President Donald Trumpwon’t live forever. But a generation of MAGA faithful shaped by his ideology very well could, warned longtime Republican pollster and focus grouper Sarah Longwell — and their “dark plans” for this country are beyond what anyone is prepared for.
Longwell, a frequent critic of the Trump administration, laid out her fears in her upcoming book “How to Eat an Elephant,” adapted and excerpted in Brian Tyler Cohen’s Substack.
“Today’s young conservatives — or ‘conservatives’ — bear little to no resemblance to the people I surrounded myself with back in my early career,” wrote Longwell. “And now that I’ve walked away from all that, and spent the last decade working to dismantle Trumpism root and branch, here’s my warning for anyone who cares about American democracy: The generation of young people coming up on the right are not your father’s conservatives. They are Trump’s heirs, and they are here to stay.”
For example, she said, older conservatives may be loyal to Trump but at least acknowledge he represents an aberration in American politics, something that isn’t normal. But younger conservatives who came of age under Trump’s first term and former President Joe Biden “don’t share your sense that Trump is a deviation from normal politics because they have no reference point for what ‘normal’ politics looked like before him. To them, this is what politics is. The chaos, the tweets, the rallies, the culture war, the constant drama — that’s American politics.”
Few if any of these Trump supporters got their start in politics by “reading the works of conservative intellectuals or being persuaded by economic arguments about tax policy or the size of government,” Longwell wrote. In her focus groups, they are focused on grievances — and open to fringe ideas that would have been unthinkable a decade before.
“Nick Fuentes does not like Jews,” she wrote. “Tucker Carlson promotes a ‘historian’ who says Churchill was the real villain in WWII and that the Holocaust was just an oopsy. The Tate brothers are heroes to hundreds of thousands of young men because they traffic women. Over the last couple of years, we’ve had dozens of scandals in which young Republican types have been caught doing some Nazi fetishizing, or Jim Crow-style racism, or joking about rape. That’s what political transgressiveness looks like for Republicans in 2026.”
This sort of thing could be defeated, Longwell wrote. However, “it requires independent media that understands what time it is, and refuses to gaslight its audience with both-sides nonsense, or to bow and scrape before this vindictive administration. And it’s going to require moral and physical courage, and the clarity of vision to see that we’re in a new era now.”
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