The future of MAGA after Trump

The Battle Of The Bastards

I try really hard not to predict the future. I swear lol. But I am increasingly convinced that we are watching the end of something.

The MAGA coalition that’s been building for a decade is clearly fracturing, or, at the very least, morphing into something new. The apparently uneasy alliance between the manosphere, QAnon, Project 2025, reactionary Silicon Valley, and our country’s various white nationalist groups that President Donald Trump rode to victory on last year is pulling apart. And before I get to what I think will happen next, I want to break down where we’re currently at.

The first big crack in the MAGA movement, funnily enough, was King of the Boston Yah Doods, Dave Portnoy. The Barstool Sports CEO lashed out at Trump in April after the president announced his idiotic tariff plan, dubbing the disastrous stock market reaction, “Orange Monday.” And Portnoy has continued to publicly gripe about Trump’s deranged economic policy ever since.

The second fissure in the movement was Elon Musk’s departure from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in May. Musk started feuding with Trump over tax credits and, at one point, accused Trump of being on Jeffrey Epstein’s client list. Musk also had several very public meltdowns, seemingly coming out of his months-long haze to discover that the entire world now thinks he’s a Nazi. Strange, I heard the ketamine come down is usually pretty smooth. The drama got so bad that the All In podcast, the de facto Reich cabinet of Silicon Valley, wouldn’t even address it and may have even briefly broken up over it.

The same week Musk lost the game of thrones, Theo Von, a dog that got turned into a human via a magic spell and is now the world’s third-biggest podcaster, posted an impassioned video to X, titled, “What are we doing?” Where he accused the US of being complicit in the Palestinian genocide. Von is not a particularly deep thinker and hasn’t totally turned left over it, but he has continued to focus on Palestine, even pressing Vice President JD Vance on the genocide when Vance was on his show in June.

All of these tensions came to a head this month, following the hapless rollout of the Trump administration’s Epstein Files investigation and The Wall Street Journal’s bombshell that Trump had written a letter for Epstein’s 50th birthday. Trump has since lost the support of Joe Rogan, as well as the weird mutant growth on Rogan’s stomach, podcaster Andrew Schulz. Rogan condemned Trump’s deportation scheme and also accused the administration of “gaslighting” their followers on the president’s connections to Epstein. While Schulz told listeners that none of this was “what he voted for.” And the vast universe of smaller MAGA influencers that run defense for Trump every day online are struggling, as well.

As I wrote earlier this month, they’re desperate for a new conspiracy theory, one that can suck up all the oxygen around the Epstein scandal. They’re currently oscillating between, “The Epstein stuff is a Democrat smear campaign,” and some variation of “it’s actually ok if the president is a pedophile.” Neither are really sticking. And random chatter on X isn’t much of a match for a mainstream media finally no longer pulling their punches, following the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show. Even South Park is going for the jugular now. The Republicans are trying to contain the situation, of course, sending the House of Representatives home until September, hoping that squashes the discourse. Except Trump, hilariously, continues to find new ways to make things much worse.

This week, Trump said he “never had the privilege” of going to Epstein’s island. Odd way to put it, big dog. And just yesterday, aboard Air Force One, Trump seemingly confirmed that an underaged Virginia Giuffre, who previously accused Epstein of sexual exploitation in 2011, was trafficked or, “stolen,” as Trump so eloquently put it, by Epstein from his spa at Mar-A-Lago. Trump is also reportedly mulling pardons for both Ghislaine Maxwell and Sean “Diddy” Combs for some reason??? Oh, also, there’s apparently more security footage out there of Epstein’s cell that isn’t missing a minute.

Throughout all of this chaos, though, there is one group that is clearly still consolidating power. Russell Vought, who is now both the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as well as the semi-official head of DOGE. According to the Project 2025 tracker, Vought and his cronies are about halfway through the roadmap for dismantling American democracy they constructed last year. And another author of Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation's Paul Dans, just announced he’s planning to run against Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. Dans, aptly, told NBC News that it would be a “battle for the future of MAGA.”

So what is the future of MAGA? Well, it’s time to say something that would have been unthinkable even three months ago. There is a very a good chance that we are watching the MAGA movement decouple from Trump in front of our very eyes. And as delicious as the schadenfreude would be if Trump was impeached by a government controlled by his fellow Republicans, it would actually signal a far more dangerous political reality. The direct result of Project 2025’s architects doing the arithmetic and realizing they no longer need the president’s cult of personality to maintain power. Jettisoning their loud, elderly liability, hoping Peter Thiel’s favorite special boy, Vice President JD Vance, can stabilize things and bring the warring tribes — the podcasters, the venture capitalists, the Christofascists — back into the fold and let them continue their coup. But like I said, I try not to predict the future. It’s just getting hard to shake the feeling that we’re barreling towards a new darker era that will make the Trump years will look quaint by comparison.

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A Good Post

New Dumb Crypto Scandal Dropped

—by Adam Bumas

Shocking news from the crypto world. A theoretically funny memecoin seems to have been a scam the whole time. The latest offender is a Solana-based coin called “360noscope420blazeit”, or just MLG for short. The token’s value zoomed up and back down again within 24 hours earlier this week, but it’s been around since last year. Before the spike, the most attention it got was in January after endorsements by offshore-casino-made-flesh Adin Ross and multiple members of FaZe Clan — once the world’s biggest esports team, now a cautionary tale about internet success, and the same kind of nostalgic punchline as saying, “MLG,” is.

Speaking of cautionary tales, Ross and FaZe’s Richard Bengston (aka FaZe Banks) are now trading blame over the alleged scam. Bengston has stepped down as CEO of the company, but blamed Ross for everything in a leaked message. Ross responded on X “shit sad asf, if you guys think that mlg being rugged was me im sorry to tell u it wasn’t.”

So who was it? Our finest minds are stumped. Banks called in to Ross’ Kick stream on Tuesday, apologizing for his accusation. Both of them agreed that a neutral party — namely, YouTuber Coffeezilla, who’s best known for exposing the Hawk Tuah crypto scam — would be best suited to assign the blame. Either way, I’m pretty sure all this is exactly what Satoshi Nakamoto wanted.

An Internet Without “Kids”

It’s been barely a week since the UK’s Internexit. What was meant to protect children from seeing pornography has devolved into a Byzantine system of verification systems blocking users from basic internet services. British users this morning woke up to notifications telling them that if they don’t let Spotify scan their ID it will delete their accounts. You know things are bad when the UK’s closest equivalent to Trump, Nigel Farage, is demanding the whole thing is repealed.

Per Politico, UK regulators are threatening US platforms with criminal charges if they don’t comply with the Online Safety Act. I asked the UK room in the Garbage Day Discord, which was already called Starmer’s Posting Gulag lmao, and they said there isn’t any kind of age verification for Garbage Day. It would have to come from Beehiiv. So, if any UK readers want me to describe what the internet looks like, I’ll do my best. Also, anecdotally, I’ve heard the new restrictions don’t seem to work if you’re on roaming data in the UK.

But it’s not just Great Britain that is trying to carve off a chunk of the internet. Australian regulators want YouTube to block children under 16 from using the platform. The country’s version of the Online Safety Act is already targeting other platforms like Facebook, but had previously said YouTube would be exempt.

And if you’re reading this from outside the UK or Australia and thinking, “so what,” well, here’s your reminder that the internet only really works as a global system: YouTube is rolling out an AI feature that will identify users that are under 18. If the AI incorrectly identifies you as a child, you’ll have to upload your ID to prove you’re an adult.

Everyone’s Being Really Weird About This Random Japanese Woman

Alright, so, I wasn’t going to deal with this because it was mainly just a thing for deeply unwell X users, but I’ve seen it make the jump to other platforms. A Japanese model and salarywoman that goes by SAO has gone very very very viral this week. (Everything in this section is a link to X by the way.) Elon Musk is even sharing — thankfully SFW — AI-generated videos of her now. I’m also going to give SAO the benefit of the doubt and say maybe she doesn’t seem to totally clock the baseline level of racism on the platform. Which hopefully explains why she is sharing some “fan” works about her that are super offensive.

If you’re struggling to understand why this random Japanese woman has gone viral — and is getting pitted against Sydney Sweeney — you basically have to understand that a massive chunk of the far right on X are obsessed with anime and obsessed with Japan. And they think that she looks like an anime character and are now in love with her. This is causing them a lot of distress because they’re all extremely racist.

Sigh, Let’s Talk About The Zinc Thing

Here’s another thing I wasn’t going to fully cover, but it, too, has jumped containment. There are a lot of men — typically gay men — that are trading “zinc stacks” on Reddit. This isn’t a totally new thing, but Reddit’s algorithm is pushing this stuff more aggressively right now. I first came across these guys via a couple weight-loss and exercise subreddits over the winter.

There are all kinds of, you know, basic health benefits for taking zinc supplements, of course, but there is another side effect that these guys are very excited about. If you’re British, please send your local MP a copy of your ID before reading the following screenshot:

So yeah, a whole bunch of dudes are taking zinc to do big cums. Now you know. Have a great week, everyone!

A Good First Beat

Some Stray Links

• “Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog”

• “The Pedro Pascal smear campaign”

• “The Real Demon Inside ChatGPT”

• “I Went Back to Skinny Jeans, and It Feels Incredible”

P.S. here’s a subtle message from The Dropkick Murphys.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***