GftNC
So much is happening in the world, and with (as Tina Brown called him) a berserk brontosaurus in the White House, the topics of possible interest seem endless. The Florida election after which Mar-a-Lago and Trump are now represented by a Democrat? The insider betting on the timing of US military (and PR) actions? The incomprehensible (/s) fact that the state most benefitting from the current situation is Putin’s Russia?
Open Thread, as I mentioned
And since it is near the end of the month, and I still have gift articles available, here is the ambivalently-regarded Ezra Klein in today’s NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opinion/ai-claude-chatgpt-gemini-mcluhan.html?unlocked_article_code=1.W1A.D28d.ZeeiJbtOng_2&smid=url-share
I spent last week in San Francisco talking to people on the frontier of the A.I. age. I try to do that every few months, but my conversations on this trip felt different than my conversations on previous trips. In the past, what I saw was how the technology was changing; this time, what I saw was how the people were being changed by the technology.
GftNC: I wondered what you make of MAGA? What do you think explains how this has come about, in people who voted for Trump when he said he would not get the US into foreign wars, claimed that the Biden administration (and family) were tremendously corrupt, and made a fetish of patriotism (USA! USA!) while insisting that the 2020 election was stolen in the face of all evidence to the contrary?
MAGA was a campaign slogan. It was used derisively under Biden. It’s a noun, an adjective, a compliment, a pejorative, etc. The uses are so varied this question is hard to answer. Only 60% or so of Republicans identify with “MAGA”, whatever “identifying” means (e.g. Biden coined “Ultra MAGA,” so which MAGA?).
Here is my take: The core of the movement originally was restoring America’s status at home and abroad. America first, bringing jobs back home (especially manufacturing), securing the border, restoring military strength. At the time, not all Republicans bought into Trump’s non-interventionism or economic protectionism, but they were aligned with a lot of the other values. Transgender issues, DEI/equity/socialism, crime, rejection of the attempts to reframe the Founding (1619) etc. became part of the discussion too over time, but that was shared with Republicans in general, just perhaps not as strong.
I don’t know anyone that actually says “I am MAGA.” However, I know many conservatives that believe that the American Experiment has been amazingly good for humanity overall (though flawed), that believe in free markets, limited government, being a good and helpful member of the community of nations, secure borders, a strong military to protect the Experiment, equality and that the arc of history bends towards justice. Republicans find those collective values align more with Trump than, say, Biden or Harris (or Newsome for that matter).
So your specific questions. There are several there, really arguments with your own conclusions. I’m not going to go through each one, but I’ll answer the thrust in the context of the war with Iran. If this war drags on, it will split the Republicans. How much depends on how long and the toll on America/the world. My sense is that most conservatives (like me) worry it will escalate while at the same time despise the regime in Iran. The amount of “MAGA” that will support Trump no matter what happens in the war IMHO is small. Rubio stated a few days ago the war is expected to continue 2-4 more weeks. If that is true, Trump will have been consistent enough. It won’t be an “endless” war. If it ends up being lengthy, different story.
Re your additional comment, a few thoughts come to mind. First, Trump isn’t exactly conservative. He is his own thing. That there are inconsistencies with traditional conservative thought doesn’t necessarily mean there is a fracture there. Some were known and frankly helped him win him the election. I don’t think his strong take on the executive is necessarily inconsistent, especially when aimed at things like border security, fraud, short military action, and so on.
Pro Bono: I stand corrected (I thought a small amount of refined uranium was involved).
TP: Not a good analogy IMO. We KNOW what Iran would do with cartridges. They have been doing it for decades, proxies and all. As for funding, there is that much fraud in California alone, and likely more. Stop that, and we’re not only even, we’re ahead.
You have seen the hats, right?
‘I don’t know anyone that actually says “I am MAGA.”
What’s the first rule of fight club?
You’ll know them by their swag hats, T-shirts, coffee cups, bumper stickers, flags and signs in their yards and barns, truck trailers lined up on farmland along highways throughout Your-Fly-Is-Open-Country with his brand, and their fake news television channel choices.
I don’t know anyone who who actually says “I am an Asshole Shithead” either, but they don’t have to, do they?
We know them by their deeds.
Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and company at least have the cojones to announce “I am a Nazi”, so we know whom exactly we will be shooting at as the Civil War gains steam.
I expect the shy MAGAs who have kept their MAGA light under a bushel will follow up with the Nazi swag too. We already have the concentration camps. Why not the hats and the jackboots too?
I’ve never understood why Hitler, Mussolini and company didn’t capitalize on the Nazi swag angle. I suppose stealing all of the art and jewelry and property and Jewish and Eastern European dental fillings was their idea of a retirement program.
Trump has been an innovator in that area.
Interesting. Because I would say that those conservative values align far more with Biden or Harris than with Trump. Or any other Republican with a national profile.
in fact, while Trump is big on secure borders, and likes a strong military (although that has nothing to do with protecting the American experiment), he’s got no use whatever for the rest of those values. Indeed, he seems to be working hard to trash all of them.
bc, thank you for at least a partial answer. I say partial because the Iran war is only a month old, and Trump (elected on the back of MAGA) has been in power for fourteen months.
What I mean by MAGA, in asking this question, is whether you think that in the last fourteen months the Trump administration’s actions have, in any sense at all, “made America great again”.
The core of the movement originally was restoring America’s status at home and abroad. America first, bringing jobs back home (especially manufacturing), securing the border, restoring military strength.#
I know many conservatives that believe that the American Experiment has been amazingly good for humanity overall (though flawed), that believe in free markets, limited government, being a good and helpful member of the community of nations, secure borders, a strong military to protect the Experiment, equality and that the arc of history bends towards justice. Republicans find those collective values align more with Trump than, say, Biden or Harris (or Newsome for that matter).
The reason I asked about MAGA is that I do not at all think this is the same thing as conservatism. wj has been fighting a lonely fight here for years to hold the line on what conservatism is, or used to be, and we all lived through e.g. Reagan and Bush Snr, and Bush Jnr.
So when I ask about your opinion of MAGA, I want to know how you think the current administration (still strongly supported by hardcore MAGA) scores on your following categories:
a) free markets
b) being a good and helpful member of the community of nations
c) equality (whether of opportunity, or between the sexes, races, religions or otherwise)
d) the arc of history bending towards justice (in whatever way this differs from c)
Given what you say about the benefits of the American Experiment, and with regards to points c) and d), I wonder what you make of this:
The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg has published its latest annual assessment of the state of democracy worldwide, covering developments through 2025. The report concludes that democracy for the average person in the world has fallen back to the level of 1978. The gains of the third wave of democratization since the mid 1970s “are almost eradicated”, the report says.
According to V-Dem researchers, the United States has lost its long standing status as a liberal democracy for the first time in more than 50 years, falling into the lower category of electoral democracy.
https://www.democracywithoutborders.org/41651/v-dem-report-finds-global-democracy-is-back-at-1978-levels/
The thing that I find particularly interesting, though, is how you skate over the implication of my question which relates to Trump and MAGA accusations of the corruption of the Biden family and administration, given what we know now about what has been happening in the past 14 months. And, given that corruption or its absence in political leaders, their families and contacts is very obviously an important aspect of equality and justice, and what the founders intended for the American project, I am curious why you say that Republicans find those collective values align more with Trump than, say, Biden or Harris.
You self identify as a conservative, but seem to disavow the importance of MAGA, and (like McKinney before you) think Trump is sui generis. So, how much do YOU find that those collective values align with Trump, than say Biden, or Obama? (I’m leaving out Harris and Newsome, because we have some realistic basis for comparison with Biden and Obama).
I’ll leave bc to participate as they see fit in responding to others’ questions. Meanwhile, on the subject of US trade and manufacturing, I give you all these two articles from the bicycle front.
The first is this piece at NPR about Guardian Bicycles:
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/29/nx-s1-5746807/trump-bike-children-competition-tariffs-opposition
I have no experience with these bikes, so I won’t offer any judgment on the product. I do see that they are pushing a direct-to-consumer model to keep their retail prices down, so for all that they talk about the US economy, they are probably doing less on net for local economies than are a few thousand local bike shops with bikes made in Taiwan.
And on the other side of things over at Bikepacking.com…
https://bikepacking.com/news/paragon-machine-works-closes/
Paragon has not commented in detail about what those “market and industrial factors” are, but pretty much every small custom framebuilder who has commented on the story has assumed that the biggest factor involved is likely the tariffs on steel and aluminum. I’m hearing similar stories from wheelbuilders who are having a very difficult time finding affordable spokes for the same reason.
Guardian Bicycles employs around 250 employees, and they do utilize tubing from American manufacturers, so their footprint is larger than just those 250 employees. I’d be surprised if there were 250 full time custom framebuilders in the US, but every bike shop in the US has to have at least one wheelbuilder.
I think y’all can work out where I stand on this particular tale.
When Trump releases the UFO facts of life (Epstein murder distraction) report, we’ll learn about the alien bug that crawled up his fundament as a child and how all the insecticide made legal by Trump’s EPA couldn’t stop him from eating the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQd2Rpv-f9c
Nous, here’s a summary of another NPR segment, which I listed to today, (sorry, can’t find the link right how to the segment) on a true American who manufactures rat-proof garbage bins and how tariffs have screwed her:
The NPR report (via Here & Now / WBUR) and related business reporting focuses on Liz Picarazzi, the CEO of Brooklyn-based Citibin, which manufactures welded aluminum, rat-proof trash enclosures designed to combat New York City’s rodent problem. NPR
+1
Here are the key points regarding her business and the impact of tariffs:
Key line by MS Picarazzi: Tariffs are taxation without representation with no accountability about where the money is being spent.
Apparently she couldn’t make her bins ratf*cker-proof.
Regarding this, bc:
“being a good and helpful member of the community of nations, secure borders, a strong military to protect the Experiment, equality and that the arc of history bends towards justice. Republicans find those collective values align more with Trump than, say, Biden or Harris (or Newsome for that matter).’
A senior Administration official quoted in a New Yorker article regarding “Trump’s new world disorder”, when asked to define the Trump Doctrine, put it curtly:
“We’re America, bitches.”
Those words pretty much sum up the attitudes of many, not all, but too many conservatives I’ve known all my life.
Trump is the gangbanging apotheosis of the right-wing conservative movement since World War II.
They thought it all along and finally he says it out loud and let’s them say it out loud too.
Along with both “N” words.
The experiment is over. It’s a toxic mushroom cloud above the contaminated lab.
As others have noted, the hats, t shirts, tattoos, bumper stickers, etc., should really be a clue.
I’ll allow the secure borders point, although at the cost of the 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendments. And the lives of Good, Pretti, and a number of others. And the well being of hundreds or thousands more.
I find it very hard to believe that any sane and reasonable person would see any of the rest embodied in Trump or any of his cabinet.
It boggles my mind, each and every day.
I have to ask – do you recognize how utterly corrupt and full of shit the man is?
Trump is a good and helpful member of the international community?
That’s the most ridiculous statement I have read in a while – excepting the utterances of the narcissist in chief and his coterie of course.
But apart from that, it certainly doesn’t apply to e.g. Nixon, Reagan and GW Bush either.
bc: it’s very welcome to have someone on here speaking for a Republican viewpoint. Two questions from me:
Let’s define MAGA, even if only for the sake of argument, as strong support for Donald Trump. People support him for different reasons, but the support itself is what matters.
It should be obvious to everyone that Donald Trump flies by the seat of his pants and has no depth of thought on anything as actual policy making is concerned. The presidency is a get-out-of-jail-free card and a grifting scheme for him.
Does anyone wish to dispute this?
Setting aside for a moment the fight against fascism, I read the Prospect article about the nature of conservatism which GftNC linked to. I’m reminded of a much-quoted passage from Michael Oakeshott’s essay On Being Conservative:
When I read that, I thought “that’s me. Am I a conservative?”. But, of course, the passage is about how to proceed, not where to proceed. A Fabian Gradualist can prefer all the same things. The difference is in where one wants to go to, not whether to walk or run. A conservative is willing to make slow changes when necessary to maintain social stability, but what they want is to maintain wealth and privilege for the few. Whereas a social liberal wants to reduce inequality, and, in so far as possible, to eliminate inherited privilege. That is why I am not a conservative.
The new version is ever-increasing wealth and privilege, perhaps for even fewer people, at the expense of everyone else. There used to be some recognition among conservatives that maintaining social stability required some kind of limits on inequality. Now it’s about oligarchic techno-feudalism (or whatever you want to call this “project”).
Characteristics of American traditional conservative ideology:
• Limited government and constitutional originalism
• Free-market capitalism and private property
• Individual liberty paired with personal responsibility
• Traditional moral order and civil society
• National sovereignty, secure borders, and realistic foreign policy
• Rule of law, social order, and prudence
• Skepticism of concentrated power
Traditional US Conservative Ideology Characteristics
I like that quote, but I just read up on Oakshott and came across this. I’m not a fan playing the life against the work but it’s there is an undeniable discrepancy between the public and private persona:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oakeshott#Personal_life
Oakshott married three times and was twice divorced. In 1927, he married Joyce Fricker, and they had a daughter, Daphne, and two sons, Simon and Francis, the latter only one year old when his parents separated. In 1936, while still with his wife, he began an affair with Kate Burton, a young graduate of Newnham College. In 1938 he was divorced and married Burton, gaining a small step-son, Christopher Cox, in whom he took little interest. They were together living in Great Shelford until 1940, but Oakeshott refused to have children with his second wife, and the marriage effectively came to an end during the Second World War. When Oakeshott returned from his military service at the end of the war, he moved into a college room and did not return to his wife. This is reported to have left her heartbroken.[21]
From the 1940s to the 1960s, Oakeshott had numerous affairs, many of them with wives of his students, colleagues, and friends, and even with his son Simon’s girlfriend.[21] His most notable lover known to his biographers was Iris Murdoch. With Mary Walsh, in 1955 he had a son, Sebastian, out of wedlock, but abandoned them when the child was two and did not meet him again for nearly twenty years.
Definitely. If you leave out its importance in continually feeding his ego, you will miss a lot of what makes him tick. I’d say it’s actually more important than the get out of jail free card (although that is definitely an enabler). And it’s the bit that’s actually important, whereas the grift is just an ongoing reassurance for his ego.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/31/trump-launches-tirade-against-european-countries-not-joining-iran-war
I don’t know how much you all are seeing about Trump’s broadsides against the UK and the other Europeans. Very understandably, I assume American media features less about this aspect than ours does.
But his (to the UK) “ “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, [the US] won’t be there to help you any more, just like you weren’t there for us”, as well as “you can go and get your own oil”, and Hegseth’s “last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that”, really beggars belief.
In addition to the childishness and stupidity, it shows that not only did they not have a plan, they literally have no concept of what they have unleashed and how, why any of it has unfolded as it has, and will continue to do so. The growing unpopularity of this among the American people must be driving already unstable characters to the brink of madness as they are backed, disbelievingly, into a corner.
I’ll readily grant that this is true of a lot of (loudly) self-proclaimed conservatives. But it’s easy, as I’ll testify first hand, to see massive wealth inequality as antithetical. Not least because it leads, sooner or later, to revolutionary change. Not necessarily violently, but generally abruptly. That’s the opposite of the conservative approach. And it’s a foolish conservative who can’t look ahead to the obvious consequences of massive wealth inequality.
Similarly, privilege for the few, while less certain to result in it, is also more likely than not to generate radical changes. Some about eliminating the privileges (or, depending on the situation, just eliminating the privileged), but a lot of others unrelated to privilege.
But you’re not disputing it, wj. You’re acknowledging that the presidency is those two things to him, just not those things exclusively.
I certainly don’t dispute the egotistical aspect of it. It’s very hard to miss.
“The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand”
True then, even more so now.
And “not very bright” doesn’t begin to cover all of it.
Who could ever imagine that the Presidency of the United States of American would become a hidey-hole for subhuman EVIL.
Brought to the world by American Christians.
The idea that “equality and that the arc of history bends towards justice” could somehow be more fitting to Trump than any major Democratic politician you could name is so delusional that it renders further discussion pointless, unless you want to do some detailed parsing of just what “equality” and “justice” means to the parties in the discussion. I will decline in that exercise.
And I consider bc to be reasonable and thoughtful, not at all antagonistic in the way that McKinney came to be. So I welcome their comments, even if they don’t much overlap with my evaluation of reality. But Jesse Jackson has been buried, perhaps all the common ground was what was used to fill and cover his grave.
(..) Until then we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!! President DJT (link)
I have no words anymore. The complete and utter inhumanity on display here is truly frightening. Unfortunately millions of people think the same way.
Of course, the religious Right should take umbrage at the term ‘stone ages’ since they deny there ever was such an age. 😉
Meanwhile, in an interview with the Telegraph (behind a paywall):
Trump, who has been frustrated by U.S. allies refusing to get involved in the U.S. war on Iran and the subsequent efforts to force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to full international traffic, was asked in the interview if he would reconsider ending U.S. membership in the alliance.
“Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration. I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way,” Trump said in the interview.
The BBC covers some (but not all) of the comments here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c79je4vldq5o
I mean, apart from everything else of incredible ignorance and stupidity, the absolutely headspinning thing (even more than the fact he doesn’t seem to know that NATO is a defensive treaty, and according to its charter is about attacks on members in Europe and America) is that he can say this, without being aware that everybody else in the world even slightly informed on this knows that part of Putin’s main strategy for years has been to destroy the EU (hence his support for Brexit) and to destroy NATO. Funny, that: one doesn’t normally go to such lengths to destroy or neuter something you think is a paper tiger.
As do I. I mostly don’t agree with bc but that is a different issue.
I hate to say this, because I hate that it is true. But the EU and the “middle powers” (as Carney calls them) really do need to assume that the US under Trump is unreliable. Is stepping away from any commitments that do not benefit Trump and his family, personally.
And I don’t understand the dynamics of his relationship with Putin but it’s pretty obvious that Putin holds the upper hand there.
Funny (not funny), when Mr. 33% Approval Rating refers to NATO as a “paper tiger,” it reminds me most of this:
America under King TACO is more like OBL’s assesment of America than it has ever been. King TACO is the purest expression of that kernel of truth.