Finally Trumped: who’s the heir to MAGA?
The 47th president of the United States has defied the odds time and again. But even Donald Trump has acknowledged that it’s ‘pretty clear’ the Constitution bars him from running for a third term. With the 2026 midterm elections looming, Republicans face the very real prospect of losing the House – and perhaps even the Senate. If so, Trump will enter the final stretch of his presidency as a lame duck. Where will the populist energy behind Trumpism go? Who will inherit the MAGA movement?
For the two favourites, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the challenge resembles that faced by Icarus: getting close enough to the president to inherit power while avoiding flying so near that they are consumed by his downfall. Trump’s war in Iran, failures to tackle the cost of living and an approval rating of 37 per cent have shaken his movement, and both men have become deeply implicated in its failures: Rubio as America’s chief diplomat and Vance by being thrust into negotiating a peace settlement to a conflict he almost certainly never wanted.
Perhaps, then, it’s foolish to assume that figures immersed in the Trumpian establishment can inherit a movement that has always gravitated toward outsiders over insiders. A former Trump sycophant, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has rejected the MAGA label, dubbing herself ‘America First’. Commentator Tucker Carlson has positioned himself at the heart of that movement, advancing Russian and Iranian narratives, as well as lending a sympathetic ear to the economic plight of American citizens. Should he choose to run, his relative popularity has left him with odds as short as 10 to 1 to win the Republican presidential nomination.
Further along the ideological fringe, a growing minority of young Republican activists – reportedly comprising as much as 30-40 per cent of Gen Z congressional staffers, identify as ‘Groypers’ – followers of the openly white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Young Republican leaders in several states have been caught using racial slurs, making casual references in support of Hitler, and describing rape as ‘epic’. Senator Ted Cruz has warned that antisemitism is ‘gaining real purchase’ with young people from both sides of American politics.
On the left, a very different Democratic Party is beginning to take shape. The Democratic Socialists of America have emerged as a significant political force, backing Zohran Mamdani’s successful bid for the New York mayoralty, helping insurgent candidates defeat established members of Congress in Democratic primaries, and increasingly organising behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a presidential nominee. Is it fair to diagnose this movement as the rise of political ‘Third-Worldism’? Can the Democrats reposition themselves as anti-establishment insurgents?
So, is the future of MAGA ‘America First’ rather than Trump First? Can any other leader hold together Trump’s 2024 coalition of young Latino and Black men, and what will be the influence of the ‘Groypers’? What sort of Democratic Party will emerge to challenge a post-Trump Republican Party? And what’s next in a new era in which both parties are defined less by the old left-right divide than by competing forms of anti-establishment movements?