The Biggest Myth About Trump’s Base (And Why Many Believe It)
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To judge by recent accounts, Donald Trump’s intervention in Venezuela has imperiled his standing among his own supporters. Traditional-media outlets have warned of a MAGA schism, as have some high-profile right-wing influencers. “President Trump seized control of the Republican Party on an anti-interventionist ‘America First’ platform,” The New York Times reported on January 4, but his removal of Venezuela’s leader “threatened to open a new rift within the political movement he has built.” The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told the paper that the president’s messaging “on a potential occupation has the base bewildered, if not angry.” Two months before the U.S. military captured Nicolás Maduro, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson warned against American intervention and suggested that efforts to oust the Venezuelan dictator were part of—I am not making this up—a “globohomo” conspiracy to bring gay marriage to the country.
The theory of a MAGA rupture over Venezuela has a certain surface plausibility. It’s also completely contradicted by what masses of Trump’s backers are telling pollsters. Two days after the Maduro operation, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 65 percent of Republicans supported it, compared with just 6 percent who didn’t. Another poll, by The Washington Post, pegged that support at 74 percent. And a subsequent YouGov/CBS survey recorded even more striking results: 89 percent of Republicans backed Maduro’s ouster, and for self-described “MAGA Republicans,” the number was 97 percent—a level of enthusiasm that would make even the election-rigging Maduro blush. Days after the Times quoted Bannon fretting about the GOP base’s alleged upset over Venezuela, the paper spoke to its own yearlong panel of Trump backers and reported, with characteristic understatement, that such “skepticism may not be shared by many rank-and-file Republican voters.”
This sequence of events follows a familiar pattern. For months, major media outlets have run story after story about the alleged crack-up of Trump’s MAGA base, sourced to a specific set of elite right-wing influencers. These accounts have been widely shared and celebrated by liberal readers and pundits. And yet for months, that crack-up has failed to meaningfully materialize in polls and focus groups, and the allegations of MAGA infighting have borne little resemblance to the real-world trajectory of conservative politics, where Trump still reigns supreme.
This same pattern—in which so-called Trump influencers asserted a MAGA split where none was actually in evidence, and various news outlets ate it up—was apparent last summer over a different foreign intervention. Before America attacked Iran’s nuclear sites in June, outlets such as Politico hyped a “MAGA civil war” over the prospect. “A strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths,” Carlson claimed. War with Iran, he later added, would amount to a “profound betrayal” of Trump’s supporters and “end his presidency.” Such a conflict would “tear the country apart,” warned Bannon. “MAGA Divide Over Iran Splinters Trump Allies,” declared The Hill. Curt Mills, the anti-interventionist executive director of The American Conservative, told ABC News that the president’s coalition was “revolting to show it’s disgusted with the potential of war with Iran.” That very evening, Trump bombed Iran.
Not only did Trump disregard all of these alleged MAGA thought leaders—so did MAGA voters. YouGov/CBS News found that 85 percent of Republicans backed the strikes, including 94 percent of self-described MAGA Republicans. “While all Republican factions support the airstrikes,” NBC News wrote of its similar survey results, “respondents who identify with the MAGA movement are significantly more supportive of them than those who identify as traditional Republicans.”
The obvious conclusion is this: These purportedly pro-Trump figures do not actually speak for Trump or his supporters. Trumpism is not neo-isolationist or neoconservative, pro-restraint or pro-intervention. It is not pro-worker or pro-billionaire. It is whatever Trump says it is. According to YouGov, two weeks before American forces snatched Maduro, Republican support for invading Venezuela stood at 43 percent. Today that number is 74 percent. “America First” and “Make America Great Again” are slogans, not deeply held governing philosophies. They are branding—and Trump is the brand.
Republican defectors such as the former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene are often held up as evidence of Trump’s slackening hold on his base. But Greene’s trajectory proves just the opposite. As soon as the president turned on her, her political career became untenable and she quickly announced her departure from Congress. Influencers such as Greene, Bannon, and Carlson present themselves as fighting against out-of-touch elites on behalf of the “America First” masses, but again and again, it is they who have been exposed as elites at odds with the movement they claim to represent. No one has ever spoken for the MAGA coalition other than the man who created it.
Now, it is true that Trump’s overall popularity has been eroding, as my colleague Jonathan Chait recently wrote, but that’s not because he’s losing his base. Rather, it’s because he’s bleeding support among a very different demographic that helped elect him—namely, low-propensity swing voters, especially young men, who backed him because of their concerns about the economy or political correctness. But although the president may be losing these fair-weather friends, the much-larger MAGA movement remains firmly in his corner.
“Let me be very clear: There is no rift in the Republican Party,” said CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, last week. “Donald Trump has had an iron grip on that Republican base for a long period of time, and it is the same iron grip that he had six months ago,” he continued, pointing to polls showing Trump maintaining an 85 percent approval rating among Republicans despite headlines to the contrary. “Every so often, people are trying to say, ‘Oh, I spot these little rifts in the Republican base. Oh, oh, you know, they’re finally starting to break. They’re starting to break from Donald Trump.’ It ain’t happening.”
None of this is to say that Trump supporters are on board with everything he does. Voters often have things they dislike about their preferred candidate; those things are just not decisive. For years, most Republicans told pollsters that they thought Trump tweeted too much; that didn’t stop them from voting for him or his preferred GOP-primary candidates. Today, most Republicans don’t like how Trump has handled the Epstein files—but most Republicans are not choosing how to vote based on the Epstein files. People tend to make allowances for politicians they like, and Trump has an exceptional instinct for what his supporters actually care about and what they’re willing to overlook, which is why they have stuck with him for more than a decade.
So why do so many reports continue to argue otherwise? The zombie narrative about Trump’s supposedly splintering support has been fueled by a confluence of right-wing, left-wing, and journalistic impulses. Many reporters are drawn to stories of drama and conflict. Many liberals are desperate for signs that Trump’s stranglehold over his base is slipping. And a group of media-savvy right-wing influencers have exploited these desires to promote a story about widespread MAGA discontent that has little basis in fact but that serves their own interests.
And those interests are no longer reliably aligned with Trump’s. As hard-right populists, Bannon and Carlson initially sought to use Trump to advance their own agenda—isolationist abroad, ultranationalist at home, and more overtly anti-Semitic. But as Trump has deviated from that agenda, particularly in foreign affairs, they have begun seeking to supplant him. By weakening the president, they hope to have a say in picking his successor and directing the party after he departs the scene, reshaping the Republican Party more reliably in their image.
[Yair Rosenberg: Trump world’s Wizard of Oz problem]
To these men, Trump’s sway over the MAGA faithful is an obstacle to be overcome. They are careful not to openly disparage the president himself, in deference to his influence, but their growing animosity has become impossible to miss. In recent months, Bannon has opposed Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy; broken with him on Iran, Venezuela, and support for Israel; and repeatedly called for driving the president’s Big Tech buddies out of the MAGA tent, dubbing Elon Musk and David Sacks “sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley.” Carlson’s disdain for the president goes way back. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he messaged his TV producer after the president lost in 2020. “I hate him passionately.”
Add to this the two men’s formidable skill at manipulating traditional and social media—Carlson long served as a source for the liberal press he publicly disdains, and both he and Bannon host popular podcasts that regularly drive online conversation—and the result has been a self-perpetuating cycle in which left-wing wishful thinking meets right-wing opportunism. Carlson and Bannon (and others like them) tell amenable liberals and media outlets what they want to hear; those groups then echo the narrative of MAGA infighting, thereby helping the Trump frenemies inflate their influence and undermine the administration—but by no means furthering the public’s understanding of the actual political dynamics at work.
Carlson, Bannon, and their allies have several more years to chip away at Trump’s standing on the right—and may yet succeed—but they have a very long way to go. Last week, Carlson welcomed James Fishback, a far-right fringe candidate for Florida governor who shares many of Carlson’s views, to his show. “Pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this,” Carlson wrote on X when he posted the interview. The same day, a poll of the GOP gubernatorial primary in Florida found that the Trump-backed Representative Byron Donalds was leading Fishback by a healthy 47 percent to 5 percent. But that wasn’t all. “His lead leaps to 76%-6% over Fishback,” reported Florida Phoenix, “when voters are informed about the Trump endorsement.”