MAGA 1.0 is Over. What Comes Next Is Worse.
There is a moment in nearly every political movement when the revolution eats its own.
Donald Trump still thinks he is the future, which is understandable. He has been the sun around which the MAGA solar system has orbited for a decade. MAGA royalty like Turning Point USA still thinks it is edgy, which is harder to justify when your idea of rebellion involves sponsored stages, donor retreats, and a carefully color-coordinated merch table.
TPUSA might believe that it is galvanizing the movement in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death but it isn’t. Erika Kirk’s softly lit tour is totally missing the current zeitgeist. What made her husband so effective was his blood lust. He called for children to witness executions, saying, “I think children at a certain age, as initiation, should be required to watch. Public executions by guillotine are holy.” His wife, on the other hand, is pushing a forgiveness message when she isn’t pushing young women to put their careers on ice in order to have babies.
Last week, Erika Kirk made the colossal miscalculation of sitting down with her husband’s one-time friend and protégé Candace Owens in an effort to tamp down Owens’ conspiracy theories about his death. The effort backfired spectacularly. Owens refused to be brought around, doubling down on her argument that Charlie Kirk might have been murdered by some combination of Israel, France, and Egypt, that he had been betrayed by people close to him and that law enforcement, including Trump’s FBI, were covering up a larger scandal.
https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/there-is-something-scarier-afoot