(This column from my friend Matt Lewis ran an numerous places nationwide via the Los Angeles Times, with this taken from the Pittsburgh Poat-Gazette, Nov. 30)
President Donald Trump’s tight grip on the GOP, long assumed to be an inevitable feature of American life (like gravity or the McRib’s seasonal return), has started to loosen.
Republicans are now openly defying him. The man who once ruled the GOP like a casino boss can’t even strong-arm Indiana Republicans into gerrymandering themselves properly.
This sort of resistance didn’t emerge overnight. It fermented like prison wine or bad ideas in a faculty lounge. First came the Iran bombing: an early shock that suggested “America First” might also mean “Israel First,” at least to the populist-nationalist camp inside the GOP.
Then came the effort to muffle the Jeffrey Epstein files, a notion so foreign to MAGA’s ethos that the subsequent drama, according to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., “ripped MAGA apart.”
Greene also expressed concern that the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies are set to lapse, and that Republicans have no plan to fix the imminent premium spikes — an occurrence that threatens to alienate the very working-class voters that MAGA now insists it represents.
All the while, another MAGA soap opera was churning. Tucker Carlson decided to “platform” white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, leading to an outcry of criticism that prompted the Heritage Foundation’s president to defend them (sparking another Republican “civil war” subplot).
The common thread in these stories is the sense that Trump’s days are numbered. The question of “Who gets MAGA when Dad can no longer operate the remote?” has become unavoidable.
True, pundits have been prematurely writing Trump’s political obituary since he first came down that escalator. But it feels different this time. The question is why.
There are likely numerous reasons, but I’ve zeroed in on the five that I think are the most important….
[The full column is at this link.]
