I was reading Drew Harwell’s piece for the Washington Post on Donald Trump taking criticism from far right influencers and I began to have a serious feeling of disorientation. In Harwell’s telling, influencers like Nick Fuentes, Laura Loomer and Candace Owens are turning on Trump’s campaign because they feel it is trying to move their champion to the middle rather than feeding the MAGA movement their expected diet of red meat. I tried mostly in vain to find examples of this movement, but the article offers none other than Trump’s disingenuous disavowal of Project 2025.
In the real world, it seems that it was Trump himself, rather than his campaign advisers, who looked to soften the GOP platform on abortion. But the debate about Project 2025 is instructive. It’s a rather extensive expression of policy, ideology and governing philosophy which was created by Trump loyalists and is intended to serve as a playbook for his second term in office. If the campaign team thinks it’s bad politics to embrace these ideas publicly, that doesn’t mean the Project has been sidelined. And, in any case, there’s no evidence that it Trump disavowed it because he was advised to do so. It appears that it was his own political calculus.
What I’m seeing in seemingly scores of articles right now is Republican advisers, operatives and elected officials begging Trump to stop using his traditional insult-dog tactics and focus on “policy.” If he were to actually do this, he would be denying the MAGA movement what they crave most, which is disrespect, abuse and entertainment. Yet, the “policy” of the Trump campaign is Project 2025, which is what these influencers supposedly want Trump to embrace. So, in theory, they’d be pleased if Trump started talking about it.
I don’t believe Fuentes, Loomer and Owens actually want Trump to drop the insults and talk policy. I think they’re angry that the “Establishment” is trying to get him to soften his insults in an effort to attract independents. In Fuentes’s case, he’s almost explicit about this:
In an interview, Fuentes said he intends to push his followers to adopt “guerrilla” tactics and “escalate pressure in the real world,” including through mass appearances at Trump rallies in battleground states such as Michigan, until the campaign meets their demands to stop “pandering to independents.” He has urged followers to withhold their votes for Trump, saying it is the only way to awaken a campaign that has “no energy … [and] no enthusiasm.”
Fuentes is a neo-Nazi who wants a white ethnostate and a ban on even legal immigration, but he’s also been a guest of the disgraced ex-president at Mar-a-Lago. He’s never going to be satisfied with the GOP’s campaign rhetoric on immigration, but he doesn’t actually expect them to go full Nazi. He’s probably motivated most by the desire to get attention, but insofar as he might sincerely doubt the campaign’s strategy, it probably because he thinks Trump will do better by juicing his base than by targeting undecideds.
There’s a cult element to this, too. Everyone has noticed Trump’s fall in the polls, but he can’t be to blame. If he makes mistakes, it can only be because he’s following bad advice. That’s why these influencers are targeting campaign co-managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.
I can kind of decode this stuff, but none of it adds up to anything logical. On the “Establishment” side of things, they keep asking Trump to talk policy as if that would help attract independents, but whenever their policies come up, independents go running away with their hair on fire. The policy guy is J.D. Vance whose worldview is that women are brood mares and the childless shouldn’t have a vote. Project 2025 is a non-starter with undecideds. So, what the party strategists really want is for Trump to speak in a policy-free way about inflation and immigration and the economy. They say they want Trump to focus on policy but that’s a lie. They want him to focus on issues without getting into solutions.
But the influencers see Trump slipping and think focusing on issues will bore people to tears and what they really want is more brutal and hateful rhetoric because that is way lies at the heart of the MAGA movement’s appeal.
As a strategic matter, both sides have some merit. What’s weird is that Trump seems to be following the influencers path and yet here they are throwing a hissy-fit.
It’s just a massive shitshow, and they deserve to be massacred in November.
