets, not Washington, should still allocate capital and labor. Meanwhile, economic nationalists in the mold of the America First Policy Institute and Vice President JD Vance believe that the economy is “rigged,” requiring state intervention through tariffs, industrial policy, and antitrust action against Big Tech.

Vance, the current favorite to carry the Republican torch in 2028, has cited Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as his “favorite Democrats on policy outcomes” and argued in his new book that the gross domestic product is a “useless statistic” — that it elevates economic growth above dignity, community, and other moral goods.

As with national identity, the competing views here are mutually exclusive. And without a Trump-like figure to unite these factions, only one side’s vision will win out.

It’s much the same with foreign policy. The Iran war has only deepened the existing divide between those who believe America should uphold its traditional role as guarantor of global order and those who advocate for retreating from foreign entanglements. The sheer bitterness of this dispute, sharpest where it touches the alliance with Israel, was on full display when Trump’s own allies argued over whether the short-lived cease-fire with Iran was a victory or a betrayal.

So what will the post-MAGA Republican Party look like?

We sit at an exhilarating and crucial moment in our political history precisely because it could go either way. The debate is genuinely open and the momentum shifts from one news cycle to the next. The nationalist populists enjoy the advantage of having their man a heartbeat from the presidency and the current polling front-runner for the nomination. The traditional conservatives, now playing the role of the rebellious outsiders, enjoy the advantage of a Republican primary electorate that has never actually voted to abolish the free market, retreat from the global stage, or trade the founding creed for a narrower definition of national identity.

Democrats would do well to watch this fight closely. They spent 10 years trying, and largely failing, to beat a personality. They are about to face an argument. They do not yet know which one they’ll be facing.

And as they learned with Donald Trump, you cannot beat what you refuse to take seriously — let alone what you don’t understand.

Peter Laffin is a senior editor at the Washington Examiner.

This article originally appeared on BostonGlobe.com on August 24, 2026.