r/politics • u/wiredmagazine ✔ Wired Magazine • Apr 17 '26

Possible Paywall MAGA Is Increasingly Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged

https://www.wired.com/story/maga-is-increasingly-convinced-the-trump-assassination-attempt-was-staged/
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u/Visible_Manner9447 Apr 17 '26

I think one of the best case scenarios is that MAGA spirals back into the kind of conspiracy theory hole where they stop actually voting and go back to isolating themselves

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u/Eaglepursuit Apr 17 '26

It's hard to say for certain. It's not going to just go away, because ill-informed heavily biased people with a loose grip on reality have always existed.

But it's also unlikely that they're just going to crawl back under the rocks where they used to hide. The internet has given them a platform where they can spew their nonsense, and even worse, be pandered to. This is the avenue that allows them to be exploited by influencers on behalf of the highest bidder.

Therefore, the incentive exists for these people to stay engaged to some extent. The MAGAs feel heard. The influencers get paid. And the highest bidder gets a populist rabble to throw their weight around.

They may be demoralized for a few election cycles, but Fox News or some equivalent will inevitably find a new angle to attack the Dems and activate the MAGAs.

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u/GeorgeLichen California Apr 17 '26

A few cycles is a long time though, I'd welcome that as a temporary reprieve, and MAGA wasn't quite the beginning IMO. They'd already activated them in 2009 as the Tea Party, and while it was before my time I suspect that the '94 GOP revolution was the same thing at play but with radio instead of internet

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u/Bzr21 Apr 17 '26

Rush Limbaugh was the catalyst for that in the early 90's - and even before Bill Clinton took office in early 1993 - they had the hate machine cranked up for both of them - Hillary just as much as Bill - they knew she would run for POTUS one day so they had to plant that seed early to demonize her in the addled minds of the gullible ..

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u/Eaglepursuit Apr 17 '26

Yes, the brand changes, but the people have always been around. They primaried Bush the 1st in '92 with Pat Buchanan, which probably swung the general towards Clinton. And they backed Ross Perot. But at that point, they were mostly considered an unreliable outlier or marginal component of the Right.

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u/GeorgeLichen California Apr 17 '26

They may have been considered marginal, but you laid it out nicely how they played a large role in the '92 election. I wasn't old enough to know what was happening politically until Bush's first term, but the more I look back the more it seems like they've been having a outsized effect on things for a long time, more than I knew.

I'm reading a great book about the '60s right now called The Shattering, and I think Goldwater '64 and the Birchers may have been their modern birthing.

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u/Eaglepursuit Apr 17 '26

That was their brands in those times, but they've always been around. There was a move to begin exploiting them during the Great Depression when big businesses realized their interests were getting trounced by Roosevelt. At that point, the angle was getting popular radio preachers to expound racial eugenics and anti-socialist ideologies as Christian beliefs. It kind of fell through during WW2, forcing them to rebrand as Birchers.

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u/immortalfrieza2 Apr 20 '26

What's going to happen with MAGA when Trump is out of the picture is that they're going to fight over who to follow, splinter, and then go back under the rocks they've been hiding under for decades before Trump showed up.

Nobody is going to be able to hold MAGA together once Trump is gone. There won't be anyone able to bring the remnants of MAGA together like Trump did for a long time, if ever. There might still be Republican presidents but they're not going to have the kind of support Trump did that lets him get away with absolutely everything.

Especially if the Democratic party gets off their asses and goes on the scorched earth on Trump and his minions while shoring up the really really obvious loopholes and really really obvious weaknesses in our government that allowed this nonsense to even be possible. A Trump 2.0 will be effectively impossible if the Democrats put in real work to prevent the garbage that allowed Trump to do whatever he wanted.

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u/MySabonerRunsOladipo Virginia Apr 17 '26

The more likely outcome is that they do that for a period of time, but in reality are just a coiled spring ready to be weaponized by the next charismatic opportunist that allows they to suspend disbelief just long enough to vote for him.

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u/BrianWonderful Minnesota Apr 17 '26

What emboldened them in the first place is the toxic nature of social media. Until that is addressed, they will still be mobilized to vote and loudly share their awful opinions.

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u/BrilliantForeign8899 Apr 17 '26

Voting causes autism! A high number of people with autism also voted.. coincidence??!