THE ECONOMIST: The fight over Republicans’ future has begun

As the dire results came in on November 3, young Republicans at Butterworth’s, a MAGA haunt a stone’s throw from the Capitol in Washington, DC, sipped glumly on cocktails such as the “Senate Majority Martini” and “The Red Wave”.

They accelerated through the stages of grief: denial, anger, then acceptance.

“This is historic”, noted one, “in the same way the Hindenburg was historic”.

An acrimonious post mortem is now under way within the party. Most concede that the Iran war did grave electoral damage; a loud faction blames Israel, too.

There is widespread agreement that voters were angered by corruption, but many are reluctant to point the finger at Donald Trump. And even as populism continues to swell, some hold out hope that the party might return to earlier precepts of free markets and small government.

Mr Trump’s dominance of the party has for years papered over its fissures. They are now laid bare.

Within MAGA, loyalists to the President remain. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, was among those to parrot Mr Trump’s line that he was not on the ballot: “I don’t think that this can be a line drawn against him.”

A few MAGA media figures, namely Mark Levin and Laura Loomer, continue to support the Iran war and America’s relationship with Israel.

But a noisy group of MAGA purists contend that Mr Trump has let the movement down. On November 4, J.D. Vance, Mr Trump’s vice-president, did not blame Mr Trump by name, but took the stunning step of blaming his boss’s policies, including the war, a failure to bring down costs and the relationship with Israel.

MAGA-purist vodcasters such as Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Steve Bannon had already broken with Mr Trump before the election; they were scathing after it.

On November 5 Natalie Winters, the co-host of Mr Bannon’s War Room show, alleged that White House officials such as Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, had made “shady deals” and that “the actual grifters in the administration” were tarnishing “the entire MAGA movement”.

She stopped short of implicating Mr Trump himself.

Mr Carlson called the results a “disaster”, on his show on November 4.

“You could mark it on your calendar,” he added: “Trumpism gone.”

He blames war, corruption (Mr Trump was “vain and venal”) and the President’s decision to endorse flawed candidates such as Darline Graham, sister of the late, hawkish Lindsey Graham, in South Carolina.

The administration had been too focused on fighting antisemitism, he argued, a stance he dubbed “Jewish lives matter”.

Mr Levin, for his part, skewered Mr Carlson, describing him a “loathsome creature” who had worked to “sabotage the President, the GOP, and the midterm elections”.

As brawls continue within MAGA, Republicans’ old guard, severely diminished but still defiant, is hoping for a resurrection.

“The American people have rejected our party’s shift toward economic populism,” asserted Mike Pence, Mr Trump’s vice-president in 2017-21, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, glossing over the populism espoused by many Democratic candidates.

Pat Toomey, a Republican senator from 2011-23, suggested in a post on X that Republicans had also gone astray in adopting statist industrial policy, pointing to the Government’s equity stakes in semiconductor and rare-earth mining firms.

Mitt Romney, the last pre-Trump Republican to have run for president, in 2012, offered a more sweeping and scathing critique of Mr Trump on X, pointing to the war and corruption, as well as his domestic excesses, fiscal profligacy and diplomatic arson (“weaponised justice, ICE brutality, mountainous deficits, hiding Epstein, abandoning allies and coddling enemies”).

Mr Trump has not only “bad policy”, he argued, but “bad character”. Many traditional Republicans privately agree; vanishingly few will say so, even now.

Between the MAGA purists and the old guard is a more fluid category of Republican, who could be charitably called pragmatists or, more cynically, opportunists.

Consider Ted Cruz, who after Tuesday’s sweep is poised to be the last remaining Republican statewide office-holder standing in Texas.

In his own election autopsy on his podcast, he paid lip service to the need to rebuild as a “true blue-collar party”, but pointed to a pre-Trump solution: Republicans had to be “real free-market conservatives”.

Mr Cruz, a longstanding proponent of muscular foreign policy who once cheered on Mr Trump’s war, felt compelled to change tack after the election, saying that the war should have been “brief, decisive, and over”.

Ron DeSantis, the term-limited governor of Florida who failed to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, is now hoping the MAGA movement might give him a second look.

Like Mr Cruz, he has been a prominent hawk. In the days before the election, however, he had soured on the Iran war.

In his own post-election critique, he noted that Republicans had failed to deliver on their pledge to release files pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted paedophile, a passionate issue within MAGA.

He also contended that Vivek Ramaswamy, the defeated Republican candidate for governor in Ohio, had lost because “he wants to bring in people, foreign workers on visas”. And he urged a ban on stock trading by members of Congress — though without naming Mr Trump directly, who has made more stock trades since coming to office than all lawmakers combined.

More fights will probably break out. Even as Mr Vance appeals to the MAGA purists, many within the MAGAverse despise him, not least for his ties to Silicon Valley, where he worked before running for Senate.

MAGA purists are vehemently opposed to the conflict in Iran, championed by Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, yet Mr Hegseth’s purge of supposedly woke generals from the Pentagon has earned him ardent fans within the right-wing “manosphere”.

Should he be ousted, “MAGA is going to lose its mind,” predicted Sean Trende of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, at an event dissecting the election’s results.

Observing these skirmishes is Mr Trump himself, not known for pulling his punches. As if to declare himself the most MAGA of all, on November 6 the White House announced that Stephen Miller, a nationalist and immigration hardliner, would be named chief of staff.

Mr Trump retains a huge war chest. His primary endorsements can still guarantee a candidate 30 per cent of the vote, notes Douglas Heye, a Republican strategist, which is often enough to carry the day.

“I don’t think that we’re ever in a post-Trump period until he’s no longer alive.”