The End of MAGA

August 14, 2026 Hunter Wallace 2026 Midterms, Conservatism, MAGA, MIGA, Politics, Populists 0

Editor’s Note: The following speech was delivered at the Southern Culture Center’s 2026 conference in Wetumpka, AL on August 14, 2026.

We are 82 days from the 2026 midterm elections.

We are also only three weeks away from the beginning of football season here in the South. I’m sure everyone in this room has watched plenty of football games in their life. You probably know that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you are watching a big game and there is still time left on the clock, but the outcome of the game is no longer in doubt. The outcome of the whole season is no longer in doubt too. Your team is about to lose a championship. You know that when you wake up on Monday morning there will be legions of angry fans on social media demanding that the head coach be fired. Fans with long faces are already streaming out of the stadium to get ahead of the traffic.

Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement now finds itself in exactly this predicament. It has lost the House of Representatives before in the 2018 midterms. It lost control of Congress after the 2020 election. It had an underwhelming victory in the 2022 midterms. The 2026 midterm elections, however, are fundamentally different and are the beginning of the end of the MAGA movement. After November, Donald Trump will be a historically unpopular, term limited lame duck president who will spend his last two years in office fighting off endless investigations and a third impeachment effort. The recriminations will begin as Trump loses his iron grip on the party which he has controlled for over a decade.

The facts are indisputable here:

  • The Twenty Second Amendment makes Donald Trump ineligible to run for a third term.
  • The president has fallen into a polling abyss in the mid-30s and is now more unpopular than George W. Bush and Joe Biden. He has a lower approval rating than Jimmy Carter on inflation. He is more unpopular than Herbert Hoover was when he lost to Roosevelt in 1932.
  • No one has ever climbed out of such a deep hole. It is the place where presidencies go to die like the Carter presidency or the George W. Bush presidency.
  • No one else associated with the MAGA movement like Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio who could emerge as a successor is untainted by Trump’s unpopularity.
  • The MAGA brand is now toxic and deeply unpopular with Independents who determine the political balance of power in America.
  • There are no third chances in politics. Trump swung twice and struck out.
  • Finally, the MAGA movement is organized around a cult of personality and its leader is deeply unpopular and about to exit the stage of national politics in two years.
  • Being associated with MAGA will only be a liability for anyone with national political aspirations moving forward. The label will be memory holed like the Tea Party.

It is true that Republican voters love President Trump and he remains popular in the Republican Party, but this isn’t anything new. Republicans aren’t even a third of the country. The same 33% of voters are a floor that supported George W. Bush to the end in 2009. They voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney. 2/3rds of Republican voters believe the Iraq War wasn’t a mistake even today. The political fallout from the Iraq War still gave us eight years of Barack Obama and discredited the old Republican establishment. If it was up to Republican voters, Republicans would win every election but that doesn’t happen.

I say all of this as someone who was open minded enough to vote for him twice and who hoped something good would come out of his presidency. I was interviewed about MAGA right here in this building when the movement first began in 2015. I gave a speech in Arkansas in which I tried to look ahead to America after a Trump presidency. I gave another speech last summer in South Carolina in which I strongly defended the start of Trump’s second term. I thought at the time that our ideas were going mainstream and we could be practical and reenter national politics and get some of what we wanted.

In hindsight, I look back on MAGA and see our people pouring over a decade of their time, attention, effort and energy into what was essentially a golem. Ten years ago, mainstream conservatism was on the fritz and the Jewish donors who bankroll the Republican Party spotted an opportunity. They created Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as an outlet to soak up all of that populist discontent in the electorate. It succeeded and it grew up to become the monster that is the MAGA movement which they control and have used as their weapon to destroy their enemies at home and around the world. These people have astroturfed fake populist movements in other countries like Brazil and Argentina. We’re currently in a war with Iran which was started to install the son of the Shah, a Mossad asset, in power in that country.

What did we get out of being practical and supporting Donald Trump’s MAGA movement? 85% of his time in office as president is now history. We should pause and take stock of the last decade.

  • Did it get us any closer to an independent Southern nation? No, MAGA sucked all the oxygen out of the room and left us worse off than we were a decade ago.
  • Did we get a White ethnostate out of it? No, it is still the same country that it was a decade ago. It is just about 5% less White than it was then.
  • Did we get our freedom of association back? No, Eric Orwoll is going to speak on that this weekend. Return to the Land in Arkansas is under investigation for violating fair housing laws.
  • Did we get the mass deportations of illegal aliens that we were promised? No, Greg Bovino who was in charge of the Border Patrol was let go and is doing podcasts now.
  • Did we save our Southern heritage? No, the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson monuments in Charlottesville were torn down and desecrated. Confederate monuments have been torn down all over the South since 2015. We lost Monument Avenue in Richmond. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife were dug up from their graves in Memphis. We’re getting new monuments of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr. though in Trump’s Garden of American Heroes in DC. Juneteenth has also become a federal holiday. We also got hit with the Sines v. Kessler lawfare judgment.
  • Is the average person at least financially better off today? No, the dollar has lost about 25% to 30% of its value since 2019. Everything has become much more expensive.
  • Did we get the national debt under control? No, the national debt has more than doubled since 2015.
  • Did Elon Musk become the world’s first trillionaire? Yes, this milestone was briefly crossed in June.
  • Did Donald Trump personally become a lot wealthier? Yes, Donald Trump’s net worth has increased by about $4 billion since 2024. He has more than doubled his personal wealth.
  • Are we living in a Golden Age now? The Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen from 17,900 to 53,800 in the Trump era. It is a Golden Age for billionaires and wealthy investors.
  • Do corporations pay less in taxes? Yes, Donald Trump was the only Republican president in a century to be given two trifectas. He spent both on enshrining a permanent corporate tax cut into law.
  • Did we end the foreign wars? No, we are in a new war with Iran for Israel on top of funding the war in Ukraine which is still going on.
  • Did we bring back American manufacturing? No, but we are building AI data centers all over the South to destroy millions of white collar professional class jobs.

After 11 years of MAGA, it costs more to rent an apartment or buy a house, afford health insurance, buy a new truck or a used car, to fill it up with gas, to buy groceries, eat fast food or to throw a steak on the grill. We are deeper in debt. The demographics are worse. It is harder to find a job. There are millions of more legal and illegal immigrants here than when this movement began. There is less free speech. Forget about any of our grandiose political aspirations. It is harder just to survive than it was a decade ago. We have gone backwards and are worse off than when the MAGA movement started.

I’m afraid this is only the beginning of our woes. By wasting the last decade on giving a reality television show host two terms as president, we have set ourselves up for the next decade of hard repression. The failure of the MAGA movement to control spiraling wars, debt and costs have made socialism popular by default. These lunatics are about to return to power. They will open the borders again, send all the South African refugees home and bring back anti-White discrimination in the government. All of the things that you could point to and claim as a Trump accomplishment will be reversed like it was in the Biden era. Radicals will eventually come to power. They will just be on the other side of the political spectrum.

As the Trump era comes to a close, the great moral lesson that I believe we should take away from it is that it is practical to be a radical. Donald Trump was given control over all three branches of government twice. He was given the popular vote. He had a mandate to “Make America Great Again” and built a White House Ballroom with it. We have seen the limits of that approach. Instead of watering our own garden of dreams, we poured our water into his garden and what we have reaped is a harvest of weeds.

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