Trump was their champion-a comedian, a performer, but, most importantly, a fighter. If MAGA was anything, it was a coalition bound less by shared policy goals than by a shared sense of grievance and a love for the game.
I've been feeling so uninspired and so heartbroken about this country. What I realize, I keep wanting to put my head in the sand and pray that I wake up and it's all over.
LaBeouf hasn't anchored a box-office hit in more than a decade, and little of his 2020s art-house work has drawn buzz. The most notable thing he's starred in lately was a clip of him on a podcaster's couch, hunched and diminished, talking about his fear of gay people.
Jackson Lahmeyer has made headlines for his inflammatory comments, including labeling the LGBTQ+ community as 'sick' and calling Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization. His provocative style has garnered attention and positioned him within the MAGA movement.
A record high of adults—80 percent—believes that Americans are divided on the most important values. National pride, trust in government, and confidence in institutions are near record lows. The Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz says the United States hasn't been this divided since the Civil War. Nearly half of Americans think another civil war is likely in their lifetime.
The US's clear military and economic dominance of the postwar world gave it an obvious claim to seniority; however, there was also a strong strain within English conservatism at the time that saw itself as Greeks in this American empire, in the words of former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan. In other words, even if the Americans were to be the new Romans, extending their dominion over every corner of the globe, without the intellectual, cultural and political guidance of their wise old mother country they would quickly fall into ruin.
Collating data from the World Bank and other sources in innovative ways, he argues that globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was accompanied by then-unprecedented growth of income in both previously poor populations (notably in China) and people at the top of the world's income distribution (especially those in the West). By contrast, relative shares of world income stagnated or were thought to have declined for wealthy nations' middle and working classes, including in the United States.
the rotting carcass of the MAGA era, its shrieking insecurities, its pathetic resentments, its festering hatreds, and that distinct, metallic tang of panic rising in the back of its throat behind the soft wattle.
The Department of Homeland Security's Facebook account recently posted a recruiting notice for ICE under the banner "WE'LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN"-the title of a white-nationalist anthem by the Pine Tree Riots ("By blood or sweat, we'll get there yet"). The Department of Labor recently posted a video montage referencing American battle scenes under the tagline "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American"-a slogan close to the Nazi-era Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.
The most notable, and perhaps most effective, ad of the 2024 presidential campaign featured footage of the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, voicing her support for gender-affirming treatment for inmates in federal prisons. "Kamala is for they/ them. President Trump is for you," the narrator concluded. The spot was a crisp, 30-second encapsulation of one of the key Republican talking points of the cycle: that "wokeness" was sweeping the nation and upending established ways of life, and that Donald Trump would fight against it.
Charlie Kirk believed that gay people should be stoned to death, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a "huge mistake," that we should legally be allowed to whip foreigners in the U.S., that Muslims only move here to destroy the country, that American Jews encourage anti-whiteness, that men should physically attack transgender people, that all women should submit to their husbands, and that Black professionals "steal" their jobs from more qualified white people.
The second interpretation purports to be more hardheaded and sensible, wiser and world-weary after so many years of watching Trump at work. Isn't this always how he negotiates? Stake out an absurd-sounding position, freak out all the institutionalists and keepers of consensus, rattle the markets and then use the madman's leverage to induce other countries to accept an advantageous-for-America deal?
"It is not the critic who counts," President Theodore Roosevelt once said. "The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena." The Heritage Foundation has been in the arena for many years, fighting many battles, so it's no surprise that it has attracted many critics as well. And while Heritage cannot claim perfection, this much is certain: We have stayed true to our mission despite the critics;
Earlier this week, Gary Kendrick, a GOP council member in the red town of El Cajon, on San Diego's eastern outskirts, announced that he was crossing the aisle and joining the Democrats. Kendrick was the longest-serving Republican official in the region's local government. "I've been a Republican for 50 years," he said, in the statement explaining his action. "I just can't stand what the Republican Party has become. I'm formally renouncing the Republican Party."
The word that comes to my mind is dissidence. If we want to understand why the whistleblowing, camera-wielding people of Minneapolis have caused the Trump administration-and Donald Trump himself-to flinch, I believe we need some added history, and a bigger map. What we've been watching is part of a long, established tradition-one that might help Americans unlock a different kind of future.
The readings in my last series led me to see the genuine hatred conservatives have for what they call variously liberal hegemony, liberal ideology, left-wing ideology, and other names. David Brooks, newly ensconced at Yale and The Atlantic, is just sure it was liberals who caused Trump's wins, with their snotty "knowledge", and "refined tastes". I mocked this nonsense, but apparently Brooks was serious about the super bad feelings his people have about such things.
On this week's episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reflections on the recent shootings in Minneapolis. He argues that these killings, alongside ICE's warrantless home raids and mistaken detentions, and the reports of deaths in custody, are not isolated abuses but signs of a rapidly deepening crisis in American democracy, one in which basic rights and due process are applied unevenly and increasingly contested.
More than two decades ago, I semi-seriously proposed calling this website The American Conservative Online. My reasoning was twofold: 1) At that time, we ink-stained wretches were still somewhat in denial about this whole internet thing, so we liked to append "online" to our website titles. 2) The acronym would have been "TACO." The hilarity of publishing broadsides against George W. Bush's proposed immigration amnesties on something called TACO would have been hard to deny, but cooler heads prevailed.
Ben Shapiro is a conservative provocateur. Ever since he was a teen-ager at U.C.L.A. writing op-eds for the Daily Bruin, he has shown a penchant for the rhetorical grenade. Women who have abortions are "baby killers." Western civilization is "superior" to other civilizations. "Israelis like to build," he tweeted in 2010. "Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock." Shapiro is now forty-two, and his rhetoric has mellowed only somewhat.
Sparklers sizzled, boom-badoom-boom bass thumped, and Nicki Minaj emerged onstage at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest last month to deliver the latest plot twist in an exhausting year for politics and pop culture. The rapper-whose straight black hair reached the hem of her sleek minidress-sat down with Charlie Kirk's widow, Erika Kirk, who sported medieval-princess blond braids and waves. Then Minaj tore into previous presidential administrations for being un-Christian and uncool.
On January 15, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $75.1 million for humanities projects across the country. Presented as part of President Donald Trump's January 25, 2025 executive order, "Celebrating America's Birthday," the move is the latest example of how the Trump administration is increasingly using federal funding as a vehicle to achieve its broader goals of reshaping higher education.
