September 7, 2026

VDH: What Happens to MAGA When Trump Is Gone?

A post-Trump MAGA future involves several preliminary considerations. The first is the health, longevity, and political viability of Trump himself in retirement. No one can predict Trump’s future vigor and energy with certainty. Yet even his supporters accept that the whirlwind pace of the start of Trump’s second term is unsustainable for any 80-year-old man, especially one who reportedly scarcely sleeps, eats as he pleases, and wades into public crowds almost daily.

In addition, there is the question of whether Trump’s second term will be judged successful or will be overshadowed by the partisan hysterias of the first term and its aftermath—two impeachments, lawfare, hoaxes like Russian “collusion” and Hunter Biden laptop “disinformation”—or by crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, yet another conflict in the volatile Middle East, and the post–George Floyd rioting. The next two years are also an open question: If there is an economic downturn, or if the ongoing war with Iran continues too long into the future, it could fundamentally imperil Trump’s legacy.

Finally, recent history is against Trump. No modern president emeritus—even the most popular—has ever been able to significantly affect the policies of his party or choose his successors. Barack Obama came the closest when he stayed put in Washington after his second term ended in 2017 and sought to help guide the flailing Joe Biden presidency between 2021 and 2025. Yet even despite Obama’s alleged surrogate role, his political capital diminished during the 2024 campaign in direct proportion to his visibility.

Similarly, Ronald Reagan left office after two successful terms and after moving his party markedly to the right. But instead of continuing Reaganism, his vice president, George H.W. Bush, almost immediately talked of a “kinder, gentler nation,” raised taxes, toned down Reagan’s cultural fights against liberal orthodoxies, and sought to expand supposedly insufficient social services with “a thousand points of light” of volunteer citizen participation. Bush was also more likely to use considerable military force abroad.

Harry Truman, who assumed the presidency after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death, also gradually drifted away from Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies. He inaugurated the Cold War against the Soviet Union, sought successfully to save South Korea from communist invasion, and was regarded as a far more centrist, realist, and hawkishly anti-communist commander in chief.

As a general rule, an administration’s unique political and personal brand is likely to erode under the next presidency, even if it is from the same party. Ex-presidents usually do not wish to, or cannot, imprint an agenda on their successors.

Jesse Kelly has some thoughts on the craziness that’s right around the corner:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Crash And Burn – The Elliot Page Story.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

MOVE ALONG CITIZEN, NOTHING TO SEE HERE:

Posted at 4:36 pm by Ed Driscoll

MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME: America Had a Come-to-Jesus Moment About Armed Self-Defense in the Last Five Years.

Gun control advocates are losing the public-carry culture war. Seventy percent of gun owners now report at least “some circumstances in which they carry a handgun for self-defense,” up from 56% in the original survey.

That doesn’t necessarily reflect public carry, since some may carry only on private property. Still, the new report estimates that 33.6 million Americans are “public carriers” — that is, they have a concealed carry permit and carry for self-defense “at least sometimes.” That’s a remarkable 60% increase in five years.

What could possibly explain this?

The original survey ran from Feb. 17 to March 23, 2021. Much has changed in the public-carry landscape over the last five years.

One of those changes is a lot less violent crime. Correlation isn’t causation, of course, but predictions that increased public-carry would lead more violence certainly didn’t come true.

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

ANN ARBOR’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

ADVENTURES IN DUMB:

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SHE’S BASICALLY HITLER:

Posted at 2:29 pm by Stephen Green

WILD-EYED THERANOS FRAUDSTER ELIZABETH HOLMES APPEARS IN UNSETTLING SECRET DOC: ‘I’m not deceiving you.’

A top-secret documentary about disgraced Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes premiered Sunday at the Telluride Film Festival — featuring the wild-eyed convicted liar unsettlingly telling the crew, “I’m not deceiving you.”

The film — titled “You Can See Everything” — was filmed in secret by directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim and follows the Silicon Valley scammer around in the weeks before she was sent to a Texas federal prison camp in May 2023.

The doc was aired at the Colorado film festival Sunday night, surprising the audience at the Werner Herzog Theater, who didn’t know exactly what they would be watching because the screening had been kept under wraps all week, Vanity Fair reported.

Before it started, the audience was required to hand over their cell phones.

“Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move,” a synopsis of the almost three-hour doc reads.

“What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.”

A trailer was also released on YouTube to coincide with the film festival premiere.

And it’s not creepy at all!

No word yet if Sundown Joe appears in the documentary: Biden played big role in promoting convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

VIDEO: ‘Mass Female TikTok Psychosis’: The Lindsay Clancy Cult. “Here is a unique brain frying happening over on Tik Tok. And it has caused probably the greatest gender divide I have ever seen on any culture war topic ever. It’s one of the very few times I’ve genuinely been taken aback by something on the internet. And if you know me, that should worry you.”

Trump should have shut down TikTok.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, THAT IS A TAKE:

Posted at 1:28 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: Why the AfD Wins.

For the past several months, in the course of the Sachsen-Anhalt election, accusations of fascism have been brandished against a candidate who not only wasn’t born when Nazis held power but wasn’t even born when the Berlin Wall came down almost half a century later.

Without a direct emotional link to its darkest days, Germany’s version of democracy—in which certain political parties are constitutionally entitled to encourage a court to ban others—has become too bizarre to maintain. Harald Martenstein, a conservative columnist for Welt and hardly an AfD backer, took part in a debate in Hamburg last winter over whether to ban the AfD, and shocked the audience by contemptuously throwing the question back at his mostly progressive audience. “You know that you are not trying to prevent the Fourth Reich, but only to eliminate your political competition,” Martenstein said. “It would be child’s play to keep the AfD down. All you would have to do is tackle a few problems that are real problems.”

As Melissa Chen tweets, “This is the inevitable result of the mainstream media stretching the label ‘far-right’ until it covered any opinion to the right of Lenin. Once a term is used on sensible opinions on border control, energy policy, crime statistics and school admissions, it just becomes noise and people start resenting the attempts at manipulation. Gay race communism became the only position that was ok to hold.”

To be fair, this isn’t your grandfather’s “far right” party: Why do so many gay men support the AfD?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll