Why Don’t We Form a MAGA Party?

When Trump first announced in 2015, nobody in the GOP took him very seriously. After all, he was up against guys like John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, all of whom were not only long-time party stalwarts, but had been waiting around for the Obama years to end.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Trump sliced through the whole bunch of them in a couple of months and went on to beat Hillary in the general election, even though she outspent him by two to one.

And what does Trump then do? Instead of making nice to all his brief competitors, Trump from the beginning of his Presidency went out of his way to cast aspersions on the motives and performance of every other member of the GOP leadership and then to make matters worse, promoted his MAGA brand as a supposed and sometimes actual organizational alternative to the GOP.

Not only did Trump take phony umbrage at anyone and everyone in the party who didn’t play ball with his brand of politics, but he went out of his way to pick fights with non-party individuals who didn’t or wouldn’t dance to his tune.

What did Trump gain by calling Anthony Fauci a liar? This was a man, I’m talking about Fauci, who saved millions of people from the terrible public health threat known as AIDS.

Want did Trump gain by picking a public argument with Jeff Bezos just because Bezos owned the Washington Post? You don’t get into a fight with a guy who has totally transformed the consumer economy, which happens to be the economic activity which makes the American economy the largest economy in the entire world by far.

I remember that after the 2017 inauguration, there was a Women’s March on Washington with a crowd (see pic above) estimated to be twice as large as the attendance that watched Trump take the oath. What Trump should have done instead of ignoring this event was to invite the leaders into the White House for lunch and a face-to-face talk.

If nothing else, making nice with a group representing the gender that consistently underperforms for Trump in the polls might have made a difference in some of the states which went back to being blue in the 2020 campaign.

Trump keeps referring to MAGA as a ‘movement,’ because he isn’t about to form a separate third party and challenge the GOP head on. But what Trump can’t control are the political ambitions of some of his MAGA acolytes like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz who see themselves as turning the MAGA brand into a vehicle which they can ride into the Oval Office over the coming years.

In the 2040 election, MJT will be sixty-six years old, Gaetz will only be fifty-eight. Think those two aren’t setting their sights on a run for the big one in sixteen years? Think again.

With the advent of AI, which now permeates every aspect of social media, building a political party isn’t like the olden days when someone had to stand in front of every supermarket begging housewives dragging some little brats into the store to stop for a minute and sign a petition to get your candidate on a ballot line.

Now, all you have to do is buy or swipe some email lists and put up a website with a page which lets you create the petition for recognizing a new political party and you’re good to go. And by the way, most if not just about all the folks who would help you run your campaign, would be willing to work for free. After all, if several thousand MAGA schmucks were willing to invade the Capitol to hang Mike Pence, how difficult would it be to find another crop of MAGA diehards to sit in a room and mann some phones?

Even though I’m the yellowest of all yellow-dog Democrats you’ll ever want to meet, the more I think about this scheme of creating an independent MAGA political party, the more I think it’s a doable idea and could even make me a few bucks.

The only real difficulty will be how much I’ll have to pay Trump for his MAGA brand. But we can run a GoFundMe campaign to take care of that.

Oops, I forgot! We also need a national finance chairman but I’m willing to bet that Elon Musk would be ready, willing and certainly able to fulfill that role.

Too bad I didn’t think of this idea sooner because why wait for the 2040 campaign when we can always run George Santos as our Presidential candidate this year?