The Auron MacIntyre Show - August 20, 2026


The Battle for MAGA After Trump ｜ 8⧸20⧸26


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

148.89

Word count

1,284

Sentence count

69

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 When I first entered the public arena, the focus of my work was almost entirely on why the right needed to take power seriously.
00:00:07.540 Conservatives had suffered a devastating string of political and cultural losses because they focused on arguments and ideology while paying little attention to the way power actually worked.
00:00:17.960 That criticism drew plenty of hostility from defenders of the status quo who didn't appreciate some rookie pointing out why decades of conservative leadership had produced so little.
00:00:27.440 It turns out I wasn't alone.
00:00:29.220 Popular voices, including Matt Walsh and John Doyle, now openly support conservatives taking
00:00:34.840 and wielding power effectively. That disagreement has launched another round of public debate over
00:00:40.700 the pursuit of power, but the argument is only a proxy for a larger battle over J.D. Vance,
00:00:46.580 foreign policy, and the future of MAGA. Donald Trump represented a serious threat to the
00:00:52.740 established political order. Initially dismissed as a brash reality television host, he quickly
00:00:58.600 demonstrated that he was tapping into something deeper than celebrity and catchy insults. Trump
00:01:04.120 was not a career politician. He did not enter politics with deep ideological commitments,
00:01:09.540 and he didn't know or care about the established rules. Trump fused law and order, economic
00:01:15.980 protectionism, foreign policy restraint, immigration enforcement, and culture war issues in a way no
00:01:21.560 Republican candidate has since Pat Buchanan. Trump saw an untapped political market, and like any
00:01:27.240 good businessman, he gave the customers what they wanted. The people in charge didn't appreciate
00:01:32.580 this one bit. Many prominent establishment figures declared themselves Never Trump and vowed to
00:01:37.920 resist MAGA's takeover of the conservative movement. That strategy failed. Trump became a
00:01:43.100 political steamroller. Some Never Trumpers migrated into the Democratic coalition or created opposition
00:01:49.300 conservative outlets such as the Bulwark. Others decided to bide their time. MAGA had the populist
00:01:56.520 momentum, but the establishment still controlled the institutions, personnel, and much of the
00:02:01.940 class. The bet was that they could outlast MAGA and co-opt it, just as the Republican establishment
00:02:08.520 had absorbed the Tea Party. The next opportunity came with Ron DeSantis. Establishment conservatives
00:02:14.460 hoped Trump's legal troubles would make him vulnerable to a popular governor with a record
00:02:19.120 of victories. DeSantis was supposed to offer Trumpism without Trump. Populous energy packaged
00:02:24.580 in a form more compatible with the old ideological agenda.
00:02:28.400 Turns out that didn't work either.
00:02:30.120 There is no Trumpism.
00:02:31.660 There is only Trump, the man.
00:02:33.820 Trump's primary and general election victories removed any illusion that a direct assault
00:02:38.540 on him from inside the party could succeed.
00:02:41.780 If the establishment couldn't oust Trump, then the remaining option was to derail his
00:02:46.320 movement and prevent anyone from carrying MAGA into future elections.
00:02:49.960 Despite Republicans controlling the House, Senate, Presidency, and Supreme Court, congressional Republicans have repeatedly clashed with the administration.
00:02:59.520 The Senate stalled the confirmation of key personnel and hasn't passed the SAVE Act.
00:03:04.120 Republican politicians know that they must praise Trump rhetorically, but many continue to resist important parts of his agenda.
00:03:11.740 Just add a deeply unpopular war with no obvious end on top of that, and the result is an effective containment mechanism.
00:03:19.280 MAGA divided, distracted, and exhausted.
00:03:23.360 That's why the fight over J.D. Vance matters so much.
00:03:27.020 When Trump sent the vice president to negotiate a peace deal,
00:03:30.760 critics who had spent years presenting themselves as Trump's loyal allies
00:03:35.100 suddenly questioned Vance's ideology, associations, and viability as a successor.
00:03:41.000 Like Trump, Vance isn't wedded to the neoconservative foreign policy.
00:03:44.860 His role in the negotiations made it clear that he was being prepared as a possible heir to the
00:03:50.320 movement. At the same time, some critics began presenting Marco Rubio as an alternative while
00:03:56.120 attacking any attempt to withdraw from the conflict. Not exactly a subtle move here, guys.
00:04:01.440 The fights over power, foreign policy, affordability, and the dangers of the new right
00:04:06.440 are all, therefore, part of the same proxy war for control of the GOP. It's not an accident that
00:04:12.880 many establishment figures who favor expansive military commitments abroad also recoil from
00:04:18.800 using political power aggressively at home. We can always find money for war, but when the cost
00:04:25.080 of living becomes unbearable, suddenly government action is communism. The overlap is not accidental.
00:04:31.460 It reflects the old conservative settlement. Republicans can fight wars abroad and protect
00:04:37.100 big business at home. They may talk endlessly about social issues, but they're never supposed
00:04:42.800 to spend serious political capital actually addressing them. That would be, you know,
00:04:47.560 again, socialism or communism or something. This is why it may seem strange at first to watch
00:04:53.420 figures like James Lindsay, Joel Berry, and Ben Shapiro portray guys like Matt Walsh as a socialist
00:04:59.020 or J.D. Vance as a crypto-Nazi, but the rhetoric makes a lot more sense when viewed through
00:05:04.480 coalitional politics. Whatever they think personally of Walsh or Vance, they recognize
00:05:10.220 both of these men as a threat to an order that existed for decades. The conservative movement
00:05:15.900 became comfortable as beautiful losers. Controlled opposition rewarded with money, status, and 0.97
00:05:22.140 institutional access while the country moved steadily left. Trump disrupted that arrangement.
00:05:28.040 Vance threatens to continue disrupting it. If conservatism is ever to become a real political
00:05:33.860 movement it must escape the ideological shackles that keep it from acting as russell kirk argued
00:05:40.200 in the conservative mind conservatism should not be about preserving an abstract ideology
00:05:46.340 but instead preserving a particular people and their way of life maga represented that shift
00:05:53.580 it was willing to pursue policies that improve the lives of americans even when those policies
00:05:59.260 fell outside of the neoconservative economic or foreign policy orthodoxy achieving these goals
00:06:06.540 requires the right to think seriously about power and how to wield it even reducing the size of
00:06:12.540 government requires acquiring and applying state power it was easy to tell ourselves that after
00:06:19.520 trump won a second election and everyone recognized that they had to basically praise this man
00:06:25.340 endlessly in order to just get elected that he had total control of the conservative movement
00:06:31.040 that makes sense at some level but what's obviously being revealed is that they are still
00:06:36.460 a very very real never trump movement inside the republican party and these people are perfectly
00:06:42.380 capable of praising trump out of one side of their mouth while ultimately trying to sabotage him at
00:06:48.240 every turn we see this in their drive towards a disastrous foreign policy we see that they are
00:06:54.080 ultimately attacking the very base that got Trump elected in the first place, and we see that they
00:06:59.520 are attempting to completely destroy the ability of MAGA to hand the project off to the next leader.
00:07:05.920 The project of the Never Trumpers now is to poison the well around Vance, prevent him from inheriting
00:07:12.060 the movement, and return the GOP establishment to politics as usual. This is the argument underneath
00:07:18.700 the latest round of conservative infighting. The personalities change, the immediate controversy
00:07:24.300 changes, and the slogans change, but the stakes remain constant. Someone will define what MAGA
00:07:30.740 becomes after Trump, and the establishment has no intention of surrendering that decision.
00:07:36.720 The arguments breaking out across the conservative commentariat are not separate fights.
00:07:41.840 They are a proxy battle over the same question. Who gets to rule the Republican Party after Trump
00:07:47.360 is gone.
00:08:17.360 the links to do that are down below in the description and of course if you want to pick
00:08:22.460 up my book the total state it's out in its second edition a paperback with an extra chapter you can
00:08:27.720 do that over on amazon you can always read all of my columns and watch all of my shows over at the
00:08:33.840 blaze thanks for watching and as always i'll talk to you next time