The deep sexual dysfunction at the heart of the MAGA movement has burst into full view, argued a columnist who's tracked that malady for years, and it's driving away potential converts.
"It may not initially seem obvious why Mar-a-Lago face, incels, Elon's pregnancy fetish or the Epstein files are linked," wrote Salon's Amanda Marcotte. "But this is a year in which MAGA showed they are very weird about sex. And it's hurting them."
Marcotte pointed to popular MAGA influencer Sólionath, who melted down revealingly over mockery directed at the hugely popular and Hitler-admiring podcaster Nick Fuentes' admission that he was a virgin.
“I could make a dating app profile and lose my virginity by dinnertime,” Sólionath claimed. “But very few people alive have ever actually had *sex*. They’ve slapped their damp, clammy body against another damp, clammy body, like the wriggling of a suffocating fish ... [If] I ever tried to make love [I would] reveal the deepest and most primal aspects of myself to a woman ... she [would] be mine in totality and no other human even think of her existence.”
Sólionath then vowed to impregnate this imaginary woman who wanted to have sex with him, Marcotte added.
"In 2025, the right’s leaders and influencers revealed the deep sexual dysfunction driving their movement" Marcotte wrote. "The constant drumbeat of weird sexual displays is likely a major reason the MAGA coalition, which was flying high at the beginning of the year, is losing popularity rapidly, especially with younger voters."
Republicans love casting aspersions on LGBTQ+ people as "groomers" and perverts, but Marcotte argued that Americans saw their accusations as psychological projection.
"The biggest example of this is the Epstein files, the 5.2 million pages of documents collected by the Justice Department during the investigation into accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein," Marcotte wrote. "As the files continue to leak out ever so slowly, Trump’s frantic efforts to prevent their release make more sense. It’s not just that a notorious convicted sex criminal deemed himself 'Don’s best friend' and appeared closer to Trump than any other human being in the president’s life for nearly two decades."
"The nation got a glimpse of the sexual world the president apparently inhabited, or at least stood in close proximity to, one which wasn’t glamorous but simply gross," she added.
The right's defense of the unsavory insinuations Trump and his relationship with Epstein is repellant enough, Marcotte wrote, but the way many in the MAGA movement talk about sex and relationships is off-putting and bizarre.
"Maybe MAGA has grossed out the rest of the country enough that they will finally stop forcing their disturbed proclivities on the rest of us in 2026," she concluded. "Or maybe we’ll plumb new depths of dysfunction in the coming year. Musk hasn’t even started to imagine impregnating women with artificial intelligence, so things can always get worse. Either way, there’s one thing I can predict with confidence: We’ll get another round of articles handwringing about why it’s so hard for Republicans to find a date, which will show no understanding that the answer was always obvious."
