Adams’s note: This is part one of a two-part essay entitled “A Few Good Congressmen,” about the need to turn one Trump into many America First Republicans.
One of the most important things Donald Trump did as President was give voice to the unheard voices of his supporters. But Trump was just one man in time, with a million different responsibilities as President. He simply couldn’t be up to speed on the nuances of every particular political issue at any given moment. We saw this first hand as he fumbled through a critique of Critical Race Theory at the first Presidential debate in 2020. And when he did speak on current issues, he didn’t have a strong support network, even rhetorically. Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity, and other old guard figures were not his allies, despite pretending to be such. Trump’s real allies– Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, etc., even MAGA-aligned members of the administration, were basically embargoed to Fox News, with occasional appearances on mainstream outlets defending the President’s every word from leftist outrage. And experts on emerging issues– Christopher Rufo on CRT, Blake Masters on Big Tech, Dr. Robert Malone on COVID and the vaccine— were either not yet in the public eye or didn’t (in some cases still don’t) have enough attention to catch the ears of Trump or his people.
We’ve seen the consequences of this already now that Trump has retreated from public life. Populist grassroots conservatives are in disarray. Case in point: the trucker convoy protests. The Canadian “Freedom Convoy” protests against COVID-19 related-government mandates in February were actually somewhat effective. They made national and international headlines for blocking several border Canada-U.S. border crossings and the capital city of Ottawa, and actually achieved the lifting of some COVID restrictions in Canada. The Canadian government’s iron fist came down on the protest, freezing fundraising accounts that would have kept the blockades going for months. But the truckers and their supporters found ways around traditional channels, at least until the government cracked down on those, too, and then used police to forcibly break up the peaceful protests. Nevertheless, the Freedom Convoy made a statement that resonated with Canadians and terrified the tyrants in the Parliament.
The trucker convoys in the U.S., on the other hand, fell flat, for two reasons. First of all, they completely missed their moment. The “People’s Convoy” protests began shortly before the Super Bowl in February, and rumors swirled that they were going to stage a blockade at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood to protest California’s mask and vaccine mandates. They didn’t. Then they were expected to drive to Washington, D.C. in time for Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. They didn’t do that either, and by then the mask and vaccine mandates in the Capitol, and in most of the country, were lifted anyway. They then announced that they were going back to California at the end of March, but by then, nobody really cared anymore. Second, the organizers got spooked when the crackdowns came in Canada, and officials in the U.S. planned similar actions to restrict the protests here. Local police and the National Guard were brought out in California. The Capitol fences went back up in D.C. The crackdowns on fundraising platforms were threatened. So support never really materialized.
The reason ambitious grassroots movements like these protests failed is simple: they lack real organization. The reason they lack organization is equally simple: they lack leadership. The base of grassroots conservatism is almost a movement in and of itself, but it requires a rhetorical line that it can parrot, otherwise it will not do or say anything with said movement. A lot of individual members of the base look to politicians, besides talk radio and cable news, for their frame of reference as to how they understand what is happening in America and what we should do about it. Trump is the apex of this phenomenon. If President Trump starts talking about the Great Reset, the base will eventually grasp what it is, and the people will have a name they can slap on it, which means they’ll be able to identify it and rail against it. But as I’ve just mentioned, Trump was just one man. He needs allies in positions of power directing his attention, and the base needs allies of power to direct their energies in Trump’s absence, both now and after his second term in 2028.
It also needs to be bigger than Trump. The MAGA phenomenon was the first real expression of tangible backlash against the political establishment. But again, Trump is just one man in time. He will leave politics, he will die, as will we all, and we simply cannot afford to let the spirit he and the MAGA agenda embodied go away with him. We can’t afford to let the MAGA movement be an aberration, a collective morphine drip for Deep America meant to dull the pain as the nation collapses in on itself from decades of institutional rot. There needs to be an army of Trumps, or at least Trump acolytes, doing what Trump does and saying what Trump says, in every corner of American politics if we want to preserve the nation-state for future generations.
This essay will be continued in part 2, coming soon…