The Great MAGA Crack-Up

It's Not Just Musk. The Whole Coalition Is Falling Apart

Sorry I haven’t written anything in a while. My backup failed on my way out of Oman and I lost three interview recordings that I really, REALLY needed. It messed me up on a lot of levels but I’m back now, with just…way too many words. Premium subscriber AMA next week: stay tuned for details. Thank you for your patience, and I hope you’re having as much fun reading the news as I am right now

Its 5:09 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, June 5th. We’ve been sitting on the tarmac for an hour, and I am praying for further delays as I shovel metaphorical popcorn into my face with both hands and watch the alerts roll in. I've had some bad break-ups in my day, but never one catastrophic enough to warrant a New York Times live alerts page. “Trump Threatens to Cut Musk’s Government Contracts as Online Feud Escalates,” the headline currently blazes. Meanwhile, literally as I write this, Politico has blasted me with “Musk goes scorched earth: Trump will cause ‘recession,’ implies he should be impeached.” They’re burying the lede on this one: Musk has accused Trump of being part of Epstein’s pedophilic cabal. This isn’t a mere lover’s quarrel. Some things can’t be unsaid.

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Light a candle, melt it in a spoon, inject it directly into my veins. Finally — finally — this fragile, doomed alliance is splitting apart. I don't just mean the one between Musk and Trump. The MAGA movement itself is splintering, and has been for quite some time. They've presented a united front in the face of the hated Liberal enemy, but they’ve won a lot of battles and the urgency is fading. With (tenuous) control over all three branches of government, MAGA can do (almost) whatever it wants, which in some ways is the worst thing that could happen to them. The factions within MAGA have incompatible worldviews and want VERY different things, they’ve all convinced themselves that Trump is secretly on their side, and — surprise! — this is almost universally not the case. The cracks began to show weeks ago, and now the foundation is crumbling before our eyes.

Let's take a quick look at the different factions: who they are, what they want, and why almost all of them are beside themselves right now:

1. The National Socialists

Let's dispense with the coyness and call these guys what they really are.* There's no better way to explain this faction’s position than this: socialism for members of the nation and no one else. What “the nation” means varies from person to person, but it definitely doesn't include immigrants or commies, or. You know. Undesirables. Low-IQ individuals. They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, etc.

Members of this faction include Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Josh Hawley. Generally speaking, they adore Russia, despise Ukraine, and either cheerlead genocide or despise Israel for all the wrong reasons. They're giddy over ICE arrests and fully erect for CECOT torture porn. Trump has followed through on his promise of cruelty, and no one’s happier about it than these assholes.

It’s about the only thing they’re happy about — that, and Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine. As their faction name suggests, these guys want tax the rich and broaden (or at least maintain) the social safety net. Hawley is going to war in the Senate over Medicaid cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill, and he’s using progressive talking points (and natalism) to do it:

For the better part of 50 years, working wages have been flat in real terms. Working people cannot afford to marry when they want to, have the number of children they want to or raise those children as they want to. These days, they can barely afford to put a roof over their kids’ heads, to say nothing of health care…

Our voters not only want us to protect the social insurance they need to get by; they also want us to fight for a better life — for a better economy with the kinds of jobs and wages that allow working people to marry and start families, to buy homes and have a stake in their towns and neighborhoods.

Hawley’s apparent face turn surprised a lot of people, but it’s not a face turn and there’s nothing surprising about it. He's a fiscal progressive and a social reactionary. Medicaid for Some. You know which ones.

Bannon’s doing the same thing with tax cuts for the rich. “Elon got the political class off the hook. That's how you get the big beautiful bill,” he said on his June 4th War Room podcast. “If you want to stop the debt bomb, Elon? And the guys on Capitol Hill? You're going to have to raise taxes. The wealthy cannot get an extension of the tax cut. That's gotta go to the middle class and the working class. That has to be extended and it has to be made permanent.”

The National Socialists have been on the outs within MAGA ever since that showdown between Bannon and Musk way back in December. Bannon lost decisively, but the scabrous bastard has come back from worse losses than this. He’s continued to sing Trump’s praises, bashed Big Tech, and patiently waited for the inevitable crack-up. He is well-positioned to take advantage of their rift.

An ascendent Bannon would be extremely bad news. The National Socialists are the second most dangerous group on this list because they get half of it right. Social safety nets are good. Medicare is good. Taxing the rich is good. It's a lot easier to sell shit when you dip that shit in chocolate. The Democratic party’s open scorn of the left and movement towards the center cedes progressive political ground. Nature abhors a vacuum, so these assholes have set up camp and brought their christofascism and Great Replacement Theory and various flavors of racism with them. Don’t sleep on the danger, and for God’s sake don’t mistake them for friends.

2. The Tea Party Rump State

Thomas Massie, Chip Roy, Rand Paul, and the rest of what's left of the Tea Party are having a terrible time right now. Their two fundamental beliefs are: taxes are too high and national debt is a national emergency. These people would rather die than pay off the debt by taxing the wealthy — taxation is theft, remember? The only acceptable way out is to shred the social safety net, shrink the government, and liberate corporations from the shackles of things like “food safety” and “OSHA requirements.”

Trump’s shredded a few regulations, and the government is definitely smaller thanks to Musk’s chainsaw assault. But DOGE did not reduce spending in any meaningful way, and now Trump is dropping a $2.4 trillion nuclear warhead on the American deficit. These budget hawks find the Big Beautiful Bill’s Medicaid cuts as intolerable as Hawley does, but for the opposite reason. Medicaid, Medicare, and (to some extent) Social Security are abominations before God; they are bankrupting our country and bankrolling indigence and must be stopped at all costs.

(In normal times, this kind of universal antipathy would be a testimony to Trump’s political acumen. Politics is the art of negotiating a solution that everyone hates but most can tolerate. Unfortunately for the Republicans, they’ve spent decades denouncing compromise as part of their ongoing RINO purges. Asking these factions to compromise no longer feels like politics as usual. It's a betrayal. A knife in the back. And you'd better believe they see it that way.)

And then there’s the Federalist Society, which is older and broader than the Tea Party, but ideologically aligned in most ways: socially conservative, fiscally libertarian judges who love drowning the government in a bathtub unless that government wants to stop you from getting an abortion or marrying the person you love. Unfortunately for Trump, their whole “constitutional originalist” thing often means obeying the goddamn constitution, which means they’ve been saying no to Trump, a lot. Trump’s had enough. He has declared war. The libertarians are truly in the doghouse these days.

3. The Cultists

I’m tempted to leave this group out entirely, because they overlap with other factions and because they’re barely sentient, but there are a lot of them and they’re worth at least a mention. These freaks worship Trump with a ferver that transcends coherent ideology and manifests in fanatical support of his every move. They have accepted Trump as their Lord and Savior, sometimes explicitly, and see themselves as soldiers in a holy war. These are the end times and God has made them for such a time as this, they are locked in cataclysmic and eschatological battle with the demonic forces of Communism and Transgenderedism and Witchcraft. In other words, they have driven themselves utterly insane.

Trump always had die-hard followers, but the cult as we know it today started with QAnon. When The Storm failed to materialize and Q vanished without a trace, adherents discovered that the QAnon conspiracy has an identical structure to end-times charismatic Christianity. Swapping out Q for God required nothing but a find/replace command. They completed that transformation years ago.

Conspiratorial thinking is the only cult belief that exists separately from Trump’s will. COVID is a bioweapon. Masks are satanic. The deep state controls the weather. And, most importantly, there still exists an enormous cabal of pedophilic elites who rape and sacrifice children for their adrenochrome in the basement of pizza restaurants.

Anyway, conspiracy peddler and deputy director of the FBI Dan Bongino now says Epstein killed himself after all.

Musk now asserts that the Epstein files implicate Trump and the regime is covering for him. It's a dangerous game. Musk knew Epstein too. The cultists are fully invested in Trump as their savior and are willing to believe the most outlandish conspiracy theories imaginable. I don't think Musk's (extremely plausible) claim is going to work out the way he thinks it will — not with this group, anyway.

4. Wall Street

Oh Wall Street. You poor bastards. “Trump will be good for business!” you said. “Trump will relieve us of these troublesome regulations and make our precious tax cuts permanent. Why is the finger on that monkey’s paw curling?”

You thought Trump was joking about those tariffs. You thought he was just saying it to please those Bannonite freaks. You thought Trump would once again surround himself with people able to restrain his worst instincts and channel his animal spirits into business-friendly policy, even though it was obvious he’d completely and permanently broken with anyone who even thought the word no in his general direction.

The market can thrive in a lot of conditions that make life worse for the unwashed masses, but it cannot tolerate instability for long. Trump’s tariff policy changes day-to-day, the cost of imports fluctuates wildly and without warning. How is anyone supposed to plan for the future in this kind of climate? How can you order raw materials when their costs are so variable? How can you make long-term investments when the short term is so chaotic?

The thing that gets me about you guys is that, unlike the National Socialists or Tea Party Rump State, you could have gotten most of what you wanted by throwing in with the actual party of business: the goddamn Democrats, who were always willing to negotiate. Yes, your taxes might (might) be slightly higher. Yes, those regulations Trump shredded would remain. You know what you wouldn't have?! The tariffs Trump has talked about nonstop.

You get what you fucking deserve. Unfortunately, we get what you fucking deserve as well.

5. Big Tech

This group is similar to Wall Street, but different enough to warrant their own section. Big Tech is more worried about regulations and anti-trust actions than tax rates (though of course they’d prefer lower taxes as well). While Wall Street is conservative-coded, Silicon Valley was generically aligned with the Democrats, to the extent they got involved in politics at all, until very recently. They were relatively late to get on the Trump Train, and those nerds are too awkward to even pretend their change of heart is anything but mercenary.

And look, they’ve received some benefits. Also, though, the administration openly supports breaking up the Google monopoly and keeps threatening to tariff companies like Apple and Samsung unless they manufacture their products on American soil (likely impossible). These latecomers are very much on notice. I don't know how they expected this to go. Ten years ago, their companies were cutting-edge. Now, they're dinosaurs. You either die a disruptor, or live long enough to become the disrupted.

Speaking of which…

6: The Disruptors (Tech Bros and Venture Capital)

Welcome to the winner’s circle.

This faction, which sometimes calls itself “little tech,” is the Silicon Valley miasma of would-be start-up founders, AI fetishists, crypto scammers, and — of course — the venture capital that feeds them. These are the guys who are winning right now. These are the guys who are killing it.

Tariffs hurt start-ups, it's true. But tech bros don't really work with their hands or need to order a ton of stuff from overseas. Their products tend to exist only online, where tariffs have very little power. And yes, market instability means less capital for angel investors to sprinkle over fertile Bay Area soil, but you know what makes up for that? All those AI deals Trump is striking with Middle Eastern nations. There's so much goddamn money for AI right now, and every tech company is becoming an AI company in some way\, so there isn't even much of a drought.

Tech bros want unregulated AI, supported crypto markets, and the death of behemoth tech companies like Google and Apple lumbering around the savannah and chowing down on the choicest leaves. Trump is working his way through that wish list, and shows every indication of continuing to do so. He’s also promised to establish several “freedom cities,” which are company towns on steroids: a special economic zone that closely resembles the technofascist dream of a Network State.

Earlier, I said the National Socialists are the second-scariest faction. It's a high hurdle to clear, but the tech bros cleared it. These freaks want to destroy the nation state and replace it with corporate city-states governed by a CEO-style monarchy. The only recognized human rights will be the right to leave the start-up city and find another. And if none of them will have you — the outcome they explicitly fantasize for liberals, AI skeptics, and artists, by the way? Enjoy your wasteland, motherfuckers.

These network states are doomed to failure. These guys don't just drink the Kool-aid, they bathe in it; they have kool-aid in their veins and Kool aid on the brain. They really think they can replace everyone in the world but themselves with AI, and it's just not true. AI hallucinates constantly, it destroys critical thinking, it enfeebles anyone who uses it (including you, dear reader). Besides, who's going to protect them against us wasteland raiders? Who's going to make their food and build their futuristic skyscrapers and allow them to live in luxury?

Destroying a nation-state, on the other hand, is well within their capabilities. We've learned this the hard way over the last four months. Trump's schizophrenic tariff policy seems designed to weaken the dollar, and DOGE’s wanton destruction of institutional knowledge in every government department lays groundwork for privatizing everything that government does. Is Trump in on the grift, or just unbelievably stupid? Doesn't matter. The tech bros are winning regardless.

7. Project 2025

Our old friends from the Heritage Foundation. Not socialist enough to be national socialists, too jaded for the Tea Party Rump State. Like the tech bros, Project 2025 wants to tear down the foundations of our society and replace it with a surveillance state, but they prefer theocracy to CEO monarchy. Despite relentlessly fetishizating our founding documents, they have no respect for the words written on them. The Democrats have already destroyed our constitutional republic, they claim, and only a “second American revolution” that bypasses the rule of law can restore this country to the Handmaid's Tale dystopia they fantasize we used to be.

Project 2025 infamously published a 900-page book laying out everything they would like to accomplish during Trump's second term. Roughly 40 percent of their policy wish list has either already happened or is in the process of happening. It's safe to say they're winning pretty hard.

Project 2025 traditionally sits at the top of the left-of-center fear index, but they’re a solid third on mine. They lack the popular appeal of the national socialists and, while they do have the backing of several billionaires, they lack the unlimited resources and online control that the tech bros wield. One of the big reasons for their recent success is how shockingly compatible their longed-for dystopia is with the Network State fantasy.

There are some signs that the two groups are merging. Tech Bros are converting to Christianity. The Heritage Foundation is embracing crypto. JD Vance stands as the fell offspring of this unholy union: a spiritual couch-fucker and dead behind the eyes. Whatever happens to their alliance, one suspects Vance will share the same fate.

Which brings us, at last, to…

8. Musk

Musk is a thing unto himself. He is a one-man faction with a fanboy cult of his own.

Spiritually Musk most closely resembles a tech bro, but he's also big tech: Space-X is a near-monopoly and Tesla used to be one. He's a budget hawk — that is, unless the budget is flowing to him. He's a sieg-heiling eugenicist, but there's not a shred of socialism in that ketamine-addled skull. And his pathological hatred of trans people and desire to chainsaw massacre the government aligns him with Project 2025. He's a Frankenstein's Monster of right-wing poison, a nightmare amalgam of the worst ideas on the planet. No wonder he’s on so many drugs. The cognitive dissonance must be deafening.

The thing that makes Musk his own faction, rather than simply a Trump-like figure able to hold this impossible, unworkable alliance together through sheer force of will, is that Musk has larger ambitions than Trump. Musk wants to go to Mars, and he wants everyone to love him.

Trump wants money. He wants a golden toilet and a trophy wife and big beautiful business deals. And he does seem to really like real estate — he's interested in it, he enjoys building things and ripping people off and going bankrupt and doing it all again. But Trump did not redefine the real estate industry. Trump did not gather the most brilliant architects in the world and flog them into nervous breakdown and then take credit for their suffering and brilliance. And Trump does not have the burning desire to accomplish the impossible. He does not want to be the savior of humankind or send them to the stars. He wants to dance to YMCA and gossip about Arnold Palmer’s dick.

Trump wants attention. Good attention, bad attention: who the hell cares, all publicity is good publicity. Everyone needs to look at Trump all the time. He enjoys holding power over people because he likes it when they have to prostrate themselves and suck up to him and smile while he insults them. He doesn't care if they hate him — in fact, he kinda seems to like it when they do.

Musk, on the other hand, has a lust for approval that’s damn near biblical. This is the man who pretended to be an elite Path of Exile player to impress a bunch of video game nerds. The man who bought an entire social media platform so he could boost his own tweets and ban people who talk shit about him. A man who, after months of terrorizing civil servants and laughing at the pain he was causing, almost broke down on Fox News and cried on social media because people were being mean to him. From a distance, Trump and Musk’s pathologies look the same. Up close, they're quite different.

Musk and Trump are both charismatic leaders. They coexisted for a shocking amount of time, far longer than I expected then to. But Musk lost Wisconsin, and Trump discovered that he could earn infinite money by accepting bribes in the form of cryptocurrency instead of putting up with Musk all the time. It’s over. They've said the things that cannot be unsaid. And their big beautiful breakup threatens to tear the already-crumbling MAGA alliance apart.

Predictions

Here's what I think is about to happen.

Steve Bannon, who has waited so patiently for this moment, will attempt to take his rightful place at Trump’s side. The national socialists will flock to Trump, as will the cultists — it's that or admit they spent the last decade worshipping the Antichrist. The tech bros and Tea Party Rump State, on the other hand, will mostly fly the flag of X. Wall Street will cautiously back Musk in hopes that he’ll free them from the shackles of the tariffs. Big tech will stay out of it until the last moment and hope no one notices them (with the possible exception of people/companies Musk has targeted personally).

Project 2025 is a wild card. Team Trump is the obvious bet, but I'm not entirely sure. They're a very pragmatic bunch, and if they think the Musk faction provides a better vehicle for destroying America, I think they jump ship. Tech bros have infinite wealth and control over the internet, the Heritage Foundation is historically cozy with Wall Street, and the National Socialists are at odds with Project 2025 in some very important ways. So we’ll see.

I’m watching Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), very closely. He co-authored Project 2025 and masterminded a lot of the policy we’ve seen out of the White House. He might be the most powerful man in Washington right now. So far, he seems to be throwing in with Trump. As goes Vought, so goes the party. Or at least, that's my read right now.

Who ultimately wins this fight, aside from the audience? Trump is literally, actually the President, which is a hard advantage to overcome. But Project 2025 and DOGE have their filthy tentacles/paws in every single government agency, and Trump is an old man. A tired man, in a lot of ways. Could he truly stand up to the pressure? I'm not sure.

Realistically, there probably won’t be a clear winner or loser for quite some time. The two sides will likely strive for some sort of stalemate, this hot war will turn cold. But Musk and Trump are both too petty to not periodically trade barbs, and the deeper fractures within the movement means this conflict will continue to rot the foundation of the Republican Party.

This is, obviously, fantastic news. I don’t have a lot of hope for free and fair general elections in 2026, but primaries are a different story. Things could get savage. It could possibly split the vote in ways that make it more difficult to use voter suppression and draconian ID laws to swing the general election to the right.

America is absolutely riddled with the pox of binary thinking. If one side is Bad, the other must be Good. I am worried that the Democratic party is going to decide to take sides on this, go for some kind of unholy alliance with the tech bros in the name of defeating Cheeto Jesus. Pundits also have an extremely unfortunate history of throwing their lot in with national socialists — if they like Medicaid, how bad could they be?

Bad! Both sides are very bad! Any Democratic strategist or beltway pundit that makes noises about how maybe [bastard] has a point or how [asshole] could help us win in 2026 needs to be immediately dispatched to a farm upstate where they can run and play. No quarter, no compromise: let them fight.

If these two sides do enough damage to each other, however, there might be an opportunity to reach out to voters — not the factions themselves, but the people who supported them in hopes that things would get better. “Hey. These people seem like real assholes. Seems like they don’t have a plan and everything’s in shambles. Have you heard the good news about actual socialism?”

As always, I am advocating for conversion and not alliance. We do not pander or move to the center. We do not sacrifice a single principle, we do not sacrifice trans people or immigrant rights or racial justice. We present our case for building a better world: solutions that actually address the very real problems that have driven so many people to madness. A critical mass of people in this country voted for Trump, and we cannot win this fight without peeling off some of them. A lot of people are beyond help at this point. I can't believe all of them are.

Keep an eye out for opportunity. Look to Russ Vought. And indulge in some buttery, high-sodium popcorn. You deserve it. This is the funniest thing that's happened in a very, very long time, and I for one intend to enjoy every glorious second of this battle royale before the next horrible thing inevitably happens.

*My use of the term “national socialist” has the potential to piss a lot of people off: the right for obvious reasons, the left because many believe that the Nazis weren't socialist at all. It’s true that, in Germany, big business ended up siding with the Nazis. It's also true that Nazis offered their Aryan superman a fairly robust social safety net. It was a bastardized form of socialism — call it a genocidal mixed economy. Regardless, I am not calling America's National Socialists a literal reincarnation of the Nazis, and I don't believe that acknowledging the way they use socialism as an enticement to get people onboard with their christofascist bullshit invalidates regular socialism in the slightest.