MAGA Champion Need Not Apply
MAGA Champion Need Not Apply
The Iran War demonstrates why no “true MAGA” candidate will ever replace Trump.
Strange bedfellows defined the coalition that carried Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 and 2024. Evangelicals, libertarians, nationalists, and traditional Republicans, groups with little agreement on core policy, laid down their knives on those November Tuesdays to rally behind a whimsical, big-city showman who built, and often mismanaged, his inherited empire.
Trump was their champion—a comedian, a performer, but, most importantly, a fighter. If MAGA was anything, it was a coalition bound less by shared policy goals than by a shared sense of grievance and a love for the game.
And we were played. I should know. I voted for the man. His faults now exposed for the world to see are, in part, my own.
Trump has abandoned the America First, antiwar message that catapulted him from outsider to president. The great promises of MAGA have not been met. Gas prices are surging and new home sales are stalling. Six-figure earners in America admit that homeownership is beyond reach and those who earn less say they can no longer dine out or plan a vacation. Polling data reflects that shift. A CNN poll conducted in July 2025 found that 40 percent approval of Trump’s handling of the economy. By March of this year, that number had dropped to 31 percent, a decline exacerbated by the Iran War.
Other polling tells the same story. Nearly half of Americans say groceries are “unaffordable.” A new car is unattainable for nearly 75 percent of Americans. And on the price of gas, more than one in four respondents said prices are too expensive. The one bright spot in the poll, which was conducted before the war began, has been completely obliterated by this administration’s war of choice, which has sent oil prices skyrocketing. But if you listen to Trump, the “affordability crisis”—which he has begrudgingly admitted is real, despite first claiming it was “fake news” spun up by Democrats—has been effectively solved.
Never mind new reports on Tuesday that found the U.S. hiring rate fell to 3.1 percent in February, the lowest number since April 2020, the nadir of the Covid shutdown economy. Never mind beef prices hitting an all-time high amid the widening war. Never mind the stern warning by Mohamed El-Erian, Wharton School Rene Kern professor and chief economic advisor at Allianz, who told CNBC on Monday that the Iran War could lead to “shock inflation” across the country. Nothing is breaking through.
None of that seems to matter to Trump’s core base. In March, CNN’s Harry Enten noted that Trump maintained near-total approval among self-identified MAGA voters. On the war, an astonishing 90 percent of Trump’s base said they approve of his decision in the Middle East. “Those who disapprove of Trump are not MAGA at this point,” roared Enten at the end of the segment.
The figures were difficult to comprehend for those in conservative media who have staked their careers on Trump’s rise. Major conservative commentators who once argued Trump represented a break from Bush-era foreign policy now insist he has been deceived. By advisers, by media figures—by anyone but himself. For those who really believed in the MAGA doctrine as promised, it is easier to blame the figures surrounding Trump than to confront the possibility that this is simply who he is.
Conservative commentators who question the war generally stop short of fully breaking with him. Criticism is often hedged, softened, or redirected at the hawkish coalition Trump has amplified. When Trump told reporters that Tucker Carlson had “lost his way,” Carlson replied that he’ll “always love him no matter what he says about me.” When Megyn Kelly read a Trump tweet arguing that anyone who disagrees with Mark Levin “cannot be MAGA,” Kelly replied: “I will stay MAGA-adjacent.”
These reactions reveal something telling about the movement Trump built. It doesn’t constrain him because he defines it. The president can shift positions, attack allies, and abandon core principles, and the movement he built will simply adjust in real-time to meet his new demands. Even as MAGA shows signs of fracturing, its loudest advocates remain loyal not to a set of ideas, but to the man himself. By and large, self-identified MAGA voters appear not to have elected Trump because of the policy he promised but because of the myth of a man who has redefined his beliefs over decades of public life.
For many commentators who once attempted to intellectualize Trump’s movement, the explanation for his turnabout is simple: He has been misled. Convinced by the wrong people, led astray. But taken to its logical conclusion, this argument absolves Trump completely. It conveniently assigns blame to those around him, never the man himself. Trump, for his part, has made clear the voices he values and it is certainly not the foreign-policy restrainers and realists. He has spent the war promoting those who cheer for escalation in the region despite the economic warning signs that threaten both the United States and its allies.
The fact that such a high percentage of MAGA voters and conservative commentators remain loyal to Trump as he amends the policy he campaigned on reveals the substance of the movement the president has built. Trump can be openly hostile and break the rules of his own movement because he is the movement. He possesses immense flexibility to strike out at allies or completely change his political positions and his most ardent followers will stay the course.
Some commentators believe a “true” America First candidate will emerge in 2028. Speaking this week, the commentator Glenn Greenwald argued that such a figure could mount a serious challenge to the 2028 Republican primary. “I hope it’s Tucker,” said Greenwald before suggesting Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) or the former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) as alternatives. “There will be someone who runs on a real America First platform,” Greenwald said, arguing that voters will still desire a candidate committed to avoiding foreign wars and prioritizing domestic concerns.
Nevertheless, though figures such as Massie and Greene can imitate the rhetoric and Carlson can articulate the worldview, none of them can replicate the one thing that made MAGA so durable and potent: Trump himself. The truth is that MAGA was never an ideology waiting to be inherited. It was always a movement built around a single man. And it will end the way it began: with Trump. MAGA Champion Need Not Apply.
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