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The MAGA stars freaked out by their own movement

The right’s leading lights are looking for anyone to blame for the right’s growing extremism — except themselves.

In 2017, US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) offered what remains one of the most insightful explanations of Donald Trump’s rise from any elected official. Massie, a Tea Party libertarian in the Rand and Ron Paul mode, was wondering why so many of his supporters could back an un-libertarian candidate like Trump. His conclusion was grim.

“They weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race,” Massie said. “And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

Last month, the “craziest son of a bitch” took Massie down. Trump — miffed by Massie’s stance on the Epstein files and the Iran war — endorsed his challenger in Kentucky, and the popular libertarian was pushed out of a seat he’d held for nearly 14 years.

More leading figures on the MAGA right are becoming concerned about the direction their movement is heading, warning of conspiracies, extremism, and antisemitism.

These leaders aren’t acknowledging their own roles — often significant — in the movement’s long-term radicalization.

Without accountability or control from its most influential figures, the right’s future after Trump is completely up in the air. The door is open to the chaos of permanent escalation.

Massie conceded. But at no point, during the race or afterward, has the logical next step: reflecting on how his own actions caused the problem. Massie’s years of vocal support for Trump, and his boundary-pushing Tea Party politics, had helped turn the GOP into the political chaos agent he once bemoaned.

Massie is the poster child for a particular kind of conservative now emerging in Trump’s second term: influential Trump allies who have sounded the alarm about the right’s direction, but who steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that their own actions in the Trump era may have had something to do with it.

The examples are mounting. Joe Rogan, who regularly sells his audience on conspiratorial mistrust of official narratives, is now denouncing conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts on Trump. The pundit Ben Shapiro has gone to war against right-wing podcaster Candace Owens, who he now calls an antisemitic crank — while barely acknowledging that he himself played an instrumental role in Owens’s rise. You can even see this happening with Trump himself, who has spent his presidency battling rumors about an elite pedophile network run by Jeffrey Epstein that he helped stoke earlier, and which arose from a MAGA movement he trained to see conspiracy at every turn.

It’s a real-life version of the famous sketch on Tim Robinson’s show I Think You Should Leave, where a hot-dog-shaped car crashes into a storefront and a man in a hot dog suit says, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”

The “hot dog men” — and yes, they’re almost all men — are easy to mock. But their growing ranks point to something serious: that right-wing political machine is spinning out of control in ways that even some of its most aggressive and radical voices recognize as dangerous. And as the right searches for new leadership before Trump himself fades into history, nobody on their side has shown any proven ability to contain or redirect its worst impulses.

In the absence of post-Trump leaders both willing and able to address the real problems, the future of the right — and, thus, in some sense, America — is dangerously unclear.

The growing ranks of the “hot dog men”

Admitting error is tough; admitting culpability for something bad happening is even harder. We’ve all been “hot dog men” at some point in our lives — and in politics, all movements have had moments of desperately trying to blame anyone else for their mistakes.

But there are, at present, a disproportionate number of hot dog men in the right’s top ranks. This is not a coincidence. It’s a reflection of the right hitting a moment where its continuing radicalization has begun to elude the control of even the people who thought they were steering the ship.

Take Ben Shapiro as an example. His feud with Candace Owens began when she worked at his outlet, the Daily Wire, arising out of her criticism of Israel during the war with Gaza. After Owens’s critiques verged into openly antisemitic territory in 2024 — liking an X post accusing a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood” — the Daily Wire fired her. Since then, Shapiro has not only attacked Owens, but has worked to actively purge her from the conservative movement. The Ben Shapiro Show regularly features monologues........

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