Sunday reader: Trump supporters: 'MAGA is back'

Steve Bannon had been sprung from federal prison only 12 hours earlier, but he had a message to deliver: "MAGA is back."

It was a week before Election Day and Bannon, the right-wing podcaster, culture warrior and former chief strategist for Donald Trump, was sitting in a palatial Park Avenue hotel suite, describing how the next Trump presidency would surpass the last one.

The entire scene seemed bizarrely improbable. Bannon had just delivered a hardscrabble populist attack to a roomful of reporters in a suite costing thousands of dollars per night. He'd been incarcerated for four months for defying a congressional subpoena, yet emerged tanned and trim (he credits a regimen of prison-yard calisthenics). And he'd made it back just in time to witness what he correctly predicted would be a Trump victory over Vice President Kamala Harris - or, as Bannon prefers to call it, "The greatest political comeback in the history of American politics."

It's difficult to dispute that characterization. By many measures, Trump's recapturing the White House is an even more remarkable feat than his surprise upset of Hillary Clinton was in 2016. This time, he beat Harris despite his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden; the collapse of his approval rating to 29% after the U.S. Capitol insurrection; the Republican party's attempt to blame him for its 2022 midterm losses and anoint Florida governor Ron DeSantis the GOP successor; his 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records, not to mention two indictments over his alleged attempts to interfere with and overturn the 2020 election result and one on mishandling classified documents; and a slew of new accusations from women accusing him of sexual misconduct. He'd also run a campaign nearly devoid of serious policy discussion, one that was instead, as Harris put it in her closing address on the National Mall, "obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance ... he's out for unchecked power."

Yet Trump won anyway, storming to victory and reclaiming multiple Sun Belt and "blue wall" states that Biden had swept four years earlier. The claim Bannon was making, with the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning, was that Trump's resurrection will deliver a MAGA renaissance that he believes will utterly transform the country - because nothing, and no one, has been able to halt the inexorable political advancement of Donald J. Trump.

What, exactly, will it mean for Trump to "Make America Great Again" a second time? Washington has fixated on this question since at least mid-summer, when Trump's widening lead in the polls over Biden made the former president's prospective return seem ever more plausible. It's a question that can't fully be answered until it's clear which party will control the U.S. House of Representatives. But even if Democrats can hold onto this last bastion of power, the consensus in both parties is that Trump will go much further than last time, and be far more effective in achieving his goals. "A lot of the impact he'll have is the incredibly expansive use of unilateral power," said Liam Donovan, a Republican lobbyist. "That's the stuff that'll shock the system. He's not going to want to have another situation where lawyers are telling him no."

To that end, Trump will surround himself with loyalists. During his first term, Trump relied on seasoned military leaders and establishment Republicans to staff his administration, mostly out of necessity because he was so new to politics. Many of those staffers saw their primary duty as being to the Constitution, not to Trump, and thwarted his most extreme proposals - much to the new president's displeasure. "I had some people that I would not have chosen for a second time," Trump griped to Bloomberg Businessweek in July.

This time around, Trump will assume office backed by an army of experienced staffers and policy specialists drawn from think tanks such as the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute whose explicit purpose is to run a future Trump administration in accordance with his wishes. "There will be two types of people around Trump - ideologues and grifters - but there won't be any RINOs," said Stephen Myrow, managing partner of Beacon Policy Advisors, an independent Washington research firm, referencing the conservative term for so-called "Republicans in Name Only."

Trump isn't likely to have many Republican critics outside the White House, either. The military officers, former cabinet officials and Republican lawmakers such as Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who publicly stood up to him have either retired or been driven from the party. No lawmaker with any ambition will dare emulate their example. "There's no flavor of Republicanism that can exist in explicit and deliberate contrast to Trump," said Donovan. "It has to be implicit, subtle and unspoken for anyone hoping to make it through a primary as a winner."

A resurgent MAGA movement can be expected to ratchet up its attacks on the press, especially if Trump commences the three major policy changes that most animated him at rallies: enlisting U.S. law enforcement to conduct large-scale raids and deport upwards of 11 million unauthorized immigrants; imposing sweeping tariffs around the globe on enemies and allies alike; and withdrawing U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

Trump's threats of retribution have registered with everyone from media owners to officials in Biden's Justice Department to veterans of Trump's own administration. Retired General Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and later a vocal critic, fears he'll be court-martialed if Trump returns to power, according to journalist Bob Woodward in War, his latest book on the presidency. "He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he's going to try to do," Milley told colleagues, according to the book. "And it's not just him, it's the people around him."

But for all the talk of score-settling and grievance, Trump's second presidency won't simply be a rehash of his first. It will also reflect an evolution already apparent in the MAGA movement. Anyone who attended Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, for instance, would have been struck by the relative youthfulness of the crowd. Political rallies - especially Republican ones - are usually filled with older folks. The supporters who propelled Trump to the White House the first time, especially in key Midwestern states, were often displaced factory workers, victims of globalization pining for the values and economy of mid-century America. The newer wave of MAGA activists tends to be younger, brasher, steeped in social media, oriented less around economics and more toward waging culture-war battles over race, gender and sexual identity. Besides Trump, the figures who generated the most excitement at Madison Square Garden were a new vanguard of right-wing provocateurs and media personalities, including Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Trump has always been sharply attuned to the attitudes and desires of his supporters and what resonates with them. In 2016, his infatuation with building a border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border grew out of the crowd response that the idea evoked when, pushed by his advisers, he began mentioning it at early campaign rallies. By the same token, the MAGA movement's evolving fixation with topics such as vaccine skepticism, transgender care and hostility to diversity, equity and inclusion programs are likely to shape Trump's second-term priorities. After all, Trump has always been a political chameleon, quick to align his policies with the desires of his biggest supporters - especially financial ones. Would it really be a surprise if Trump were to suddenly embrace electric vehicles or decide to emulate President John F. Kennedy, Jr., and throw the weight of the U.S. government behind a Musk-led mission to Mars?

Yet even if Republicans hold on to the U.S. House and secure a governing trifecta, a resurgent MAGA movement won't have unchecked power. Trump is bound to have trouble getting a conspiracy theorist such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. confirmed to a government position that gives him "control of the public health agencies," as Kennedy has said he's been promised, even with a GOP Senate. Trump can appoint Musk to slash the federal budget, but Republican lawmakers who vote on his proposals will recoil the minute those cuts jeopardize their reelection prospects, which means that despite all his bluster, Musk has little prayer of cutting the $2 trillion he's suggested.

Public opinion will ultimately limit Trump's hand, too. Most economists agree his regime of tax cuts and tariffs would curb U.S. growth and spike inflation - the latter of which proved deadly for Biden and Harris. Mass deportations would also exact a steep toll. A Bloomberg Economics study found that deporting immigrants in the numbers Trump's campaign suggests would shrink the U.S. gross domestic product, perhaps significantly.

But none of these limitations will necessarily stop Trump from putting his indelible stamp on the country in ways that could resonate for decades. "Certain things are endemic with Trump: drama, infighting, leaks, and the revolving orbit of people coming in and out," said Myrow. "But even so, this time is sure to be more assertive, much more thought out, and less ham-handed. These guys have had four years to prepare."

The Republican Party has already been remade in Trump's image, all but guaranteeing that his influence and his movement will shape American politics long into the future - despite his attacks on the foundations of the U.S. political and judicial systems, the dozens of state and federal crimes he's been charged with, and the furious contempt with which half the country regards him.

Trump's return and his party's transformation also once seemed improbable. But his victory makes it all but inevitable that history will remember the former television reality star, product pitchman and convicted felon as one of our most consequential presidents, and one whose movement radically reshaped the country.