From 3rd Positionism to 3rd Penthouseism, A Case Study Into The (De)Evolution of The MAGA Movement.

Now that Trump is gone, and his movement is blowing in the wind, I think now is the time to analyze how it changed throughout his administration, particularly as a result of The Unite the Right Rally at Charlottesville.

The way I see it, there were two iterations of the MAGA movement, MAGA 1.0 and 2.0, both were similar, but had one major difference.

MAGA 1.0 is the movement that sprouted up as a result to Trumps 2016 campaign, which in terms of rhetoric and ideas was the closest this country has gotten to 3rd positionism since Huey Long. The ideas it espoused, economic populism, nativism, a desire to return the country to its glory days, as well as an emphasis on the nature of the lügenpresse put its adherents on the top of a very slippery slope, with a skull mask and SS Uniform at the bottom. This is where 1.0 differs from its successor, as 1.0 had no stop gap to prevent people from sliding down that slope as they noticed certain patterns and searched for information without any form of deradicalizing lens to prevent them from reaching uncouth conclusions. I don't think the Trump campaign realized this at first, or if they did, they assumed that it would be manageable, Charlottesville shattered that Illusion. Seeing thousands of neo-fascists and reactionaries (many of whom were led down the path by Trumps earlier rhetoric) show up to an event in public in broad daylight shocked the country, and it especially shocked the Trump administration, who would spend the rest of its existence trying to put this genie back in its bottle. After Charlottesville, the Trump administration began to look at some of its most ardent public supporters, and their followers, from the 2016 campaign and noticed that they had slipped further and further down the rabbit hole and had adopted more reactionary positions. This realization, combined with mounting internal pressure was what led to the birth of Qanon (the first Q post was roughly 3 months after Charlottesville, which is about how long it would take to put an op of its caliber together).

Qanon was an op run by Trump officials and was as much a deradicalization tactic as it was a viral marketing campaign for his reelection bid. This op would form the bedrock of MAGA 2.0. 

2.0 was created as an antidote to the radicalizing nature of 1.0, unlike its predecessor, it did have stop gaps to prevent further radicalization (at the cost of its potency, which is what ultimately lead to its failure in 2020), it had Qanon for the more hardcore supporters, and increasingly more inoffensive RNC talking points, token minorities, a greater emphasis on the LGBT movement, etc for more moderate individuals. And while the central concepts of the 2016 movement were still there, they were bookended by "the plan" and "secret operatives working for the good of the nation". These concepts prevented most neuvo-MAGApedes from slipping down the same slope as MAGA 1.0, as all the potentially radicalizing elements were now being "taken care of" and didn't require its adherents to do anything themselves to stop them. It was a perfect grift op, bringing in millions of boomers and soccer moms to vote for him, while alienating the more "unoptical" members of his original base.

Had he won in 2020, 2.0 would have been a complete success and the gold standard of deradicalization ops, but then the system "reinforced" the election in broad daylight, Trump ordered his operatives to kill the Q op in mid-December, and just like 1.0, 2.0 was now at the top of a very slippery slope with nothing to stop them from sliding down it. Then January 6th happened, and Silicon Valley kicked all the MAGAboomers onto a series of services most of which had massive communities of alt right personalities and accounts (MAGA 1.0) who understood just how to break through the measures Trump had put in place to suppress them. This is why Trump is currently making his own Social Media platform, instead of just joining any of the ones currently in existence, he wants MAGA 2.0 to remain in an isolated hugbox for when he wants to grift more money off them,  instead of being within spitting distance of the "undesirables" that helped Trump win in the first place, and who he later threw to the wolves at the first sign of trouble (kind of like he's doing to 2.0 right now). Whether this social media will work as intended is anyone's guess but judging by his storied history of licensing his name to subpar products, and then abandoning them, I'm not optimistic.