Diamonds may be forever, but MAGA is not, according to political historian Claire Potter. It will feel forever for us to get back to some kind of normalcy and it may even take a generation, tragic as that sounds. My theory has always been that a pickle never goes back to being a cucumber but it is reasonable to suppose that the toxic MAGA environment we’ve all been brining in for a while may morph into something completely different once Donald Trump is off the scene. It is devoutedly to be wished, in any event. Potter declares that it’s curtains for J.D. Vance, though, in 2028.
No, JD Vance will not be the next president. He has real deficits, in the sense that he is interracially married, he has no charisma or stage presence, and he projects very little authority. Also, frankly, he just isn’t mean enough. He tries to be mean on X, but just ends up sounding like a cluck, whereas Trump’s cruel and incoherent ravings have a kind of weird charm for the MAGA faithful.
I also think Vance is a terrible campaigner and a mediocre fundraiser, and working for Trump will not have made him more than marginally better at these things. He barely won the primary for his Senate seat, and only because Trump jumped in and pushed him over the top and Peter Thiel gave him millions of dollars.
But I don’t think there is a MAGA movement without Trump. It will be something else, something that bears a relationship to it, much as many of the rightwing or explicitly fascist parties in Europe have evolved out of the fascisms of the interwar period, coyly gesture to that history but also disown it. AfD, for example, bears a strong resemblance to Nazism, but of course, since Nazism is illegal in Germany, it has to gesture at it rather than be explicit about its genealogy. Georgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, was steeped in Italian postwar fascism. She is a fascist and she governs as a fascist, even though her party is euphemistically called the Brothers of Italy.
There’s another problem. Like all fascisms, MAGA is a nostalgic movement, imagining a nation that strayed from an “original” America that was white, virtuous and Christian. This produces two problems. One is the profound unease many magas have with the fact that Vance is married to a brown daughter of immigrants and that he has mixed-race children. The many photos of Vance embracing Erika Kirk, who I think is going to have real problems hanging on to the very male-centered TPUSA, have anointed her as a potential “office wife.”
But the second problem is that Trump’s nostalgia, when translated into economic policies, is driving the nation into debt at an accelerated pace, at the same time as he is cutting as many Americans loose from the social safety net as he can. This is going to drive the United States into a social crisis that the Republican Party will not survive in its current form. It’s why we see so many GOP office holders streaming for the exits. It’s not just the 2026 midterms: it’s that they understand that there is no Vance presidency in 2028 — nor a Rubio, DeSantis or Abbott presidency.
Rubio has plans to be the vice president on the 2028 ticket, although make no mistake, if he thinks he can get the nomination, he’ll blast right past J.D. Vance without a thought. As to DeSantis, we saw in 2024 what a disaster he was as a campaigner. And if by Abbott, we’re talking Greg Abbott, oh puh-leeze. I didn’t even know that that was on the table.
I do agree that the GOP is going to go through some kind of a metamorphisis. It can’t survive as part MAGA, part Old School, if there even is an Old School faction left. Trump, the showboat, will leave the scene at some point and who will take over from him, either MAGA or Old School? We will see, but I think Potter is right, MAGA is going to fade and the GOP will morph into something that it is impossible to predict in the here and now. Who could have ever predicted the GOP would become the party of a TV game show host? That said, who knows what the GOP will do next? I can’t imagine them bottoming Trump but then I said the same thing about Dubya and look what happened.
With his ill health and life style there’s no way Drump lives to finish his Term. When Drump dies in office then unfortunately Vance will ascend to the Presidency. But he will never be elected to any office again. People from both sides have seen him for what he is and detest him equally but for different reasons.
Mr Mc (Man-child) Eyeliner Creep hasn’t got the same set of reptilian pills as the current but failed and declining ‘P’OTUS sicko. Hr Mc EC may temporarily get to wear his own version of a MAGA crown, in the very near future, but it’ll most likely be taken from him by a yet to surface and evolving operators and their form of MAGA game play. Mr Mc EC possibly may scuttle back to his well used sofa, not only to seek solace and refuge, but to fantasise how he’d have outdone the damage ‘you know who’ did – as documentef here on Trump Tracker. See:
https://www.trumpactiontracker.info/?
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He’s too weird and creepy to vote for.
He doesn’t stand for anything but himself.
He’s like a version of Nixon but with less charisma, less likeability, and less humanity.