MAGAReport for 9/1/2024 - adrift

There is a marked lack of focus, online and offline, among the MAGA crowd as the election draws nearer

This week, I ventured out to Johnstown, PA to talk to people at another Trump rally. The hostile reception I had at the last event I attended in my hometown of Woodstock, IL had me a little worried that the whole MAGA vibe had shifted against me. Fortunately, everything was back to “normal” this time. People were friendly and happy to talk and share their pro-Trump insights as they waited to be let in to the arena. Here are a few takeaways:

I have noticed a shift in attitude over the last few months with respect to violence. At the RNC, which started just a few days after the shooting in Butler, PA, there was a lot of violent rhetoric going around. I wrote back then about how the online forums were full of talk about civil war and threats against the media. At the RNC, when I would ask what would happen if Trump lost in November, “civil war” was the response from a majority of people I talked to.

But this week in Johnstown, when I asked about what would happen if Trump lost, “civil unrest” was the strongest answer I received. Overall, people weren’t talking about violence at all. It was much more common to hear them talk about how, if Trump loses, the country would likely fail and that it would be the end of America as we know it. But their concern was America would be unrecognizable after another Democratic Presidency, not that the nation would be physically destroyed.

With the decline in talk of violence has come an interesting increase in the frequency of something else. One person at the RNC had told me that they thought there would be a foreign terrorist attack on American soil before the election, possibly a nuclear attack or dirty bomb. This is not something I’d seen discussed online or heard before, and I considered it a one-off theory. But this week, a third of people I spoke to in Johnstown, without prompting, told me that they thought we would not even have an election in November. When I asked why, they spun some complicated theories that generally centered around this kind of terrorist attack. For example, one man told me that he thought Biden would resign soon so Harris would become the first female President and that would help her going into the election. Then, there would be a terrorist attack on a major city, likely in the form of a nuclear or dirty bomb attack. After that, Harris would declare martial law and “postpone” the election.

There is obviously no credibility to this theory, but it captures an interesting quirk of the MAGA mindset. They tend toward conspiracy theories and the catastrophic. When there is a person they don’t like, it’s not just someone with bad policy ideas. Instead, they are almost immediately accused of being a pedophile, their positive traits are spun into something to be mocked, and they are criticized in bad-faith. That person can’t just be bad, they must be evil. They can’t just be someone with different views, they must be worthless. And when hard-core Trump supporters worry about the election outcome, it can’t just be that Trump could legitimately lose because people are tired of his ideas. It is that the election is stolen or that maybe something huge will happen to prevent it all together. The MAGA crowd feels like they are engaged in a battle for the soul of the country, a battle of good vs. evil - thinking Trump encourages - and thus a loss for their side would mean powerful evil forces must be at play.

That is what makes me worried about violence. I am not a great prognosticator, but I expect that we are likely to see isolated MAGA demonstrations, possibly with limited violence, on election night and in the days after as votes are counted. There are no solid plans for any of that yet, and I don’t expect to see them until late-October, but I’m convinced enough that I’ve blocked my calendar so I can travel to the hotspots.

In the meantime, things in online MAGA forums continue to be unfocused and generally unthreatening. There are wide ranging attempts to belittle the Harris-Walz campaign for various things, but nothing is emerging as a point for them to coalesce behind. There are no organized plans for violence or demonstration.