The MAGA mind has cracked. On the one hand, Trump supporters believe that Donald Trump is a great populist leader with solid instincts. On the other hand many have come to believe the president is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s puppet. This argument implies that President Trump risked his “no new wars” pledge for trivial reasons. The Iranian nuclear program is either inconsequential or threatens only Israel. The fact that Iran has spent nearly 50 years calling the American-led West the “Great Satan” — while sponsoring numerous terrorist proxies — does not justify acting either.
In 2026 the man MAGA idolized is little more than a cretin — perhaps suffering from dementia — or worse, compromised. If he did not care about gas prices, it was because he betrayed the base. Long since forgotten was the fact that as a private citizen Trump — in keeping with all U.S. presidents — is on record going back more than two decades drawing a red line at a nuclear Iran.
Following a Midterm election wipeout, the President seemed resigned to the reality of the legacy-endangering foreign policy path he chose. When asked at the site of the White House ballroom construction project if he would do it over again knowing the cost, he insisted he had little choice otherwise “everything you see here, someday might not exist”.
The president may have been clear and consistent but his messaging has at best been spotty. At the outset of the conflict he remarked that Iranian ICBMs were within reach of Europe and soon the U.S. Reporting in defense publications — overwhelmingly ignored in early 2026 by mainstream media — suggested Iran had engaged in joint testing of ICBMs with Russia and would soon have hypersonic missiles for which there is no defense.
Americans did as they do at most elections: Vote kitchen table economics.
What decided this election was less about Democrats turning out than Republicans sitting it out. A large portion of the Trump base became convinced that Trump is under the control of Israel and AIPAC. For them the election became a referendum not merely on Trump but Zionism more broadly. This schism has marked the “America First” portion of the Trump base as politically toxic while failing to scratch the surface of what really went wrong with the economy and why.
Conservative media, too, failed to raise key issues to counter the emergence of “Jew Derangement Syndrome” on the right. And the timing could not have been worse: Many Jewish voters during Biden’s term, concerned about the antisemitic tone of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, began withholding donations from Democrats, with wealthy donors pulling back from Ivy League endowments. Many no doubt landed on the Republican side of the ballot in the 2024 presidential election. By the 2026 Midterms many had become politically homeless or — judging from how much of the Michigan Jewish vote went to Senate candidate Abdul Al-Sayed — squarely back in the Democrat fold.
Since the blue tsunami washed ashore, many of the JDS afflicted are also in the throughs of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The glass-half full Midterm reckoning may have gone as follows: The hallmark of genuine leadership (courage) can best be characterized as choosing the longterm welfare of a country over the path of least political resistance. This approach might be expected to give lip service, at least, to the notion that as a recipient of presidential briefs Trump’s sense that Iran could not wait another 50 years was grounded in actionable intelligence about a genuine nuclear threat. It would anticipate that mainstream media would downplay the Administration’s case for intervention because they have rarely been known to do Trump any favors.
This vantage point would no doubt recognize that the uniparty has always been stacked against Trump, among them rhinos in the GOP. Key figures like Senate Leader John Thune allowed the Save America Act among other aspects of Trump’s legislative agenda to languish, citing a slim Republican majority in the House and Senate. The Executive Branch, apart from the One Big Beautiful Bill, has been largely left to govern by “easy come, easy go” executive orders — frequently challenged in court and often struck down.
The glass half-empty reckoning consists of doubling down. Supporters blame Midterm election losses solely on the presidency. However, a close look at social media over the past year reveals another explanation: The audiences of Alex Jones, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Joe Rogan exceed the daily reach of CNN, MS NOW and Fox News combined. These individuals became a self-reinforcing narrative loop — repeatedly underscoring doubts that spawned a flurry of “MAGA civil war” reporting.
Collectively, this amounted to a voter disenfranchisement campaign. In the end, it was the Trump base who threw down their ball and found common cause with Democrats and rhinos — to include members of the Bush family, who came out in support of James Talarico in Texas — or who by their refusal to vote delivered record electoral gains to the Democratic Socialists of America.
Unlike the leftist intersectional framework with which to build solidarity across disparate identity groups, when MAGA’s figurehead betrayed them, the coalition shattered.
Like many Americans, the president’s base had legitimate grievances — anger over DOGE, Epstein files and AI data centers just to name a few. But what drove the knife into the president’s legacy was not a series of arcane policy disputes. It was not even strictly a cost of living crisis. Rather, the more radical elements of the base declared war on anyone who historically supported Israel.
These voices were quickly amplified on social media by bots — no doubt from the likes of Iran and Russia — to gin up a perception that attacks on the Israel-US relationship enjoy a great deal of organic support. For a “big tent” movement that initially exhibited little affinity for antisemitism in 2016, by 2026 a shocking percentage of the alt-right dabbled in Nick Fuentes’ brand of stereotypical far-right rhetoric — a caricature of everything Hillary Clinton once said about the “deplorables”.
Radical elements, still associated with the Trump base despite actively distancing themselves, essentially acquired a propaganda hammer and two nails: Israel and Iran. Day after day after day they pounded home the same narrow narrative. Mainstream media gatekeepers fell silent. If they had given Americans an alternative explanation for the inflationary picture, it may have gone differently:
Government Spending is Inflationary: Having surpassed $40M in debt with $1T in interest piling on every 100 days — with overall interest payments greater than the entire defense budget and the gross national debt now at 125 percent of the Gross Domestic Product for the first time since the post WWII period — the future is, unfortunately, costly. No amount of veering right and left in future elections will fundamentally correct the cost of living crisis until Americans understand the mutual threat of owing more than $118,000 per man, woman and child. At an estimated price tag of $200 trillion, DSA candidates cannot deliver on their promises — but they may very well kill us with a slew of new taxes trying.
Geopolitical Conflict: The conflicts in Ukraine and Iran account for a reduction in approximately 15 percent of global oil. While this is not inconsequential — particularly given that fertilizers essential to global food security have taken a heavy hit — the Strait of Hormuz closures primarily threatened oil bound for places like China and the EU. While this increases the cost of oil globally, it has yet to surpass Bush/Obama-era oil/gas highs when adjusted for inflation. Moreover, because the U.S. is a net exporter, high prices also serve to bring money into the economy — though not without cost-of-living frustrations shared across political lines.
Population Growth: In 2018, researchers from Yale and MIT published a study that went beyond standard Census data. Using mathematical modeling of operational data, visa overstays, and demographic flows from 1990 to 2016, they estimated that the true undocumented population had a mean of 22.1 million with an upper limit nearing 29 million. If that study were to occur today — following the pandemic era border crisis — the mean would be ~28M, with an upper limit of ~36 million per Gemini. (Although to be clear, estimates vary widely.) Given that the average U.S. state — with notable exceptions for California, New York, Texas and Florida — sits just below seven million in overall population, by whatever measure is used a 51st State of noncitizens arrived under the Biden Administration’s watch, alone. This took place at a time when the pandemic was unraveling supply chains, small businesses closed and many workers became “nonessential”. Inflation hit 40-year highs and demand increased across the board — housing, food, healthcare, education and energy. The problem? Ramping up supply to meet demand shocks is a years-long undertaking — not within the realm of the Trump Administration solving in just two years.
Fossil Fuel Transition: The war we rarely talk about anymore is the larger culprit: Climate crisis. This objective sent the Biden administration on a “fossil fuel transition” that among other things including cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, already well underway when he took charge. While the Obama Administration pursued energy independence, much of that attributable to fracking, the Biden Administration set its sites on the so-called Green New Deal (Inflation Reduction Act). The “stick” in this picture consisted of the Blackrock-backed Environment, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) investing. Cap-and-trade and similar incentives to decarbonize rounded out the mix. States like California quietly shuttered oil refineries — fewer than 12 today down from ~50 during the 1980s. Meanwhile, because there are few, if any, pipelines brining oil refined in Texas to the West Coast, much of American oil refining capacity bolsters exports. In essence, the U.S. came to supply the world even as inadequate infrastructure starves the American consumer — in turn driving up prices to the benefit of an ESG-oriented oil industry. With AI data centers adding to the demand-side of the equation, nothing can fundamentally transform structural bottlenecks until domestic refining capacity not only increases but is more evenly distributed. In a move that came too late to deliver economic relief prior to the Midterms, the Trump Administration announced a plan to nationalize production in October after the Strategic Petroleum Reserve hit 44-year lows. For now, unfortunately, the inflationary impact of high-cost energy will continue for the foreseeable future. Wrapping up the Iran and Ukraine wars will not solve for self-inflicted wounds.
While the far left may argue the “fascist” right is only living down to its dastardly reputation — with the center left now tempted to breathe a sigh of relief as the “cult” comes to its senses — in truth mainstream media largely left Americans of all political stripe in the dark about why a return to the affordability of the pre-pandemic economy remains out of reach. Reporting scarcely acknowledges the paradox of energy independence and structural bottlenecks as a cause of rising prices irrespective of geopolitical crisis. They refuse to explicitly tie the cost of living crisis to the national debt. Similarly, mainstream media is loathe to draw attention to President Biden’s record-setting border crisis as a source of “sticky” demand-pull inflation. Meanwhile, vacuums exist to be filled and into this void stepped an age-old form of scapegoating: The Jews.
Given that fascist Italy and Nazi Germany arose from the ashes of economic distress — and the self-inherent danger of an antisemitic far right and far left finding common ground — the world can ill afford to underestimate the power of social media silos in which tropes triumph over reality and obsession passes for critical thinking. The usual suspects did not force the U.S. live beyond its means to the point of risking a USSR-level collapse under the weight of snowballing debts. If Israel and Iran were non-issues, structural problems closer to home would still represent a crisis — economic work that now rests in the hands of the same people who brought us the inflation-promoting war on climate change in the first place.
Few truer words have been uttered in politics than when political consultant James Carville famously told Bill Clinton “It’s the economy, stupid!” To this, another truism: “Life is energy”.
Energy prices may never be what they once were because the deck is stacked against it. On the one hand, energy supplies are endangered by wars largely supported by the Military Industrial Complex. On the other hand, AI energy demands are so gargantuan that they compete with humans for vital resources. But beyond this, affordable living is endangered by climate crisis and the Blackrock-backed ESG investment ecosystem that sprung up around making renewables more competitive as a function of making oil and gas exploration/infrastructure less attractive to investors. Until voters see fit to examine the macroeconomic picture — one in which unchecked government spending, AI and the rush to renewables deals a death blow to affordability for the foreseeable future — little changes.
Blaming Israel is just a whole lot easier than unmasking the big picture.
###