As in his first term, Donald Trump now presides over a visibly sinking ship as his approval ratings slide. MAGA, a movement built around the personality of one man, never amounted to a coherent political force or even a workable coalition. Claims that Trump and his lieutenants won a mandate in 2024 and then ‘saved’ the country were always delusional. After all, his margin was thin, as was that of his party in Congress.
Three forces are killing MAGA, perhaps even pushing the US in a distinctly socialist direction. The first are the internal divisions, which are growing ever-more pronounced and will only intensify as an aging Trump becomes an ever-lamer duck, particularly if Democrats romp to victory again in the 2026 midterms.
The second, arguably more serious, weakness lies in the loss of the Latino vote – a growing political force in many states. Many Latinos shifted to Trump in 2024, but the brutality of the ICE crackdown, reported with typical zeal by his media foes, has eroded his appeal, as seen in results from New York, New Jersey and Virginia.
The third, and most fatal, factor is the economy, whose troubles may have begun under Biden but now belong to Trump. Pressured by investors and accelerated by the rise of artificial intelligence, the US has produced an economy in which major companies, particularly in tech, are shedding workers even as they post record profits. It’s not a good look, especially given that under Trump the 10 richest Americans grew richer by an astounding $700 billion.
The ideological divide within MAGA has grown increasingly harsh. Trump is not, at heart, a professional politician. Rather, he is a blend of New York developer and carnival barker. His uneasy alliance with ‘tech bros’, Wall Street insiders and fervent right-wing nativists was never stable. It was held together mostly by Trump himself – and by the awfulness of the Democrats.
Sadly, this faction could define MAGA after Trump. Its likely vehicle is Trump’s heir apparent, JD Vance. I spent time with the vice-president before his Trumpist conversion and he once seemed genuinely sensitive to the struggles of the poor, having come from that world himself. Now he seems unwilling to denounce far-right anti-Semites and, despite being married to a Hindu, appears intent on morphing MAGA into a white Christian nationalist movement.
As a political strategy, this approach has limited prospects, given the demographic decline of the white population. Until recently, MAGA gained ground among growing groups – especially Asians and Latinos. Latinos, in particular, represent a vast and expanding electoral force. Since 1970, they’ve risen from five per cent to roughly 20 per cent of the US population. Between 2010 and 2023, they accounted for 56.3 per cent of total population growth. The Census Bureau projects they’ll expand by another 31 million between 2025 and 2060.
In 2024, Trump won an unprecedented share for a Republican of this critical bloc. Many Latinos favoured his early measures to secure the border and expel criminal aliens. But the crackdown on long-settled workers – people who’ve raised families and bought homes – has deeply unsettled even right-leaning Latinos. Few people are unmoved by the sight of families being herded into vans and sent away.
MAGA activists may not realise it, but Latinos are not a marginal community separated from mainstream America. The vast majority speak English – even in multicultural Los Angeles, barely one in five Hispanics from non-immigrant households speaks Spanish at home, while three-fifths of third-generation Latinos speak only English.
Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
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