Trump Isn’t the Threat; it’s the MAGA
By Patrick N. Theros - July 26, 2024
Reading
the Steve Bannon early July NY Times interview with David Brooks, one
statement struck me as far more instructive than any other. After he
criticizes Trump for being wishy-washy on Ukraine, border controls, and
deportation, Bannon concludes saying “I don’t think President Trump’s
close to where we are. They all got to go home.”
The “they” in
this case is unambiguous; Bannon sees Trump as a member of the elite
trying to capitalize on the MAGA movement. However, he will continue to
support him because he sees Trump as the vehicle to bring Bannon’s
“movement” (in his words) to power. His comments echo those of the
evangelical Christian leadership that does not care about Trump’s sinful
life because “God has a plan” that uses sinners like Trump to achieve
His objectives. Once God’s Kingdom comes, they will have no further use
for Trump.
Bannon personifies the policy preferences of Project
2025, a blueprint for governance put together by scores of veterans from
the first Trump term under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation.
(The Heritage Foundation sees itself displacing the Federalist Society,
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and FOX, as the intellectual foundation of
MAGA.) They have issued a road map, titled Project 2025, to repurpose
the institutions of American government into the instruments for a
wholesale transformation of American society.
It calls for
purging the civil service of officials it deems ‘leftist’ or disloyal,
abolishing the Department of Education, and supporting private and
charter schools at the cost of public schools, ending birthright
citizenship, sweeping tax cuts, a ban on pornography, an
almost-no-exception ban on abortion to encourage larger families,
purging the FBI, bringing the Department of Justice under the
President’s direct control, and seeding every branch of government with
officials whose job description sounds very much like that of political
commissars in the old USSR.
Once Heritage unveiled Project 2025,
Trump has done everything in his power to distance himself from it,
without notable success. Trump’s partisans and critics agree that (1)
Trump believes the Democrats will use Project 2025 to recruit swing
voters and disaffected Republicans and (2) will disavow it until he wins
back the White House. For Trump everything is a target of opportunity.
When he gets booed for advising people to get vaccinated, he backs down
and then calls Robert Kennedy Jr. to demonstrate his anti-vax
credentials. Sensing that young Democrats are enraged over Biden’s
handling of Gaza, he has taken a much more nuanced position; advising
Israel to stop the war, i.e., agree to a quick cease-fire. In fact, I
fear Netanyahu may have deluded himself into thinking Trump cares enough
to save him.
Trump does not share Bannon’s vision; his vision seems confined to regaining power and taking revenge on his tormentors!
However,
I am also persuaded that much of MAGA are, as Bannon says, “beyond”
Trump. The tribes and sects that make up MAGA see Trump as a vehicle to
advance their issues. Trump has no ideological attachment to banning
abortion, gun rights, or most other hot button MAGA issues. He is quite
clever in picking which issues to low-ball while asserting his
dedication to the cause.
Abortion is a hot button issue for a
core MAGA constituency that demands a total federal abortion ban. Trump
knows that espousing such a cause would enrage the majority of women.
Consequently, he proposes leaving it up to each state, a cop-out for the
ban-abortion MAGA sect who believe that banning abortion is God’s Will,
not a decision to be made by the people.
In the end, Bannon’s
movement and most of the MAGA tribal and sectarian leaders see Trump as a
means to an end, useful for now, but a tool to be discarded when they
gain power. This happens a lot in authoritarian movements. History
abounds with successful despots who had to deal with the ideological
zealots who helped propel them to power. Their zealotry threatened the
authoritarian leader’s hold on power. Hitler massacred his Brown Shirts –
a quasi-military militia whose violence paved his way to rule. Trotsky,
a dedicated communist zealot, tried it on Stalin and ended up with an
axe in his head.
Trump, whatever I think of his failings, is not
cut from the same cloth as Hitler and Stalin; murdering people does not
seem to appeal to him. However, his selection of J. D. Vance for Vice
President intrigues me. I believed at first that Trump selected him to
teach never-Trump Republicans that groveling on Vance’s Shakespearean
scale brings rewards. Perhaps the pundits are right when they see Vance,
who advocates the most extreme positions that Trump avoids, as the heir
apparent to the MAGA movement. Vance is Trump’s sop to the zealots –
it’s part of a Faustian deal: “Give me power now and I will give you the
United States when I leave the scene.”
If Trump loses the
elections, Bannon’s movement is prepared for the long struggle. He
describes a campaign to seed American public life with its activists.
The movement started, Bannon says, by taking over school boards. It has
now expanded into every level of power. The movement now controls the
party, not the party politicians, Bannon gushes triumphantly. As Brooks
noted, Bannon is describing a program that follows what Lenin and Stalin
did on the ground. A small number of activists controlled the nascent
communist movement in 1917 in Russia, then spread its control over all
the country.