Pluralistic: MAGA crackup (18 Jul 2025)

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Today's links


A Maga hat, limned in flame and severely pixelated. Standing on its bill is an elephant in GOP logo livery with a Trump wig; the elephant is crazed with cracks.

MAGA crackup (permalink)

It's been a year since Project 2025 became national news. At the time, I cited the great Rick Perlstein, an expert on the history of the conservative movement, who said that the most important thing about the P2025 document wasn't its extreme plans, but rather, it's total incoherence:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

You see, Project 2025 isn't just one roadmap for turning America into a doomed, corporate/christofascist hellscape: it is several such roadmaps, with many policy prescriptions that directly and violently contradict each other.

For Perlstein, this was both revealing and important. Like all successful political campaigns, Trumpism is a coalition. Coalitions form when groups of people set aside their disagreements and join together. Virtually every important political change is downstream of a coalition.

The easiest kind of coalition to form is an oppositional one, where groups agree on what they don't want, without agreeing on what they do want. Think, for example, of the Andrea Dworkin wing of the feminist movement making common cause with Jerry Falwell to oppose pornography. Obviously, these people have a completely irreconcilable goals for what they want, but when it comes to porn, it's easy for them to agree on what they don't want.

That's fine when you're waging the campaign against something, but if you happen to win that campaign, you're in trouble. That's when the fight starts over who will get their way. That's the moment when winning coalitions become bitterly divided:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

Now, some of these conflicts matter more than others. The least politically connected, least sophisticated (and most numerous) members of the conservative coalition have long been mollified by performative acts of cruel racism and gender discrimination. These could be enacted without any real impact on the power-players in the coalition, since they were insulated from discriminatory lending and hiring, immune to police violence, and could skip to another state or country to get abortion care, hire sex workers, etc. No one is ever going to deny Peter Thiel a mortgage, no matter how many twinks he bangs. Ted Cruz's daughter will always be able to get an abortion, no matter what Texas or federal law states. Clarence Thomas doesn't have to worry about getting pulled over because he "fits the description." As Wilhoit's Law says:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Project 2025 is an anthology, edited by the Heritage Foundation, collecting the post-victory aspirations of the most important members of the Trump coalition. As anthologists, Heritage's job was to choose which submissions to include and which ones to reject. Perlstein's key insight is that wherever Heritage included two or more directly contradictory plans in Project 2025, we can infer the groups that submitted those plans are each too powerful and important to sideline – they are equally matched combatants, and it's impossible to predict which one will get their way and which ones will eat shit in the aftermath of a victory.

There were so many contradictions in Project 2025: immigration policy, military policy, trade policy, monetary policy, tax policy, and more. As Perlstein pointed out, Project 2025 was a 900-page roadmap to the future fracture lines in the Trump coalition. These were the places where the opposition could break off parts of Trump's base, in the same way that Steve Bannon has been doing to the progressive movement (also an easily fractured coalition).

Since Trump won the presidency, House and Senate, he has done a remarkable job of keeping this brittle coalition together through a mix of flattery and bullying. But the fact remains that Trump's most important factions hate each other and are gunning for one another, and whenever Trump chooses one faction to win and another to lose, the losers are prone to turning on him:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales

Trump's lifelong strategy has been to race across a succession of rivers on the backs of alligators without losing a leg. He is the undisputed all-time historical champion of this bizarre sport, but no one can win that race forever, and your first loss is a career-ender.

I think a lot of people – including Trump allies – understand this, at least at a gut level. That's why the Epstein stuff is so huge now. It's impossible to overstate the extent to which the Trump base is organized around conspiratorial beliefs about elite pedophile rings:

https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/the-great-epstein-backstab-e332

These beliefs are a stand-in for an overall rage against elite impunity, the two-tiered system of justice that lets the powerful get away with anything. The sexual abuse of children is such a viscerally offensive crime, so the idea that rich and powerful people are getting away with it carries a lethal charge.

Conspiracy fantasies have their roots in traumatic reality. Without a long list of US military cover-ups, there'd be no room for UFO conspiracies. The credibility of antivax ("pharma companies want to kill you and regulators want to help them") is rooted FDA's failure to prevent the opioid crisis, and the million Americans who died as a result:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

Conspiratorialism is a cognitive failure that occurs when you blame systemic problems on individuals. That's why they call antisemitism "the socialism of fools" – it's what you get when you blame Jewish bankers, rather than the finance sector's class warfare, for your problems:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

Conspiratorialists have the right feeling, but the wrong facts. If you hate elite impunity, you should be furious about the Supreme Court ruling that presidents have "absolute immunity" from prosecution for the crimes they commit in office. But bad actors can exploit the failures of the conspiratorial mindset to make people who are legitimately enraged by elite impunity to direct that rage at imaginary "cultural Marxists" at universities.

As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, the right lives in a "mirror world" where child abuse is confined to largely imaginary children in nonexistent pizza parlor basements, while actual kids in Florida concentration camps, or border detention cages, or meat-packing plant night shifts, or living in hunger and without a home, are ignored:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

It's not hard to understand why Trump wants to suppress the Epstein files. He had a long friendship with Epstein, and spoke glowingly of Epstein's taste in "beautiful women…on the younger side." Trump sent Epstein lewd drawings and imaginary dialogues about Epstein's "wonderful secret":

https://archive.is/20250718003039/https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-jeffrey-epstein-birthday-letter-we-have-certain-things-in-common-f918d796#selection-2084.1-2084.2

Not only that, it's likely that many of Trump's most important supporters were directly complicit in Epstein's crimes (participating in the rape of young women and girls) and indirectly complicit (covering up these crimes and helping to launder Epstein's money).

Can Trump convince the conspiratorial wing of his coalition that Epstein is a "nothingburger" and a fabrication of Biden, Obama, the Clintons, Emmanuel Goldstein and Snowball?

It's not impossible. As The American Prospect's Ryan Cooper points out, conspiratorialists possess an incredible ability to "believe just about anything, even if it literally kills them—witness, for instance, the unvaccinated Texas GOP official who was posting anti-vaccine memes on Facebook right up until he died of COVID":

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-18-epstein-end-of-donald-trumps-crisis-management-style/

As ever, The Onion captures the spirit of the moment with a single, brilliant headline, "Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trump’s Actions":

https://theonion.com/elderly-woman-keeps-mind-active-justifying-trumps-actions/

But so far, the signs are not looking good for Trump. Writing for Wired, Jake Lahut speaks to many high-ranking Trump advisors, past and present, anonymous and named, who are concerned about the mounting fury from Trump's conspiratorial base:

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-epstein-maga-revolt/

As Lahut writes, Trump is flubbing this badly, but there may be no way for him to resolve the Epstein affair to the satisfaction of his base. They were already primed to be suspicious of whatever story they were presented with, and this latest incident all but guarantees that they will not accept whatever material Trump is eventually arm-twisted into releasing.

And that's not even the biggest disappointment Trump's conspiratorialists will confront. Trump has no intention of changing the system to make life better for this Christmas-voting turkeys. Arresting 11 million immigrants and any number of US citizens who fit the description will not help these people with their very real, material problem. Nor will banning abortion, giving tax breaks to the ultra-rich, or defunding the police at the CFPB who were in charge of shutting down rip-off artists at payday lenders, big banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, etc. So these people can only ever get angrier.

But the conspiratorial base isn't the only Trumpland faction that is being forced to eat shit after Trump's victory. In another Wired story, David Gilbert presents a snapshot of the pieces of the Trump coalition that have broken off, or are hanging by a thread:

https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-list-maga-angry-trump/

There's Tucker Carlson, who thinks (correctly) that Trump is a warmongering lunatic for bombing Iran:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/18/ted-cruz-tucker-carlson-iran

There's Laura Loomer, who thinks (correctly) that it's unforgivably corrupt for Trump to accept a luxury plane from Qatar:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/12/trump-maga-loomer-plane-qatar-00341653

There's Ben Shapiro, who thinks (correctly) that Trump's tariffs are economic suicide:

https://www.mediamatters.org/tariffs-trade/ben-shapiro-general-area-policy-we-should-not-be-dropping-gigantic-tariffs

There's Joe Rogan, who thinks (correctly) that Trump's immigration raids are unforgivably cruel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfmrEa0L08E

And there's Elon Musk, who is (correctly) furious that Trump wiped his ass with his promise of a balanced budget so he could hand trillions to the richest people in the history of the human race:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-third-party/

Each of these people is an avatar for a bloc in the Trump coalition, and they reflect the fury of the people who stand behind them. This is as Rick Perlstein prophesied a year ago: these groups hate each other and the only way for some of them to get what they want is for others to be totally betrayed.

Trump has been racing over those alligator-backs for so long now, it can sometimes feel like he'll never miss a step. But he's one snap away from losing a leg, and after that, it'll be a bloodbath.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Winds howl over the deserted moonscape behind Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper paywalls https://web.archive.org/web/20100716212545/https://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/502/whats-really-going-on-behind-murdochs-paywall.html

#15yrsago Vatican: ordaining women is as bad as raping children from the pulpit https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/world/europe/16vatican.html?_r=1

#10yrsago Disney World after humanity’s demise https://www.deviantart.com/eledoremassis02/gallery/34539438/life-after-disney-photo-manipulation

#10yrsago UK schools’ “anti-radicalisation” software lets hackers spy on kids https://web.archive.org/web/20150714144952/https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/07/14/child-surveillance-vulnerability/

#5yrsago What's in Blueleaks https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/16/text-adventures-resurgent/#blueleaks

#5yrsago Librarians' virtual escape rooms https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/16/text-adventures-resurgent/#escape-forms

#5yrsago EU court kills data-sharing deal with USA https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/16/text-adventures-resurgent/#nein

#1yrago Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris's "Youth Group" https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/16/satanic-panic/#the-dream-of-the-nineties

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1021 words Wednesday, 3058 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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