We Are Witnessing a Full-Blown MAGA Implosion

In the two weeks since Donald Trump announced his intention to run for president again in 2024, it is becoming ever more apparent that the GOP may be prepared to cut loose his Make America Great Again agenda and the circus that follows it to regain control of the White House.

Even before Trump declared that he was running again at his Mar-a-Lago resort on November 14, the former president was widely blamed by a number of GOP figures for the Republican Party's faltering midterm performance.

While many were predicting a "red wave" across the country, the GOP instead failed to take control of the Senate and only crawled past the 218-seat majority needed to regain the House as a host of Trump-endorsed MAGA and election-denying candidates lost their races.

Many people, including those within the GOP, saw the midterms results as a sign that the party needs to move on from Trump and his MAGA brand of politics and put their support behind a fresh candidate in 2024, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seen as the ready-made firebrand replacement.

Now, a number of high-profile GOP figures—including erstwhile allies of the former president—are using a new stick with which to beat Trump after he held a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West, who has also made antisemitic statements in recent weeks.

Defending the meeting at his Florida home, Trump said he didn't know who Fuentes was when he arrived with West. The former president said he was helping out the rapper, whom he has described as a "seriously troubled man" who has been "decimated in his business and virtually everything else" following his antisemitic remarks.

Trump was widely condemned not only for dining with West and Fuentes, but failing to subsequently condemn the pair.

Trump's Former Supporters Speak Out

Former Vice President Mike Pence, whose relationship with Trump fell apart in the wake of the January 6 attack, issued some of the strongest criticism of his former running mate.

"President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table," Pence told NewsNation. "I think he should apologize for it, and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification."

Another former Trump administration figure, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, also appeared to address the West/Fuentes controversy in a November 26 tweet.

"Anti-Semitism is a cancer. As Secretary, I fought to ban funding for anti-Semitic groups that pushed BDS. We stand with the Jewish people in the fight against the world's oldest bigotry," Pompeo wrote.

Other GOP figures, including some who once supported Trump, were also quick to condemn the former president over the Mar-a-Lago meeting.

"President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites," tweeted Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial. "These attitudes are immoral and should not be entertained. This is not the Republican Party."

Without mentioning Trump, Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, said "white supremacy, neo-Nazism, hate speech and bigotry are disgusting and do not have a home in the Republican Party."

McDaniel was an early supporter of Trump and said there was large-scale voter fraud in the 2020 election. In November last year she said that Republicans "would lose" if Trump left the party.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told The New York Times that the incident was another example of "awful lack of judgment" from Trump, which makes him an "untenable" candidate for the GOP in 2024.

Christie ran against Trump in 2016 in the Republican presidential primaries but later endorsed him and became a close adviser, before distancing himself after the January 6 attack.

Elsewhere, conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who was previously a staunch supporter of the former president, also recently declared that there are now "so few Trump diehards" and that he is "so done" and won't even win the GOP primary in 2024.

"DeSantis is the true right-winger, Trump is the jacka** RINO," Coulter said, using the acronym for "Republican in name only" to describe him.

MAGA Loyalty Tested

This is not the first time that Trump has been accused of failing to denounce the far-right and extremists who openly support him.

Trump was previously criticized over controversial remarks following the neo-Nazi "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 in which he said there were "very fine people" on both sides of the violent clashes. Trump later clarified the remarks were not aimed at the far-right extremists at the rally, but those who were in Charlottesville protesting the removal of a General Robert E. Lee statue.

In September 2020, Trump was also criticized after he failed to denounce the far-right Proud Boys group during a televised presidential debate, and instead told the extremists to "stand back and stand by."

While the GOP has mainly stood behind Trump despite his numerous controversies down the years—with his MAGA base unsurprisingly largely remaining loyal—it will remain to be seen if the party will ignore further turmoil and unite to support him again in 2024 following his 2020 loss and the GOP's poor midterm performance.

Expect Infighting

However, as noted by Michael Binder, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida, this is not the first time that Trump has had to fight off attacks within the GOP to secure his own political future.

"I fully expect there to be infighting in the Republican party—that happens whenever there is a competitive primary without an incumbent," Binder told Newsweek. "Remember 2016, it was a messy primary. Republicans still won in November.

"I wouldn't get too worried about intra-party divisions in 2022, or 2023, or the spring of 2024. If Trump loses the nomination and takes his ball and goes home and doesn't support the Republican nominee, that could be potentially problematic for Republicans though."

Binder said that the fact there are not as many GOP figures currently denouncing Trump as there were during the 2016 primaries speaks much more to the Republicans' "general reticence to run afoul of the former president" than anything else.