Trump did not betray the MAGA movement. Trump is the MAGA movement

Donald Trump debuted in politics with the slogan Make America Great Again (Make America Great Again), whose acronym, in English, forms the word MAGA. What started as a campaign slogan soon became a national populist movement.

The concept behind the slogan was the idea that America was once an exemplary country whose leadership commanded respect around the world and whose traditions, republican and cultural, were popularly valued. In 2015, Trump was questioning the country Obama was leaving, but he was also questioning, among other things, the mistakes that had been made by the Republicans who preceded Obama—especially Bush.

And two of those big mistakes were the military incursions, first Afghanistan and then Iraq. The experiences, chaotic and with dramatic consequences for both the Middle East and the United States, left in place the idea that U.S. military incursions, especially in Arab or Eastern countries, contravened U.S. interests.

The Republican Party that in 2016 elects Donald Trump was already, in itself, a different party. The MAGA concept resonated, above all, among the popular classes, until then frustrated with the Democratic administration, with the establishment in general, and with uncontrolled immigration. And during the four years of that first Trump administration, paradoxically, working-class support increased.

But Trump, who before his political career sailed freely through the parties, was not and is not a dogmatic man. Quite the contrary. His image as a pragmatic and unscrupulous businessman was what made him such an interesting candidate for many. He would manage the country as he had managed his business. It was not principles, but instinct, that governed the MAGA concept, a concept created, sculpted, and defined by Trump himself.

And that's why Trump's first administration was so unpredictable. Trump challenged the neoconservative thirst for interference in Middle Eastern countries, but at the same time had an enormously active, decisive, influential, and, yes, also bellicose foreign policy. For example, he took his fight against the terrorist Islamic State to the end, when the United States finished off the Sunni leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A few months later, in January 2020, Trump proudly announced that he had killed Iran's second most powerful man, Qasem Soleimani, with a drone.

Trump also engaged in bombing terrorist cells in Africa, threatened Kim Jong-un before sitting down to negotiate with him, and isolated and pressured communist regimes in the Americas, such as Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or Díaz-Canel in Cuba, as no other president had ever done.

Now, in his second administration, with Americans—and especially Republicans—more frustrated with the presence of U.S. soldiers around the world—a sentiment reinforced after Biden's disastrous exit from Afghanistan, Russia's endless war against Ukraine, and the conflict between Israel, Hamas, and Iran—Trump seems unwilling to correct course and assume a completely isolationist attitude. He is not like that, nor does he think like that.

Last weekend Donald Trump decided, after days of tensions and back-and-forth, to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. U.S. support for Israel tremendously discomforted an important part of the hard right, today conceived under the umbrella of the MAGA concept. Important voices such as those of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Jack Posobiec, and Charlie Kirk, who have been very influential in building the movement around Donald Trump, expressed their discontent, and some went further by claiming that the president was betraying the MAGA movement.

But that's nonsense. First, because nothing Trump is doing contrasts with what he ever proposed or did. Trump has historically said that the US cannot allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Moreover, during his first administration, he was clear that, if necessary, the US must use force to eventually achieve peace. This is precisely the manifestation of another concept that the MAGA movement has salvaged, this time from the Reagan era: "Peace through strength."

Second, because Trump cannot betray the MAGA movement when he is the MAGA movement. Trump has not betrayed the MAGA movement, because the MAGA neither precedes him nor transcends him. The MAGA concept has never been sustained on a dogmatic or ideological basis. It cannot do so when those who conceived it have neither dogma nor ideology but are moved by smell or instinct. With its whims, with its incoherence, and with its pragmatism, MAGA is defined by Trump.

It is true that the concept appeals to a historical greatness of the United States. At bottom, it casts the notion that it rises above the will to rescue America's traditions, sovereignty, and power, be it economic, military, or cultural. And all of this may indeed be enshrined in the MAGA ethic, as well as Trump's own. But there is not much beyond that. The MAGA movement cannot be said to be isolationist or neoconservative any more than it can be said to be capitalist, protectionist, corporatist, or populist. It is everything and, at the same time, nothing.

That's why the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities is as MAGA as Trump's insistence on negotiating with Putin or the push for Europe to increase security spending. It's all in response to what Trump has done all his life: negotiate or act on his nose.