As Republicans faced a nationwide drubbing in Tuesday’s midterm elections, supporters streamed out of a Dallas ballroom where they’d hoped to toast a win for US Senate candidate Ken Paxton, a favorite of President Donald Trump.
In the hotel bar, Michael Little, a 59-year-old businessman and three-time Trump voter, stared at the president’s image on a television screen. “People are pissed off at Trump. Trump has cost us,” he said, capturing a sentiment rippling through the president’s Make America Great Again movement after the Republican Party’s worst electoral defeat in decades.
Across the coalition, some supporters who once viewed Trump as MAGA’s greatest asset are beginning to question whether he’s become its biggest liability.
The midterm losses amounted to more than a repudiation of Trump. They were a referendum on the political and cultural movement he built. A defining force in American politics that began as a campaign slogan during Trump’s 2016 presidential run now faces a potentially existential reckoning after voters disillusioned with soaring fuel prices, the Iran war and Washington corruption delivered Democrats decisive congressional majorities.
Trump’s first major response to the midterms came on Friday. Instead of changing course, he doubled down on the movement’s core. He promoted Stephen Miller, the main architect of the administration’s hardline immigration crackdown, to chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles. Wiles was seen as a stabilizing force inside an often chaotic White House.
The move was celebrated by some of MAGA’s most ardent influencers, who saw it as a return to the anti-immigration agenda at the movement’s roots. “Exactly the energy we need,” right-wing influencer Benny Johnson posted on X to his 4.1 million followers. “Solid move. It’s Miller Time.”
The White House did not directly answer Reuters’ questions about why Republicans lost, the defeat of candidates who embraced Trump’s false 2020 election claims, or where MAGA goes from here. Instead, it pointed to Trump’s remarks on Wednesday, when he said, “If I were on the ballot, we would have won.” He also said it was “largely true” that the Iran war had cost Republicans because “it drove the gasoline up,” but that he’d do it again.
For nearly a decade, MAGA has reshaped the Republican Party and transformed national debates on issues such as trade, immigration, race and gender. The movement installed loyalists throughout federal agencies, cracked down on immigration and pressured corporations and public institutions to retreat from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. MAGA survived the fallout from the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and propelled Trump back to the White House. In Trump’s second term, MAGA was no longer a faction of the Republican Party; it was the party.
Now, the Democrats’ sweeping victory has forced the movement to grapple with an unexpected question: Is MAGA over?
Reuters interviews with more than a dozen MAGA activists, influencers, party strategists, Christian nationalist leaders and researchers who track right-wing politics, along with a review of MAGA supporters’ posts and podcasts since Tuesday, show a movement turning its anger on itself.
The stolen-election claims that have driven MAGA since Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election have mostly gone quiet. Instead, supporters are blaming Republican leaders and Trump’s advisers, and in some cases the president himself, for broken promises on living costs, the Iran war and the government’s decision to redact or withhold major portions of its investigative files on late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
MAGA’s factions also disagree about what comes next. Some want a return to populist and nationalist basics. Some want a movement less tied to one man. And a vocal minority say MAGA is already dead.
“We have to rebuild,” Steve Bannon, a prominent MAGA proponent, podcaster and former Trump White House adviser, told Reuters. He urged the party to double down on an aggressive populist and nationalist agenda and praised Trump for elevating Miller. “Miller’s appointment as chief of staff underpins my point,” he said. “There is no more hardcore MAGA proponent than Stephen.”
As pro-Trump internet forums digested the election results, a notable slice of self-described MAGA loyalists – more than 20% – raised doubts about the movement’s leadership and direction, according to an analysis of social media traffic done for Reuters by PeakMetrics, a data intelligence firm. About half of that cohort remained supportive of the MAGA movement but no longer backed Trump as its leader. The other half remained loyal to, though critical of, the president himself.
The analysis was based on 12,850 posts sampled from a universe of 4.6 million Trump-related comments on X and Reddit from 9 p.m. on Election Day to 8 p.m. the next evening. It found broad concern among MAGA supporters as the results became clear. Of the posts that assigned blame for the rout, nearly a third said concerns about the Iran war and Israel’s influence over US policy had overshadowed Trump’s message. A quarter said Republicans not fully committed to the MAGA agenda had undermined the movement.
The results left Trump facing large Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. Democrats could hold as many as 56 of the Senate’s 100 seats, more than enough to block his judicial nominees. They will also hold governorships in all seven battleground states Trump won in 2024, and they swept every statewide race in Texas, which last backed a Democrat for president in 1976.
Some prominent Republicans, long wary of a MAGA base that punished dissent, have begun openly criticizing Trump.
Republican US Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said on Saturday that corruption was present in “all branches of government,” including “I’m sad to say, within the Trump administration.” He cited Calley Means, a former White House adviser who told “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast on Friday that Trump’s top aides catered to special interests and blocked policies popular with Trump’s Make America Healthy Again movement. Voters “were expecting us to drain the swamp, but it seems like the swamp won,” Johnson told Fox News.
Asked about Johnson’s remarks and Means’ accusations, White House spokesperson Allison Schuster did not address the corruption allegations, saying Trump had “made incredible strides to Make America Healthy Again.”
On Sunday, Republican US Representative Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, who won reelection despite his party’s losses, called Trump’s promotion of Miller a “bad mistake.” “You don’t promote those who were in charge,” Stutzman told CNN. “He’s not liked out here in the Midwest by people. They don’t like his tone,” he said of Miller.
