What to do about MAGA's cultural reign

Trump's critics need to build more than "resistance" to defang him

When I stepped into the cold outside of Union Station last weekend, I grappled with an unanticipated feeling of loss. It didn’t only relate to Trump’s return, although I’ve felt a baseline sense of dread about that for over a year now. The loss I felt had to do with missing the flawed but comparatively vibrant culture we had before Trump’s political career started. I missed any time before everything seemed to be centered around Trump and Elon Musk.

For many people in America now, MAGA is the entire culture. It’s not that Trump’s fans don’t have their favorite Netflix shows and sports teams. They obviously do. But if you’re MAGA, everything is ultimately filtered through this vast, seemingly all encompassing “culture war” lens. It colors the way they see music, entertainers, and routine medical care. Trump is now the president not only of the country, but of many people’s minds.

MAGA cultural dominance obviously includes this rigged and frequently vacuous social media landscape that helped create Trumpism in the first place. Now that billionaire social media moguls have openly rushed to Trump’s side, making adjustments to their platforms that will further his brand, the deluge of propaganda glorifying him will only expand.

I interviewed physically freezing Trump supporters on January 20 in D.C. and repeatedly asked them what Trump could do to disappoint them during his new term. Predictably, everyone said “nothing.” There’s no policy he could abandon. There’s nothing he could really say to offend them. It often seems like it isn’t really about policy for the majority of his fans, although his vision on immigration has picked up an unpleasant degree of steam since 2016. It’s a little bit about resentment for liberalism but it’s mostly about showing deference to one man’s towering fame.

An increasingly multiracial coalition

Everyone I spoke to had traveled considerable distances only to be locked out of Capital One Arena due to overcrowding. I talked to a Mexican-American couple from California who drove–as in by car–2,800 miles to Washington D.C. to see Trump’s inauguration. They tried to attend his victory rally on January 19 but it filled up. They tried to get in the arena on January 20, but after standing for hours, cops informed them that it was filled up too. It’s hard to imagine anyone but maybe Taylor Swift inspiring that kind of blind sacrifice.

I spoke to a middle-aged Black man who drove up from Atlanta both to celebrate Trump and sell merchandise with his face on it. He brought up Snoop Dogg’s appearance at a pro-Trump crypto event with defensiveness, acknowledging that people criticized the rapper and TV pitchman over it. He explained that it was “just business” and acknowledged that he liked Trump in part because his fans spent ridiculous amounts of money on souvenirs.

“A lot of Democrats are racist too,” he said.

Trump lost the Latino vote. He lost the Black vote by a wider margin. Still, the crowd I saw on the streets of D.C. was unmistakably diverse. It looked a lot more like the crowd you would see in Times Square on a given holiday than it did the Unite the Right rally from 2017. If your conception of MAGA is that it’s a white rage political movement, you have to at least acknowledge that a growing number of non-white people want to participate in that. Many of them likely don’t care about Elon Musk’s apparent roman salute because he’s MAGA.

We need a counter cultural response

Antifascist demonstrators overshadowed Trump’s first inauguration, driving the headlines by torching a limo and punching Richard Spencer in the face. Small clusters of protesters braved the cold for the 2025 iteration but I saw nothing resembling that explosion of rage against Trump this time. It only served to underline how beaten down people feel after a decade of absorbing his stupid and hateful rhetoric.

On the train down from New York, I read about the underground origins of Detroit techno. It was a totally unique explosion of sound and it came from such an improbable place. Early techno’s antiracist and anti-authoritarian nature, its emphasis on liberation through dancing, and its willingness to seek out humanity inside new technologies, seems completely antithetical to our present moment.

Generation-shaping movements in music and art like that seem to be fading away. I also thought about David Lynch’s recent death and how improbable it would be to cultivate a career like that now, even for someone with talent. Lynch’s relentless pursuit to expose the depths of our psyches is similarly antithetical to MAGA culture. His death I can swallow, but I don’t want to live in a cult-of-personality country that can no longer produce artists like him.

MAGA is filling the void where journalism, film, music, and literature used to go. We can’t sit back and wait for Trump to destroy the economy in the hopes that the people who love him unconditionally will suddenly stop doing that. Trump’s critics need to build an alternative culture based on something more than so-called resistance and posting. We need to create a world that’s much bigger and more inviting than one man’s ego.

Note: If you subscribed to my previous newsletter from 2023, I have shifted you over to this Substack. I plan on doing posts focused on news analysis as often as I can. I spent 2024 finishing the draft of my first creative non-fiction book.

Photos by me.

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