Sia: Long but so satisfying!

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MAGA Turns On Itself. Revolutions eat their own. MAGA is no exception.

by Rick Wilson - Aug 26

There’s a wonderfully bleak rule of revolutionary politics I’ve shared with you before: eventually, the people who build the guillotine find that their own necks fit perfectly into the National Razor.

Maximilien Robespierre learned this in July 1794 when his head plopped into a wicker basket. As Trump flounders, rots before our eyes, and his legacy becomes one of abject failure and destruction, MAGA is learning it now.

MAGA is devouring itself in an entirely predictable pattern of revolutionary excess; results are going to be both hilarious, bloody, and like all things Trump, spectacularly ugly. For them, I mean. For the rest of us, it’s going to be delicious.

For years, Robespierre and the Jacobins had converted revolutionary purity from a political aspiration into a bloodthirsty tool for purging anyone deemed insufficiently fervent

They found enemies everywhere. Girondins. Hebertists. Dantonists. Counter-revolutionaries, real and imagined. Moderates. Royalists. People insufficiently enthusiastic about murdering the previous group of insufficiently enthusiastic people.

In April 1794 Robespierre had Danton, who had once been his ally and one of the great figures of the Revolution, executed by the guillotine. Three months later Robespierre delivered a speech in which he threatened to carry out further purges without conveniently naming all those whom he intended to purge.

His colleagues did the math. On 9 Thermidor, they arrested him.

The next afternoon, the Apostle of the Terror took the same ride to the Place de la Revolution he had arranged for so many others. There is something almost mechanically and historically predictable about this.

Revolutions start with enemies outside the gates. They inevitably discover more enemies within them.

After 1917 the Bolsheviks experienced the same sequence of events. Initially the enemies of the Revolution appeared—these included the monarchists, the liberals, the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the bourgeois newspapers and the Constituent Assembly. Next, disagreements arose among the revolutionaries themselves. By 1921 Lenin had officially banned internal factions. The political machinery built to suppress opposition outside the party was then swiftly turned inward.

Pol Pot’s Cambodia took the principle to its homicidal endpoint. Once the Khmer Rouge had brutalized and marched the Usual Suspects to the Killing Fields - the educated, engineers, doctors, urbanites, prosperous farmers, small business owners (stop me if this sounds familiar) - the regime became obsessed with largely imaginary traitors within its own ranks.

Thousands of loyal Khmer Rouge cadres disappeared into the torture chambers and killing grounds. By the end, the revolution devoured the people who actually knew how to run it.

MAGA is by no means revolutionary France, Bolshevik Russia, or Democratic Kampuchea; it is in fact more chaotic, more foolish, more devoted to carbohydrates, and less able to understand history.

But the political psychology is recognizable.

MAGA has always behaved less like a conventional political coalition than a revolutionary movement.

Its Carl Schmidt-inflected system (though outside of Bannon and a few NRX weirdos, they wouldn’t know Carl Schmidt if he bit them on their asses) defines only them and us. Friends and enemies. The People and The Other. It demands loyalty rather than achievement. It treats compromise as corruption. It defines politics as an existential struggle against enemies who possess no legitimate claim to power.

Most important, as Trump grows weaker, MAGA constantly requires fresh proof of ideological purity. We’re entering the “Unless Robespierre dies, we all die!” phase.

And now, the fun begins.

MAGA is fracturing, and fast.

The first great MAGA schism is Iran and Israel.

For years, “America First” meant no more stupid Middle Eastern forever wars. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and other isolationist-populist figures took that promise seriously. The old Israel hawks in the Trump national-security establishment, the evangelical pro-Israel right and people like Mark Levin took a very different view.

Trump’s Iran war detonated the contradiction.

Carlson and Levin went after each other. Carlson humiliated Ted Cruz in an interview over basic facts about Iran. MAGA personalities accused one another of betraying America, Israel, Trump or all three. By June, Carlson was publicly declaring himself finished with the Republican Party, accusing it of putting another country’s interests ahead of America’s.

Then the wheel turned again. When Trump’s Iran policy moved briefly toward a settlement, some of the hawks who had defended the war revolted over the concessions. Mark Levin attacked the prospective deal. In the days before his death, Lindsey Graham demanded that JD Vance defend it before Congress.

The isolationists think Trump betrayed them by starting the war. The hawks think Trump betrayed them by trying to end it.

It’s the Oprah rule of Trump’s Middle East policy: You get a betrayal. YOU get a betrayal! Everybody gets a betrayal!

The second crack is Epstein.

For a movement built on conspiracy theories about hidden elites trafficking children, the Epstein files were supposed to be the Book of Revelation with flight logs and secret videos of Bill Clinton sacrificing children on Epstein Island.

Then Epstein-Trump Justice Department’s coverup denied MAGA the apocalypse it had promised itself.

The result has been extraordinary. The Epstein Schism means former Trump stalwarts including Carlson, Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene have abandoned him, and more than a few of his former cheerleaders now increasingly accuse the administration of concealing precisely the kind of elite conspiracy MAGA spent years promising to expose.

You cannot train millions of people to believe every institution is lying to them and then demand they look anywhere except at Donald Trump’s sticky relationship with his dear friend Jeffrey, the world’s worst sex trafficker and notorious pedophile.

The third fracture is the MAGA media ecosystem itself.

For a decade, right-wing media and social media arms of the revolution had one organizing principle: Donald Trump.

Now that the decaying emperor is visibly knocking on death’s door, the succession has begun, and the courtiers are discovering ideological differences they spent years pretending didn’t exist.

Tucker Carlson. Ben Shapiro. Megyn Kelly. Candace Owens. Laura Loomer. Mark Levin. The Fuentes faction. The Israel hawks. The Israel skeptics. The white nationalists. The antivax loons. The conspiracy entrepreneurs. The people denouncing the conspiracy entrepreneurs as grifters.

The coalition that once spent its evenings hunting liberals now spends more of its time hunting one another for ideological imperfections. Witness the jockeying between Trump’s entire White House staff and First Mistress Natalie Harp.

It gets more granular, down to the GS-9s: the brief kerfluffle this week over Trump’s own government employees accusing one another of betrayal and Deep State madness in the “DataRepublican” mini-scandal is just the tip of the infighting.

This is not incidental. It is structural.

An outrage economy requires, well, outrage. When Democrats cease providing enough calories by not playing MAGA’s stupid culture war games, and as Daddy Trump’s physical and mental infirmities join his abject failures on every topic they cared about, cannibalism becomes a perfectly viable business model.

The fourth fracture is the definition of America First itself. What is the Revolution for, beyond the aggrandizement of the Dear Leader? That was enough for a long run, but no longer. A bleak future of hard questions awaits.

Is MAGA an isolationist movement? A white nationalist movement? A Christian nationalist movement? A pro-Israel movement?

A working-class economic populist movement? A Silicon Valley techno-libertarian movement?

A mass-deportation movement?

A bizarro-world, Republican Party offshoot wearing a red hat that will shed its skin when Trump dies?

Yes.

Which is another way of saying no.

Trump held these contradictions together because Trump never really had an ideology. He let others project their ideology onto his protean power in the GOP. He was a personality cult with a licensing agreement.

That becomes enormously important in 2028.

Already the Vance-Rubio-Cruz distinctions point toward a real ideological contest. Vance is naturally positioned to inherit the techbros, the nationalists, populists and intervention-skeptical parts of MAGA.

Rubio has become much more closely identified with the monied wing and the hawkish national-security wing, particularly on Iran. Ted Cruz is…well, Ted Cruz, a brand without a single redeeming feature save ambition.

The war and Trump’s engineered economic collapse are indefensible points with the base, but all three men (and the dozens of others who will at least dip a toe in the 2028 waters) will be doing all they can to defend Trump’s record.

Every Republican presidential candidate in 2028 will face the same impossible task: claiming to be Trump’s rightful heir while explaining why every other claimant is a heretic and telling a MAGA base who have been screwed harder by Trump’s failings than any liberal ever could that they’ll save them from the depredations of communism.

Which brings us to 2027.

Taking the House from Republicans this November will dramatically accelerate the MAGA crackup. Democrats currently hold an advantage in the generic congressional ballot, and with work, both the House and Senate are within reach.

Republicans are rightly worried about the political damage from Trump’s disdain for an affordability message, the Iran war, and his overall lunacy. This, too, speeds the plow.

A House loss means investigations. Hearings. Subpoenas. Legislative showdowns. Republican members scrambling to explain who lost the majority. They know who lost it: the gibbering orange lardsack currently besmirching 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with his white-trash decorating obsessions and monomania.

Trump will blame congressional Republicans. Congressional Republicans will blame a secret cabal of communists who made them defend Trump.

The isolationists will blame Iran. The hawks will blame Iran…after all, if only we’d just nuked Tehran, it would have all been solved. The immigration absolutists will blame insufficient deportations and not enough murders of American protestors. The populists will blame Wall Street. The donor class will blame the populists.

Everyone will blame the GOP’s utterly venal consultant class, which is admittedly one revolutionary tradition I completely endorse.

Then comes 2028.

Succession becomes real when the Dear Leader’s physical and political power starts to crack, and Trump’s is cracking like a Faberge egg on the floor of a biker bar. The revolutionary leader cannot rule forever until some AI dork can upload them to the cloud, which, thankfully, still seems a bit far off.

The knives are out.

Robespierre understood the problem only when it was too late.

The Revolution requires traitors because revolutionary politics cannot tolerate ordinary disagreement. Every policy failure must therefore have an explanation involving betrayal, sabotage, or insufficient faith in the Cause.

MAGA spent ten years teaching its voters that losing is evidence of treason. They were told over and over that the Democrats weren’t opposition, but pure evil. They were told compromise is surrender, institutions are conspiracies, experts are corrupt, and insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump is the greatest political sin.

Now those rules are being applied inside the movement.

It’s not the counterrevolution we need to purge this nation of Trump and MAGA’s pernicious stain, but it’s a start. They’ll do a lot of the work for us.

I was deep in the revolutionary history rabbit hole on this article, and I wondered how Robespierre, the Steve Bannon of the French Revolution, met his last moments before mounting the fatal scaffold and putting his head beneath the blade.

I discovered that the great orator of revolutionary purity had no magnificent last words. A bullet had smashed his jaw during his arrest. When the executioner ripped away the bloody bandage holding it together, Robespierre screamed until the guillotine silenced him.

MAGA has followed its own descending staircase of purges: Democrats, Never Trumpers, RINOs, insufficiently loyal Republicans, insufficiently pure MAGA, people who don’t embrace the 2020 stolen election lie, the Israel hawks, the isolationists, the Epstein heretics, and soon enough the rival camps of Vance, Rubio, and whoever else Trump decides is the One True Heir.

The names change. The accusations of treason don’t. The circle gets smaller. The blade keeps falling until the Revolution is soaked in blood and its founders are either dead or terrified into silence.

I can’t wait.