It’s been a rocky month for the GOP after losing big in last month’s elections, and the party knows it. Members of Congress are heading for the exit; the vibe couldn’t be further from Trump’s exultant return to power in January.
To understand what’s going on — and what it portends for the future of the right — I spoke with my colleague Andrew Prokop for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.
Why does it feel like the right is in disarray right now?
In 2024, there was a lot of talk about the vibes shifting in favor of the right. There was a sense that public opinion was moving in their direction, history was on their side, elites had accepted they were right on some major questions. Nearly a year into the second Trump administration, the vibes appear to have shifted again. Various factions of the right are increasingly discussing and debating this question of, What has gone wrong? How did they go from MAGA triumphant to this increasing suspicion that things aren’t actually going well for them anymore?
How has that manifested?
The most interesting example is in the MAGA influencer sphere. Back in Trump’s first term, the way to get maximum virality and engagement from a right-wing audience was loyalty: Just back Donald Trump in whatever he did. We are increasingly seeing that it doesn’t quite work like that anymore in 2025.
There’s not a full break from Trump, but we’re seeing increasing criticism on certain issues where these social media influencers and media personalities are very attuned to what their audience is thinking. There is this increasing move toward debate and criticism about certain things in Trump’s second term that might not be going very well. And there are signs in Congress of congressional Republicans being a bit less likely to go along with what Trump wants.
This can be exaggerated a little bit, but we have seen some instances of defiance, like the vote to release the Epstein Files. The debate in the larger right-wing ecosystem is about what their party should actually stand for.
What’s responsible for Trump’s loss of momentum?
Part of this is a familiar, normal story about the president winning and being term-limited. The recent election results in November put a scare into Republicans, and hammered home the message that, actually, the polls are correct. Trump is unpopular. The public doesn’t like what he’s doing. And the GOP is on track for a difficult midterms.
I also think that a lot of the vibe shift on the right is about ways in which the broader issue environment has changed, in part because Trump was so successful. For instance, in Trump’s first term, his presidency was constantly under siege, beset by investigations and impeachment. That actually served as a unifying force on the right. But now those threats are gone. Trump won convincingly in 2024. He shut down the investigations into him and so he doesn’t really have that to fall back on anymore.
“I also think that a lot of the vibe shift on the right is about ways in which the broader issue environment has changed, in part because Trump was so successful.”
The other big threat that has united the right, especially in recent years, was the hatred and fear of “wokeness.” The MAGA 2.0 coalition could disagree on a lot of things, but they all came together in the belief that they hated wokeness. And again, this is a case where Trump is a victim of his own success: There has been this vibe shift in which the right’s monster of wokeness appears to have been slain and the culture appears to have moved on. The people who were once united against it are now no longer focused on it as a big threat anymore, and are freed up to focus on what they disagree on.
Is this a temporary thing, or the start of a longer spiral for Trump?
There’s always a push and pull with this stuff. A lot of times in the second term, once reelection concerns are gone, presidents feel more free to try to please their base, to do things that maybe they would have shied away from early on. I do expect Trump to continue to try to push the limits of what’s legal or acceptable.
We’ve seen signs that he’s going to that: Stephen Miller thinks the immigration crackdown should be even harsher than it already is. If he remains empowered in the administration, we should expect it to get harsher. We should expect these constant attempts to implement policy from the executive branch.
The right-wing base hasn’t broken with Trump — they’re not against him. They’re just a little burned out or disappointed that they haven’t gotten everything they dreamed of. He might try to deliver them more wins to keep them engaged and to try to get them to turn out to vote in the midterms.
JD Vance is arguably Trump’s heir apparent. What role does he play in all of this?
He has his wagon hitched to Trump, and that’s a tough spot: a vice president trying to succeed a president who is increasingly being viewed as somewhat of a disappointment. He would have to make the case about what he would do differently; and, in theory, there are ways he can do that, but there’s a lot of pressure not to break from the president in any way.
Having said that, loyalty and affection toward Trump among the larger Republican electorate is still quite strong, so it’s a tremendous advantage for Vance if he does end up being Trump’s anointed successor. It’s going to be very hard to dislodge him unless there’s some sort of even further break from Trump, akin to George W. Bush’s popularity collapse in his second term. Unless that happens, Vance is still in a pretty good place.
Anything else you’re keeping an eye on here?
I do think it’s good to distinguish between Trump’s increasing unpopularity among the general public — which is probably mainly because of the economy — and the increasing disillusionment and dissatisfaction among elements of the highly engaged right-wing Republican coalition, because I think they stem from different sources. The particular issues, and the way this plays out among the right-wing coalition, are very different from what we might be seeing in the general public’s backlash against Trump.
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