The MAGA Death Rattle

On MAGA's collapse, what it cost to be right, and why we still can't put down the guardrails.

I think it’s really important to understand what we are witnessing, in real time, right now.

Tucker Carlson practically called Trump the anti-Christ. Alex Jones is screaming that Trump should be kissing his ass. Nick Fuentes is talking about supporting liberals. Megyn Kelly issued a scorched-earth statement rebuking Trump, calling him a lunatic. MAGA influencers are posting public apologies. Not quiet, buried-in-the-notes ones. Loud. Public. On the record.

But, we said this would happen. We said the whole thing was a house of cards built on manufactured grievance and a charismatic con man, and that the moment he did something that hit them where they actually lived, the walls would come down.

They called us delusional sheep. They called us brainwashed. They unfriended us, uninvited us, estranged us, reported us, screamed at us calling us every name in the book. They told us we just didn’t understand real America. I understood real America just fine. Real America just wasn’t listening.

So when I say we’ve earned the right to say, I told you so, we fucking earned “I. told. you. so.” Every syllable. MAGA can shut their yappers now — they’ve buried themselves in their own bullshit deep enough.

The Iran strike was the crack in the foundation. Not because war is new. That Dollar Store Dictator has always loved the theater of it. I imagine he sits in his oval office watching the bombs drop on children’s schools and hospitals while he plays with his green army men and GI Joes waiting for his next diaper change, like the narcissistic little psychopath he is.

But this time it’s MAGA’s kids. This time the people who’d been sold the story that their Lord and Savior Jesus Trump was the anti-war candidate, the America First candidate, the guy who was finally going to stop sending their sons and daughters home in boxes — this time they finally looked up and realized they’d been had, despite us howling it from the rooftops since 2016. And the machine couldn’t hold.

To understand the mechanics of what’s actually happening inside MAGA, let’s look at it from a different angle — because I’ve seen this before. Not in politics.

In recovery.

I have four years sober. And one of the first things you learn in sobriety is that nobody quits because someone outside their life presented compelling evidence they had a problem. Drunks never think they have a problem.

Before COVID, I was an occasional drinker. Nothing alarming. Then lockdown hit and to quench the boredom, I took a masterclass on wine. Literally. Suddenly I was locked inside with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and wine was just… there. Masking up and heading to the store for a couple bottles after work became routine. What started as something casual became wine-thirty every night the second my kids went to bed. I kept my career. My marriage was good. The kids had hot meals and everything they needed. From the outside, everything looked perfectly fine.

But I felt awful. I gained weight. I was exhausted before noon. I developed GERD. It’s almost as if I could feel parts of my body beginning to shut down. They weren’t, but dramatics aside, I just didn’t feel good anymore. The point is that I didn’t see the problem until my body started loudly knocking at the door to stop.

Nobody hits bottom because a loved one staged an intervention with a PowerPoint. They change when the internal cost finally exceeds the internal story they’ve been telling themselves about why they’re fine. MAGA was never really an ideology. It was an identity. A story they told themselves about who they were and who the enemy was. And identity-based movements don’t collapse through argument.

They collapse through permission.

Someone inside has to say it out loud first. That’s what the influencers just did. They gave permission. When Tucker insinuates that Trump is the evil anti-Christ, every person who’d had that quiet, uncomfortable thought, the one they buried under loyalty and sunk cost and not wanting to admit they’d been wrong for this long, they just got told it’s safe to surface. When a MAGA influencer posts “I was wrong, I fucked up, I’m sorry,” their followers hear, “Oh, we can say that too, now. We aren’t alone.” They operate within a hive mind. Too scared to speak out unless someone they perceive as a leader tells them it’s okay to do so.

Umm…like, sheep with their shepherd. You know, the thing they called us. The irony of their projections are not lost.

That’s how it ends. Not with a bang. With a permission slip. I’ve watched people get sober. I’ve watched people leave the church and their entire worlds behind. I’ve also experienced what it feels like when someone finally puts down the thing that was destroying them and blinks in the light like they’re seeing clearly for the first time. It’s not graceful. It’s disorienting and ugly and they don’t always know yet what they’ve done or what it cost. But it’s real. And this is exactly what’s happening on X right now, in comment sections and public apologies and ideological defections. This is real and the whole world can now hear the wet, gurgling sound of the MAGA death rattle reverberating throughout America.

MAGA is dying.

But, we still need to be vigilant. Donald Trump still has the courts. He still has the military command structure. He still has every loyalty-purged agency, every executive order, every piece of apparatus his people spent years quietly building while we were all watching the circus. A movement can die while its damage lives on indefinitely. The true believers can scatter and the authoritarian infrastructure just… stays. Waiting. A person can get sober and still have blown up their marriage, their finances, their kids’ sense of safety. The wreckage doesn’t clean itself up just because the drinking stopped. Even though MAGA is dying, what it built is not.

Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones having a public meltdowns and somewhere out there Nick Fuentes is earnestly talking about relating to liberals and that is genuinely, objectively, cosmically hilarious and we are allowed to laugh. We were right. We saw it. We said it out loud a long time ago, when saying it out loud cost us a lot of things we loved. And now the people who told us we were crazy are saying it too. Exactly what we said would happen. We knew it was only a matter of time before the leopards began eating their own faces.

What comes after it isn’t guaranteed to be better… it’s just, different. Different requires the same attention, the same resistance, the same refusal to look away that got us here.

What we should be doing now is exactly what we’ve always done, except now we do it with the wind at our backs instead of in our faces.

Talk to the ones who are waking up if you have the space to do so.

Not to gloat. You already did that, and you earned it. But the people peeling off from MAGA right now are disoriented. They’re blinking in the light. They are, whether we like it or not, potential allies. You don’t have to coddle them. You don’t have to pretend the last decade didn’t happen. But if someone in your life is saying “I think I was wrong,” that conversation is worth having. Not for their sake. For ours.

Document everything.

Screenshots. Receipts. The public apologies, the defections, the admissions. Not because we need validation, we have that, but because the rewrite is already being drafted. The same people posting “I was wrong about Trump” will, inside of eighteen months, be posting “I never really supported him anyway.” History has a way of getting laundered. Don’t let it. They need to come face to face with the full gravity of what they’ve done. You can’t truly change what you refuse to acknowledge.

Stop waiting for institutions to save you.

The courts have been packed. The agencies have been gutted. The military command structure answers to him. None of that disappears because Tucker Carlson had a crisis of conscience on X. The institutions we were taught to trust as guardrails have either been compromised or are hanging by threads. That means the work is local, it’s relational, and it’s unglamorous. School boards. City councils. State legislatures. The boring machinery of democracy that most people ignored while the spectacle played out on their phones.

Build your actual community.

Not your online community — your physical one. The people within driving distance. The ones who will show up. Movements that win are movements that can put bodies in rooms, not just likes on posts. Find your people. Know where they are. Make plans that don’t require WiFi. End the “bitch-sessions” and start talking solutions. Stay focused on the bigger picture. George Fuechsel once said, “garbage in, garbage out.” A simple computing principle, but it applies to our inner lives just as much as any machine. Feed your mind a steady diet of the bad and the ugly, and that’s exactly what you’ll produce. Our reality is largely what we make of it. Let’s make it better.

Keep your economic pressure on.

Boycotts work when they’re sustained. Divesting from complicit corporations, banking locally, supporting independent media… yours included… these are not symbolic gestures. They are the slow removal of resources from systems that depend on our participation to function. Hit these billionaire assholes where it hurts most – their bank accounts. Stop giving them what little money we have left. Fuck that. Bleed their revenue streams out.

Take care of yourself like your presence matters.

Because it does. The people who saw this coming — who paid the social and emotional cost of saying so out loud for years — are not expendable. Rest is not surrender. Grief and empathy are not weakness. Anger is not enough fuel to run on indefinitely. You need to still be standing when this enters its next phase, and it will enter its next phase. Self care is crucial. Protect your peace.

The death rattle is loud right now. It’s satisfying. It’s real.

But a dying animal is still dangerous. Sometimes it’s most dangerous right at the end.

Stay loud. Stay local. Stay together.

We don’t get to rest just yet.

If this piece hit something in you, the vindication, the warning, or both, please share it. Send it to the person in your life who is starting to blink in the light. Send it to the one who never stopped watching. This is the moment we’ve been documenting for years, and the people who need to read it aren’t all going to find it on their own.

The work continues here, week after week, without a corporate filter and without a permission slip from anyone. If you’ve been reading for free and you’re ready to put something behind it, this is the time. I appreciate your paid subscriptions and donations more than you know. The writers who saw this coming need to still be standing when the next chapter starts. So do you.

And if you can’t right now — share it anyway. That matters too.