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Opinion The fault lines that could imperil Democrats  Opinions - Campaign | 1 minute ago

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MAGA made Trump — it won’t disappear when he does

Trump named it, but he did not create it. The spirit of what we now call “MAGA” was circulating long before he arrived.

What Trump did was recognize the sentiment, brand it, and give it a rallying cry. The slogan didn’t invent a movement; it catalyzed one. It pulled together a fragmented set of conservative circles and gave them a single banner. In that sense, MAGA didn’t emerge from Trump’s imagination — Trump emerged from the cultural terrain MAGA had already shaped.

But why was the branding so catalytic?

Within conservative circles, the slogan carried unspoken implications. If America needed to be made “great again,” then the Obama years — led by the nation’s first African American president — must have made it worse.

The slogan also suggested that electing Trump was the only path to restoration. And it offered something more personal: supporting Trump would make you great again, too. Trump reinforced this with lines like “We’ll never stop winning” and “We’ll be respected again.” For many conservatives, competition is a cultural instinct. Suddenly they had a team name, a team jersey, and a coach promising a championship.

But the need to “win” went deeper than sports-style victories. It was about controlling the direction of American culture and protecting it from perceived threats already identified. In 2006, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly published “Culture Warrior,” which cast American politics as a struggle between “traditionalists” and “secular-progressives.” That framing taught millions of viewers to see cultural conflict — not policy — as the central political battlefield.

Two decades later, we hear similar themes echoed by leaders who describe secular humanism as a force weakening American institutions. The continuity is striking. The language of cultural combat has been a through-line in conservative media and politics for years, since long before Trump descended the escalator.

Now the country has Trump, its self‑styled culture warrior, in charge. He often says he will “be a president for all people,” yet his electoral coalition has always reflected a deeply polarized nation.

Trump won 46 percent of the popular vote in 2016 and 50 percent in 2024 — competitive numbers, but not the broad national mandate his rhetoric suggests. To be fair, his opponents weren’t any better. But regardless of the margins, Trump governs and communicates as a combatant, not a unifier. He routinely casts his political opponents as threats rather than fellow citizens. That posture all but guarantees a country split between those who see the federal government as their champion and those who see it as their adversary.

Within that divide, MAGA supporters themselves are far from monolithic. Some are deeply committed to the movement’s core themes — law‑and‑order politics, economic nationalism, and a desire for renewed international respect. Others are more loosely aligned, sympathetic to the message without embracing every part of the platform. And a significant share are simply voters who will not support Democratic candidates, regardless of the specifics of the MAGA agenda.

Because the culture‑war frame divides the country into two morally opposed camps — and because the MAGA movement has intensified without expanding its base — our politics increasingly resembles a kind of rhetorical civil war. The conflict plays out in language, identity, and loyalty tests rather than on battlefields, but the effect is the same: a nation where disagreement is treated as disloyalty and political opponents are cast as existential threats.

The consequences are no longer confined to rhetoric. In recent years, the culture‑war framing has already spilled into moments of physical confrontation between federal authorities and citizens. These incidents are not yet widespread, but they reveal how a politics built on existential threat can move from language to action. When leaders describe fellow Americans as dangers to the nation, some supporters inevitably begin to treat political conflict as something more than civic disagreement.

The question before us now is how we move beyond this. It begins with engaging the most reasonable voices within the Republican base — the voters who may feel culturally displaced but are not committed to perpetual conflict.

Their concerns are real: the erosion of traditional family structures, the presence of unauthorized immigrants in our country, the economic decline of rural communities, and the sense that Christian religious values are increasingly dismissed in public life.

Acknowledging these issues does not require abandoning the pursuit of civil rights, justice, or equal participation in our system. It simply means recognizing that a healthy democracy must be able to hold multiple priorities at once. There is a path that honors both tradition and progress, if we choose to appeal to the shared humanity that still exists among some — hopefully most — on both sides of the aisle.

Colin Kelly is a U.S. Army veteran and founder of the All Republic Project: Tradition and Transformation.

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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