We’ve all lived through a decade where the coalition Donald Trump built looked inevitable. Impervious to facts, reason, and compassion.
It was a coalition held together by loyalty to one man.
And now, it’s a coalition at war with itself.
You can feel it if you spend any time in that world.
The smiles are tighter. The knives are increasingly out, not for the hated “socialists” but for one another.
The people who once lived to “own the libs” spend more of each day subtweeting each other, accusing one another of being disloyal to MAGA, of being globalist plants, Soros puppets, or, worst of all in that ecosystem, insufficiently devoted to Dear Leader.
This is what happens when you build a movement on raw power and loyalty checks instead of principle, paranoia instead of policy, vibes instead of values.
Eventually, the purity tests get so extreme that no one can pass them. The circle keeps getting smaller until the last three guys in it are accusing each other of being communist Deep State sleeper agents.
The MAGA revolution did more damage to America than we can recount.
It wrecked the old GOP, of course, and hollowed out conservative institutions, transforming them into arms of a new nationalism and statism that would have made Ronald Reagan recoil.
It gave every crank with a ring light and a microphone a sense of enormous entitlement and a platform.
But here’s the funny part.
Once you train everyone to think in terms of enemies and traitors, of obedience and betrayal, they can’t stop when the Democrats are out of the room.
They turn the weapons on one another.
The Epstein Files imbroglio is just today’s most immediate example. Sure, we’ve got the White House trying to keep the cover-up going with a modified limited hangout by “allowing” the House to vote on releasing the scubbed, redacted, edited, and sanitized version, but the damage is done. A meaningful fraction of the base believes Trump is hiding his connections to Epstein. (Spoiler: he is.)
The damage is done.