The Hydra Chokes: Inside MAGA's Stalemate and Self-Inflicted Decay
Some big problems are grinding Trump’s second term into stalemate.
After nearly a year of the second Trump administration’s flurry of (often illegal) executive actions and Steve Bannon’s early cries of “muzzle velocity” as a governing philosophy, the would-be authoritarian regime now finds itself mired in a bog of internal knife fights, lawsuits, broken promises, and a growing chorus of allies who’ve decided self-preservation matters a lot more than loyalty to the man in the high tower.
How did we get here?
You might chalk it up to dumb luck for the “good guys” — and sure, there’s some of that — but the real story is, as usual, a lot dumber and more human. The new Trump coalition happily dragged almost anyone into the tent: Q-pilled zealots, the bored and apolitical, people obsessed with “releasing the Epstein files,” and people who just remembered that life felt less chaotic from 2017 until the pandemic. Some were motivated by ultranationalism, some by nihilism, some by xenophobia; but the new coalition was propelled to victory by those whose votes were informed by growing rents and grocery bills.
But it’s almost impossible to open your tent that wide and still give everyone what they thought they were promised. It’s even harder when the only person you actually care about is yourself, and your real project isn’t restoring America to “greatness”, rather it’s just personal enrichment and power at the expense of anyone and everyone else.
Muzzle Velocity to Mud
The opening months of Trump’s second term felt like a speedrun of every authoritarian fever dream. Trump comes back into office insisting he has a sweeping mandate. He purges civil servants who are there for America instead of Trump, he gives Project 2025’s founders free reign to implement it, and he surrounds himself with tech-bro asset J.D. Vance and a bench full of Heritage lawyers and tech-world oligarchs (the so-called Christofascists vs. Technofascists from my previous article).
For a while, it works. The right’s culture-war superfans are ecstatic. Tech oligarchs get their AI wish list. Christian nationalists get their hands on the machinery of the state. The average apolitical voter isn’t paying close attention yet; they just see a guy who said he’d bulldoze the things that are making their lives shitty and, to his credit, it looks like he actually is bulldozing something. And who knows if it’s good; at least they can finally see some kind of change from the government.
But no matter the muzzle velocity, no bullet escapes gravity’s pull.
Trump’s tariff tantrums and chaotic budget cuts start hitting regular people where it hurts: rent, groceries, car payments. His “I’ll end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours” promise turns into a groveling plea for Ukraine to accept what amounts to a surrender plan that was written in Moscow. Gaza is a hellscape: first we talk about U.S. occupation, then we write a blank check to Netanyahu, then constant lurching between “let them finish the job” and “wow this looks pretty bad on TV, tone it down.”
The authoritarian machine isn’t falling apart for lack of power. They came in with what felt like unlimited power. But the muzzle velocity drops as the machinery jams. Without any real guiding principles from the king, the factions that happily marched in lockstep when the target was “woke elites” suddenly remember they hate each other — all while a growing contingent of actual neo-Nazis begins to infect the mainstream of the Republican party.
I won’t pretend to have been above panic or that I always had the “correct” opinion about how Trump’s second term would play out (although — shameless plug — I did predict the right-wing overextension on the culture war front). The truth is that I’ve been, and still am, deeply concerned for the future of the republic. I genuinely believe that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the constitutional order and that there is still a real possibility that he, with support from his Christian nationalist and Tech oligarch allies, will be able to assert dictatorial control over the United States of America. But Trump’s own selfishness; his lack of discipline; his willingness to sell the country off to the highest bidders appears to be directly working against the actors who have long planned to discard liberal democracy in favor of their own brands of autocracy.
The Bill Comes Due
Some big problems are grinding Trump’s second term into stalemate.
Epstein Files
“Release the list” was a rallying cry on the right-wing for years. In the run-up to the election, Trump’s surrogates turned appointees (meet conspiracy theorists & podcasters turned FBI chiefs Kash Patel and Dan Bongino) were gung-ho about releasing the so-called list and exposing all the crooks involved.
But when the chance finally arrives and the power is all his? Trump does what Trump always does when his own interests are at risk: he tries his hardest to bury it. That goes badly. Republicans in Congress, some sincerely disgusted and some just smelling blood in the water, join their Democratic colleagues to force a release of the files. Trump loses the fight in his own party and then, as usual, pretends it was his idea all along.
To a lot of his voters, this really doesn’t look quite right. The guy who promised to finally expose the “elite pedo ring” suddenly looks like he’s actually…protecting it? You don’t need to believe every insane conspiracy theory to feel gross about that. In the past I never actually thought Trump was implicated in the Epstein affair, but his actions have even made me question just why he would fight so hard to keep them hidden.
Cost of Living
Trump and his people can spin in the media and tweet all the charts they want about “Bidenflation.” But the reality is that none of it actually matters when a family walks into the grocery store and watches the total climb. Tariffs sold to the American people as righting some wrong by foreign countries ripping us off actually work as a tax on food, clothes, and the basics that everyone needs. Eventually the White House has to partially back off and ease some of the tariffs on consumer goods. That reversal pisses off the nationalists and confirms what all the critics were shouting from the start: this was an entirely self-inflicted wound. Now the Supreme Court even seems poised to strike down Trump’s unilateral ability to impose tariffs.
Foreign Policy
The 24-hour Ukraine “miracle” that Trump promised turns into months of pressure on Zelenskyy to accept a “peace plan” that’s functionally a surrender: permanent loss of territory, forced neutrality, and their military on a leash. The Kremlin loves it — and why wouldn’t they? They did write it, after all. But Kyiv doesn’t. Europe doesn’t. Even some old-school Republican hawks don’t. The administration ends up looking weak and oddly eager to carry Putin’s water just so Trump can get a “win” on paper and get that Nobel Peace Prize he’s been yearning for.
This same pattern plays out in the Middle East. Trump’s early “do whatever you want” approach to Netanyahu delights Christian Zionists, but the footage from Gaza horrifies almost everyone else — even people who otherwise supported Israel’s war against Hamas. (And no one forgot about the “Trump Gaza” hotel idea either).
Under pressure from markets, allies, a younger generation that’s not keen on endless war, and a surprisingly loud contingent of groypers who just don’t want us helping “the Jews,” the White House nudges toward a ceasefire. That enrages the hardliners who thought they finally had their biblical final showdown, while doing nothing to erase the months of carnage.
Mass Deportation
Lots of people who voted for Trump were thinking, “Sure, deport violent offenders, fix the asylum system, stop the chaos.” That’s honestly a very reasonable take. They weren’t thinking, “Let’s watch ICE raid churches, terrorize daycares, and teargas children.” They weren’t prepared for a teenager who gets wrongfully deported, or the videos of parents ripped away from their terrified and heartbroken kids in parking lots.
The hardcore nativists and propagandists may cheer; but business owners, neighbors, pastors, friends, and a lot of quiet-Republican suburbanites do not. It feels a lot less like “law and order” and more like a government that enjoys cruelty for its own sake.
Pile those together. Epstein, groceries, Ukraine, Gaza, deportation raids — and you get a simple picture: Trump’s version of “strength” keeps boomeranging back and hitting him in the face. Not necessarily in a way that magically saves liberal democracy on its own, but seemingly enough to weaken the spell.
Kleptocracy vs. True Believers
What happens in an authoritarian project when the dictator doesn’t actually care about the ideology?
I’ve written about this before; the so-called altar and algorithm. There’s the Christian nationalists on one side: Heritage, the Federalist Society, Mike Johnson, Kevin Roberts, and the preachers who say secular society is heretical. On the other side you have the tech oligarchs: Thiel, Musk, and the rest of the Curtis Yarvin acolytes who want a CEO-run state.
And they can certainly work together, for a time. But only as long as the enemy is something abstract like “wokeness.” But their goals are just fundamentally incompatible. One wants a theocracy that locks in a biblical idea of family, gender, and faith. Meanwhile the other wants a society in the end-stage of capitalism, where markets and oligarchs rule over everything.
But while Trump is happy to accept patronage from these two factions, the reality is that he’s loyal to neither of them. His only loyalty is, and always has been, to himself.
That means every single serious project inside his administration must get pegged to the most important questions: what does this do for me right now? Does it help me and my family get richer? Does it help me avoid my legal troubles? Do I get publicly praised for it?
So you get scenes like:
Project 2025 staffers working for years to draft policy blueprints for a new theocratic state, only to be kneecapped by Trump’s flip-flopping on policy.
Tech billionaires plotting to build their surveillance/AI state, then get humiliated on social media because Trump felt disrespected or slighted in some way.
Hard-right influencers whipping up their audiences for “revolution,” then privately realizing that the guy they’re shilling for keeps fawning over whoever flatters or charms him the best.
To be clear, none of this makes Trump less dangerous. It just means that the danger is undisciplined. It’s a shambling, corrupt machine prone to tripping over its own feet while it swings at enemies.
The Kids at the Edge of the Stage
There’s another growing faction in this fight that’s easy to miss: the zoomer far-right.
Nick Fuentes and his army of “Groypers” don’t care about constitutional theory and they don’t give a damn about liberal democracy. Their generation came of age with only ever knowing Trump’s vitriolic brand of politics. COVID and its lockdowns shaped their youths. Fuentes’ so-called “Groypers” see their prospects as hopeless. From dating, career prospects, or home ownership. So to take revenge on a system they feel failed them, they’ve decided they just want to burn it all down with open fascism. They want anti-miscegenation laws to right the “wrongs” that have led to their failed dating lives. They want a white ethno-state so “those people” stop taking their job opportunities.
Trump himself has always played a really weird game with these groups. He likes to toss them rhetorical scraps just to keep them happy and make them believe he’s on their side (remember “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by”), and then pretends like he has no idea who they are whenever he gets bad PR because of it. Meanwhile, they chant his name and talk openly about what comes after Trump. They want a leader who is even more ruthless; who is even less bound by the old norms; and most importantly, less interested in Trumpian-style grift and more in ideological purity.
These people have always been kept to the fringes of the right-wing, but they’re beginning to creep their way into the mainstream of the Republican party and that is serving to further weaken the party’s grip on power.
From the outside it might look like a monolith, but from the inside it’s a huge mess of clashing fantasies about what restoring our nation to “greatness” actually means.
So What Happens Next?
You might be wondering, “so…what does this all mean? What happens next?” It’s tempting to think that these cracks and schisms mean that the Trump administration is destined to come crashing down. I’d love to believe that. But I don’t.
I reiterate that I believe Donald Trump is a unique danger to the constitutional order. The guardrails have been demolished. The courts are packed with loyalists. The administrative state has been bent and kneecapped in ways that will take years to undo, even under great leadership.
What has changed is that Trump’s “aura” of invincibility appears to be fading, if not altogether gone. Republicans watched him lose the Epstein fight in a chamber they control. They watched off-year elections in 2025 become mini-referendums on Trumpism specifically, with Democrats wildly overperforming and moderate Republicans bleeding support in areas that were previously safe. They’re starting to imagine life after him. Quietly for now, but their whispers will only keep growing.
On the movement side, you can practically feel the tension between the techno-authoritarians, the religious nationalists, and the zoomer fascists. Each thinks they’re the future of the right. Each thinks they could do a dictatorship “properly” if this asshole at the top would just get behind them instead of only being in it for himself. None of them are willing to compromise enough to build a truly stable regime together.
For a coalition that wants to beat back MAGA, Trumpism, and the broader right-wing extremist project, this moment is a weird mix of danger and opportunity. The danger is obvious: desperate authoritarians do desperate things and a cornered regime is capable of atrocities it wouldn’t have dared try when it felt untouchable.
Regular people who voted for Trump because they were hurting are now watching groceries spike, allies die overseas, neighbors dragged off in raids, and their president twist himself into a pretzel to hide the truth about rich pedophiles. No one expects them to suddenly become liberals. But some of them are open, for the first time in a very long time, to the idea that Trump’s “art of the deal” has just been a con all along.
And that’s where a real opposition has to live. We can’t waste time lecturing people and chastising them for voting the way they did. We need to give them an off-ramp. A politics that says: yes, the system is broken; no, the answer is not a king; here’s a way to actually make your life less miserable without putting absolute power in the hands of a guy who wouldn’t think twice about screwing you over to make a buck.
The authoritarian MAGA project is bloated and paranoid; it’s full of backstabbers and looters. And its weakened state might just be a chance for a true pro-democracy coalition to destroy this illiberal ideology once and for all.
As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat. You can find me on the following platforms:
Substack: https://unaligned.sh
Twitter: https://x.com/just_becs
Email: rebecca@unaligned.sh