MAGA Is Misreading Its Mandate
In their hubris, Donald Trump and his acolytes risk interpreting the 2024 election result as a mandate for an eclectic vision that doesn't resonate with most American voters' concerns.
When asked why they voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential Election, most of his voters gave one of three responses: ‘to lower costs,’ ‘to disentangle from the many foreign wars the Biden Administration had become caught in’ and ‘to reduce immigration, both legal and illegal’. While other examples were given, those were the three fundamental issues animating the Trump election wave. It’s why he was the first Republican since George Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. It’s why he won every single swing state.
Yet, his victory was not as decisive and monumental as all of the fawning opinion pieces would suggest. Trump only won the popular vote by 1.5%, smaller than the 4.5% Biden secured in 2020. Most of the swing states were also won by relatively small margins. And it seems the election was decided moreso by Democratic fatigue rather than a sudden new burst of enthusiasm for a total conservative reallignment. Trump and his allies would be wise to keep this in mind as they make prepare themselves for the inauguration on Monday. The foundations of their support is tenuous at best. The mandate given to them may have been a rejection of the old social-liberal orthodoxy but it wasn’t at the same time a blank cheque for the complete inverse.
As chief executive after chief executive pay homage to Trump and MAGA, with Apple, Meta, Amazon and OpenAI making identical $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration, either through their chief executives or their corporate accounts, there is a sense that his election signals some sort of sweeping ideological, paradigm shift, a triumph of right-wing populism over all its foes.
It is no such thing.
The truth of the matter is that we don’t know whether Trump’s second victory will have an enduring ideological impact on American politics at all. If Trump fails, then all the ideas he supposedly vanquished, from “wokeism” to neoliberalism to Reagan-style conservatism may well come roaring back in the vaccum.
Many Republicans believed Bush’s re-election heralded a new era of Republican political dominance — right up until the Democrats swept Republicans out of power in the House and Senate in 2006 and took back the White House in 2008.
Barack Obama’s victory, combined with his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, represented a moment of Democratic triumph. At long last, the emerging Democratic majority — described by Politico as “a left-of-center coalition of minorities, young people, women and knowledge economy professionals” — was asserting itself and transforming American politics.
That consensus also lasted all of two years, until the libertarian-minded Tea Party revolution wiped out the Democratic majority in the House and gave Republicans immense confidence that Obama would be a one-term president.
But then, in 2012, the emerging Democratic majority reasserted itself and Obama won re-election. Then Republicans routed Democrats in 2014 and Trump won a narrow victory in 2016. Democrats defeated Republicans in the House in 2018, won a narrow presidential election in 2020, and performed better than expected in 2022.
Both parties have high floors of support, and the few voters who oscillate between them (and ultimately decide presidential elections) aren’t embracing new ideologies; they’re rejecting the person or party they believe has failed to achieve the results they want. At the mercy of the public conscious, if that new president/party fails to deliver just like their predecessor, they’re doomed to suffer the same fate.
Arguably the biggest factor behind Trump’s reelection victory was voter grievances with stubbornly high inflation, which had eroded consumer purchasing power, whittling away people’s living conditions. Incumbent governments around the world had been toppled over the issue. That economic anxiety drove millions of people from traditionally-safe Democratic-voting households - Hispanics, the Midwest working-class, younger, urban voters - to cast a ballot for the Republicans for the first time in their life.
Trump’s incoming team, however, have provided very little details as to how they plan to actually reduce prices, often waving it away with vague promises about opening up more drill sits to combat high energy prices and deregulating markets. No such concrete plan exists.
Complicating things further is the constant threats Trump has made about levying blanket tariffs on goods and services from foreign countries as a bargaining chip. Tariff, he once said at a campaign railly, “is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. More beautiful than love, more beautiful than respect.” Trump is no stranger to protectionist policies. He demonstrated a deep affinity for tariffs during his first term, using them as a cudgel to punish both allies and rivals as he tried to force companies to make their products in the United States. This time, he seems to be intent on a much more aggressive approach, a full-scale upending of the trading system in which the United States is no longer a partner in the global flow of goods, but a mercantilist nation intent on walling itself off from the world.
He has talked about tariffs as the solution to an array of problems, from making the country rich to funding tax cuts and paying for child care. But most central to his vision is the ability of tariffs to reverse decades of globalization and force factories to move back to the United States. It looks like it might become the defining feature of Trump’s second term.
While his approach could help some companies that are already making their products in the United States, since they would make the cost of entry higher for overseas competitors, those benefits would be outweighed by the costs, as the kind of broad-based tariffs Trump is envisioning would significantly raise prices for U.S. manufacturers and businesses that must buy material and parts from abroad. Higher prices would then be passed on to U.S. consumers, with the burden falling particularly on the working-class.
This is before even considering the multiple trade wars likely to be incited as other countries retaliate with tariffs on American goods. Those trade spats would reduce U.S. exports, disrupt global supply chains and shake the system of alliances that the United States has worked to construct since World War II.
The scale of what Mr. Trump is proposing - a universal tariff of 10 to 20 percent on most foreign products - is larger than any tariff increases that have been seen in nearly a century. To ban Chinese cars from coming into the United States via Mexico, he has said he would impose “whatever tariffs are required — 100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent.”
A regime of universal tariffs would really be a grenade thrown in the heart of the system, worsening, not improving, the cost of living. One estimate by the Peterson Institute for International Economics put the annual cost at $2,600 for a typical American household. Another by the Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, put the annual cost at $1,900 to $7,600 per household.
Another one of the central promises made by the Trump campaign was to pursue diplomacy in ending the Ukrainian and Gaza wars while gradually withdrawing American troops stationed overseas and shifting the responsibility of guarding corners of the world to countries local to the area. Enter instead: a bombastic, zealous return to the expansionist Monroe Doctrine, as the president-elect teases using military force to acquire Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada.
It would be easy to laugh off Trump’s annexation claims as little more than political trolling aimed at stirring up his MAGA base and usefully diverting attention from more pressing issues, such as the lack of a clear strategy for managing the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. There is, though, more to this story that just Trump shooting off his mouth. In fact, Greenland has long been a serious obsession for the former and future president, who first made a bid to purchase the island in 2019.
It’s not hard to see why. Greenland is rich in natural resources, including rare earth minerals, which are critical for America’s high-tech industries and green technologies. More important is its position at the doorstep of the geopolitically invaluable Arctic Ocean. Not only does the region hold vast untapped reserves of oil and gas, but as ice caps melt, previously inaccessible maritime pathways are opening up that could significantly alter global trade dynamics. Chief among these is the Northern Sea Route, along Russia’s coast and through the Bering Strait, which could cut transit times between Asia and Europe by as much as 40%, bypassing traditional routes through the Panama and Suez Canals.
While Trump is no stranger to masking sabre-rattling behind inflammatory rhetoric, the extent to which he and his team have fixated on this point over the last month suggests that the threats might hold more weight than previously expected.
Maybe Barron Trump has been feeding his father grandiose ideas of securing a lasting legacy, fueled in part by playing too many Paradox strategy games. Perhaps, the seed of this fixation was planted by someone else closer to the president-elect from the State Department who harbours expansionist ambitions. Regardless of the idea’s genesis, instead of pursuing an isolationist agenda, MAGA seems intent on invoking the Imperialists of the 19th Century and carving out a new empire for themselves. How Trump plans to harmonize this recent pivot with demands from some voters for America to take a step back from global affairs remains to be seen.
Even on immigration - once the defining feature of the MAGA movement - cracks have begun forming, with the dividing line being H1B visas, a foreign worker visa that allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in so-called specialty occupations. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, both who are expected to chair the government deregulating board of D.O.G.E., publicly supported lowering the visa requirements for workers from India in a bid to recruit more workers for America’s burgeoning tech industries. The backlash was immense, with Musk even being raitioed under his own tweets. While the two have since backtracked, the issue has only gone on stasis, hinting that the incoming administration might just replace the inflow of new migrants from Latin America to Southeast Asia.
Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday was further evidence that Trump doesn’t understand the reasons for his own victory. The Pentagon is a vast bureaucracy, and the military is facing a complex strategic problem in responding to a rising China, an aggressive Russia, and a wounded Iranian regime that may well try to race to assemble a nuclear weapon. To address that problem, Trump nominated a man whose chief qualification appears to be that he’s the most prominent (and loyal) MAGA veteran on television. The nation desperately needs competence, but, as The New Yorker reported, Hegseth was forced out of previous jobs for mismanagement, excessive drinking and “sexist” misconduct.
His probable confirmation is one of the most remarkable examples of “failing up” in modern American history. And MAGA seems mostly oblivious to the irony inherent in rewarding incompetent, unskilled workers for th
Just looking at Trump’s nominees reveals he’s not replacing D.E.I. with meritocracy, but with something that looks a lot like a pure political spoils system, where the main qualification for high office is loyalty to Trump and hatred for his enemies. This is just D.E.I. reskinned. Rather than draining the swamp, Trump is merely adding to it with more venture capitalists and unskilled yesmen.
There is only one way for Trump’s victory to herald a true American political realignment: He has to succeed, just not in the way he might think. He has to be able to swallow his thirst for vengeance and tame his erratic mind enough to actually begin to restore American confidence, delivering on the promises made on the campaign trail - lowering costs while fixing the social malaise plaguing America’s institutions.
If he won’t (or can’t), this MAGA moment will end the way every supposed realignment of the last 20 years has ended — in the agony of political defeat, cast aside by the next animating force that can capture the zeitgeist.