Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation is significant not merely because it was a public, detailed break with Donald Trump and his politics. It was also significant because it highlighted something that has mostly been whispered in right-wing conversations over the 12 months since Trump’s reelection: What happens once Trump is gone?
Greene’s resignation announcement spurred a flurry of agreement from other Capitol Hill Republicans. Speaking anonymously — a very important caveat — they told reporters from Punchbowl News that Greene’s depiction of a neutered legislature was accurate and as frustrating as she suggested.
The urgency of this tension will only increase. Every second that ticks by brings the right closer to having to figure out what its post-Trump future looks like. Every second is another one in which Trump’s current allies and critics will be looking for ways to slice off a bit of the power and attention he controls for themselves and for their priorities. Every second, centers of power are being reinforced and eroded in hopes of being the agreed-upon future of the party — or of being the most powerful combatant in a ferocious battle for Trump’s power.
In March 2021, much more than four years ago in political time, the polling firm Fabrizio Lee attempted to segment the Republican Party at the outset of what one might have reasonably believed to be the post-Trump era of right-wing politics. The firm, which had worked on Trump’s first presidential campaigns (and would work on his third), split the party into five rough groups.
The largest were the “Trump boosters,” 28% of Republicans, which was a group that still viewed the then-former president positively but considered themselves more loyal to the party than to Trump. That contrasted with the “Diehard Trumpers” — 27% of Republicans — who were strongly supportive of Trump, even preferring him to the party itself. There was another group of Republicans who were just as supportive of Trump but had another differentiating characteristic: The “Infowars GOP” were the 10% of Republicans who also believed in the QAnon conspiracy theory. Then there were the skeptics. A fifth of Republicans were labeled “Post-Trump GOP,” appreciative of Trump but looking for a new face for 2024. The last 15% were “Never Trumpers,” Republicans who opposed Trump and, usually, always had.
By November 2024, the party had consolidated the votes of nearly all of those Republicans, with 95% of Republican voters supporting Trump’s candidacy. The lines that made sense in Fabrizio Lee’s 2021 analysis had blurred or vanished. The election and its aftermath also demonstrated a flaw in that analysis: It only included Republicans, and not the broader right.
Still, as a guidepost, the Fabrizio Lee analysis is informative. Similar fault lines that existed then still do today, but I’d say there are now six post-Trump coalitions to consider.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation is significant because it highlighted something that has mostly been whispered in right-wing conversations over the 12 months since Trump’s reelection: What happens once Trump is gone?
The Never-again Trumpers. This evolution of the Never Trumpers is perhaps the most obvious group, the central carryover from Fabrizio Lee’s 2021 delineation. These aren’t entirely Mitt-Romney or George W. Bush-style Republicans, but the group includes many who would fit that description, people who sided with the establishment against the Tea Party or who objected fervently to Trump’s rejection of agreed-upon (if imperfectly manifested) conservative and American values.
It’s important to note that this group will almost certainly be larger in future years than it was in 2021. There will be more space for people in the waning days of Trump’s presidency (and after) who reject Trumpism on the grounds of his break with party tradition than there are now. Just as twice as many people said they were at Woodstock as actually were, there will likely be plenty of people who claimed to be Never Trump but were actually Very Much Trump.
The anti-establishmentarians. One segment of the right embraced Trump because he rejected the sort of establishment Bush and Romney embodied. Despite being a billionaire crony of America’s wealthy and powerful, Trump managed to tap into this sentiment by relentlessly casting institutions and the establishment as dangerous in aggressive terms.
To some extent, he believes it; to some extent he understands that eroding trust in everyone else also lowers the bar for how much trust he needs to have instilled in himself. As a political tactic, though, it worked, convincing millions of people to come out and vote for him who might otherwise have stayed home out of the belief that voting didn’t matter. We’ve already seen that this bloc invests its energy and power in Trump almost exclusively, with Republican candidates stumbling in years when Trump wasn’t on the ballot. It’s likely that, in a post-Trump world, most of these voters will dissipate back into indifference rather than coalesce around someone else. What it depends on, really, is that someone.
There’s an important subset of this group: the conspiracy theorists. They are inherently anti-establishment, since conspiracy theories necessarily depend on a rejection of fact and authority. But, thanks to Trump’s self-serving embrace of conspiracy theories as a means to accumulate power, those conspiracy theorists are also heavily loyal to Trump (as Fabrizio Lee found in 2021).
Consider, for example, PRRI polling that looked at how Trump has handled the Epstein controversy. People who believed in the QAnon conspiracy theory were the most likely to say that the release of the files (something Trump fervently opposed) is a critical issue. They were also twice as likely as people who rejected QAnon to say that Trump was handling the Epstein issue adeptly.
In other words, the conspiracy theorists also overlap with another group.
The Trump loyalists. Just as Trump retained significant support in March 2021, he will also retain support in 2028 and beyond. It’s just a question of how much — and who is the elected standard-bearer for the idea.
Perhaps the most potent non-Trump faction on the right at the moment is the America Firsters.
Oddly, this may be the weakest of the six competitors for the right’s power. A lot of Republicans will position themselves as the inheritor of Trumpism, but since Trumpism is so dependent on Trump, those inheritors will never be able to actually keep the loyalists satisfied.
Perhaps the most potent non-Trump faction on the right at the moment is the America Firsters. Greene used the term repeatedly in her resignation statement, referencing the idea that MAGA hasn’t gone far enough in protecting the U.S. and its citizens.
The emergence of America First as an alternative to MAGA is heavily a function of a tactical error Trump made. Trump has, to a significant extent, neglected his base, choosing to focus much of his attention during his second term on increasing the power of corporations and other wealthy Americans. (When, for example, is the last time he held a rally for his supporters?) A focus on boosting foreign partners, tariff carve-outs for allied businesses and Trump’s embrace of visas for skilled immigrants — not to mention his suggestion that America lacks similarly skilled workers! — have prompted allies (including Greene) to suggest that he’s taken his eye off the ball.
Tucker Carlson is among those championing this rhetorical future. In a recent podcast episode, Carlson framed “America First” as the central Trumpian argument, one that was “the most popular political message that any candidate has delivered in many, many generations. And it’s popular because it’s self-evidently true. Who wouldn’t want that?” It’s an obvious effort to transition Trumpism and Trump’s support into something slightly different than what MAGA has become.
But Carlson has also elevated a significant flaw: This segment overlaps with another potent but toxic element of the political right. To wit:
The extremist fringe. It used to be that white nationalism, antisemitism and Christian nationalism existed on the fringes of political argument, and nowhere near political power. But that’s changed, in part because political power on the right is so heavily dependent on attention as currency. In a social media, ask-your-own-questions world, policing the frontiers of the fringe and keeping it out of mainstream discourse becomes difficult, if not self-defeating: Why are you trying to keep me from learning about this? What are you afraid of?
Carlson’s recent interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes forced an uncomfortable conversation on the right about the extent to which antisemitism and, more narrowly, hostility to Israel would be welcomed in the right’s coalition. That there was a debate at all, though, shows how far from the fringe these ideas have progressed.
Christian nationalism, meanwhile, barely elicits any consternation at all. There’s a correlation between Trumpism and Christian nationalism; Trump’s second term has seen a focus on integrating Christianity into the federal government that’s been without equal in recent memory. At the same time, it has eliminated recognition of America’s ethnic and racial diversity, through the guise of combatting “DEI.” These ideas are already empowered and will be defended.
What isn’t clear is how much of the American right fits into this segment. By its nature, it’s tricky to measure, given the unwillingness of most people to admit these sorts of views (or even to recognize them within themselves). It’s similarly hard to measure the size of the other groups, given how nebulous the boundaries between them often are.
It is nonetheless safe to say that this is a broadly fair presentation of the battlefield as it stands. It will evolve further, partly in response to how and if Trump attempts to reconsolidate his base. It is inevitably the case, though, that Trump’s power will eventually fracture and be reassigned to candidates and voters who align at best imperfectly with his politics. Where that power will be centered is anyone’s guess.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and creator of the “How To Read This Chart” newsletter. He spent 11 years at The Washington Post and is the author of the 2023 book “The Aftermath.”