The MAGA Crackup
Might Finally Be Here
Nov. 17, 2025
Opinion
Columnist
This weekend, Donald
Trump picked a fight with two Republicans in Congress and lost.
The president has
reportedly been apoplectic about a House vote, which could come as soon as
Tuesday, ordering the Justice Department to release its files on the
sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein. On Friday Trump attacked Thomas
Massie, the eccentric conservative who, along with the California Democrat Ro
Khanna, spearheaded a maneuver to bypass House leadership and force the Epstein
measure to the floor. Massie’s wife of three decades died unexpectedly last
year, and on social media, Trump mocked him for remarrying. “Boy, that was
quick!” he wrote, adding, “His wife will soon find out that she’s stuck with a
LOSER!”
Then, on Saturday, Trump
lashed out at Marjorie Taylor Greene, a MAGA die-hard who has been loudly
demanding transparency on Epstein, calling her, among other things, a traitor.
Trump seemed to be
trying to dissuade other Republicans from voting yes on the Epstein Files
Transparency Act, which Khanna wrote. But many were still planning to defect,
with Massie predicting as many as 100 Republicans might join him. Such
defiance, Khanna told me, would show “how weak Trump’s hold is becoming on his
own caucus, and it may signal the beginning of the end of Trump’s dominance.”
Perhaps Trump agreed, because on
Sunday night he reversed course, announcing that Republicans should go ahead
and vote for the release of the Epstein files. In doing so, he avoided a
humiliating public rebuke. What he cannot avoid, however, is the growing
disillusionment among conservatives with their deeply unpopular lame-duck
leader.
The last wretched decade
shows that reports of a MAGA crackup ought to be viewed somewhat skeptically.
There have, after all, been many moments when Trump seemed to be losing his
grip on the right, only for his hold to grow stronger.
But a few things are
different now. In his first term, Trump inherited a good economy from Barack
Obama, and the establishment Republicans who surrounded him prevented him from
tanking it with major trade wars or mass deportations. Much of Trump’s base distrusted
these figures, seeing them as part of a deep state cabal trying to thwart his
populist agenda. But they shielded the country from at least part of the price
of Trump’s erraticism.
This time, however,
Trump came into office with a much shakier economy, and, unrestrained by
Washington technocrats, has proceeded to make it worse, putting the country in
a sour mood. “The five-alarm fire is health care and affordability for
Americans,” Greene told Politico. “And
that’s where the focus should be.”
For a while, Republicans
could dismiss polls showing public unhappiness with Trump as fake news. Such
denial has become harder in the wake of this month’s elections, in which
Democrats made outsize gains virtually everywhere. As Axios has reported,
Republicans are now worried about the possibility of a Democratic upset in a
Tennessee district that Trump won by 22 points.
When a president becomes a drag on his
party, it can have a psychological effect on partisans. Suddenly, flaws they’d
barely registered come into focus. (Recall, for example, how many Democrats
refused to see Joe Biden’s age-related decline until it became a political
emergency.) We may never see a Republican stampede away from Trump, but some of
his supporters are experiencing a moment of clarity about his character.
Even before this
weekend, many conservatives were livid about an interview he gave to Laura
Ingraham of Fox News explaining the need for H-1B visas, which American
employers use to hire foreign workers for certain high-skilled jobs. The visas,
Trump told Ingraham, were necessary to bring in talent. “We have plenty of
talented people,” Ingraham said. “No, you don’t,” Trump replied.
To many Trump
supporters, angry about both immigration and an increasingly bleak job market,
his words were a slap in the face. “We’ve never seen an administration crash
and burn in its first year so badly,” wrote Anthony
Sabatini, a Republican county commissioner in Florida.
A few days later, Mike
Cernovich, the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist and MAGA influencer, posted a surprising critique of the
administration. During a visit to Washington, he wrote, “the talk of everyone
was how overt the corruption was. It’s at levels you read about in history
books.” Many, he said, were asking, “Do people just think Democrats will never
win and they’ll all get away with this?”
Now, no remotely savvy
person can be surprised by this White House’s epic graft. When Trump was riding
high, his acolytes appeared to enjoy watching his vulgar profiteering trigger
Democrats. But as Trump burns up political capital on personal enrichment, some
on the right might be starting to suspect that it’s not just the libs being
owned.
It was against this backdrop of
conservative disaffection that Trump rebuked Greene and Massie. Many right-wing
influencers reacted with unusual fury, some posting images of burning MAGA
hats. Trisha Hope, a Texas Republican who was at Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, wrote that she
was no longer entertained by Trump, and was “beginning to find him repulsive.”
Scott Morefield, a columnist for the right-wing site Townhall, called
Trump’s posts “cruel in a way that should make any human with basic empathy
question what kind of human he is.”
It would be easy here to
make a crack about leopards eating faces.
But in the past, when Trump has turned on Republicans, his base has tended to
follow. Trump ended the political careers of Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona,
once a darling of the Tea Party; Bob Good, former chair of the right-wing House
Freedom caucus; and his own first vice president, Mike Pence. His inability to
stand up to Greene and Massie suggests that something has changed.
Trump’s grudging
endorsement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is kind of absurd, since he
could, if he wanted, simply instruct the Justice Department to release the
files. Even if Khanna’s bill passes the House, Trump will have levers to thwart
the files’ disclosure. Republicans might kill the measure in the Senate, where
it needs 60 votes. Last week, under pressure from Trump, the Justice Department
announced an investigation into prominent Democrats who’ve been associated with
Epstein, and the administration may say it needs to keep the files under wraps
while that inquiry is open.
But even if the files
never come out, it’s increasingly clear that the MAGA coalition is fragmenting.
On Monday, I asked Morefield how significant he thought the fissures in the
movement were. “I think it’s pretty serious,” he said. “Epstein really started
it. It was like the crack in the dam, I think.”
Even if the dam holds for a while
longer, we can now see how brittle it is.
