A three-time Donald Trump voter expressed concern that the MAGA movement he built won't last beyond him.
Melik Abdul, a D.C.-based public affairs professional and Republican strategist, published a column for Newsweek sounding the alarm on a recent move made by the 79-year-old president he supports that threatens his political movement and the GOP itself.
"Watching him hand the nation’s spy agencies to Bill Pulte this week, a housing official with no intelligence background, I keep landing on a harder question: What’s left of Trump's legacy if he’s willing to burn it all down?" Abdul wondered. "That’s the part getting lost. Trump wasn’t elected only to win. He was elected on the promise that a working-class, multiracial coalition could outlast him and remake the Republican Party for good."
Abdul argued that Trump was the first generational figure the GOP has produced since Ronald Reagan, but he expressed doubts that his MAGA movement would endure for decades the way the 40th president's conservatism defined the party until Trump came on the scene.
"The trouble isn’t that the base has soured. It hasn’t," he wrote. "The trouble is that the administration has turned inward, chasing fights that thrill the faithful but build nothing durable. Renaming the Kennedy Center. A transgender service ban. Tariff brinkmanship. These play well with the people who were never going anywhere. They’ve done little for others in that 77 million Americans who actually put Trump back in office, most of whom don’t treat any of it as an existential crisis."
"That’s the cost of governing by applause," Abdul added. "You spend capital on symbols and end up with a second term carrying more asterisks than the first."
Most of those fights have ended in losses, Abdul pointed out, and he flagged other "self-inflicted damage" the president has caused.
"Voter ID and proof of citizenship are genuinely popular ideas. But Trump turned the SAVE Act into a loyalty test he knew the Senate would never pass," Abdul wrote. "There were never 60 votes, and no appetite to end the filibuster to find them. It was red meat. And it helped end John Cornyn’s career. Cornyn’s sin wasn’t disloyalty; he co-sponsored the bill. His sin was not being MAGA enough, fast enough."
Trump punished the GOP incumbent by endorsing his scandal-plagued rival Ken Paxton, throwing the Senate race into doubt for November, and he may have stalled his agenda by engineering primary losses and adding more members to the pool of lame-duck Republicans who have no reason to stick with him.
"A lame-duck senator who’s been told he isn’t wanted owes the White House nothing," Abdul wrote. "That isn’t loyalty. It’s leverage, and Trump just handed it away."
Pulte is the most glaring example, Abdul wrote. His resume might qualify him to run a housing agency, which he currently does, but he lacks even the most marginal background in intelligence or national security, and Trump must spend massive political capital to get him confirmed as director of national intelligence.
"Movements built entirely around one man don’t survive him," Abdul wrote. "A movement that can’t name a successor isn’t a realignment. It’s a personality. And personalities expire."
Trump's coalition appears unlikely to survive him, Abdul warned, because he has shrunk the GOP down to himself and his personal grudges and priorities.
"You don’t protect a legacy by burning down everything around it," Abdul wrote. "You protect it by naming an heir—and so far, the only one Trump has named is himself."