Rallying Cries for the MAGA Right
A look at some of the bright ideas that the GOP base could turn into slogans to make their priorities clear.
EVER SINCE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY declined to come up with a platform in the 2020 election, embracing fidelity to Donald Trump as its only animating principle, there has been a pervasive belief that it is somehow sorely lacking in the Ideas Department. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, maybe MAGA Republicans and their supporters aren’t churning out legislative solutions to real problems. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of slogan-worthy causes for the party faithful to embrace.
As a probably pointless primary process plays out and the Party of Lincoln slouches towards Milwaukee to be reborn in Trump’s image, let us take stock of some of the MAGA causes that could be adapted into modern-age rallying cries, suitable for hoisted signs.
No, silly, not the ones captured by Hamas on October 7 and still being held, but the ones who’ve been locked up for their role in that dust-up at the U.S. Capitol three years ago. “They ought to release the J6 hostages,” Trump said during a recent campaign stop, drawing cheers from his audience. “I call them hostages. Some people call them prisoners, I call them hostages. Release the J6 hostages, Joe. Release them, Joe. You could do it real easy, Joe.”
Trump described the rioters—more than 1,200 of whom have been charged with crimes for busting into the building, brutalizing police officers, and attempting to thwart the peaceful transfer of executive power—as “patriotic and peaceful.” He’s promised to come to their rescue with presidential pardons.
Shortly after Trump dropped his H-bomb, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who as the Republican conference chair is the party’s third-highest ranking House member, used it herself. “I have concerns about the treatment of January 6th hostages,” she said on Meet the Press. “I have concerns—we have a role in Congress of oversight over our treatments [sic] of prisoners.”
Yes, it’s hard to keep track of all the times that Republicans have gone to bat for prisoners, which the United States has more of than any nation on earth. Perhaps Stefanik will join forces with Bryan Stevenson.
For most political players, electoral campaigns are a wrenching experience. You win some, you lose some, even when you’ve given it all you’ve got (and then some). But today’s Republicans have worked out an end run around these disappointing outcomes: Just say that any election you lose is illegitimate. Trump sowed the seeds for this contention well before the 2020 election (“The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged”), and he and his followers are sowing them again.
Take Stefanik, for instance, who during the same appearance on Meet the Press pointedly refused to commit to respecting the results of the 2024 election should Trump not win, saying “We will see if this is a legal and valid election.” The one in 2020, she posited, was tainted by “unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution.”
That each and every one of the more than sixty challenges to the 2024 election results were soundly rejected by courts as baseless is immaterial to such claims. Unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution cannot be disproved by a mere lack of evidence or legal merit. With founding myths, that’s just the way it is.
The same strategy of simply denying an election result that one does not like has been embraced by Kari Lake in Arizona, who lost her bid to become that state’s governor in 2022 and has yet to concede. (In late November, an Arizona judge rejected Lake’s most recent challenge to that election, comparing her quest to that of fabled villagers searching for a goose that laid a golden egg “except that her goose failed to lay the egg she expected.”) Indeed, Lake and Stefanik are both seen as leading prospects to be Trump’s running mate. Hmmm, wonder if they’ll join him in saying he was robbed?
Asked whether Donald Trump’s use of the word “vermin” to describe his opponents might come across as being a wee bit fascistic, the former president’s campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, replied: “Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
Similar nonchalance greeted Trump’s borrowing of Hitler’s language for talking about how immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” It’s just Trump being Trump. His followers are fine with it. Hark back to 2016, when white supremacist Richard Spencer cheered Trump’s electoral win with a rousing “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” Attendees at the white nationalist conference he was addressing offered straight-armed Nazi salutes in response. Spencer told NBC News he was trying to be “cheeky, “exuberant,” and “ironic.”
The irony is over. Trump and his supporters now openly promise to exact revenge on his political foes, which will explicitly include locking them up. Kash Patel, one of Trump’s former National Security Council advisers who is now being eyed for the job of CIA director in the next Trump administration, has vowed, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.”
And Trump’s supporters eat it up. They stand for it. Hail Trump.
The words immunity and immunization have the same Latin root: immunis, which means “exempt.” But the GOP response to each is widely divergent.
Let’s look at immunization first. Party operators seeking to rally the masses with a divisive issue have been so successful in raising unfounded fears about the danger of vaccines that a survey last fall found that just 7 percent of adults and 2 percent of children had received the latest vaccine for COVID-19, for which hospitalization rates are soaring; almost 40 percent of respondents said they “probably” or “definitely” wouldn’t get it for themselves or their kids. And the exemption rate for routine childhood vaccinations is the highest it’s ever been, causing medical experts to warn of the possible resurgence of diseases like the measles.
On the subject of immunity, however, the MAGA mind takes a different view: Vast swaths of Trump supporters have no problem with the contention advanced by Trump’s lawyers that he has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his actions as president absent a conviction at an impeachment trial. He could even order the assassination of a political rival—or, for that matter, however many U.S. senators it would take to thwart a conviction in an impeachment trial.
Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who helped prevent Trump’s removal via impeachment by arguing that the nation had a criminal justice system from which presidents were not exempt, now claims meekly that the issue is above his pay grade, telling reporters, “I choose not to get involved in it and comment about any of the people running for the Republican nomination.”
In both cases, immunization and immunity, the party is trying to make itself exempt from reality.
There was jubilation last week throughout the right-wing ecosystem as a federal appeals court halted the Biden administration’s effort to overturn some Trump-era changes to the rules for dishwashers and laundry machines. And, naturally, the outcome was framed in militaristic terms.
“Federal court throws wrench into Biden’s war on appliances,” crowed the right-wing website WDN, republishing a piece by the Daily Caller. Meanwhile, the Washington Times ran its story under the headline, “Court serves defeat to Biden’s dishwasher police.”
In 2020, Trump’s Department of Energy approved standards proposed by the industry- and foundation-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, which said the longer dishwash times were “making life miserable for families.” (Talk about First World problems.) Similar relaxed rules were passed for top-loading washing machines. Biden’s DoE in 2021 repealed those standards and introduced new ones that were less wasteful. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals called the administration’s reversal “arbitrary and capricious” and sent it back to the department for additional attention.
As with all efforts to improve conservation, warn consumers of dangers (as in the case of gas stoves), or protect the environment (another alleged War on Appliances battle rages over EPA actions to curtail the use of dangerous chemicals in refrigerators and air conditioners), the Biden team’s standards are being cast as intolerable infringements on human rights.
“Glad a federal appeals court struck down the Energy Department’s overreaching & unnecessary regulatory actions targeting dishwashers,” clucked GOP Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina on X. Soon, conservative talker Jesse Kelly chimed in: “Why would Biden want to regulate dishwashers when he always talks about not controlling a woman’s body?”
You can’t argue with logic like that.
To those on the right, no threat to the republic is greater than the one posed by DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion. Exclaims former Trump aide Stephen Miller, “This DEI bigotry is sinister, wrong, immoral—and must be defeated.” Trump, as president, did his best to defeat it, issuing an 2020 executive order (which Biden rescinded) banning the federal government and its contractors from giving “malign” consideration to gender or race.
Now the scourge of diversity has been implicated in a horrifying airplane mishap. No, really.
On her program on January 9, Fox News host Laura Ingraham aired a segment about the Boeing 737 plane that lost a door panel at 16,000 feet above the state of Oregon. Thankfully no one was hurt, but experts agree it could have been much worse had it happened at a higher altitude. Some have suggested that lax industry oversight might have played a role. Not Ingraham. She zeroed in on another possibility: The company is too focused on hiring women and minorities.
Ingraham said that while “doors are falling off the planes” at Boeing, the company had touted its recent success in building a more diverse workforce, including 47 percent of hires at the management and executive levels. She continued, “We can’t link the diversity efforts to what happened—that would, you know, take an exhaustive investigation. But it’s worth asking at this point: Is excellence what we need in airline operation, or is diversity the goal here?”—the obvious implication being that it is impossible to have both at the same time.
Three days later, Ingraham returned to the topic to allege that efforts to promote diversity are “shredding the standards of excellence” and putting people’s lives at risk. “Now in some settings, when DEI comes first and merit second, this may mean needless American deaths—and a lot of them.” Others on the right chimed in, including Fox Business host Sean Duffy, who teased his segment on the issue with this: “Attention Boeing executives, DEI must die, not passengers on your planes.” It’s an act of self-defense.
As president during the worst public health crisis in a century, Donald Trump promoted crack cures, including injecting disinfectants to make the COVID go away. He appeared to use a Sharpie to change the trajectory of a hurricane to match his erroneous pronouncements. He kicked scientists off EPA advisory panels, replacing them with quacks. He shrugged off the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding climate change, declaring, based on no evidence: “It will start getting cooler, just you watch.” (No, 2023 was, by far, the warmest year on record, but gosh darn if Iowa didn’t get real cold in mid-January!)
Now Trump has shared his non-peer-reviewed findings about magnets, claiming they stop working if they get wet. “Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets,” Trump expounded during a recent Iowa rally. He immediately followed that up with this: “Why didn’t they use John Deere? Why didn’t they bring in the John Deere people? Do you like John Deere? I like John Deere.”
Trump also recently explained that the way to prevent wildfires in California forest lands is to keep them damp. As he put it: “If you dampen your forests you’re not gonna have these forest fires that are burning at levels that nobody’s ever seen.” Someone needs to get right on that.
Perhaps Trump will donate his brain to science after he passes so that, long past his lifetime, it can continue to conjure up innovative solutions like these.
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