This isn’t about Trump or MAGA per se. I suspect most people don’t realize how we’re all witnessing historic shifts in American and world politics in the past few years. What many of us are not noticing will be written up in future history books.
NY Times, opinion by Carlos Lozada, today: America Has Become a Dangerous Nation [gift link]
We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes “the West” these days will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated, one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.
Rather than leading the free world, the United States is striding across the globe seemingly free of restraint, forethought or strategy, exerting its power because it can. In a matter of months, the Trump administration has captured Venezuela’s president and tossed him into jail in Brooklyn and has pummeled Iran’s theocratic leadership in a war that is ricocheting across the Middle East and upending the global economy; now the president says he will have “the honor of taking Cuba” next. Trump in his second term is like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” settling all the family business.
Very long piece; gift link provided. A couple more samples.
The United States wants the benefits of hegemony, but without accepting the responsibilities — ensuring collective security, promoting economic openness, nurturing vital alliances — that come with it. Trump doesn’t care to be a superpower; he just likes to wield superpowers. He wants to operate in the world constrained only by “my own morality” and “my own mind,” as he told The Times recently.
Lozada recalls a similar transition: “when we were shifting from a Cold War stalemate to a period of unrivaled U.S. primacy”.
In this light, Trump’s fixation on how America is getting “ripped off” by the rest of the world — whether through trade deficits, the loss of manufacturing plants, or insufficient military spending by NATO members — is not just the mantra of a real-estate guy obsessed with negotiating a better deal. It is also the resentment that dominant powers always have toward weaker ones, as Robert Gilpin, an international relations theorist, explained in “War and Change in World Politics,” his classic 1981 study of what makes hegemons come and go.
… For Trump, the problem with leading the free world is that the free world gets a free ride.
Skipping a lot. The essay concludes:
We are not entering a post-American world, one in which the United States recedes from the stage or stops wielding its military might. Far from it. But we may be entering a post-America world, one in which the meaning of America, the principles and values the country has long stood for — sometimes in reality, sometimes in aspiration — are fading. And the loss of that America may prove just as damaging, and far more lasting, than any harm Donald Trump’s excursions can inflict.
And this last thought certainly echoes my repeated comments that modern conservatives, especially MAGA, are less and less interested in the principles upon which the US was founded, than they are in protecting themselves and oppressing others.
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For example. They really do want to destroy non-Christians. None of this Constitutional nonsense for them.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 23 Mar 2026: By Any Means Necessary: Christian Nationalists Call For The Destruction Of Their Political Enemies
Last week, Christian nationalists Joshua Haymes and Brooks Potteiger urged their fellow right-wing Christians to pray “imprecatory psalms” against James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Texas.
Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian who has openly cited his Christian faith in support of his progressive political positions, much to the outrage right-wing Christian nationalists.
Potteiger, who was the pastor at the church attended by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in Nashville, Tennessee, and will soon take over the Washington, DC church founded by Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, warned that Talarico is “a wolf” who is working to “distort what Christianity is in order to lead people away from Christ, toward the teaching of demons.”
As such, Potteiger and Haymes encouraged the use of “imprecatory psalms” against Talarico, which are prayers asking God to pour out his destruction upon one’s enemies.
“I pray that God kills him,” Haymes declared. “Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ … If it would not be within God’s will to do so, stop him by any means necessary.”
And that’s just the first example. Anything not part of their fundamentalist religious ideology is “evil” and must be destroyed. This is why religion is dangerous.
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Asking the question yet again.
Washington Post, opinion by Jim Geraghty, today: There’s a reason for MAGA’s 100% support of Trump, subtitled “MAGA is standing by Trump and his war, with help from a polling fault.”
Conservative journalist Christopher Caldwell, hitherto a strong supporter of Donald Trump, is so deeply disappointed with the president’s decision to launch a war against the Iranian regime that he concluded in the Spectator: “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.”
And so on. Let’s jump down and see the writer identifies a reason for that poll (even if that result wasn’t really 100%).
Well, here’s what he finds. Basically: those who disapproved of Trump way back when stopped calling themselves MAGA, or even Republican, and so aren’t being counted in polls like this.
If you’re a Trump supporter who is upset or wary about the Iran war or the resulting impact on gas prices … maybe you’re not as inclined to identify as MAGA to a pollster lately.
…
That’s why we shouldn’t expect to find many MAGA supporters expressing their opposition to Trump’s decisions on Iran or much else. When people in this demographic disagree strongly enough, eventually they just stop calling themselves MAGA.
There is no “Trumpism” without Trump, and thus it is difficult to buy into Caldwell’s argument that the president is betraying some clear preexisting set of values. To the extent “Trumpism” as a philosophy exists, a core tenet appears to be: “Always trust the guy in charge, because he knows what he is doing and is playing seven-level chess.”
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Briefly noted.
- Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, 23 Mar 2026: The Alito Wing of the Supreme Court Sure Sounds Sold on Trump’s Voter Fraud Lies. “But what makes it even more disturbing is the fact that so many justices proved eager to embrace a legal theory that is incoherent, dishonest, and rooted in paranoid hostility toward mail voting.”
- AlterNet, Thomas Kika, today: Author reveals Trump’s major power over MAGA voters. The author is Kurt Andersen (whose 2017 book Fantasyland I’ve yet to read):
“He’s an idiot. He’s always been stupid,” Anderson said. “And his stupidity has been an under-remarked-upon, unheralded part of his — along with the lying, along with the mental disorders—the stupidity is important.”
- JMG/NYT: Trump Just Voted By Mail In Florida Special Election. NYT: Trump, Who Calls Mail-in Voting ‘Cheating,’ Just Voted by Mail [gift link from JMG]
- JMG, from CNN: WH: Glorious Leader Is Always Right About Everything
Donald Trump’s White House spokespeople have a favorite two-step reply when reporters ask them to comment on one of the president’s false claims. First: They say, “President Trump is right.” Second: They defend some related point that isn’t the one Trump actually made.
- Never mind airport safety or functioning. JMG: Comer: ICE Is Really At Airports To Own The Libs. Tribal vengeance.
- NYT: Stephen Miller Asks Why Texas Pays to Teach Undocumented Children, subtitled “Citing gridlock in Washington, President Trump’s top immigration adviser encouraged Texas lawmakers to lead on conservative priorities.” The answer: conservatives deny that living in a society in which everyone is educated is better than living in a society in which many are uneducated just because conservatives don’t like them. And, racism, and selfishness.
