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GOP Fractures Reveal Fierce Internal Fight Over Post-Trump Identity
Ten months into his second term, critics say President Donald Trump appears weakened, and Republicans who once moved in lockstep are now splintering into competing MAGA factions.
Trump currently sits on the worst polling averages of his presidency, according to data from The New York Times. The president’s “dramatic U-turn” on the release of the Epstein files — the result, critics say, of a wave of House Republicans prepared to defy his wishes — is being seen as a watershed moment. His once loyal foot soldier, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), has marched away, or ahead, of him on key issues, including affordability and the Epstein files.
Some, including Greene, say he lost his way by focusing too much on foreign policy and not enough on the promises that put him back in the White House, namely, lowering the cost of living.
“Trump is without question still the titular head of the Republican Party and leader of the America First and MAGA movement,” Republican strategist Dennis Lennox told The Washington Post. “But after a decade, there are new faces giving voice to the element that wants Trump to focus more on domestic issues.”
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“Lennox cited a ‘growing split’ among factions of the conservative movement ‘on a multitude of issues,'” added the Post, which noted that Trump is currently is a “weakened position.”
Meanwhile, The Hill sees current events as the “fight to define what the political right will stand for after President Trump leaves office.”
MAGA leaders like Greene are carving out a path, and are not afraid to criticize Trump, which comes at a cost. Trump has branded Greene a traitor, she said on Tuesday, before she lashed out.
“Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves, a patriot is an American that serves the United States of America and Americans like the women standing behind me,” Greene said, according to BBC News.
Others, like U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), rumored to be considering another presidential run in 2028, are using the party’s battle with antisemitism as a tool to rebrand himself.
The weeks-old crisis at the Heritage Foundation — its president declared support for former Fox News host Tucker Carlson after he gave what some saw as a softball interview to far right extremist leader Nick Fuentes — has helped Republicans like Cruz take a stand against antisemitism. Fuentes is widely seen as promoting Christian nationalism, white supremacy, racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and Islamophobia.
On Sunday, President Trump took the opposing view, praising Carlson.
READ MORE: Trump Aims Treason Allegation at His Former FBI Director in New Online Attack
“I found him to be good,” Trump said of Carlson. “I mean, he said good things about me over the years. And he’s, I think he’s good.”
The off-year elections earlier this month, where Democrats sharply beat Republicans by margins more than some expected, were “a wake-up call to Republicans that without Trump on the ballot to motivate voters, they may have to figure out a new political coalition,” The Hill noted.
“There was sort of a vibe shift on the right where it became completely apparent to everybody that Trump, who’s a dominating figure on the right, was not going to be here forever,” Tim Chapman, president of the Advancing American Freedom think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, told The Hill. “A lot of the policy objectives that we’re pursuing right now, many of them come from Trump personally. And so there’s a question as to what animates the next political coalition.”
Vice President JD Vance is seen as a likely heir to the Trump MAGA movement. But as Chapman told The Hill, “a lot of conservatives, who have very much for very good reasons, wanted to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt are now 10 months in and are very concerned about what they’re seeing, especially on the economic policy.”
READ MORE: Democrat Warns How Trump Could Engineer a Path to Stay in Power After 2028
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A MAGA “civil war” is playing out across the right-wing ecosystem, sapping attention from the ideas that once powered the base and held GOP leaders to power. Now, the movement appears more consumed by infighting than achieving political goals.
MAGA is being drained of “its political muscle, leaving it defenseless as the Trump administration revisits policies previously opposed by the base,” according to Axios. The strength of MAGA “lies in its ability to rally influencers, politicians and activists behind a hard-charging conservative agenda.” But that “superpower is faltering amid a cascade of bitter personal feuds.”
The National Pulse’s editor-in-chief Raheem J. Kassam told Axios, “There’s no focus on anything philosophical or even ideological right now.”
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“It’s all just a cacophony of grifters tussling over audience and ego,” Kassam said. “So, corporate America gets to wield power with the admin virtually unencumbered by scrutiny from the base.”
Serving up a series of examples, Axios reported that on issues such as artificial intelligence, marijuana, Venezuela, and redistricting — all of which “would have triggered significant MAGA backlash” earlier — there has been “mostly crickets.”
Trump reportedly will loosen federal regulations on marijuana soon — an act that once would have attracted MAGA influencers to scream about “pothead culture,” Axios noted. This time, however, the news “barely made a ripple on right-wing social media.”
The “America First” president seizing a tanker loaded with Venezuelan oil and refusing to rule out boots on the ground to overthrow the Maduro regime “barely pinged on MAGA’s radar.”
MAGA influencer CJ Pearson told Axios that “the movement is wholly consumed right now on personality clashes. That is a recipe for electoral doom, and it’s unfortunate to see the unity that we saw after Charlie [Kirk]’s death dissipate so quickly.”
READ MORE: ‘His Heart Just Ain’t in It’: Report Reveals Trump’s ‘Achilles Heel’
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President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, demanding records related to the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump “has increasingly pressured his administration to find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite those claims having been debunked and dismissed in dozens of cases by the courts,” The Washington Post reported.
The lawsuit calls for Fulton County to hand over to DOJ “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
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Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, according to the Post. “indirectly and without evidence accused Georgia officials of ‘vote dilution'” in a statement.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Dhillon said.
“At this Department of Justice,” Dhillon added, “we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Trump in a recorded telephone call told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
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Two years later, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump on racketeering charges. The case ultimately was recently dismissed after setbacks and that Trump, having since become a sitting president, could not be indicted.
Democracy Docket, which covers voting rights, elections, and the courts, called the move “a major escalation in the Trump administration’s dangerous effort to revive President Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen.”
The news site also reported that Kristin Nabers, the state director for All Voting is Local, said in a statement: “This administration’s unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia uses outright lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”
“With this terrible overstep of power, the DOJ is now weaponizing laws meant to protect voters for their political vendetta,” Nabers added.
Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics called it “More insane nonsense.”
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President Donald Trump’s “signature” weave — where he goes off-script and off-topic — is not working for Americans when it comes to affordability.
That’s according to CBS News correspondent John Dickerson, writing at The Atlantic.
His weave was “on display” this week during a speech that the White House promoted as focused remarks on the economy, but his comments included, Dickerson noted, “the topics of tariffs, U.S. Steel, fracking, wind turbines, electric-vehicle mandates, immigration, crime, gender policies, Obamacare, the Fed, his election victories, rare-earth negotiations, a D.C. terror attack, and ‘the lips that don’t stop’ of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”
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The problem, he noted is, “now that the engine of the U.S. economy is smoking, the American people are looking for a technician, not an improv comic.”
Trump is hitting “a wall of resentment,” according to Dickerson, who pointed to a Politico poll which, he noted, found that “nearly half of voters—including 37 percent of Trump’s own 2024 coalition—said that the cost of living is the ‘worst they can ever remember.'”
There’s more.
“Only 31 percent of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a new AP/NORC poll found, down from 40 percent in March,” he reported. “It’s the lowest economic approval that AP/NORC has registered in either of Trump’s two terms. In a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, a majority of respondents said that his policies are driving up food and grocery prices.”
During times of crisis other presidents have worked to get results:
“Franklin D. Roosevelt passed 15 major bills in 100 days. Ronald Reagan, in the teeth of double-digit unemployment, pushed for sweeping tax cuts week after week. Bill Clinton built an economic ‘war room’ before he even took office, and his team introduced what has now become a political cliché: focusing ‘like a laser beam’ on the economy. Barack Obama instituted a morning economic briefing that put the issue on par with national security. Each practiced the same principle: If you can’t solve the problem fast, at least get caught trying.”
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He say that now, Trump is trying. “Kind of.”
Despite talking about “affordability” during his Pennsylvania speech, he also knocked it.
“The president’s most focused message on affordability is that affordability concerns are a hoax. He used that word, or an equivalent, several times on Tuesday, as he has in Oval Office remarks, in a Cabinet meeting, and on social media.”
The “unavoidable truth, no matter how hard you weave,” Dickerson wrote, is that “his argument is weak because he has to overcome people’s lived experience.”
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