FIGHT!: How Trump and the MAGA Movement are Changing the World

INTRODUCTION

It was early Saturday evening in downtown Manhattan. My wife and I were visiting my oldest daughter who just got her first job at an international law firm in New York. We were just seated at one of the few remaining tables inside a popular local pub that was already hopping just after 6pm.

Then I got a text.

It was from my son. Dad, you have to see what just happened to Trump!

My heart sank. I knew it.

I knew that in mere seconds I was going to be reading about President Donald J. Trump having been shot.

My hands were shaking as I pulled up my X feed. At the top, the very first tweet I saw featured a video with the comment: Trump was just shot on live TV! Please stop what you’re doing and pray!

I watched the video. It stopped right after he fell to the ground.

I prayed.

And then, as I continued to scroll through the frantic tweets, I saw what has now become one of the most iconic moments in American history: Trump rose to his feet, blood spilling down the side of his head, not knowing the full extent of his injuries, not knowing what would become of himself, he stood up, looked to the crowd of thousands in front of him and millions watching online, raised his hand high in the air, and shouted out:

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Tears welled up in my eyes. It was akin to a scene from Braveheart, with William Wallace rousing his disheartened countrymen to rise up and fight for their freedom. Or one of my favorite scenes from The Two Towers, the second of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, when Frodo began to despair and asked Sam what could possibly keep them going in the midst of this hell that had been unleashed on Middle Earth. We have to keep going, Sam exhorted, just like the heroes of old kept going; they had so many chances to turn back, but they didn’t; they kept going, because they were holding on to something. What are we holding on to Sam? Frodo asked. Sam looked straight into his eyes: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for!

In the midst of all the frenzied commentary that followed that historic day on July 13th, with all the references to that iconic moment, few in our pundit class actually asked the question, let alone answered it:

What precisely is Trump fighting for?

This book seeks to answer that question. Simply put, Trump is fighting for a new and very different world.

***

When Donald J. Trump came down his own high-rise escalator on June 16, 2015, few could have anticipated that the world would never be the same. Over the next hour, Trump would relentlessly hammer themes that characterized his campaign for the next 16 months. China was repeatedly humiliating us on trade. Mexico was laughing at us on the southern border. Globalist trade policies had decimated our manufacturing industry, and America was on the decline. It was time for Americans to rise up and take their nation back from the corrupt elite who have sold out our country for their own financial and political gain.

It was time to Make America Great Again.

In so many ways, Trump’s campaign overturned what had become typical Republican talking points about lowering taxes, strengthening the military, and defeating terrorism. Those certainly were the talking points of 16 of the GOP’s finest, who most political pundits believed would easily and quickly take Trump out of the running. As it turned out, it was those seasoned 16 that would end up facing their most formidable political foe.

As evidenced by the special edition published by the National Review entitled Against Trump, a number of supposedly conservative intellectuals were dismissively critical of Trump’s nationalist populism, as they were of Pat Buchanan’s comparable campaigns in the 1990s. The self-proclaimed defenders of Reagan-inspired conservativism, from George Will to Jonah Goldberg, vociferously rejected Trump and his brash, uncouth populism. Leaders among the Religious Right openly wondered why so many conservative Christians were attracted to Trump’s candidacy. For example, Russell Moore, former head of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, was rather incredulous that so many Christians could support a candidate whose often racist and sexist language was voiced atop a career that made millions off a casino industry that exploits personal vice and destroys families.¹

But what eluded so many of the GOP’s elite was the fact that Trump’s candidacy represented a tectonic political shift that was happening on both sides of the Atlantic. Ironically, at the same time, Trump came down the escalator, the British politician Nigel Farage was leading a mass exodus out of the European Union, decrying the affront the Eurocrats in Brussels represented against Britain’s national sovereignty. There were also similar calls growing in France, Italy, and the Netherlands to hold similar referenda, jeopardizing the entire EU experiment.

Since the successful Brexit referendum and Trump’s election in 2016, a number of scholars have recognized that Trump and the Brexit referendum were part of a wider political trend among the various nations of the world: a noticeable turn among populations towards nationalism and the politics of the populist right. While there are various reasons for this, as the following chapters will explore, this massive turn has been fueled by a collective backlash against globalism and the erosion of cultural and national identity, a backlash that few among the GOP’s leadership seemed to recognize back in 2016.

Given Trump’s campaign theme, Make America Great Again, it’s understandable that so many thought the Trump phenomenon was specific to the United States. But the sentiment has clearly captured political imaginations all over the world. In 2019, as the Tories were campaigning to get Brexit done, Boris Johnson promised that he would make Britain great again. In 2022, a book was published entitled Making India Great Again: Learning from our History. And more recently, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban exhorted his fellow Europeans to Make Europe Great Again.

What precisely is this appeal? What does making America, Britain, India, and Europe great again really mean?

Key to understanding what’s happening here is something Trump began to say as his 2016 campaign began to get extraordinary traction. He said many times that this is not a campaign; It’s a movement. As the media reluctantly admitted, that was certainly evident in the size of the crowds that Trump rallies routinely attracted, as well as the extraordinary engagement that Trump was getting on his social media accounts.

But as we saw with Brexit and with calls to Make Europe Great Again, this movement goes way beyond the shores of the United States. In social theory, social movements are generally defined as loosely organized campaigns made up of those who share a broadly defined common goal.

What is so fascinating is that the goals of Trump and his voters share an extraordinary resemblance to comparable goals of politicians and populations all over the world.

This book is all about Trump and this larger international phenomenon. It is an exploration of how Trump and the MAGA movement are changing the world all as worldwide dynamics are profoundly influencing Trump and the MAGA movement. I believe this reciprocity is key to understanding why Trump and the MAGA movement are just the beginning of a new and rising post-liberal world order.

The argument I will make in Chapter One is that liberalism, that political philosophy predicated on limiting executive power while maximizing individual freedom, has died, having been replaced by what scholars call neo-feudalism. But the key to my argument is that liberals are largely at fault for