What Happens to MAGA When Trump Is Gone?

 by Victor Davis Hanson

As the 78-year-old Donald Trump entered his second and last term as president on January 20, 2025, almost immediately his friends and enemies alike began asking what would happen to his signature Make America Great Again movement on January 20, 2029. After all, the returning but lame-duck Trump had just four years left as president. He would be 82 years old when he was scheduled to depart the White House.

Which led to a natural question: Will Trumpism outlast Trump? Will the movement that one man created 13 years ago—a movement that has fundamentally transformed the world in the years since—continue without its founder at the helm?

A post-Trump MAGA future involves several preliminary considerations. The first is the health, longevity, and political viability of Trump himself in retirement. No one can predict Trump’s future vigor and energy with certainty. Yet even his supporters accept that the whirlwind pace of the start of Trump’s second term is unsustainable for any 80-year-old man, especially one who reportedly scarcely sleeps, eats as he pleases, and wades into public crowds almost daily.

In addition, there is the question of whether Trump’s second term will be judged successful or will be overshadowed by the partisan hysterias of the first term and its aftermath—two impeachments, lawfare, hoaxes like Russian “collusion” and Hunter Biden laptop “disinformation”—or by crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, yet another conflict in the volatile Middle East, and the post–George Floyd rioting. The next two years are also an open question: If there is an economic downturn, or if the ongoing war with Iran continues too long into the future, it could fundamentally imperil Trump’s legacy.

Finally, recent history is against Trump. No modern president emeritus—even the most popular—has ever been able to significantly affect the policies of his party or choose his successors. Barack Obama came the closest when he stayed put in Washington after his second term ended in 2017 and sought to help guide the flailing Joe Biden presidency between 2021 and 2025. Yet even despite Obama’s alleged surrogate role, his political capital diminished during the 2024 campaign in direct proportion to his visibility.

Similarly, Ronald Reagan left office after two successful terms and after moving his party markedly to the right. But instead of continuing Reaganism, his vice president, George H.W. Bush, almost immediately talked of a “kinder, gentler nation,” raised taxes, toned down Reagan’s cultural fights against liberal orthodoxies, and sought to expand supposedly insufficient social services with “a thousand points of light” of volunteer citizen participation. Bush was also more likely to use considerable military force abroad.

Harry Truman, who assumed the presidency after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death, also gradually drifted away from Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies. He inaugurated the Cold War against the Soviet Union, sought successfully to save South Korea from communist invasion, and was regarded as a far more centrist, realist, and hawkishly anti-communist commander in chief.

As a general rule, an administration’s unique political and personal brand is likely to erode under the next presidency, even if it is from the same party. Ex-presidents usually do not wish to, or cannot, imprint an agenda on their successors.

The question, then, is whether Trump will break the mold. Will J.D. Vance or another successor, if he wins the 2028 primaries and general election, successfully continue MAGA ideology and policy? History seemingly suggests not. But there is a qualifier to that generalization: Most earlier elected vice presidents had not so closely shared their president’s politics and personas. Alben Barkley, Lyndon Johnson, Spiro Agnew, and George H.W. Bush were all picked as vice president precisely because they contrasted or broadened their president’s particular brand of party politics.

Vance, by contrast, is the rare vice president who was handpicked on ideological grounds, as a force multiplier to reinforce and amplify Trump’s MAGA policies. Of course, Trump has also mentioned as a possible successor his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, age 55. Like the 42-year-old Vance, Rubio is a convert to the MAGA movement and has proven one of its most effective spokesmen. His combined 2025 role as both secretary of state and national security adviser gave him as much publicity as Vance’s vice presidency offered him. And there are apparently options even beyond these two alternatives. In May 2025, when asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker, “When you look to the future, Mr. President, do you think the MAGA movement can survive without you as its leader?” Trump answered unequivocally, “Yes, I do,” and then went on to state, “I could name 10, 15, 20 people right now just sitting here.”

And yet, Trump has also, on numerous occasions, equated the MAGA movement solely with his own person. At a March 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference convention in Maryland, Trump famously vowed, “In 2016, I declared: ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: ‘I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.’ ”

Prior to Trump, remember, the post-Reagan Republican Party’s brand had been fairly consistent for nearly 30 years. Republicans more or less agreed on the same principles: occasional interventionist use of force abroad; emphasis on income tax reductions and capital gains tax cuts; reform, if not privatization, of Social Security; de facto tolerance of mild illegal immigration; support for unrestricted free trade; and reluctant acceptance of hot-button liberal cultural orthodoxies.

During the 2015–2016 primaries, Trump blew up this model. He emphasized a closed border and an end to illegal immigration. He called China to account, damned globalism, and called for fair rather than free trade, even at the price of leveling high tariffs. This new party proved reluctant to use military force abroad, at least on the ground, loathed nation building, and waged a full-fledged culture war against the left, focusing on the causes, not just the symptoms, of the progressive ascendance.

Indeed, the key argument for the viability of the MAGA agenda without Trump is the continued mass appeal of the movement’s issues. One reason Trump won in 2024 was that key MAGA policies overwhelmingly resonated across racial and gender lines. Trump’s agenda, in short, polled even higher than Trump the candidate. But one key argument against the viability of the MAGA agenda without Trump is that the reason Trump succeeded where past right-wing populist movements—for example, the Tea Party—failed is that he created the MAGA movement in his own image.

Just look at the 2024 Republican primaries. From late 2023 to early 2024, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who won an overwhelming reelection victory in 2022, occasionally polled ahead of the then-embattled Trump. He embraced almost all the same MAGA issues. Yet he was quickly defeated and left the race in early 2024.

In the abstract, voters may have preferred DeSantis’s cool and calm style of no-nonsense conservative governance. As a presidential candidate, however, they apparently found him wanting, in part because he was perceived as lacking Trump’s volatility, zest, charisma, and unpredictability—and the ex-president’s signature desire to say anything to anyone, anytime.

Trump has often been libeled a crank or serial conspiracy theorist—but almost never by his loyal MAGA supporters. His base almost alone understands that for all the president’s exaggerations and his often fast and loose facts, he is often eventually proven prescient and more right than wrong on the major controversies of his tenure.

In fact, paradoxically, Trump’s personal excesses seem key to his occasional moves to the center. His very polarizing nature, his swagger, his plans to build a massive Trumpian ballroom annex to the White House, his cruel postmortem assessment of the virulent Trump critic and movie director Rob Reiner, his eagerness to wage verbal wars against petty celebrities, second-tier politicians, and nondescript bureaucrats—apparently, in the eyes of his base, all cemented his image as tough enough to counteract the fears that, in fact, he was sometimes too moderate on abortion, too pro-union, too protective of a soon-to-be-insolvent Social Security, and too hesitant to use force abroad.

Trump, branded with a mug shot and a Queens accent, is seen, rightly or wrongly, as a tribune of the people. His money and status are more often used against than on behalf of those who shared them. And what has helped Trump pull off such a strange paradox is that by the first quarter of the 21st century, those Americans with the most money, and who were perceived as the most sanctimonious and pretentious, were more often identified with the left than with the right.

Which brings us to Trump’s opponents. The appeal of Trump and Trumpism can also be found inside the Democratic Party itself. A survey conducted after the 2024 election by Blueprint, a Democratic polling concern, found that, when asked whether Democrats were “more supportive of immigrants than of American citizens,” 73 percent of independent swing voters agreed that, yes, they were. Some 72 percent polled that Democrats wished to “promote transgender ideology.” And 67 percent concluded that the Democrats were “too focused on identity politics.” In other words, the Democratic Party had veered so far left that millions of Americans voted against it rather than for Trump.

Trump’s appeal to disillusioned Democratic constituencies was not confined to the issues alone. His glitzy celebrity status, his long television career, his attacks on elites, and his past Democratic allegiances all allowed him to expand his MAGA base by including erstwhile Democrats, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, and winning over apolitical cultural icons, such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Dana White. A traditional Republican would not have been able, either politically or psychologically, to extend outreach to such a strange and diverse cast of culture celebrities and Democratic misfits. Nor would a Bush or Mitt Romney have sent the left into such self-destructive and nihilistic hatred.

In particular, Trump’s critics never quite fathomed that the elements they most detested in Trump’s character—his egotism, his braggadocio, his crude takedowns of critics, his unpredictability, his very loudness, his stubbornness, and his omnipresence—were precisely what allowed his movement to resonate with the white working class and, increasingly, with the Hispanic community and black males. All these groups saw Trump’s off-putting candor and occasional venom as their own surrogate revenge on “the system” that they felt had not just ignored but also alienated and insulted them. Whereas leftist candidates often sanitized or recanted their past controversial social media postings in synthetic efforts to appear momentarily moderate in statewide and general elections, Trump rarely did. He preferred to be damned as characteristically crass or extremist rather than faulted as hypocritical and inauthentic.

Even more tellingly, the elite left proved so often incapable of self-reflection. For a majority of Americans, despite the occasional cringeworthy nature of Trump’s ad hominem outbursts, his verbosity and stream-of-consciousness proved a welcome comeuppance and antidote to the left’s extremism and shrill, self-righteous, and intrusive preachiness.

Trump’s opponents somehow never understood that the multibillionaire Manhattanite was a classic populist waging war against left-wing, often bicoastal elites whose boutique climate-change, transgender, open-borders, and soft-on-crime tenets all turned off the working class, white and non-white alike.

So, what can we conclude about MAGA’s future without its founder and 13-year standard-bearer in control?

First, we must emphasize that the post-Trump Republican Party, even without Trump’s involvement, will likely not revert to Bush-era orthodoxies. There is no populist support for earlier Republican-branded nation building abroad, privatization of Social Security, porous borders, and free rather than fair trade. Nor is the moderate, bipartisan demeanor of a Bob Dole, John McCain, or Mitt Romney missed by the contemporary Republican Party. Just ask Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pence.

In addition, the MAGA agenda could easily stay popular with 51 percent of the electorate (of course, if it does not become compromised by the extreme and antisemitic right). Still, even majority support in polls for issues, policies, and agendas does not always ensure success for a presidential ticket or a presidency. Most voters had deep suspicions about the “fundamental transformation” and “share the wealth” plans of Barack Obama. But Obama the candidate tamped down such doubts and won majorities through the novelty of being the first black president, his own charisma and rhetorical skills, and his team’s adroit masking of his hard-left agendas.

Thus, whether Vance, Rubio, DeSantis, or any other putative Republican candidate could win an election in 2028 would likely hinge as much on their personal charisma and rhetorical skills as on their lockstep adherence to MAGA ideology. Of course, their success also depends on how successfully the MAGA agenda is executed by the second Trump administration.

Importantly, Trump himself remains something of an enigma. He is the second president in history to win two interrupted elections. But he also lost two out of three popular presidential votes. His supporters polled historic loyalty never matched in the modern era; his enemies showed unprecedented hatred for him as a person. He is the only ex-president to have been the target of some 91 local, state, and federal criminal charges, the only ex-president to have his home raided by the FBI, the only ex-president to have been targeted for ballot removal by some 25 states, the only ex-president to have been impeached twice, and the only ex-president to have been tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Yet only Trump could have avoided the vast majority of convictions and escaped all jail time, overcome four years of daily political obituaries and as an elderly septuagenarian, out-campaigned and outworked presidents and candidates 30 years younger.

No Republican has ever been so caught up in melodramas—and so successfully survived them and turned them to his political advantage. No Republican president or ex-president could routinely fill a 50,000-person stadium with rabid supporters—let alone do so repeatedly. Few would even try. No Republican president polled so dismally on matters of character, behavior, and comportment—while winning almost fanatical support from his base. No other presidential candidate survived multiple near-miss assassination attempts—or incurred the irrational hatred from his enemies that leads to such unhinged violence. No other president so vehemently attacked his opponents ad hominem—and none received even greater levels of ad hominem vitriol in exchange.

When starry-eyed Republican grandees and pundits wistfully dream of a candidate with a Trumpian agenda, backbone, and energy but without the downsides of his impulsive, raw coarseness, they should ask themselves why such dream candidates ran so poorly against Trump, and would likely have lost against either Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris.

I once asked a friend and fanatic Trump supporter, a 50ish-year-old Mexican American male, why he voted three times for Donald Trump and had expressed a desire to do so four and five times. His answer? “He doesn’t give a damn about what they think of him. He does what he says. Nothing they say or do will ever stop him. They deserve everything they get from him.” The key word in his diatribe was the pronoun they—a reference to a system, an elite, a class of censors who have no idea how much they are disliked.

In the end, perhaps the most consequential assessment of MAGA’s future without Trump comes not from Trump’s supporters but from his enemies. In Trump’s second term, Democrats have been reduced to smutty videos, pseudo-filibuster stunts, f-bomb outbursts, racial hysterics, petty street violence, infantile screaming on the congressional floor, and cutting videos asking 1.3 million service members to disobey any order they deem “illegal.” They are still bewildered, but in denial, that his growing appeal to minorities and the working class is in direct proportion to the left’s mounting charges that he is a racist. They have redefined themselves as against anything and everything Trump does or represents, even when it is widely acknowledged as beneficial to the country. Their “big tent” strategy has become a euphemism for bringing into the fold the very renegade socialists who despise them.

Privately, Democrats know that they must change and return to the center. They even whisper that their own ascendant unhinged radicals—like the House members of the “Squad,” New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Rep. Jasmine Crockett—scare them as much as the MAGA faithful do. Yet they prefer losing politically with their own radicals rather than the alternative of confessing—and acting on—the true causes of their maladies. So great is their eternal hatred of Trump, the undying venom that he incites in his left-wing opponents, that they are convinced that, without Trump, they can defeat MAGA.

In the ultimate Trumpian irony, well after Trump is gone from the political stage, his legacy will still haunt and obsess Democrats. Their ecstasy when at last free of Hitler-Mussolini-Stalin Trump may well blind them to the reality that their descent into radicalism and neo-socialism has made the Democratic brand unpalatable. In a nihilist frenzy, they have abandoned their once-liberal, middle-class policies and disrupted their institutional monopolies, all out of hatred for the president.

Ultimately, Democrats embraced an anti-Trump extremist agenda that any competent successor MAGA candidate might well defeat. The very erosion of the current Democratic Party was induced by Donald J. Trump. It may become another of his lasting heritages.

In other words, by enraging, warping, and thereby emasculating the Democratic Party, Trump made it possible for Trumpism to outlast himself.

https://www.thefp.com/p/victor-davis-hanson-after-trump-maga-vance-movement