How did we get to a place where MAGA no longer means bringing industry back to the rust belt, draining the swamp, tackling mass immigration and so on – all set to the beat of fun memes and dancing – but now means Mark Levin giving hectoring lectures about how the base is insufficiently loyal to Israel and how anyone who asks any questions about Jeffrey Epstein is no longer America First? What ‘America First’ now appears to mean is towing the party line of giving Israel literally anything it asks for, even as the rest of the world and much of American society sits appalled and morally revulsed by the images they see on television, which the base are offered feeble scraps from the table. Anyone who refuses or criticises any aspect of what Trump has done is branded as a ‘panican’ who needs to get ‘back into the crystal’. For the first time, the ‘energy’ around Trump feels off and wrong. I sensed this directly after the election: the cringe-inducting ‘Trump shuffle’, a very brief and mostly now-forgotten craze, felt inorganic and forced, almost like your old schoolteacher telling you to have fun at the school party at Christmas. Almost everything that made Trump so exciting: his anti-establishment energy, the fun factor, the organic and spontaneous memes and jokes, the humour, the bombast, the sense that big changes are coming has been replaced by moral lectures from Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer defending a morally bankrupt regime.

This has shocked me and many others on several fronts. The aura around Trump, the Teflon Don, seems long gone. His magic touch, his ‘luck’ which has maintained him for a decade has run out. All of it has been squandered for the sake of a few billionaire donors and religious fanatics to support an insanely unpopular project in the Middle East. The sense of community and togetherness MAGA always had also seems lost. So too the feeling that Trump is his own man, that his legendary ego and volatility might cause some sort of rift with, for example, Netanyahu. No one seems to entertain that as a possibility anymore. Suddenly Trump feels old and compromised. People voted to end the Ukraine war not to bomb Iran. Trump has not ended the Ukraine war – in fact he’s threatened to bomb Moscow and Beijing (!) – and he actually has bombed Iran.

In addition, Trump’s mental state seems to have declined rapidly, he is no longer as sharp as he always was. His feints and gambits, his one-liners, his turns of phrase, his humour, all those things that brought everyone to the dance, no longer seem very funny. MAGA’s strength was always that it seemed so organic, so grassroots, so fun, something to which everyone could contribute and feel a part of. That spontaneity and ‘fun’ has been replaced by increasingly top-down messages and ‘forced memes’ that resonate with fewer and fewer people.

Things that were once unimaginable are now manifesting. For example, CNN sympathetically playing clips of Nick Fuentes criticising Trump. Where once Fuentes would have been instantly framed as a beyond the pale extremist, now he is presented by the leftwing press as a ‘Gen Z influencer’ or podcaster who has been burned and disillusioned by the MAGA project. It is because many of those things he is saying are widely shared sentiments on the right, the left and in the centre. Despite claims to the contrary, Trump’s popularity has suffered. His handling of the Epstein saga lost many die-hard supporters who publicly burned their MAGA hats. Attempts by Team Trump to frame this as a ‘merely online’ phenomenon confined to a few dozen paid off social media stars completely reverses the truth that everyone can see: hardly anyone who is not paid off is defending what Trump is doing. Every claim that Tucker Carlson is paid off by Qatar, for example, just reminds people more of how paid off the entire GOP is by APAIC.

I would suggest all this has reached a point of crisis for the American right. It is not only damaging to Trump himself or ‘MAGA’, but to populism in general, right-wing politics overall and ultimately to America and beyond that ‘the West’. Unless something changes, and changes rapidly, history will remember Trump not as another Reagan, but as the American version of Gorbachev.