By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, October 02, 2026
Earlier this week, Donald Trump shared a 43-second clip
of CNN’s Harry Enten going through the latest midterm polling data.
“In the 2024 election versus Kamala Harris, [Trump] got
99 percent of the MAGA GOP vote—perhaps surprisingly, I might have thought it’d
be 100 percent, but it was 99 percent,” Enten said in the clip. “Compare that
to his approval rating now with the MAGA GOP. It’s 98 percent; there’s been no
real decline in MAGA support.”
You can understand why Trump would celebrate this news.
Of course it leaves out a few things, including the other
13 minutes of Enten’s analysis. We’ll get to that. But the clip also ignores the
fact that people who self-identify as MAGA are definitionally Trump supporters.
It’s sort of like asking self-described vegans whether they support eating
salad, or asking Hells Angels, “Do you think biker gangs should be legal?”
Weirdly, Enten, who is very good at his job, didn’t
address this problem. In fairness, the share of voters who describe themselves
as MAGA has not shrunk that much. From what I can tell, the share of people
self-describing as MAGA has dropped about 7 to 10 points. So, if MAGA means
“super-committed Trump supporter,” the total number of them has not dropped a
lot, and, among self-identified super-committed Trump supporters, they remain
super-committed to Trump.
Enten’s larger point was that Trump is venting support of
non-MAGA Republicans like a space station with a blown-out airlock. In 2024,
Trump got 56 percent of the non-MAGA GOP vote. Now, if polls are to be
believed, he is supported by just 7 percent of self-identified non-MAGA
Republicans, a drop of 49 points. “So, his support is definitely not just
ebbing there,” Enten said, “but is absolutely crashing there.” Indeed, 10
percent of non-MAGA Republicans say they will vote Democratic in the midterms.
Oh, and among “pure independents”—i.e., people who don’t lean toward either
party—support for Trump has dropped like Hans Gruber exiting
Nakatomi Plaza. In 2024, he won them by 15 points. Since then, support for
Trump has dropped 86 points to minus-71. It’s as if Gruber plunged through the
pavement and kept going.
Oh, and Trump’s overall approval rating is stuck in the
mid-30s, and a new AP-NORC poll this week had his approval on the economy at 17 percent.
I know what you’re thinking: The obvious strategy for the
GOP to climb out of this hole is to tell voters the economy is doing great and
to pretend that Trump is on the ballot. Also, the best way to repel grizzly
bears is to slather yourself in a thick paste of salmon, honey, and vanilla ice
cream and then grab a bear cub for a selfie.
Dead, rested, and ready.
On the MAGA and MAGA-adjacent new right, Richard Milhous
Nixon is supposedly so hot right now. The hotness is called “Nixonmaxxing.” Christopher Rufo released a video
called “Nixon Forever.” Introducing it, he suggested emulating Nixon, who “left
behind a blueprint for counter-revolution—the last hope for restoring the
American republic.” On social media, Rufo helpfully explained that “[t]he
right’s rediscovery of Richard Nixon is not about particular policies—some
good, some bad—but about the aesthetic, the attitude and the narrative of the
self-made man who won 49 states on behalf of the Silent Majority, and was taken
down in a Deep State coup.”
To their credit, the Nixonmaxxers concede that the case
for Nixon is mostly a vibes thing. Or as Rufo puts it with little apparent
sense of irony, “aesthetics.” I mean we’re talking about the guy who wore a dark suit and wingtips on the beach and needed 3-by-5-inch
notecards to navigate small talk with strangers.
Scott Greer, a dabbler in white identity politics,
concedes that “the new Nixon myth … has issues.” Nixon, Greer writes, “had few
substantive accomplishments as president, especially on the issues dear to the
Online Right. While one of the better presidents when it comes to foreign
policy, he had no real domestic achievements, aside from advancing liberal
causes and programs. In many ways, the country actually got worse on his watch,
with crime spiraling out of control and the economy plummeting. Nixon may not
be responsible for these developments, but he certainly didn’t solve them.”
Greer really can’t avoid this conclusion given his belief
that a “serious conservatism will always amount to white identity politics no
matter how much its advocates deny it. The sooner we acknowledge this, the
sooner we can make America great again.” So he acknowledges, with some
soft-pedaling, Nixon’s central role in codifying affirmative action and
extending the civil rights agenda of Lyndon Johnson.
(For an excellent primer on the strengths and weaknesses
of Nixon’s legacy, I can’t recommend enough Dan McLaughlin’s “Nixon’s Not the One.”)
I think the vibes-merchandising of Nixon is pretty amusing. It reminds
me of the hipster effort from a while back to make Spam—the tinned lunch meat—hip and cool. I mean, who can forget the SPAMERICAN Tour?
But given how Rufo, J.D. Vance, the Trump DOJ, et al.
don’t seem to think it’s entirely a joke, we should give it some serious
consideration.
I think there are a number of reasons why this is
happening. Some of them are openly and honestly argued by the Nixonmaxxers.
They like his Rousseauian
appeal to the “Silent Majority.” They like his willingness to use all the
instruments of the state for political advantage, including numerous
economically preposterous moves. They prefer Nixon’s dour anger to Reagan’s
sunny charm. I think some find Nixon’s intense white-dude awkwardness appealing
as they try to embrace “whiteness” as an identity. They certainly love Nixon’s
hatred of lefty elites. In a National Conservatism Conference speech, Vance won
cheers for invoking Nixon’s line, “the professors are the enemy.”
Vance and others also insist that Nixon was taken down by the “deep state” and
that, on the merits, Watergate would be “like a 12-hour news story” today; the
“idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” he said.
Such messaging serves some obvious purposes. If Watergate
is synonymous with a presidency-destroying scandal, that implies there’s a
limit to what Trump can get away with. If Watergate was no big deal, then it’s
an open question whether anything—from January 6 forward—can be considered a
big deal. It definitely buries the dead letter of Congress’ impeachment power
even more deeply.
Similarly, the idea that Nixon was unfairly taken down by
the deep state makes the paranoia surrounding the thick constellation of
conspiracy theories MAGA relies on seem more legitimate, and legitimizing,
for the MAGA crowd whenever inconvenient facts get in the way.
And of course, retconning the story that Nixon marshaled
the necessary integrity and character to resign from office for the good of the
country into a sad mistake forced on him by his enemies in the deep state and
media has to have particular appeal for Trump, given his adamantine inability
to imagine doing such a thing.
Nixonmaxxed Weber.
But I think there’s another reason, which will take a
minute to explain.
The great German sociologist Max Weber identified three sources of legitimate political authority. First
there is traditional authority, which rests on inherited customs, the royal
line of succession, and that kind of thing. Then there’s legal-rational
authority, which is the impersonal rules of law and process, whether it’s
democratic elections under a constitutional regime or the bureaucratic systems
of, say, the old Soviet Union.
The third is charismatic authority. I should be
clear that charisma in the Weberian sense doesn’t mean “charming” in the way we
mean someone who has a lot of charisma or “rizz” (which is derived from
“charisma”). But Weber does mean charming in the older sense, as in charmed,
as if by spell or magic or, in biblical terms, gifted with divine grace or
favor.
Charismatic authority rests on the heroic, exceptional,
even superhuman traits the charmed see in a transformative leader. Napoleon,
Jesus, Muhammad, Mao, Ayatollah Khomeini, Joseph Smith, Gandhi, Hitler,
Mussolini, Atatürk: History is full of such examples, good, bad, divine, and
satanic.
Weber is not offering normative or moralistic opinions
about charismatic leaders—and neither am I. Please do not infer any moral
equivalence here, because I am not implying any.
The challenge for societies, Weber argued, was when
charismatic leaders die (or, I suppose, retire). The movements they built were
based on an intense personal, often religious, but always passionate,
commitment to the leader. When the leader is gone, that leader’s followers and
elites are generally left with a conundrum: How do we keep going? How do we
stay true to the mission, the cause, or the movement? What do we do with the
power left to us, and how do we keep it?
Weber calls this the “routinization” or
“bureaucratization” of charismatic power. Under a charismatic authority, people
follow the leader because the leader’s authority is derived from him
personally. He is the ruler. When the leader departs, “Do this because the
leader says so” becomes “Do this because this is what the leader would have
wanted.”
After Jesus ascended to heaven, the church was built to
institutionalize his teachings. After Mao died, the party bureaucracy took
over. When Fidel Castro died, the Cuban government stayed committed to
Castroism. Charisma is replaced with rules, institutions, procedures, and laws
that allow the uncharismatic to rule in the “spirit” of the leader’s ideas
without the spiritedness of the leader’s personality.
Trump was elected as a legal-rational leader. In 2016, he
lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. In 2020, he lost both. In
2024, he won both. But over this whole period, he has chafed, squirmed, and
railed against the constraints of the legal-rational box he was elected to. He
wants to be a charismatic leader who governs based on will, “instincts,”
personal authority, and Weberian charisma. At the midterm “convention,”
Republicans played a video that explained how “God made Trump” to save us. “On
June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said,
‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.” Just this week, he once again
explained that he was betrayed by his Supreme Court appointees because they
haven’t shown him personal loyalty. The idea that Supreme Court justices
should be constrained by the law rankles him because he thinks he is above the
law and loyalty to him should be the highest law. Do what the leader says, for
he is your leader.
Some Trump fans agree with this to one dismaying extent
or another. Some of his sycophants and enablers merely pretend to, as political
requirements demand. But everyone deeply invested in Trumpism, and the
political projects made possible by it, is desperate to keep the party going.
They don’t want to go back to the pre-Trump era of Reaganism.
Ironically, Reagan was a charismatic figure, too. When he
finished his second term, he was very popular, which made it possible for his
vice president to run as the inheritor of the Reagan mantle. People wanted four
more years, which is why George H.W. Bush was the first sitting vice president
elected directly to the presidency in 152 years. Bush distanced himself at the
margins from Reagan when he ran in 1988, but Reagan’s popularity and success
were what made victory possible. Bush was no Reagan, but the assumption that he
would routinize Reaganism is what got him elected.
A lot of J.D. Vance’s fans have convinced themselves that
he will have a similar success at the end of the Trump era. I am very skeptical
that voters will want four more years of this at the end of Trump’s
presidency. And it is dawning on some folks that Vance, for whatever skills you
think he has, has nothing like Trump’s charismatic connection with voters. You
might think he has charisma—I don’t—but he certainly doesn’t have Weberian
charisma.
So, what do you do if you’re professionally, politically,
and personally invested in the Trumpian transformation of the GOP and politics
writ large? How do you successfully routinize his shtick into our politics so
that his uncharismatic heir can gain and wield power? Well, you might construct
an ornate theory about another charisma-deficient politician who nonetheless
navigated politics brilliantly. You might look for someone who symbolized and
personified your own resentments. You might lionize a “realistic” statesman who
was content to make peace with our enemies, withdraw from foreign wars, and
dismiss the idea of standing up for freedom and human rights. You might try to
rehabilitate a leader who shared your view that the point of power was to use
it for the betterment of your team or tribe and to punish your enemies whenever
possible. You might claim that a certain disgraced president was actually a
kind of prophet without honor, a John the Baptist heralding what was to come.
In other words, you might just start Nixonmaxxing.
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