Exposing the Rot at the Core of MAGA

Even after Trump exits the scene, his heirs are here to stay. And they have some dark plans for America.

This article has been adapted from Sarah Longwell’s new book, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time,” which lays out the definitive playbook for how Democrats can beat the MAGA movement and reverse the country’s slide into authoritarianism. You can order your copy here.

I spent the first part of my career surrounded by young conservatives. My job was funny. Working for a right-wing think tank, I traveled across the country promoting conservative thought on otherwise overwhelmingly liberal campuses. It was the early 2000s.

Ten years later, Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA and targeted the same types of conservative kids. His mission was to herd them away from the life of the mind and turn them into activists. He succeeded to a degree that no one could have predicted.

Like most conservatives in the Before Times, Kirk was initially skeptical of Trump. He said—publicly—that Trump’s ascent made it harder to convert kids on college campuses.

He tried to prop up the candidacies of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Like pretty much everyone else on the right, though, he learned to love Trump after 2016. By 2020, Kirk was calling Trump the “bodyguard of Western civilization” on stage at the RNC.

That evolution tracks closely with the broader MAGA-fication of the very-online right. Today’s young conservatives—or “conservatives”—bear little to no resemblance to the people I surrounded myself with back in my early career. And now that I’ve walked away from all that, and spent the last decade working to dismantle Trumpism root and branch, here’s my warning for anyone who cares about American democracy:

The generation of young people coming up on the right are not your father’s conservatives. They are Trump’s heirs, and they are here to stay. And if we want to save America from MAGA authoritarianism, it’s going to require more than just beating Trump and his hand-picked candidates—it’s going to mean tackling this entire movement. That starts with understanding how they got here, and what their dark vision for the country entails.

* * *

If you are thirty years old in 2026, Donald Trump has been part of the political scene for as long as you’ve been paying attention. Trump entered politics as a birther conspiracy theorist going after Barack Obama when you were sixteen years old. The first presidential election you could vote in was in 2016, when Trump won. Your political consciousness was formed during Trump’s first term. Then there was COVID and four years of Joe Biden. And now Trump’s president again.

For people my age and older, Trump was shocking. He violated every norm, every expectation, every standard of presidential behavior we’d grown up with. He was extraordinary in the truest sense of the word—completely outside the ordinary bounds of American politics.

Here’s the first thing you need to understand about young conservatives today: They don’t share your shock. They don’t share your sense that Trump is a deviation from normal politics because they have no reference point for what “normal” politics looked like before him. To them, this is what politics is. The chaos, the tweets, the rallies, the culture war, the constant drama—that’s American politics.

When I ask young Trump voters in focus groups how they first got interested in politics, it is... unusual to hear them talk about reading the works of conservative intellectuals or being persuaded by economic arguments about tax policy or the size of government. Instead, here’s what I hear from the youngest members of the GOP base, who helped drive a shift to the right among young people in 2024:

• Antonio from California: “I looked into Trump, and I found out that everything the news said about him was fake, that he wasn’t actually a racist. And I’m like, ‘Okay, I support Trump.’”

• Justin from Kentucky: “I remember a lot of controversy around Russian meddling … it was all just kind of a wild goose chase. That’s kind of when my political views started to shift.”

• Sam from Missouri: “I’m a big fan of Benny Johnson, Charlie Kirk, and Joe Rogan podcasts.” He said he doesn’t “watch mainstream media at all anymore” because it “seems really biased.”

Trump isn’t the end point of a logical political journey. Trump is the starting point. He’s the gateway. And from there, the algorithm takes over.

* * *

There has been a lot of chatter in recent years about “virtue signalling” on the left. But in response, the right came up with something of its own: vice signaling. They find it enjoyable to live in spaces that feel verboten. To consume content that’s edgy or controversial or that people tell them they shouldn’t watch. It’s transgressive. Now, for young people, being transgressive has always been appealing. Elvis, long-haired hippies, punk rock—same as it ever was.

The problem is that the way to be transgressive today is to flirt with the far, far right. Nick Fuentes does not like Jews. Tucker Carlson promotes a “historian” who says Churchill was the real villain in WWII and that the Holocaust was just an oopsy. The Tate brothers are heroes to hundreds of thousands of young men because they traffic women. Over the last couple of years, we’ve had dozens of scandals in which young Republican types have been caught doing some Nazi fetishizing, or Jim Crow-style racism, or joking about rape.

That’s what political transgressiveness looks like for Republicans in 2026. Some of the young people who try on these poses do it with ironic distance. “We don’t really believe this stuff,” they’ll say. “We’re not literal Nazis. We just like to trigger you squares and explore ideas that everyone says we’re not allowed to talk about.”

But here’s the thing about ironic distance: It shrinks. We are the stories we tell about ourselves. You begin with ironic distance— “I’m just watching this for the lulz, I don’t actually agree with it”—but the more you engage with evil, the more it becomes part of how you think. It’s the Orwell line about how we become the masks we wear.

Trump didn’t just win elections. He changed what it means to be conservative for an entire generation. He made it okay—cool, even—to say things that used to be unsayable, to reject expertise, to trust podcasters over professors, to make politics more about the culture war than the “providing for the common defense” and “promoting the general welfare” that’s part of our government’s remit.

None of this will go away when Trump leaves the scene because there’s a whole generation of young conservatives who only know politics this way. For them, Trump isn’t a deviation from conservatism—he is conservatism. They’re building a durable movement in his image. Trump will be gone one day, but his heirs will remain.

For those of us in the pro-democracy community, that’s a scary thought. Back in 2016, it would have been a lot more comforting to think of Trump as an anomaly, an accident of history. But what we’ve seen since then is the opposite: His brand of politics took over one half of our system, and if we want to save the country, it’s on the rest of us to offer a better, more inspiring, positive vision for what the country can be.

As an optimist, I fully believe that’s doable. But it doesn’t happen on its own. It requires that the big, broad, pro-democracy tent invest in building a messaging infrastructure that helps us communicate at scale to counteract the MAGA media machine. It requires independent media that understands what time it is, and refuses to gaslight its audience with both-sides nonsense, or to bow and scrape before this vindictive administration. And it’s going to require moral and physical courage, and the clarity of vision to see that we’re in a new era now.

Sarah Longwell is the author of “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time,” publisher of The Bulwark, and host of The Focus Group podcast.