Oh no, the America First/MAGA coalition is completely falling apart because – and I want to make sure I’ve got this correct – Donald Trump has systematically destroyed a bunch of Third World semi-human pagan savages who have been murdering Americans for nearly 50 years before they could top a missile with a hot rock and nuke Philadelphia. Yeah, the coalition is gravely disappointed – but not in Trump. It’s disappointed that a small component of his coalition that, for reasons that remain elusive and probably involve extreme greed, a psychotic break, gross stupidity, and/or libertarianism, which is an amalgamation of all three, has decided to adopt views that are functionally identical to those of the damn communists. This is both inevitable and unsustainable.
Coalitions have tensions. They resolve; we’re going to be fine.
Here’s the thing. Donald Trump built a new coalition. He brought together a whole bunch of people who were united by a resistance to the gooey, nanny-state socialist woke blob that was doing the bidding of our garbage ruling class and screwing us over in the process. But the thing about a coalition is that coalitions are composed of different groups with different interests. In 2024, folks like me and most of you – straight-up patriots, largely Republican, who love America, love freedom, and hate the woke communist self-hating garbage that has infiltrated so many of our institutions – united with other factions to put Donald Trump back in office. Now, the folks like me and you, pretty much the normal conservatives, make up the vast majority of the Trump coalition. But we don’t make up a majority of the country. To win a majority, we had to unite with other folks to beat Kamala. That is, we created a coalition. But we don’t agree with those other people on everything.
We agree with them on a lot. Some of these groups we probably agree with on 75-80 percent of the stuff, and that’s pretty good. A coalition in which you agree with people on most things is strong. But it’s those places where you differ that the cracks and the fissures develop. It’s the seams where the coalition is vulnerable to fracture. And there’s some fracturing going on now. The question is whether it will break the coalition apart.
Before we talk about where the coalition is cracking, let’s talk about what the coalition is made up of. We have the aforementioned normal Republicans. Again, these are flag, faith, and family folks who like America, and are generally not living bizarre lifestyles that involve multiple genders, animated animal costumes, or welfare fraud. It’s the majority of the Republican Party. It’s not all of the Republican Party; it’s about 80 percent+ of it, to judge from the polls of Republicans that show Trump has about 80 percent+ GOP support on Iran. The Republican Party is, itself, a coalition and is composed of several factions besides normal Republicans, like establishment shills and Never Trump traitors. The shills use the Republican Party as a vehicle for personal gain and power. They will be with us as long as it’s to their advantage. The Never Trump types are as faithful to other Republicans as their wives are to them when Pablo the Pool Boy shows up. The loud and proud Never Trumpers long ago disassociated themselves with the GOP. It’s the hidden ones who are the problem; when they finally reveal themselves and see they’ve got no future, they feel free to indulge their pro-Democrat inclinations. But enough about Thom Tillis.
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The Trump coalition is not only these normal Republicans, but it is also some folks who were previously associated with the left. Look at the MAHA Moms – vaccine skepticism and inverting the food pyramid, where about -12 on a scale of 1 to 10 in importance for regular Republicans. But it was 10 out of 10 for the MAHA Moms. Donald Trump brought Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., into the coalition and threw that part of the coalition oversight of American health. Which was fine with normal Republicans – if you’re telling us we should eat more steak, we’re all ears. And, frankly, the disgraceful behavior of Science Inc. during COVID-19 and otherwise made us quite willing to give people we might, in other contexts, have thought of as crackpots a crack at fixing our society. While SNL did a very funny take of (I know, the sun coming up in the west, right?) on The Pitt if run by RFK, Jr., the biggest and best joke they could do about the Health Secretary was that he’s like 75 years old and super muscular. We should all be so lucky.
Another significant group was the pod bro contingent. In many cases, these were associated with libertarians, so you know where this is going. But JD Vance is also somewhat associated with them, though that may change. Many of them were young men completely alienated by the Democrats’ war on, well, young men. Their avatars were guys like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens. They hated wokeness, but they also hated what they called "forever wars." And not without good cause. Our establishment killed and maimed countless Americans through its utterly inept foreign policies and failed execution of military projects. Trump was the first to speak out as a Republican against the Iraq War in no uncertain terms, and his opposition to that kind of foolishness was key to winning over this particular demographic.
But pod people seemed to hear what they wanted to hear from Donald Trump, not what Donald Trump was saying. Donald Trump is no pacifist. Donald Trump is a Jacksonian. Donald Trump is happy to use the United States military as a Louisville slugger to beat Third World scum who get uppity with the United States into a pulp. But he’s not willing to waste American lives where there’s no cognizable interest, nor where we’re doing uncompensated work for alleged allies who won’t pull their weight. Yes, we’re talking about you, NATO, which is right next to Ukraine, and is eager to fight Russia to the last drop of American blood.
There are other little groups, too. Some people overlap groups. But the bottom line is this: this is a coalition. These are different groups with different focuses, each expecting a slice of the pie of power. The Democrats do this, too. They’ve got their coalition – normie liberals, race communists, various flavors of perverts, as well as ethnic hustlers, criminal excusers, and welfare cheats. We’ve happily exploited the fault lines in their coalition, and now they’re exploiting the ones in ours. That’s why, suddenly, Marjorie Taylor Greene – if only this could be the last time I ever have to mention that creature, who is about 47 minutes into her 15 minutes of fame – is all over CNN. That’s why Joe Kent, who should have more common sense, is getting approving tweets from Bernie Sanders and the like.
The podcast people have turned on Donald Trump, not because he started a war with Iran, but because he decided to finish one. It bears repeating – it is not a forever war if you win it. The real objection to those wars was losing them. And Donald Trump intends to win this one despite the full-scale fake panic of people who seem more than a little committed to America’s defeat. Why that is unclear – I’m convinced that a psychotic break explains why Tucker Carlson is sounding like a daddy-disappointing 23-year-old gender studies sophomore from Oberlin. But others just see they can carve out a tiny, but lucrative, niche by hating on the guy who made them relevant in the first place.
Now, we may lose some of the podcast people, but the idea that this is somehow because of a betrayal by Donald Trump is idiocy, if not an outright lie. Donald Trump never promised to withdraw America into some sort of shame closet of Thomas Massie- approved isolationist onanism and allow bizarre primitives to hassle the United States without fear of our righteous wrath. He promised no more endless wars pushed by our garbage elite and fought by normal Americans that resulted in tactical victories and strategic defeats. He rejected the Rules of Engagement Theory of warfare, which prioritizes upholding an arbitrary standard imposed by academics far outside the battlefield, instead of embracing the one and only metric that matters in war: victory. And Trump is keeping his promise.
But will this shatter MAGA? Well, according to at least one poll, Donald Trump has achieved a North Korean dictator-level of support of 100 percent among MAGA. It’s not at all clear why a minority portion of the coalition would expect Donald Trump to embrace their radical minority view regarding the masculinity of our foreign policy. The podcast people are basically rounding errors when it comes to numbers – they’re just very loud. We normals are a much bigger group, and we strongly support the president. Why is it a betrayal for our president to do what the vast majority of the coalition wants, instead of catering to a few bespoke ideological neophytes who just became political last week and now expect us to embrace the brand new bunch of beliefs they just adopted and now aggressively advocate with all the feverish zeal of a convert? Before last Tuesday, most of these goofs couldn’t have found Palestine on a map, even if Palestine existed on a map. They look and sound foolish, which they no doubt think is somehow the fault of the Jews.
So no, the fight over the Iran War won't destroy this coalition. The fact that Donald Trump hasn’t already done everything every subgroup of the coalition wants isn't going to destroy the coalition either. Oh, they may stay home in November. Some of them were not hyper-voters because they’ve never voted before. Either the valid argument that the Democrats are much worse will work, or it won’t. They may cut off their nose to spite their face, but you can’t make people politically mature, especially when they’re politically immature.
But the fact is that a useful coalition partner is a coalition partner whose members understand that they can’t get everything they want all the time. A functioning coalition consists of partners who sacrifice some of their preferences to achieve other of their preferences. If your reaction to not getting everything you want all the time, right now, is to throw a temper tantrum, you’re not actually a member of the coalition anyway. You’re just a free rider. Donald Trump should save his rewards for those who do the hard work of being members of the MAGA coalition, not pay tribute to a bunch of people who will turn on him the moment he does something they dislike. That’s not being part of a coalition. That’s being a jerk.
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Editor's Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
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