COLUMBUS, Ohio — The young Republicans had grown restless even before their disastrous election, tired of President Donald Trump, his war and his handpicked candidates.
Now about a dozen members of Ohio State University College Republicans plopped down their backpacks for their first meeting since the election and pondered what was next.
Abraham Dixon, 20, used to identify with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. But MAGA seemed synonymous with loyalty to Trump, and he’d come to think of Trump as “the anchor around the elephant’s neck.” He worried that even a politically diminished Trump would keep bending the party to his will — and compared him to the aging emperor villain of Star Wars.
“He’s Palpatine,” Dixon said.
It was hard to picture the GOP without the man who defined it for a decade. Trump’s GOP was all they knew: Many cast their first votes for him.
But chapter president Hunter Willmitch was blunt in an interview about the changes underway: “The MAGA movement, in my opinion, is dead.”
MAGA is certainly muddled, as its rank-and-file voters look to leaders outside of the Trump administration, have crossed over to Democrats or disengaged from politics altogether. There is no consensus about who should run in 2028 and plenty of skepticism for Vice President JD Vance, who once seemed the heir apparent. Like Trump or not, everyone agrees his vacuum will be hard to fill.
Right-wing influencers increasingly critical of Trump were declaring themselves vindicated by his rebuke in the midterms. Extremists like Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist influencer, saw the chaos on the right as an opportunity. “We could not have asked for a better outcome,” Fuentes declared on his live stream.
It was a moment of both peril and opportunity for the Ohio State College Republicans who held their meeting in an empty classroom one night this week.
“How are you?” a young woman asked Willmitch as she sat down.
“Upset at the amount of losses we took,” Willmitch said.
“Tuesday was rough,” she said.
“I thought it was going to be a little rough,” Willmitch echoed. “I just didn’t expect … that.”
He mentioned the bright spot in Florida, where Republicans had weathered the blue wave and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was preparing another presidential bid. “If it’s not for Ron DeSantis, that [state] probably flips,” Willmitch said.
He liked what he was hearing from the Florida governor, a longtime champion of the culture wars who now said Republicans needed to stop “fighting yesterday’s battle” — prioritizing issues like the rise of artificial intelligence rather than pouring money into ads about transgender issues.
Dixon agreed that the party’s best bet was someone outside the Trump administration like DeSantis. He snorted when another student brought up Trump’s latest interview on “60 Minutes,” in which he suggested he wanted to compromise with Democrats on immigration.
Republicans were like “a dog under the dinner table,” the other student vented, told to be grateful for what Trump handed them. He wanted the party to run more staunch conservatives and talk more about the new populist issues animating both the right and the left: Flock cameras and data centers.
Ohio state Rep. Brian Stewart (R), an Ohio State alumnus, was there as a guest speaker and was frank about the party’s struggles this election cycle. Yes, Republicans were drawn into fighting old battles, he said, but “part of it too is we didn’t have a lot of good things to say.”
A student asked him what the GOP should look like after Trump, and Stewart said Trump’s overhaul of the party would endure in “the way we interact with the media, the way we sort of address questions, the way we sort of take criticism.”
“There used to be this just this defensive crouch that every Republican officeholder had,” Stewart said — no longer.
Yet Republicans couldn’t just mimic Trump, he warned. The president had long defied political gravity, saying and doing things that other politicians would never get away with. He said other elected officials would need to abide by “a baseline of kindness and respectability.”
“We need voters to like us.”
A ‘Front Row Joe’ packs up
Rick Frazier’s living room was still plastered with mementos from his decade as one of Trump’s “Front Row Joes” who followed him to rallies around the country. There was his picture with Trump, signed in gold pen. There was his photo with another Trump superfan best known as “Brick Suit.” There was the framed letter he got from Trump in 2023 after his daughter died of a drug overdose.
“Melania and I are devastated,” the letter read.
Frazier, 70, had thrown himself into the MAGA movement more fervently than almost anyone in the country, hooked from the moment Trump came down a golden escalator in 2015. Retired from a factory that made tank tracks for the military, he believed Trump would “drain the swamp” and help American industry.
Now Frazier was done with him. From his couch in western Ohio, he laughed along at an episode of the comedy show “South Park,” which has brutally and crudely skewered Trump and his administration over the past year.
“He’s the king of swamp,” he said.
Frazier’s shift unfolded gradually, he said. He barely spoke about it with the other Front Row Joes — most of whom still adored Trump. He didn’t like it when Trump resisted his supporters’ push to release the government’s full files on the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and he cringed when Trump, from the rally stage, mocked the word “affordability.”
He voted for Trump to straighten out the southern border and crack down on the drug trade that stole his daughter, and he couldn’t make sense of Trump’s decision last year to pardon a former Honduran president convicted for overseeing a “narco-state” that routed cocaine to the United States. “See, that got me all upset,” he said, his voice wavering.
His last Trump rally was in Kentucky, where the president railed against Rep. Thomas Massie (R), a rebellious Republican whom Frazier liked.
When the midterms came, Frazier voted for his longtime Republican congressman Jim Jordan but also backed Democrats for governor and Senate, helping to flip Ohio blue.
This week, he watched live as Massie unsuccessfully moved to impeachDefense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the war with Iran.
“I’m kind of going to go back to the way I was before Trump,” Frazier said. “I was independently swinging wherever the best guy was running. And that’s the way I think it should be.”
Frazier still liked Vance, whom he’s met, and thought the vice president was being honest about Republicans’ missteps. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote on X the day after the midterm elections.
But Frazier and plenty of other Trump voters were up for grabs now — and it wasn’t clear who could turn him into a Front Row Joe again.
‘Nobody worth voting for’
At a chicken wing chain in southern Ohio, Heather Romine said she was raised to believe that you can’t complain about things if you don’t do something about it. So she cast a ballot in every election after she turned 18 — until last week.
The 38-year-old conservative voted for Trump, but at some point in his second term, she just stopped following what was happening.
“I can’t keep up with it,” Romine said at the bar, seated next to her boyfriend, who still liked Trump. “I don’t want to keep up with it. It’s defeating. It feels like it doesn’t matter.”
“There’s not a better candidate,” her boyfriend said.
“Nobody worth voting for,” Romine replied.
Her rural, working class community in Pike County, Ohio had swung harder to the right in the Trump era than almost anywhere in the country, embodying MAGA’s rise. Voters heard Trump’s outsider pitch and thought he would be different from other politicians.
Now Romine struggled to say what could motivate her to vote again. Republicans won Pike County by a little more than 30 points last week compared to more than 50 points in 2024, in part because people stayed home.
“I feel like I’m just a silent person on the sidelines right now, watching the ship burn,” Romine said.
She voted for Trump because she thought he would “get s–t done,” but she felt she got chaos with tariffs and a war that upended the global economy. She owned a house and had a good job in health care, but with three kids, she still felt strained. She could spend $400 on a trip to the grocery store and lost track of how many times she helped buy food over the past year for a friend, a struggling single mother of two.
She wanted the country to get back to something more like the “America First” vision Trump pitched — a sentiment others shared.
“I think his America First agenda was a good idea, but I don’t think he stuck to that,” said Brandon Williams, a 46-year-old firefighter who voted three times for Trump. “So I would like to see somebody run somewhere on that same line, but actually do that.”
Plenty of people in town still supported Trump and thought he was doing the best he could. The war wasn’t great, they said, but he closed the borders and pushed back on ideas about gender identity that disturbed them.
They were all over the map, however, about who could follow Trump in 2028 and if MAGA would hold together.
They were more familiar than most with Vance, an Ohio native who briefly represented the state in the Senate. But they often weren’t sure about him and struggled to put their finger on why.
“I just don’t know, said Rick Patrick, 74, who prefers Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “It’s a feeling.”
Diane Alley, a retired nurse, worried no one could recapture what Trump had stirred up here.
“I’m terrified,” she said as she made her way through the grocery store. “I don’t know who they can run. Nobody is going to equal him.”
A White House spokesperson pointed to Trump’s comments on “60 Minutes” that he thinks MAGA can continue without him. “Because MAGA is basically common sense … strong borders, good military,” Trump said.
But the president said Republicans would have done better last week if he were on the ballot, “because you saw the level of popularity and love.”
“There was love,” he said.
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