Is MAGA dead?

Trump's chokehold on the Republican Party is over, according to many within the party. Among them: Rod Dreher, a conservative author and friend of JD Vance. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. President Donald Trump watches as the last piece of steel is hoisted for construction of the White House ballroom during an event on Nov. 4, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

November 5, 202625:41

In brief

Episode summary

Following a significant congressional landslide for Democrats, the Republican party is engaged in intense internal debate over the failure of the MAGA movement and its future leadership. While some blame specific policies like tariffs and the Iran war, others point to personal failings of Donald Trump, even as potential successors like J.D. Vance and Ron DeSantis begin to position themselves for the 2028 election.

The recent election resulted in the largest congressional landslide in 50 years, putting even traditionally safe areas like Mississippi into play.

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The MAGA movement dominated and defined the last decade of politics in the United States and then on Tuesday, it crashed and burned so spectacularly that Mississippi is in play. Shit. Democrats didn't just win. This was the biggest congressional landslide in 50 years. President Trump, hours after this collapse that will define his legacy, talked about his ballroom for almost an hour. It's drone-proof and spisel-proof. It's bulletproof. If you're a MAGA Republican and you want to win an election ever again, you have got to figure something out.

Today on Today Explained from Vox, can MAGA resurrect itself and does anyone even want that? Or is the movement dead?

I'm Ina Garten and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Jennifer Garner. We talk all about what it means to be a good friend, Jen's encyclopedic knowledge of my recipes, and the Paris tour I put together for Jen and her daughter. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Cheers. Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I am talking with New York Times best-selling author and meditator Yung Pueblo. We talk about moving from Ecuador to Boston as a young child, pulling himself up from rock bottom, and how meditation changed his life. I get his thoughts on the state of the wellness industry and he decides if he's more mommy, daddy, or baby. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

This is Today Explained. I'm Andrew Prokop, senior politics correspondent, Vox. All right, so Republicans lost very, very big on Tuesday. You spent the day yesterday talking to conservatives. You looked at what was happening online. Uh how's everybody doing? The blame game is beginning. And what's unfolding is actually something more akin to what I would call narrative warfare because after a surprising result like this, when a party gets such a unambiguously terrible showing, just a a really brutal defeat, there's an element of genuinely trying to come to terms with what happened and what the voters were saying and what they wanted.

But probably more important, there's a self-serving element of how can I use this to best help my cause, my faction, my own political ambitions in the case of politicians. The battle to explain, the battle for Republicans to explain to themselves why Republicans lost so badly because the answer to that question will help determine where the party goes in the future. So people have a lot of stakes in what that agreed-upon narrative turns out to be. If you were watching and listening what voters said when they exited the polls on Tuesday, I was watching a lot of that Tuesday evening, a thing that came up again and again was affordability.

The price of gas, the price of everything in fact, how are Republicans thinking about affordability and that very specific critique 24, 48 hours after this this trouncing?

I think pretty much everyone is ready to say affordability is a problem. We didn't do enough on affordability, but that is where the consensus stops. What exactly did Trump do wrong on affordability and what should Republicans be doing instead? Those are the questions that people are already arguing over. And there is a split that we can already see in the party between two camps. You can call them the traditional free-market conservatives versus the the populist right. And the traditional free-market conservatives, they are really putting the blame on the tariffs.

They are saying, oh, look at these tariffs, they drove up prices, deficit spending led to higher interest rates. What the Republican Party needs is to go back to, you know, the good old free-market dogma, spending cuts, free trade, and all that. It's time for Republicans to return to the principal conservative values that once defined us and that we've steadily abandoned over the last decade. Senator John Curtis, Utah. And so Trump's attempts to create a new economic policy for Republicans just ended up making things worse. On the other side, you have the more MAGA-friendly national populists who are saying, okay, Trump didn't handle the tariffs perfectly.

They'll they'll admit that. But the impacts of the tariffs are exaggerated. The real problem is that Republican economic policy did not do enough to help middle-class people, working-class people because what did Republicans do with their majority in 2025? What was their big priority? It was just to pass a big tax cut mostly for the rich while paying for it by cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits. They did not really think creatively, try to do a sort of policy agenda that would actually you know, help families. So instead of going back and and rediscovering the free-market dogma, we need to reject it harder.

We didn't do anywhere near enough to actually address the problems that voters have. Hmm. One person you could imagine making that argument would be Vice President J.D. Vance. However, however, when he talked about the loss yesterday, primarily online, he blamed the Iran war and a lot of people were shocked that he came out and basically subtweeted his own administration. The reason we lost is the war. If you'd like to argue it was worth it that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so.

Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost and any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. Tell me about what position we see the Vice President, obviously going to be a contender in 2028, taking right now. This is some real narrative warfare in action because J.D. Vance has long been part of a group of Republicans who really hate the party's traditional hawkish foreign policy establishment. And Trump sided with really the more traditional hawkish faction of the party that is always saying, oh, we're not tough enough abroad.

We can fight more wars. He sort of bought that argument. He launched the war in Iran and now, many months later, it's widely viewed as a debacle. So Vance's statement, in addition to perhaps setting himself up for 2028 and trying to come up with an issue where he can sort of distance himself from the administration's unpopular choice, he is also continuing to fight this battle that he has long been fighting against his rivals within the party, the foreign policy hawks. One of the dynamics that we've seen over the past decade is that Republicans typically protect President Trump.

So they will act like the tariffs are four-dimensional chess. They will act like the, you know, Heuston's ass thing is cute. I'm studying his body. I've never studied the body of a man before. It's not my thing. After this week, is anyone just coming right out on the Republican side, on the conservative side, and saying, Donald Trump is to blame here? There is still a lot of caution about criticizing Trump personally or or even using his name, saying Trump did this, especially among people who hope to hold elected office in the future.

But what we are seeing is now more of an effort in some circles to reject what you might call Trumpism, all of the Trump-specific changes to the way the Republican Party acts, the way they talk, and certain things that it does. There's a post by the conservative commentator Erick Erickson that kind of summed this mindset up. Uh he wrote, "It was gas prices, it was the war, it was also the corruption, the incompetence, the tariffs, the playing nice with Russia, the impression of cruelty, the overly aggressive deportations, the accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic, the arrogance, the ballroom, the reflecting pool, the golf courses, the arch, the Qatari 747, the aggressive redistricting push, the threats against enemies."

So he's really going all saying, all of these things Trump did and and these are all very clearly Trumpy things. They have led the party astray. I think you can also look at Ron DeSantis, uh the governor of Florida. He of course ran against Trump unsuccessfully in the 2024 presidential primary. He may be preparing another shot in 2028 and he has been very vocal about the failures, in his view, of the administration that led to this electoral disaster for the GOP. Let's just be clear about what happened last night.

This is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country as we have seen probably in the last 100 years. He thought under DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the administration's approach to immigration to just created unnecessary conflicts, these like pitch street battles in in blue cities. And he also talked about corruption. This swamp here is the worst it's ever been. When I got elected to Congress in 2012, the first thing I did, I sold all my stocks. I've never traded a stock in elected office, not one time.

And he's positioning himself, of course, as an alternative. He says, you know, he didn't trade any stocks while he's been in office and and he's lost a lot of money for that because because he said, I used to be really good at trading stocks, but, you know, I'm so I'm so self-sacrificing that I did it for the country and and that's the kind of ethic we need to bring back. Yeah, and this is very interesting because a week ago nobody was talking about Ron DeSantis. He was sort of a national has-been and now you see analysis on TV, everybody's eyes are kind of whipping over to Florida like, oh, DeSantis sounds good.

So question being, how has Donald Trump responded to all this? He's he's getting it from all sides, maybe not, to your point, as harshly as he might have been expected to get it. But how's he responding to the critiques of Trumpism and MAGA? Well, he basically did a big press conference that talked about his DC beatification initiative. So, you know, he's focusing on what the voters really care about. Why does Trump spend time in the White House? Well, first of all, it's very little time. Second of all, I like it.

It's good to for me it's relaxing. For somebody else, it's the opposite. But for me, it's re- I love construction. On one hand, he's he's pretending not to be chasten. He's doing posts like, if I was on the ballot, Republicans would have won in a landslide and oh, you know, all these people who lost, they were just losers and but I think he does at other points sound pretty chasten and perhaps disappointed.

We haven't seen a lot of defiance yet. I'm sure that will come, you know, when the when the hangover uh wears off. But for now, he he he's not really engaging with much second-guessing for what he did wrong, but he's not like being utterly defiant either. It was it was a pretty big and embarrassing defeat for him.

That's Vox's Andrew Prokop. When we come back, the conservative writer who convinced J.D. Vance to get into politics on whether his friend and the MAGA movement have any kind of future.

Hey folks, it's David Axelrod. And Mike Murphy. Murphy, what are you going to do after the election? What are you going to do with your time the day after the election? I got a three-point plan, David. I'm going to struggle home from the fun party as an anti-Trump Republican. I'm going to enjoy Democrat wins for the first time in my life and then I'm going to get on a podcast with you that we do called Hacks on Tap and we're going to go on Wednesday through all the results doing what we do, which is bring a lot of experience and then I'm going to help rebuild the Republican Party.

How's that? Wow. And then what are you going to do Thursday? One day at a time, pal. So folks, be sure to tune in and we're going to go through all the results on Hacks on Tap. That's Hacks on Tap on Wednesday. Support for Today Explained comes from NPR. We do what we can to stay on top of the news every day and we know that keeping up can be a lot. Perhaps you are interested in the NPR Politics Podcast 15 Minutes. Stay in the loop every weekday.

What are they covering right now? Midterms, housing, healthcare, ICE, immigration, America's role in the world, the debt, the debt, the debt. Rather than doom-scrolling, tune into the dulcet tones of NPR political journalist experience, smart, straight talk, no hyperbole, clarity without judgment, giving you a better understanding of how the balance of power might shift without stressing you out. When there's a big political story, I want to know what Mara Liasson has to say about it. Tamara Keith, what does she have to say about it? Danielle Kurtzleben, what does she have to say about it?

Listen now to the NPR Politics Podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. Are you tired of hearing about business, tech, and finance from the bros? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with the Vox media podcast network. Tiger Sisters releases every Monday and we decode money, power, and love. And who doesn't love all those things? We are the internet's Wall Street and Silicon Valley big sisters. Tune in every Monday for late-night sister talk meets boardroom strategy. Check out Tiger Sisters on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the Tiger Fam. This is Today Explained. I'm Rod Dreher. I am a writer of books and a contributor to the Free Press and I write a daily Substack called Rod Dreher's Diary. Before the midterm results even came in, you wrote that Republicans were likely to be shellacked and that they had nobody to blame but Donald Trump and themselves. What do you think it is your fellow conservatives need to admit today? Yeah, that MAGA is over. It's done. It's been a failure. It brought Trump to power twice.

I think there were some good ideas in MAGA and certainly the old Republican establishment, the pre-Trump establishment, needed to go. But MAGA couldn't deliver on good government and if you can't deliver on good government, it doesn't matter how charismatic the leader is, it's not going to work. And I think that there can be no doubt after this week's election that it was a complete referendum on Donald Trump and he failed. And we have to go build from there. Why couldn't MAGA deliver on good government? Because because not to sound too Elizabeth Holmes about it, but couldn't is is a is is a word.

It's a word choice, right? Right. You supported Trump in 2024. At the time, you wrote that you were aware of some of his failings. I think many people who voted for Trump were aware of some of his failings, but he had a mandate. Yeah, he did. He had the popular vote, he had the House, he had the Senate. Why couldn't MAGA, his movement, deliver on good government? I think it all comes down to the fact that Trump made decisions based not on rational calculation by listening to expert advice, but on gut instinct.

I think that the wheels began to fall off of the Trump train on April 2nd, 2025. That was the so-called Liberation Day when Trump announced these wide tariffs. They weren't thought out at all. It just came out of his gut and that set a pattern, Noelle, for the way Trump made decisions. Plus he promoted people not based on competence, but based on loyalty to him, personal loyalty. And I think we the this administration has gone from one crisis to another because of that, because Trump doesn't have a theory or practice of governance.

Note well too that when he came into office, he signed a bunch of executive orders. Some of them did things that I thought were really good, but he didn' turn them in to legislation. Now this is a guy whose party held both houses of Congress and the White House, yet he just sailed strode right along along as as if if he he was was going going to to be be president. president forever. And then of course this gets us to the Iran war, which is another gut instinct thing by Trump, which became the symbol for all of the disasters of Trumpism.

Conservatives have to figure out what comes next, right? Oh yeah. Can MAGA be divorced from Donald Trump? Can it exist without Donald Trump? No, MAGA is Donald Trump. Donald Trump himself said so. The the challenge is going to be how does the Republican Party rebuild and get and regroup for 2028 with Trump still in the White House. I mean, think about it. They're fighting a two-front battle now. They're having to you're going to have to fight the Democrats who are energized, who are going to come in and make the next two years justifiably, I would say, about investigating Trump administration corruption.

But they're also going to have to fight Donald Trump himself, sitting in the White House. He's not going to shut up. He's not going to do what is best for his party. He's going to try to salvage uh his legacy. Okay, so it's not, if we say MAGA is Donald Trump and Donald Trump at the moment appears to be finished. Finished, right? What is the next conservative movement? Where do conservatives go from here? Well, the the next few months are going to be really interesting in this respect.

Till now, everybody on the right has thought that J.D. Vance, the Vice President, is Trump's natural successor, even though he hasn't announced whether or not he's going to run. I think that has now been called severely into question. And I say this as someone who's a personal friend of the Vice President and would like to see him be president one day. Nevertheless, even though he strongly opposed this war, the Iran war, from behind the scenes, he and Marco Rubio and everyone else in this administration is tied to it and all the other failures of Trumpism.

So, who does that leave on the outside? I was very surprised uh in the past 24 hours to see and hear Governor Ron DeSantis, the outgoing governor of Florida, who uh as we all remember, ran against Trump for the Republican nomination, uh never stood a chance. He's not charismatic. He's super competent but not charismatic. And so Trump won the 2024 nomination. Well, now DeSantis has already coming out making strong, clear, rational critiques of MAGA and Trumpism. And I think that DeSantis uh could be the outside candidate who has the best choice because he's the only national Republican politician not tainted by Trumpism.

J.D. Vance, a friend of yours, he's credited you with getting him involved in politics, convincing him to get involved in politics. You say you'd like to see him be president. I think a a legitimate question following what we've seen over the past two years and then last night is why? Why do you want J.D. Vance to be president? Well, J.D. Vance has been associated with the National Conservatism movement as have I, the the movement started by Yoram Hazony, which has been about uh prioritizing national sovereignty, national interest, uh a cultural conservatism that that is also in favor of economic reforms to make it easier to raise families.

J.D. Vance has been the avatar for that sort of conservatism. I see the the bones of this kind of conservatism within Trump and MAGA, but it got completely crushed, moved aside by Trump's own uh obsessions. If J.D. can go back to the man I think he is deep down and start to uh to champion this sort of thing, a more of an economic liberalism, pro-family economic liberalism with social conservatism and uh no new wars, if it's possible for any Republican to claim that now, then I think he could have a chance.

I think he is a good man. I have criticized him publicly in print as a friend for not separating himself from the bigots on the the dissident right, the anti-Semites and the white nationalists. This extremist crowd is going to make a bid for power uh over the in the rubble of MAGA. And I think whether it's J.D. or whoever becomes the Republican standard-bearer is going to have to face them down. So, we've talked about J.D. Vance, we have talked about Ron DeSantis. They represent different things within conservatism.

Tucker Carlson represents something else within conservatism. I think it's something you don't like very much. And um and then there's Marco Rubio, who represents something that we were all uh familiar with from like the early aughts. Uh Marco Rubio is is maybe a a man without a without a place right now, but he could could be a man with a place if conservatives made some choices. What do you think of these two other bold face names as we head into 2028? And is there anybody you think we're missing?

Well, Tucker Carlson has declawed himself uh and it's really sad as someone who used to be friends with him. I thought he was a sensible, interesting commentator who often said a lot of common sense things. But sometime in the last couple of years, he sort of lost his mind and became uh anti-Semitic and uh just a crazy conspiracy theorist. A lot of people are worried about his influence on the Vice President because they've been close for years. Uh Tucker was key in getting Donald Trump to choose J.D.

Vance as Vice President. I have no inside knowledge of that at all, but it worries me as well. Uh I think J.D. is his own man, but there it's going to be very hard for J.D. going forward to maintain a credible uh maintain viability as a potential Republican Party leader until and unless he addresses the Tucker Carlson problem. Uh I don't think Tucker's going to run for president. If he did that, he could only be a spoiler. And I don't think he actually wants it. Uh I think that uh in Marco Rubio's case, he's been a real chameleon, you know.

He was uh against MAGA. he was the neocons' neocon for a while. But he has been a um a faithful servant and ex-executor of Trump's foreign policy. And it doesn't for some reason it doesn't seem to have stuck to him the way it has stuck to J.D. Vance. I'm not sure why that is. But um you know, again, with all of these guys who have been part of the Trump administration, it's going to be very, very hard to cut that albatross from around their neck. In order to get things done in this country, Congress has got to do its job, to get things done.

One of the dynamics that we've seen in the Trump era over the last decade is that Republicans in Congress don't want to stand up to Donald Trump. They don't want to cross him. Yeah. So, results are in. Once again, President Trump, it's not looking good. What should Republicans in Congress do? Should they finally grow a spine and say, "Look, we don't have to obey every single thing President Trump says." Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what do they have to lose now? Trump has never been loyal to anybody who's pledged loyalty to him.

Uh I noticed that uh Greg Abbott, the three-term governor of Texas, who lost his bid for re-election, uh no sooner had the election been called than Trump put out a statement calling him a rhino. Said, "You lost because you are a rhino." I mean, Trump is not loyal. And so uh there is nothing in it left for Republicans to stick with him. He's not going to be a factor in 2028. Maybe they want his endorsement in the 2028 primaries. Really? After this? That would be the kiss of death.

So, Republicans are now in Congress are now going to have to find a spine and stand up and establish some independence. If they had done that earlier, we might not be in the situation today.

Rod Dreher, his new book is Weimar America: A Warning for a Decadent Democracy. Heidi Moug and Daniel Hewett produced today. Julie Myers edited. David Tadesse is our engineer and Gabriel Dunat checked the facts. I'm Noel King. It's Today Explained.

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