MAGAs learn that Trump is not one of them

During the campaign, there were insults. Trump called him “crazy” and a “communist lunatic,” while Mamdani labeled him a “despot.”

So it was a bit surprising when the two met in the Oval Office last Friday.

Everyone expected another horror show cringe like the one with Trump’s anger and J.D. Vance a Volodímir Zelenski. Even Fox News dubbed it a “socialist showdown.”

This meeting was going to delight MAGA fans, who love nothing more than putting leftist liberals in their place.

Instead, the president and the socialist left their meeting smiling. Trump cheerfully declared that “we agree on a lot more than I thought.”

He went on to say, “I feel very confident that he can do a very good job.” In fact, they looked so friendly that a Fox & Friends host joked: “I think JD Vance is jealous”.

Wait, what?

We all know these kinds of friendly moments can quickly turn sour with Trump. But that day, the meeting left the MAGA world stunned and confused with what the New York Times called it an “internet-breaking moment.”

It would be unfair to say that the MAGA world is realizing that Trump has no ideology, much less ideological consistency. The Republican Party has twisted itself around its whims and a massive network of journalists and influencers on the right have become a formidable echo chamber.

So everyone was ready to pounce on whatever indignities Trump threw at Mamdani.

After all, a “socialist” is a ridiculously clear and unifying goal for any American on the right, not to mention quite a few on the left.

Allow me a brief political science interlude before continuing.

The United States has what we call “broad spectrum” parties there. And a political system dominated by just two parties requires them to unite voters with different ideologies, religions, ethnicities, ages and socioeconomic statuses to obtain enough votes to win.

The former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Deanput it succinctly during one of his visits to Spain: parties in parliamentary systems form coalitions after elections. Parties in presidential systems form coalitions during the campaign.

Therefore, smaller Spanish political parties can be much more ideologically consistent. But to govern, at least for the last decade, they have had to form coalitions.

As we’ve seen, these coalitions can be damned difficult to keep together.

Trump’s coalition is no different: white working-class men, some “classic” Republicans from Reaganthe populist right and the evangelicals.

More recently, they have been joined by young men, as well as Hispanic and black men.

These people don’t stick together easily. But the glue has been Trump (rather than an overarching political goal).

Therefore, it doesn’t help him at all to fraternize with socialists, since that is one of the few things that all his followers can agree is wrong.

However, Trump’s enormous ego blinds him to his own limits, and that is why he seems to think that he can ideologically jump all over the place and that his followers will jump with him.

The problem is that this requires a lot of monitoring. This is part of what makes political parties useful. The fact that they give citizens shortcuts to decide where they should position themselves on the myriad of issues we face as a society.

The columnist of New York Times David Brooks recently addressed this phenomenon in an article ominously titled Imagining what’s in Trump’s brain.

In it, he examines a set of characteristics that can be found in authoritarian leaders and that have been proposed by the Italian-Swiss writer Giuliano da Empoli.

Unpredictability is among them, something Trump is especially known for.

Brooks writes: “Any technocrat can do the expected, but the wolf [autoritario] is the master of reckless action: Putin invades Ukraine. Trump declares a trade war on the world […] The human brain is programmed to focus on the unexpected, so you can never look away.”

So far, this unpredictability has worked quite well for Trump by keeping the world focused on his every move. However, trade is a great example of how this can go wrong: raising tariffs goes against Reagan Republican orthodoxy, but the average person doesn’t really understand trade and tariffs that well.

But in most cases he has gotten his way.

Until this week, when he proposed sending a $2,000 tariff check to Americans as a solution to the high cost of living.

Senate and House Republicans have finally reached their limit and gave a resounding no to tariff checks. They also voted no to Trump’s demand that they eliminate the filibuster.

And then there are the files Epstein. As I wrote in August, Trump has spent years encouraging his most conspiratorial followers to believe that there is a vast pedophile ring made up of global elites, an all-powerful cabal of Satanists.

The problem is that Jeffrey Epstein is freakishly real, and he and Trump were friends during his heyday of partying with the young girls he trafficked. Trump went to great lengths to derail the release of the Epstein investigation files.

However, die-hard Trump fan Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greenedefied him and stuck to the promise they had all made to the voters to release these files. Together with the Republican representatives Lauren Boebert y Nancy Macethe three women forced a vote and ultimately all but one Republican voted with the Democrats to release the files.

On Saturday, Greene defied Trump again by announcing her resignation. In the face of insults and threats from the president, she gave a blistering speech declaring that “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ waiting for everything to go away and get better.”

It could just be a bad week, or that Trump is becoming a “lame duck” long before the midterm elections, which usually mark the waning of presidential powers in the second term.

Either way, as the country hurtles toward the 2026 midterm elections, congressional Republicans facing elections will be under more pressure. to vote according to their districts’ wishes rather than Trump’s whims.

I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.