For years, the MAGA movement ran on an aura of inevitability: Trump would bulldoze every obstacle, his lieutenants would tighten the screws, and the rest of America would just learn to live with it. Lately, that myth machine is sputtering.
Courts are stalling signature plans, the government shutdown is chewing up political capital, and even some of the movement’s most ideological boosters sound tapped out. As Virginia Heffernan put it in a new essay, Trump is “unpopular,” the judiciary keeps “checking him,” and the freakiest of the true believers are sounding like they want off the ride.
Inside Trumpworld, the blueprint for dominance has long been Project 2025, a hard-edged plan championed by conservative operative Russell Vought. The goal, according to critics, is to hollow out the administrative state and rewire power around the presidency. Heffernan points to Vought’s theory of a suffocating liberal “cartel,” and his assumption that once it is dismantled, Americans will “toss our hats in the air, and embrace Trump as our king.” Then she twists the knife, “this liberation by king keeps not happening in America.”
According to The New Republic, lawsuits have tied up headline-grabbing moves, protests have stiffened spines, and the shutdown has deepened voter fatigue. A fresh AP NORC poll finds that about six in ten Americans assign significant responsibility to Trump and Republicans for the closure, a number that undercuts any story that only Democrats are taking the blame. If you were looking for a turning point, mass annoyance is a decent place to start.
The discouragement is bleeding into the far right’s brain trust. Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned Dark Enlightenment polemicist and sometime muse for new right power players, once told Politico he thrilled at Vought’s willingness to “impound” congressional dollars, a power grab that would sideline lawmakers and centralize the purse in the West Wing. Now he sounds exhausted.
In a recent blog post flagged by Heffernan, Yarvin declared the administration is “failing because it deserves to fail,” blasting Trump for obsessing over “getting rid of one liberal judge” instead of “getting rid of the whole legal system” and “the whole philosophy of government.” That is not a white flag from the center; that is a primal scream from the fringe.
If the movement’s most maximalist voices are losing faith, the political math gets worse for Trump. Shutdown blame lines up with a broader drift. Reuters polling shows his approval still underwater, a reminder that grinding showdowns do not magically produce popularity. Meanwhile, core promises are mired in court, including efforts to flex federal muscle in blue strongholds, and the headlines are about injunctions and appeals instead of got it done brags. For a brand built on dominance, stalemate reads like defeat.
Heffernan’s piece also sketches the chaos factor, the way Trump’s own preoccupations keep derailing the supposed master plan. Critics have long warned that governance by stunt and grievance is a recipe for legal losses, and the record lately bears that out, docket after docket, delay after delay. Project 2025 was meant to be a juggernaut, but you cannot bulldoze institutions if you spend your days chasing cable hits, attacking judges, and relitigating yesterday’s slights.
MAGA still has energy, money, and media muscle. But the last few weeks have revealed cracks that are hard to gloss over, courts blocking, voters blaming, and ideologues despairing.
