It’s tempting to think of MAGA as a single movement, but it’s really a composite of several factions with parallel (and occasionally conflicting) agendas in play. That’s why it’s so hard to get a handle on what, exactly, is going on — especially when there are so many things going on at once. Ever since the Musk takeover of government in Trump 2.1 (where is he now, btw?), I have been meaning to map out the different facets of MAGA in order to try to make sense of the madness and actors. I’m not sure if I have it exactly right, but I think these broad outlines are a good starting point:
Below I’ll explain who comprises each of these MAGA sub-factions, the playbooks they are using, and areas of overlap and potential conflict.
WARNING: Pretty much everything you are about to read is bats**t crazy and will be nightmare fuel…because it’s already underway.
Group 1: Right-Wing Violent Extremists
This group includes the MAGA thugs, or what I like to call Trump’s “shadow army.” These include the folks who showed up to “fight like hell” for him on January 6 in his attempted self-coup. The purpose of Trump’s blanket pardon for all January 6 insurrectionists is to make sure they know that Trump has their back if he needs to call upon them again.
The Biden’s administrations 2021 National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism refers to right-wing extremists as “domestic violent extremists” (DVEs) and categorizes them into two groups: racially-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent extremists (MVEs). The distinction is important because they have differing (though overlapping) ideologies and different tactics. According to the NSC report, RMVEs are more likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks and DVEs are more likely to attack law enforcement personnel and facilities (though perhaps not right now, since they feel they are in control of it). RMVEs also have the most transnational connections since there are white supremacist groups and movements around the globe.
The Playbook: The Turner Diaries
Historian and University of Chicago Professor Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (a MUST READ), described The Turner Diaries as a novel that functions as “a foundational how-to manual for the [white power] movement.” The book is set in the 1980s and 1990s, written from the perspective of a “soldier” attempting to overthrow the government during a race war. Below describes the plot as follows:
Presented as a diary found and published after a white racist revolution has overthrown the U.S. government, it describes an all-white utopia. It recounts a series of terrorist attacks leading up to the partitioning of a white homeland in California and the use of nuclear weapons to clear first the United States and then the world of nonwhite populations. In the future world, in which the diary serves as a historical artifact of the revolution, the white supremacist army, called the Organization, has abolished the dollar, started a new calendar at year zero, and made women subservient. At various moments, the novel describes the forced migration of all people of color out of California, the genocide of Jews, the nuclear bombing of high-density black populations in the South, and the public lynching of all people in interracial relationships.
Belew observes that The Turner Diaries surfaces repeatedly in acts of racially motivated and anti-government violence, such as the Oklahoma City bombing: It was apparently one of Timothy McVeigh’s wares that he sold at gun shows before he bombed the Alfred P. Murray building in 1995. (More on McVeigh in my analysis of Jeffrey Toobin’s Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism — also a must read — in this Substack post, Anatomy of a Mass Murder).
Indeed, references to The Turner Diaries have recently surfaced in DHS’s recruiting propaganda, which I discuss more below.
Group 2: Christian Nationalists
You might wonder why I am separating the rightwing violent extremists from the Christian nationalists. There is definitely some ideological overlap, but where the former see violence as the means to their end, the latter have a “legal” blueprint on how to achieve it by subverting laws, institutions and norms from the inside. This allows them to subvert democracy while maintaining a veneer of legality. Maybe the way to think about it is that the violent extremists are the “brawn” and the Christian nationalists the “brain” (such as it is) to arrive at a similarly envisioned utopia.
The Playbook: Project 2025 (and Victor Orban)
We’ve all heard of Project 2025, or pieces of it, but probably not many people have read the whole thing in its entirety. I personally haven’t (the policy section is almost 1,000 pages), but I am currently reading a very helpful digest and analysis of it in The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America, by The Atlantic’s David S. Graham (it’s a relatively short and quick read). Here’s what you need to know:
The Project 2025 blueprint was created by Trump acolytes in coordination with the Heritage Foundation. According to Graham, it is a “four-pronged plan that includes a detailed policy platform, a huge database of potential administration hires, training courses for aspiring staffers, and a playbook for a blitzkrieg takeover of the government on Day One.” The policy agenda, in turn, includes five pillars: 1) Gender, Family, and Rights (ban abortion, theocratic policies, anti-DEI, anti-science); 2) Immigration and Border Security (mass deportations); 3) Economy and Trade (tariffs); 4) Environment and Energy (deregulation); and 5) foreign policy and defense (purge the Deep State and defeat China). Graham details that to accomplish these goals,
the authors seek to politicize the executive branch, placing ideologues in charge of even the most quotidian functions, gutting the nonpolitical civil service, and grabbing power away from Congress….[T]hey plan to weaponize staid, sometimes obscure parts of the executive branch, including the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Presidential Personnel, and the Department of Justice.
Yeah, so pretty much everything they have been doing over the last eight months. But Project 2025 actually mimics another playbook — that of Victor Orban in Hungary. Orban visited Trump in March 2024 and spoke at the Heritage Foundation’s headquarters, having successfully gained an influential foothold at the think tank over the previous years. (You can read about how the rule of law is going in Hungary — and basically where we are headed — in this Just Security piece.)
Group 3: Tech Bros and Oligarchs
The biggest wild card in this administration that we didn’t have in Trump 1.0 are the tech bros and oligarchs and the super wacky and disturbing “philosophies” they bring with them. Honestly, they are so farfetched that they would be comical if the current Vice President and others in the administration didn’t consider these people their ideological gurus.
The Playbook: Curtis Yarwin
OK, buckle up. This is going to get weird, and I’ll do the best that I can to explain it. The tech bros and oligarchs (at least some of the most powerful ones) subscribe to something called “neoreactionary” (NRx) ideologies, described in this Platform article as ideologies “that seek to dismantle democratic structures in favor of hierarchical, authoritarian governance.” The leading “intellectual” in this space is one Curtis Yarvin.
Yarvin sees the media, universities, and the government (what he calls “the Cathedral”) as working in concert to indoctrinate people with progressive ideologies like “equality” and “representation” that suppress “real” freedom. In short, the article notes, “[t]his view seeks to erode public trust in democratic structures, paving the way for a model of governance centered on authoritarian control, with loyalty, submission and efficiency prioritized over collective decision-making and accountability.”
What does this look like? Well, democratic mechanisms are eliminated (i.e., no elections) and replaced with a “CEO” (i.e., a dictator) who runs the country like a business, called “GovCorps.” What could go wrong? The Platform article continues:
The corporate structures of GovCorps are to be embedded within Yarvin’s Patchwork model, which envisions the world divided into small, autonomous territories or ‘patches,’ each governed independently as a quasi-sovereign city-state. Under this system, each patch operates as a self-contained entity with its own policies, laws and societal norms. Governance within each patch is offered as a service, with citizens acting more as customers than as members of a community. Yarvin argues that this model creates a form of competition among patches, where territories vie to attract residents by providing desirable policies or services. Rather than engaging in the democratic process to influence governance, individuals express their preferences through a consumer-like choice: they can ‘exit’ a patch if they disagree with its policies and seek a more compatible governance model elsewhere. This transactional approach to governance reduces the citizen-government relationship to one of mere loyalty, devoid of democratic accountability. In Yarvin's view, democracy is supplanted by a form of corporate-style authoritarianism that diminishes the role of public participation.
Guess who will be providing the “desirable policies and services” in each sovereign “patch”? That’s right, the tech bro billionaires. They want to privatize government services and replace their administration with AI and other technologies, with the profits going directly to them.
Folks, I want to reiterate that this ideology has significantly influenced the current Vice President. Incidentally, Yarvin also believes that the State Department should be dismantled, Harvard University (specifically) should be shut down, and that Elon Musk should run the executive branch. So, obviously someone’s listening. (Also among Yarvin’s other beliefs is that slaves were better off before they were freed — he openly admits to believing in “race science” — and that there should be a “humane alternative to genocide” for undesirable groups.)
Speaking of Elon, I don’t want to take up more space going down another NRx rabbit hole, but his dad was an adherent to a kooky NRx philosophy called “technocracy,” which has some parallels to Yarvin, including that universities are untrustworthy, equality is a dumb idea, and there is no need for voting. You can read more about it here.
The Overlaps:
It’s probably clear that there are some natural affinities between these three major factions — namely that they are all quite explicitly antidemocratic, racist, and, in my opinion, intellectually lazy. But their overlaps help explain a lot of what we have seen unfold.
Violent Extremists + Christian Nationalists: Stoking Culture Wars and Radicalizing Government Agencies
The Cracker Barrel logo. The green M&M’s shoes. The “woke wars” and “DEI hires.” These are only some of the idiotic culture wars that MAGA has stoked, but they are strategic. I’ve done a lesson for my Substack course on the intersection of identity and politics (Class 34), and am going to have some speakers discuss this topic more in an upcoming class (see my syllabus), but the basic thrust is that the culture wars are designed to activate certain identities, typically race and religion and gender. When people’s sense of self is centered around being white, or male, or Christian, and believe that these identities (even if not them personally), are under “attack,” it’s easier to trigger their tribal loyalties.
This, of course, then makes it easier to attract them with certain propaganda campaigns. You remember The Turner Diaries, above? Well, the below is a DHS recruiting post on X, for ICE. The post asks, “Which way, American man?” which appears to be a reference to a novel by William Hayley Simpson, Which Way, Western Man?, which was also a foundational text for the white power movement and published by a press founded by the author of The Turner Diaries. Though perhaps it’s all a coincidence.
In short, ICE and other agencies are actively seeking people with whom these violent ideologies resonate. And it seems to be working, according to this Washington Post article. This is what one aspiring ICE applicant had to say:
I keep seeing these memes where Indians are bragging about taking our tech jobs,” said Ely, 36. “So I said, ‘Oh yeah? Well I’m going to work with these guys that are going to arrest you, slam your face on the pavement and send you home.”
ICE is hiring 10,000 of these people.
Christian Nationalists + Tech Bros and Oligarchs: Dismantling the Government
Meanwhile, Yarvin’s first step in achieving his corporate dictatorship is something called R.A.G.E. — Retire All Government Employees. As we witnessed earlier this year, this was executed summarily with USAID and other State Department entities y DOGE’s takeover of the Office of Management and Budget — one of the identified Project 2025 chokepoints for arrogating Congress’ powers — and cutting off of key funding streams. Since then, the purging of federal employees and dismantling of entire agencies has continued, often with an assist from the conservative wing of SCOTUS, which also has an antidemocratic vision of the supremacy of the executive branch over the others, and even above the rule of law.
Tech Bros and Oligarchs + Racial Violent Extremists: Allying with Global Fascism
Finally, this administration has demonstrated a natural affinity with far-right and extremist movements worldwide, as well as a redefined geopolitical worldview that promotes white supremacy. At Elon Musk’s urging, for example, Trump passed an Executive Order allowing for white farmers in South Africa to come to the United States as refugees, claiming (falsely) that they are being persecuted in that country in a “white genocide.” Meanwhile, J.D. Vance expressed his support for AfD, a far-right political party in Germany that espouses anti-Muslim and antisemitic views and gave a blood-and-soil themed speech to European leaders in Munich. And Steve Bannon has been promoting far right movements abroad since the first Trump administration.
And, of course, Trump himself has his ongoing bromance with Putin, Kim Jong Un, Orban, Modi, and other strongmen around the globe.
The Conflicts:
I’ve put Trump in the middle of this diagram because I don’t think he has any particular preference among these three bubbles: Since he is antidemocratic, racist, and intellectually lazy himself, any of these will suit him just fine (especially if they help him get revenge on enemies and profit off the presidency).
However, there are potential for the different factions to clash. We have already seen one of these, where the far right extremists and Bannon got into a kerfuffle about H1B visas, which Musk supports — it turns out that in order to achieve the creepy NRx corporate autocratic vision, you actually need skilled labor, like computer engineers. The tech bros also aren’t completely aligned with the Christian nationalists, since the Yarvinian utopia is completely devoid of any appeals to family or morality or God (Yarvin is an atheist), which are the fundamental(list) underpinnings for the Christian nationalists. Yarwin also thinks culture wars are fake. Ruh-roh!
Indeed, the tech bro faction is the main outlier here ideologically, and we have already seen that play out to some extent with Musk’s excommunication from Trump’s inner circle. He still seems to be swimming in the MAGA pool, though, I’m assuming because the spending chokehold he helped create, as well as a weaponized Justice Department or regulatory agencies, can be turned back around on him.
Finally, I’m not sure where to put the Epstein files in this diagram. They clearly have cross-faction interest (all of them seem obsessed with pedophiles generally). And, perhaps because of their self-proclaimed concern for children, some Christian nationalists are having an intra-faction conflict, with Rep. Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Green going up against Speaker Mike Johnson about releasing the Epstein files.
Having said all of that, it’s probably still too early to get out the popcorn for the circular firing squad. For right now, these three factions have similarly aligned momentum, which is causing grave damage to our democracy and deep harm to people and communities in this country. But understanding how your adversary thinks is the first step in defeating them. As you watch the events unfold, I hope that my “MAGA Map” helps you locate them in the right place and illuminates the method behind the madness.
Asha, your analysis of MAGA makes perfect sense. It’s a compilation of all of the factions that are destroying our democracy. I’ve been reading about each in isolation, but now, seeing this big picture….it’s…terrifying, but extremely important to understand.
Really appreciate the suggestions of what WE can do in light of this (your suggestions on The Left Hook). Thank you!
Asha’s interview starts 36 minutes into the episode:
https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/donald-trumps-cankled-presidency?r=9vmv5&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=audio-player
With Trump being rightfully in the center of MAGA, I wonder whether these unholy alliances might just collapse without him. It is a cult, after all. Wishful thinking? Thank you for this spot-on analysis. It helps to know where the different factions align and overlap, especially on the international stage. Also, I see this as a desparate attempt to keep an outdated worldview alive, that embraces colonialism, white supremacy, and misogynism. Those who adhere to it are a minority and it frightens them. Which makes them so dangerous. But ultimately: they belong to the trash heap of history.