Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Donald Trump as an individual will not define American politics forever. But MAGA may outlast him. Trump has had a transformative influence in the United States and beyond. The question is whether American politics will move past Trump, who is now 80 years old. Will we ever return to a pre-Trump world? MAGA has already reshaped the political landscape. What remains unclear is whether it represents a passing phase or a deeper structural reorientation. Institutional change is fast and reversible; cultural change is slower, more durable, and may not be reversible.
Official changes may happen sooner than we think. The pollster Nate Cohn speculates that “A Democratic Senate is a real possibility.” Trump’s disapproval ratings are climbing. Democrats would need to flip only three seats—if they hold their own—to take control of the House in 2026. The future Congress could plausibly be Democratic-controlled. And if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028—assuming Trump leaves and there is a peaceful transfer of power—two branches of government could radically change.
That may be necessary, but is it sufficient? One could imagine bureaucratic and institutional transformations and rebooting to undo the horrors of DOGE and Trump. A Democratic Congress with a Democratic president could do much—especially if it has its own governing roadmap comparable in scope and ambition to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
But Democrats should temper their current enthusiasm.
One recent poll of voters found a significant minority willing to question established historical facts. A Manhattan Institute poll, as reported by Antonia Hitchens in The New Yorker, found a significant share of young Republican voters—especially men under 50—willing to agree with survey statements suggesting the Holocaust was “greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.”
That raises a question about the different political ecosystems of these groups. How much of the radical right’s rise is driven by individual leaders, and how much comes from underlying structural conditions? Historical comparisons—from interwar Germany and Hitler to Yugoslavia and Slobodan Milošević in the 1990s—suggest the same tension between leadership and structural breakdown.
In terms of Trump, the more complicated question is what this looks like across different layers of the conservative ecosystem. On one level, there are mainstream political and youth-oriented activities such as those associated with Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk, which operate inside conventional electoral politics and public activism. These spaces are not fringe; they largely frame their arguments in terms of standard policy debates rather than rejection of the political system itself.
In the short term, parts of Trump-era politics may still be reversible through ordinary electoral change. The current system may revert to “normal” after Trump.
At the same time, much of today’s political audience is no longer shaped by parties or institutions. The question then becomes where the boundary lies between these mainstream conservative spaces and more radical subcultures operating in parallel ecosystems. Figures such as Nick Fuentes and his supporters represent a much smaller but more radicalized world where rhetoric moves beyond conventional political disagreement into explicit rejection of democratic norms and institutions. Conservative Republicans are separate from the more radical MAGA fringes, both politically and culturally.
The continuing split within MAGA may give hope to the Democrats about taking control of the legislative and executive branches of government, but how will Democrats and others deal with the right-wing fringes of MAGA who think Trump is not right-wing enough? When Fuentes was quoted as saying: “My problem with Trump is not that he’s Hitler, my problem with Trump is that he’s not Hitler,” elections and returned institutions will not settle that.
There have been precedents of American hysteria under a charismatic leader. The McCarthy era, for example, had one subject—anti-communism and the Soviet Union. But the senator from Wisconsin quickly flamed out on national television, although his HUAC Committee existed well after his demise. McCarthyism never developed the same broad cultural following as MAGA and its radical fringe.
The structure of political culture has changed. The technological environment is unlike anything that preceded it. The internet and algorithmic media have altered the entire political process. There is no comparing Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential fireside radio chats with Donald Trump’s incessant use of social media as well as influencers like Joe Rogan.
Trump’s cultural MAGA transformation goes beyond political parties and politics. Antonia Hitchens concluded her article in The New Yorker on the new Christian-nationalist fringe by quoting a young high schooler: “If the [Republican] Party wants to kick us out, we will bail and have our own. They can kick us out and die.”
So even if the Democrats sweep the upcoming elections, they will still face deep cultural problems. Institutions can be rebuilt. Bureaucracies can be restored. Budgets can be rewritten. But political cultures do not change as quickly as government agencies. The cultural ecosystem that MAGA helped consolidate will not disappear with a transfer of power.
MAGA and its periphery are often treated as a sudden rupture, but they are better understood as the culmination of several decades of ideological and grassroots mobilization on the American right—from the anti-communism of Joseph McCarthy and the conspiratorial anti-communism of the John Birch Society to the religious nationalism of the Moral Majority, and finally to the anti-government populism of the Tea Party movement. Although they rise and fall over time, these movements are more than temporary political pop-ups.
Trump will leave American politics through age, electoral defeat, or history’s normal rotation of power. But elements of MAGA may already be less a moment in American politics than a feature of its future political landscape.
