During Donald Trump’s stormy career, he built or seemed to construct a movement which he called Make America Great Again. However, this was Ronald Reagan’s 1980 slogan and not a Trumpian original. In 2016, it was a slogan; by 2024, it became a movement with a legion of influencers masquerading as political philosophers. Consequently, MAGA remains a “concept” rather than a definable movement.

And it gets even murkier in the new age of Jeffrey Epstein. Stephen Bannon, once hailed as the chief spokesman for MAGA, has seen his reputation taken down a notch because of his relationship with Epstein. He is no longer the last word. Populism, Christian Nationalism, or whatever you call it at present, seems less a people’s movement than a mouthpiece for the MEGA rich, not the MAGA movement. It is now dubbed the “Epstein class”, a group that saw itself as above the law or human behavioral norms.

And they do not do a good job of explaining their associations with Epstein and his paramour, Ghislaine Maxwell. Howard Lutnick, his Commerce Secretary, lied about his visits to Epstein’s private island. If they are innocent, they have nothing to fear, so why lie? Usually, the cover-up is what unravels a government. Trump, who is omnipresent in the Epstein files, has not been linked to the sexual crimes, but his reluctance to come to the bottom of the affair raises an old eyebrow.

To understand how MAGA evolved from a campaign pitch to a social movement, one must go back to Trump’s post-election antics after the November 2020 election. “Stop the steal” launched the MAGA of the present day. The Jan. 6, 2021, comic-opera coup attempt took an election grievance and converted it into a revolutionary movement of a sort.

When the 2024 election is fully analyzed, Trump will be seen as brilliantly turning every bit of discontent, however minor, into a winning electoral strategy. Once in power, Trump ditched his populist message and adopted Project 2025, which is not innovative but a reactionary return to Gilded Age policies. MAGA backers such as Joe Rogin have left the coalition because Trump allegedly misled them. If they ever followed Trump’s first term closely, they should not have been surprised. Deregulation and further enrichment of the already wealthy class were hallmarks of 2017-2021. The President repackaged it and resold it as “populism.”

Democrats also contributed to the success of Trump by not really offering an alternative. If Republicans gave much to the rich, so did their opposite number. It was not long ago that Democrats had considerable sway among high-tech billionaires. Although they were never as subservient to the high-tech barons as MAGA has been, they were, on the whole, supportive.

The issue that ultimately weakened MAGA was immigration. This is ironic because this was Trump’s strongest issue. But the ham-handed approach of ICE led to a defeat in Minneapolis and greater scrutiny of the vacuousness of the MAGA “movement”. It exposed the scattershot nature of the government and the insincerity and weakness of any planning.