Piercing the Veil
The vultures are circling MAGA. What it means and how to take advantage of it.
The savagery of the Trump regime has just begun and the people of America have very few cards remaining. Congress gave away trillions of dollars to billionaires, impoverished millions, and bloated Stephen Miller’s secret police force with $170 billion. The Supreme Court seized total power for itself, gave a green light to Trump, and went on vacation. The Democrats, as usual, are forming a circular firing squad.
However, Trump’s entire enterprise is built on top of a personality cult that provides enough popular support to hold together a disparate array of radical identity groups, including Christian supremacists, white supremacists, techno-fascists and anarcho-libertarians. In terms of raw political power, Trump’s cult is a force-multiplier for each of its component groups to achieve their unique ideological goals—which is why they put up with his chaos.
Much of the gravity of MAGA, the stickiness and persistence of its pull on its followers, comes from the fact that the identity of the whole is larger and more powerful than the identity of the groups within it, or of the individual. But the MAGA identity per se doesn’t have an ideology. MAGA is a personality cult with one leader, who, as he said himself, “could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue…”
For each of the ideological identity groups Trump has captured—“Christian Nationalists,” racists, billionaires, etc.—there is an implicit contract which goes something like this:
“Trump will abuse the power you grant him to serve your ideological interests, if and only if you submit to his authority and give him a cut of your business.”
It’s a simple model of corruption used by countless despots, demagogues and dictators over millennia. But what happens as the power dynamic in the relationship between Trump and his captured groups changes? What if the force-multiplier becomes less of a multiplier? What if Trump starts to lose his gravity?
Trump has not quite reached the six-month mark and he is accelerating the U.S. into a set of converging catastrophes which he deliberately manufactured. Economic, geopolitical, immigration, public health and climate crises are being warped into pipelines for mass political repression and wealth transfer to corporations and billionaires.
Of course, pulling this off requires a lot of cooperation—and so far he’s been getting it. The process of getting the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed was a quintessential example of this dynamic. Hundreds of people in Congress knowingly voted for a bill that would rob and kill their own constituents because Trump’s MAGA-multiplier overwhelmed their own interests and ideologies. And just as importantly, the unanimity of the MAGA media disinformation operation has, so far, remained intact—which gives them all cover for their sycophancy and immorality.
However, the budget monstrosity, Trump’s remarkable infatuation with Bibi Netanyahu, his waffling on Ukraine and Russia, and especially the open gaslighting about Jeffrey Epstein, has broken something in MAGA, and pierced the veil of its leader’s cult in a way that feels quite new. So far, the opportunity this moment represents has only been fully recognized by one of the few people who is objectively worse than Donald Trump, Elon Musk.
Exploiting this crack in Trump’s base is what the “America Party” is all about. Musk wants to pull in disenchanted Trump voters to his “party” which will ultimately promote an agenda far more radical than anything Trump imagines.
Musk has, according to the New York Times, been consulting with eugenicist “Dark Enlightenment” promoter Curtis Yarvin on this new party, which is quite a remarkable development considering that in many ways Yarvin helped architect Trump’s destruction of the federal government to this point. [h/t Gil Duran]
As concerning as it should be that vultures like Musk and Yarvin are circling, the good news is that there are, in fact, disenchanted Trump voters—a lot of them. And there will be more. Vultures do not circle for no reason. The question is whether the rest of us can leverage this moment for our benefit, or will we continue to be bystanders as the most depraved among us pick over democracy’s bones?
Let me give you a simple way to start. If you have anyone in your life who has been pulled into Donald Trump’s personality cult and/or the echo-sphere that supports him, someone you haven’t been in contact with recently, reach out casually and let them know you’re thinking about them. It should not be political or argumentative—just touching base. A great resource on the subject of how to do this is my friend Dr. Steven Hassan, a world renowned expert on cults and helping people get out of them.
While it might sound corny to some, or pointless, I assure you that the way we will collectively get back on the road to sanity is from the bottom up. There are a surprising number of people in the greater QAnon-MAGA-verse who are having real doubts about things in the wake of the Epstein fiasco. No one wants to be the last one standing when the music stops, especially if you’re standing next to a pedophile.
The best analogy for this moment I can think of is early 2021, right after J6. Social media companies and then the Biden administration banished and ignored MAGA and QAnon, which sent them to far more radicalized places online—like Telegram—to be gobbled up by any number of dangerous groups. There was no recognition of the real problem by Biden or the Democrats. We never heard that 2020 was not a normal election, and that the insurrection of the Capitol was not just some outlier event. The neo-liberal establishment wanted J6 to be the climax of a dark chapter when it was just the first page of a whole new book.
The country never dealt with the trauma of 2016 and the Trump administration’s four years of running amok. We never dealt with the trauma of losing 30% of our population to a cult—we just ignored it. The only attempt to deal with the subject of disinformation at all was pathetically canceled before it ever got off the ground.
The sane among us, regardless of our beliefs, must start to recognize that this is where the real conflict begins and ends, with people who have been trapped into an alternate reality. As unglamorous as it sounds, this war is not going to be won on the streets with protests or violence, it will be won in hearts and minds through people’s phones—one text at a time.
If you are able to help me continue my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It really means a lot. Thank you!
Here are a few benefits to upgrading:
Live Zoom call each Sunday
Substack Live AMA every week, video posted for paid subscribers
Ability to comment and access all content
Wonderful, supportive community
Helping independent journalism fill in the gaps for our failing media
Thank you for reading and sharing my work. Grateful for your support.
If you’d like to help me with expenses, here is my DonorBox. 💙
If you’d like to help with my legal fees: stopmikeflynn.com.
My podcast is @radicalizedpod & YouTube — Livestream is Thursdays at 4PM PT.
Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson
Threads: jimstewartson
Tiktok: @jimstewartson
It was very encouraging to read your suggestion about connecting with people one at a time. I have been doing that with three trump-supporting friends since trump was reelected. One is a high school friend who is very interested in literature and hates political correctness. We are now seeing literary repression in spades, which I mention in non threatening ways in normal conversation (“ did you hear To Kill a Mockingbird has been banned in a number of schools”). One is my college roommate who is married to a lawyer who clerked for Robert Bork and lives in SWVirginia. Her I can talk to about inconsistencies such as right to life people who haven’t spoken up while babies are dying in Africa due to our abrupt cutoff of aid (“or is different if the babies are black”). The third is a lovely woman in her eighties (as am I) and also a very devout Catholic. I have tried to point out to her how disconcerted I am about the hardship visited on poor small children which, in our shared Christian faith, is not what Jesus would want to see. I don’t talk about how bad trump and the 🐘s are. I come at it from a point of how sad and depressing I find these government choices to be. I guess it’s working because we are still friends and even if it doesn’t cause immediate conversion at least they hear different opinions from someone they know and respect.
I love this idea. To reach out to someone who became MAGA, and just say you're thinking about them. I have a good friend I stopped talking to when she became a Trump supporter. I felt so offended at the time. I miss her. I know she's a lonely person underneath everything. I will reach out to her, just say I miss her. Wow: think of it! All across America, like little candles being lit, all of us individuals reaching out to friends, neighbors, co workers lost to this cult.... Wow. Thank you Jim, as always.