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Bad as Trump Is, What Follows Him May Be Worse
Has Donald Trump’s power peaked? Just a year into his second term, the US president is hardly a lame duck. After seizing Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, the full weight of the US military is now being used to squeeze Iran. Yet Tehran’s resilience and horizontal escalation strategy have vexed Trump. Look closely, and his trademark ability to defy political gravity and bring his party to heel also seems diminished.
Key points- Setbacks, rulings, and internal rebellion threaten Trump’s political power and divide the GOP
- Extremist online influencers are indirectly helping shape Trump’s second term
- J. D. Vance may have to cater to the far-right faction to maintain a Republican presidency
GOP lawmakers in Congress rebelled in November 2025 by voting to release the Epstein files—a scandal that won’t die. Trump’s signature policies on tariffs and mass deportation are, meanwhile, cratering his poll numbers. The president’s demands for gerrymandering in Indiana were rebuffed too.
Setbacks keep mounting. Normally sycophantic house speaker Mike Johnson has poured cold water on Trump’s idea to cap credit card rates. Republican state senators nationwide have condemned the brutality of federal anti-immigration operations after thirty-seven-year-old protestor Alex Pretti was killed in Minneapolis. Senate majority leader John Thune is now resisting Trump’s pressure to ram through the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act ahead of November midterms. Civil society groups argue the proposed bill would disenfranchise millions of people by requiring proof of citizenship to confirm their voter registration status.
Trump’s public appearances are less frequent and far more stage-managed as well. And his health and stamina appear in decline. Even far-right figures in Europe are recoiling from him over his threats to annex Greenland. On February 20, the US Supreme Court also struck down the president’s ability to impose tariffs by relying on a 1977 emergency powers act. Not only has the ruling dented the White House’s ability to wield tariffs as a cudgel against foreign countries, it has triggered a new political battle over roughly $175 billion (US) in fees collected that may now be eligible for refunds.
In Republicans’ ideal world, Trump would anoint a Make America Great Again heir apparent for the party to rally around. Instead, the seventy-nine-year-old leader famously loathes sharing the spotlight. That’s left the GOP’s populist faction sliding awkwardly into civil war. An appearance by white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes on Tucker Carlson’s podcast this past October accelerated this process by igniting a firestorm within MAGA. Traditionalist figures are now openly clashing with the movement’s more chauvinistic elements.
It’s impossible to foresee who exactly triumphs in the end. Although, many signs already point to one strong likelihood: MAGA, in the post-Trump era, becoming even more extreme.
During a two-hour-plus conversation with Carlson in late October, Fuentes pushed toxic conspiracies and neo-Nazi beliefs. He praised Adolf Hitler and claimed a cabal of “organized Jewry” secretly controls the United States. Carlson barely pushed back. The influential former Fox News anchor is himself a harsh critic of US support for Israel and a long-time exponent of the racist great replacement theory.
Mainstream Republicans were outraged. They condemned Carlson for handing an avowed Holocaust denier a massive platform to champion antisemitism, given his more than 20 million followers across social media and Spotify. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation—source of the Project 2025 manifesto—rushed to Carlson’s defence. In a video post, he railed against “cancelling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians.” Several of Roberts’s senior colleagues resigned in protest. The discord then roiled a Turning Point USA conference in December.
Fuentes is radioactive to most American conservatives. His ideology reflects a hostile strain of white, male-dominated, Christian nationalism. After Trump won re-election in November 2024, Fuentes trolled women in America by posting on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
Still just twenty-seven years old, Fuentes has harnessed his grievances and entrepreneurial instincts to accrue major clout. This despite having been blocked by numerous social media platforms, financial service providers, and e-commerce sites. He has also been barred from the high-profile Conservative Political Action Conference.
But Fuentes has adapted by amassing a cult following of angry, extremely online young men. They populate message boards on 4chan and watch videos on Rumble. They subscribe to Telegram channels, chat on Gab, and post rage bait on X. This army of hardcore fans—dubbed “Groypers”—also bankrolls Fuentes’s political projects through grassroots donations to the America First Foundation. The nonprofit entity functions as a political organizing hub similar to Turning Point USA but for a much more radicalized audience.
Trump’s 2024 campaign mobilized millions of low-propensity voters to support him by reaching into the murky depths of alternative online media. Within this realm, Fuentes is royalty. Other leading figures are former kickboxer and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate, YouTuber Jake Paul, comedian Theo Von, and podcaster Adin Ross. And they’re now indirectly helping shape Trump’s second presidency.
“Misogynist rhetoric circulating through far-right influencer and podcast ecosystems have greatly informed political strategies advanced during Trump’s second term,” wrote Karmvir K. Padda, a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation’s Digital Policy Hub, in an email to me.
Her research examines how digital platforms enable online extremism to spill over into the real world. Fuentes and other so-called men’s rights activists, Padda continues, have framed Trump’s re-election as the “restoration of masculine authority.” Narratives glorifying dominance and entitlement in traditional gender roles feature heavily. These regressive notions are then extended into other areas of society.
Doing so appeals to a segment of MAGA that the conservative Manhattan Institute labels “new entrant Republicans.” The category encompasses voters only loosely attached to the GOP but who comprised just under a third of the party’s support in recent elections. They are drawn to conspiratorial content and show higher tolerance for racist and antisemitic messaging. Rising levels of political violence elicit only minor concern.
This illustrates how MAGA-land is less monolithic than often portrayed. Its more extreme elements, while a minority, have also had an outsize effect of inspiring similar groups abroad. This includes the rise of white supremacist fight clubs now emerging across Canada. And as Trump’s political twilight nears, tensions between competing subgroups are surfacing. These should subside before the November midterms to avoid helping common-enemy Democrats flip congressional seats. However, expect GOP infighting to ramp up again during the 2028 presidential primaries.
Here, Fuentes and his fellow travellers could play the role of spoiler by effectively elevating and backing an insurgent candidate.
The Groypers are “no longer the meme-spamming basement dwellers their critics like to imagine,” warns conservative writer John Mac Ghlionn. Instead, “they are college-aged, articulate, and everywhere—from Telegram to Turning Point USA events.” They also control fringe social networks, media channels, and bespoke financing mechanisms.
“The Groypers are not a side-show,” Mac Ghlionn writes. “In truth, they’re the sequel.”
Vice President J. D. Vance—the presumed GOP presidential frontrunner—has previously dismissed Fuentes as “a total loser” and mocked his influence as “vastly overstated.” But polling shows Vance as the top pick for only 22 percent of GOP voters. By contrast, nearly two-thirds remain undecided and likely will be for some time.
The vice president thus risks becoming the fall guy for his boss’s unpopular policies. In particular, the Trump administration’s foot-dragging and deflection regarding the Epstein files. Many MAGA voters and power brokers are gripped by the Epstein case because they consider it emblematic of perverse corruption and the moral degeneracy of America’s elites. The US Department of Justice released another 3 million heavily redacted pages of material on January 30.
The White House’s new national security strategy could further alienate America First isolationists. It purports to crystallize America First foreign policy. But in reality, it’s a rebranding of American interventionism that deprioritizes the affordability concerns of the MAGA base. By seeking to globalize the culture wars and militarily bend the western hemisphere to Washington’s will, the plan will inevitably siphon attention and resources away from addressing rising food, housing, education, and health care costs at home.
Meanwhile, despite the grumblings of populist figures like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Candace Owens, Trump’s support among MAGA’s rank-and-file hasn’t fractured over him plunging America back into open-ended conflict in the Middle East. A CBS/YouGov poll in mid-March found 92 percent of MAGA Republicans approved of US military action against Iran. But that was before the consequent economic fallout began to take shape. And before the White House, on April 3, released a spending blueprint that calls for a $1.5 trillion (US) defence budget next year, funded by deep cuts to domestic programs.
Vance—a deft political chameleon—surely knows all this. It was probably why he avoided denouncing Fuentes and his ilk at the Turning Point USA conference in December. Vance can’t afford to feud with ultranationalist voters whom he’ll be relying on for support in 2028.
In fact, Vance will probably even need to cater to their wishes to have a shot at victory. This might come naturally, given how White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair the vice president has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” If not, a charismatic, dark-horse figure could emerge to snatch the MAGA crown.
Either way, expect the nativist movement that began with Trump to drift further into extremism once its founder exits the scene. And for its impact to spread beyond America.
The post Bad as Trump Is, What Follows Him May Be Worse first appeared on The Walrus.
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