The MAGA supremacy lasted almost exactly a year. On Nov. 5, 2024, Donald Trump won back the White House as the first president to secure nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland’s second win in 1892. The Republican Party retained its majorities in the House of Representatives and regained the Senate, marking the first time the Republicans had flipped a chamber of Congress in a presidential election year since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. Republicans held the majority of gubernatorial mansions. Republican-nominated justices held a clear majority on the Supreme Court.
Trump won more minority votes than any Republican candidate in decades. After the elections, the Democratic Party collapsed in recrimination. The radical Left dictated the terms of argument and drove the Democrats further from the center of public opinion. Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, was only 40 years old and wired into the New Right mix of Christian revival and tech futurism. True, the 2026 midterm elections would be hard going for the incumbent party. But if you asked anyone in Washington, they expected that Vance would win the presidential election in 2028. Some of them saw him winning again in 2032. The path was open for the political, legal, and cultural transformation of America.
Within a year, however, civil war broke out on the American Right. On Oct. 27, the guest on Tucker Carlson’s podcast was a white supremacist named Nicholas Fuentes. Carlson is the wayward lodestar of conservative media and a personal friend of Vance. Fuentes is the princeling of the Right’s online underworld, a Holocaust denier, a conspiracy theorist, and a sulphurous hater of women, black people, Jews, immigrants, and the late Charlie Kirk. Carlson did not interrogate Fuentes so much as massage him into the mainstream, nodding along as Fuentes explained that the country will come apart unless “organized Jewry in America” is defeated.
Anonymous social media users, op-ed pundits, opportunist podcasters, and even elected representatives split immediately into two camps. The controversy was more bitter than the fallout from the 2017 “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Charlottesville marchers who chanted “The Jews will not replace us” claimed that Trump was their man, but they were a fringe group, and Trump had disavowed them. But now, MAGA racists had a footing inside the big tent of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. No one had done more to bring them into the circus than Carlson, the Right’s media ringmaster.
No one did more to turn a drama into a crisis than Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation and a friend of both Carlson and Vance. In a scripted video message on Oct. 30, Roberts gave Heritage’s full support to its “close friend” Carlson. He condemned Fuentes’s antisemitism, but he also denounced the “globalist class” and a “venomous coalition” that was serving “someone else’s agenda” by “sowing division” and “attacking our friends on the Right.” Roberts did not seem to grasp the critics’ main complaint. Carlson was mainstreaming ideas that were not just useless to Republicans and conservatives but reprehensible to most Americans.
The right is now at war with itself. As the Roman historian Polybius reflected, “Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.”
Heritage Americans
The Heritage Foundation is in a smart but bland office building on Capitol Hill. Heritage is an aircraft carrier amid the fleet of conservative think tanks in Washington. It is bigger than the rest. In 2016, Heritage’s bureaucratic capacity filled the gaps in the first Trump administration overnight. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential elections, it proposed Project 2025, its own plan for Trump’s second term. Heritage has more reach than the rest, too. With an annual revenue of around $100 million, it dominates the center ground of the coalitions that form American conservatism and the Republican Party.
Heritage is easy to find. A giant picture of Trump covers an entire side of the building. As Heritage dominates the conservative movement, Trump dominates Heritage. In July 2024, Roberts was a guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Roberts defined Heritage’s task as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be,” Roberts said.
In his 2024 book Dawn’s Early Light, Roberts called the American system “a trillion-dollar conspiracy” against nature. He compared America’s institutions to dead wood in a forest: “Decadent and rootless, these institutions serve only as shelter for our corrupt elite. Meanwhile, they block out the light and suck up the nutrients necessary for new American institutions to grow. For America to flourish again, they don’t need to be reformed; they need to be burned.”
It was time to “strike the match.” The institutions marked for burning included every Ivy League college, the New York Times, the Education Department, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, BlackRock, Loudoun County Public Schools, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, and “80% of ‘Catholic’ higher education.” Some of them, such as the World Economic Forum and the Chinese Communist Party, were not American at all. No conservative think tanks were harmed in the making of this list.
Dawn’s Early Light was scheduled for release in September 2024 with the subtitle Burning Down Washington to Save America and a foreword by Vance. The controversy over Heritage’s Project 2025 delayed publication until the week after the November presidential election, and the subtitle was changed to Taking Back Washington to Save America. Vance’s foreword now read less like a campaign pitch than a policy statement from an incoming vice president. He endorsed the values of the “old American Right,” praised Roberts’s “fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics,” and rejected a “laissez-faire approach” because “it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
The fight over Carlson and Fuentes is part of the Right’s conflict over its path forward. There is no Trumpism to institutionalize. There is Donald Trump, and there are the institutions of a conservative movement. There is, however, the political mood that Trump rode into the Republican Party in 2016 and into the White House twice over. When Trump rides into the sunset in 2028, this movement will continue to exist. Trump calls it Make America Great Again. He calls its guiding principle “America First.”
No one knows what Trump means by this. Like all populist movements, MAGA is a mood in search of a doctrine. The mood is against the institutions, but a doctrine cannot succeed without institutional implementation. No one knows if the policies that Roberts seeks to institutionalize in the name of a hypothetical “Trumpism” are identical to Vance’s ambitions. Was Vance’s foreword to Dawn’s Early Light a favor to a friend, or is Roberts’s book a soft launch for Vance’s platform when he seeks the Republican nomination in 2028?
No one seems to know much about Fuentes and his millions of online fans either. But somehow, the fate of the Republican Party seems to be in their hands, if only because Carlson put it there.
A Rockwell and a hard place
Imagine you are a 25-year-old white man with a couple of years of college. Your childhood was the era of the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror, the federally financed property crash and bank bailouts of 2008, and the Great Recession. The populist reaction broke out when you were barely in double figures, with the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. It erupted in your teenage years, with the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Trump. The end of your teenage years in 2020 coincided with the end of the world: the apocalypse of COVID-19; the mob madness of the George Floyd protests; the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol; and an explosion of federal debt and inflation.
Your high school diploma is worthless. Your town is ruined by the decadeslong decay of American industry and the accelerated decline of outsourcing. Mass immigration depresses the wages of the service-industry jobs that remain. Economic growth is slow, but everything, from housing to ground beef, is getting more and more expensive. The nuclear family has collapsed. Drugs, prescription or illegal, are everywhere. If you want to keep your teeth, you must buy Obamacare. If you want any kind of career, you must take out a federal mortgage on your education. To get to the better-paid jobs, you must affirm that America is systematically racist and that a woman can have a penis.
Everything around you tells you that the American system is failing, but the system tells you that it is working as intended. Federal institutions discriminate on racial grounds in a bureaucratic logic established in your grandparents’ infancy by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Merit is affirmed in the marketplace, and affirmed again by its beneficiaries, some of whom amass fortunes not seen since the Gilded Age. But personal merit, which the Founding Fathers understood as the founding value of a free republic, is not a public value. The widening and hardening of class differences is acknowledged only as an “intersectional” enhancer of racial and sexual identity.
The system selects for women, minorities, immigrants, and even noncitizens. It calls its social engineering “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” You are not diverse. You have no equity. You are not included. When the system does think about you, it despises you. You despise yourself, too, because you watch endless and extreme pornography when you’re not playing endless and violent computer games. You cannot see how you will ever find a wife or buy your own home. It’s not just that you feel like a loser. By all objective measures, a loser is what you are.
The Republican Party and the conservative think tanks in Washington are fine with all this. The 2008 Republican presidential nominee is John McCain, an enthusiast for military adventure who looks 1,000 years old. The 2012 nominee is Mitt Romney, a human postcard from Norman Rockwell’s America. When Trump wins the 2016 nomination, almost every conservative outlet and intellectual agrees with the Democrats that Trump is a fascist and probably compromised by the Russians. Congressional Republicans do their best to ignore him.
The Republicans and Democrats have fused into what the internet calls the uniparty and what George Orwell called the Inner Party. You are clearly outside. The legacy media are clearly inside. They hide the growing evidence of electoral malfeasance by federal agencies. Though the same federal agencies suspect that COVID-19 is man-made, they call anyone who talks about it a conspiracy theorist and conspire with the social media companies to suppress debate.
The adults and experts have lied to you all your life. You believe nothing. You will fall for anything. You are primed for alienation, extremism, and nihilism. You are primed for Nick Fuentes. Rod Dreher calls them “Weimar America’s lost boys”: a generation unmoored in purpose and morals. Fuentes is their Peter Pan, a “horrible, evil person.” The “bigger problem,” Dreher argued in a Substack post on Nov. 4, is Carlson, for “greatly magnifying Fuentes’s presence and credibility” in a “two-hour, tongue-bath interview which now has over five million views.”
Dreher sees that there is no way back. There can be no way forward, however, without “a serious attempt to understand why Fuentes’s ugly idea — and he really doesn’t have any ideas other than tearing everything down, and hating Jews — are gaining traction, and to offer something substantive and hopeful to these alienated young men.”
Burning down Washington
The editors of National Review and the Wall Street Journal denounced Carlson and Fuentes and criticized Roberts’s response, too. In a column for the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 1, I wrote that while Roberts called Heritage the “backbone of the conservative movement,” there will be no conservative movement “if the right’s key institutions surrender to dog-whistling and resentment.” In a ramble to his followers, Fuentes said that Jews should “get the f*** out of America.”
Vance struggled to respond clearly, too. On Oct. 29, he spoke with students at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi. A student asked why the United States should support Israel when it was committing “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza and why the Jewish religion “openly supports the persecution” of Christianity. Vance did not correct either of these fictions, but he did seem to suggest it is possible for Israel to “control the president of the United States.” This sounded close to Carlson’s claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes around telling people, “I control the United States. I control Donald Trump.”
Roberts responded by posting a detailed denunciation of Fuentes on X: “Nick Fuentes’s antisemitism is not complicated, ironic, or misunderstood. It is explicit, dangerous, and demands our unified opposition as conservatives. Fuentes knows exactly what he is doing. He is fomenting Jew hatred, and his incitements are not only immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence.”
Heritage’s task, Roberts said, was to “confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place.” For the second time, he failed to mention his friend Carlson’s blatant complicity with these ideas and his equally blatant effort to launder them. He failed for a third time in an address at Hillsdale College on Nov. 4, when he again omitted to mention Carlson. Meanwhile, Heritage staff fought on social media and the leaders of Jewish groups associated with Project Esther, Heritage’s post-Oct. 7, 2023, initiative against antisemitism, resigned or threatened to if Heritage did not cut ties with Carlson.
DESCRIPTIONS AND PRESCRIPTIONS
On Nov. 5, Roberts addressed a closed-door meeting of Heritage staff. The footage was leaked almost immediately. Roberts admitted that he “didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy” before the Carlson podcast. He prefers sports podcasts to political podcasts. He read his initial statement to the camera without checking it. He blamed his chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, who had left Heritage the day before, for writing the reference to a “venomous coalition” that, Roberts said, was a “trope” aimed at Jews, and misinforming him that the Heritage board endorsed the text.
Roberts is a man of good conscience who has made a bad situation worse. Not just from personal and bureaucratic ineptitude, but because no one has any idea what to do now. The Right’s institutions are challenged by the entryism and extremism that have destroyed the Left’s institutions. The Republican Party has abandoned the Lost Boys, and the conservative institutions have no idea how to save them. Washington may indeed be burned, just as Roberts hopes. But revolutions are never bloodless. The conservative movement, think tanks and all, will be next on the pyre. The match has been struck. The flames have already singed Vance. If he does not distance himself soon, his prospects for 2028 will go up in smoke.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
