The right-wing revolution is guaranteed to continue long past Trump

Analysts are taking the pulse of the MAGA movement, seeking to understand whether it can sustain its momentum without its godfather, Donald Trump. In fact, the right-wing movement energetically was rolling along in the early 2010s, before the MAGA label emerged and while Trump was starring in The Apprentice.

In the late 2000s, a group of right-wing thinkers broke off from traditional free-market conservatives and the small-government Tea Party movement. They developed instead a new focus on social issues and organized a careful, often unseen, movement to drive change by gaining power over key political institutions. Donald Trump had little—if anything—to do with the genesis of this movement, but he was extraordinarily successful in riding it to the presidency, driving historic changes in what government does and how it does it.

Trump might slowly fade from the political scene and national commentators might debate whether MAGA still lives. But the right-wing idea factory is continuing to work, especially in state and local governments. It is generating a large and ongoing collection of issues, guaranteeing that right-wing ideas will continue to live on through an ongoing campaign for political power and influence.

Here are some of the reasons why.

1. The money pipeline is open wider. Until recently, donors had to obey strict contribution limits to candidates. Political parties could collect piles of cash, but they couldn’t coordinate their advertising with the candidates. In a June 30 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that donors could funnel money to the parties and the parties, in turn, could spend as much as they liked in direct coordination with candidates. That decision effectively blew off contribution ceilings. At least for the time being, that gives Republicans a huge advantage, since the party has more than $100 million more in the bank than Democrats. This will give the right-wing tremendous additional fuel for its ideas.


2. Transgender bans get the green light. Idaho and West Virginia have both enacted bans against transgender players on women’s and girls’ sports teams. The Supreme Court ruled that the states could indeed establish such bans. That’s sure to ignite more debates in more states about where they can draw the line on LGBTQ+ rights. The Court didn’t decide whether it was permissible for states to specifically allow transgender individuals to compete on the teams. That issue is sure to come before the Court, along with more tussles about how far the states can go in dealing with LGBTQ+ rights.


3. Religion creeps into the classroom. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that a Washington state school board was wrong in disciplining a former football coach, who knelt in postgame prayer in the middle of the field. That set off a scramble throughout the country to push religion into other school programs. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas require local schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Texas went even further by building Bible study into the curriculum, beginning with Noah’s Ark in the first grade and David and Goliath in second grade. How far will they be able to go?


4. State policy upsets traditional higher education policies. Florida is leading a broad revolution against what colleges and universities teach and how they are run. Gender studies programs are gone. So are DEI initiatives. A “back to the classics” movement has sprung up in a bid to push out what the right-wing sees as the “woke” bias in the classroom. Tenured professors undergo new, tough, regular reviews. Undocumented students are blocked from enrolling. Similar initiatives are rolling out across the country, led by Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas, all designed to uproot what are viewed as powerful liberal forces in higher education.


5. The fight to prohibit abortion is red-hot. Medications, not surgical procedures, account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. That compares with just a third in 2014, and it scrambles the efforts from the right to shut down abortions. When abortions take place in a clinic, it’s relatively easy to end them: close the clinic. But medication-induced abortions are far more difficult to prevent. Women can obtain a prescription and take the drugs at home. Some physicians prescribe the drugs remotely and mail them to patients, and that makes it possible to circumvent abortion bans in 41 states. Louisiana indicted a New York doctor for mail-order abortion medications, and a Texas judge fined a physician $100,000 for, the judge said, prescribing pills to a Dallas-area woman. New York countered that its “shield law” protected the doctor. The US Supreme Court might have overturned Roe v. Wade, but the abortion battles in the states are far from over.


6. Policy leaders are campaigning to make all public employees at-will. The Trump administration won a big victory with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, in which the Court ruled that the president could fire members of independent regulatory commissions. The administration followed the Court’s decision with a new regulation that would allow agency heads to fire employees if they didn’t meet “suitability and fitness” standards, as the officials chose to define them. The Trump administration says the changes are necessary to make public employees more accountable. In fact, they push accountability from effectiveness in administering the law to loyalty to the president. The decisions might seem subtle, but they are very likely to shift the balance of powers within the nation’s democratic system, in favor of the president at the expense of the Congress.

The list could easily go on—and Trump has had little to do with most of them. They are only loosely connected with the national MAGA movement, but they all have long legs in the states. And, put together, they point to why the right-wing idea factory will continue to anchor a big movement in American politics.

_{Feature image: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.}