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The MAGA crowd is like someone who found a genie but can't formulate their wishes well. It is the good old trope of getting your three wishes but each wish comes with a giant caveat.
They wished for ended discrimination against Asians in college admissions and didn't get increased odds of whites being accepted.
They complained about migrant crime and got dorky Indians instead of Guatemalans.
They complained more about migrant crime and got a society in which cops look like soldiers.
They complained about muslim terrorism and got a surveillance state that rivals stasi.
They complained about muslim terrorism but instead of getting an immigration ban after 9/11 they got tens of thousands of largely right wing voters killed/seriously injured fighting wars in the middle east that caused a migrant crisis and effectively ethnically cleansed Christian populations. Their "clash of civilizations" ended with the US supporting Al Qaeda in Syria and opening the flood gates to Europe by bombing Libya.
The migrants are living on welfare they complained. So they got a migrant with a job.
If you can't even state your own self interest how on Earth do you expect to win anything?
In a similar vein:
UK voters: we want less immigration.
Boris Johnson: you want less Eastern Europeans? Heard you loud and clear! A million non-EU immigrants a year coming right up!
American conservatives: we're sick of the wokeness in universities.
Politicians: we will clear out protesters against Israel's atrocities immediately.
Both Vote Leave (Cummings, with Johnson as figurehead) and Leave.EU (Farage) made blaming the EU for specifically Muslim immigration a crucial part of their message. Cummings continues to insist (plausibly, given how close things were) that the Brexit referendum could not have been won without the "Turkey is joining the EU and then millions of Turks will come to the UK" lie. Cummings was also quite frank (on his blog during the period where he was out of UK politics) that "Get rid of the Eastern Europeans", while popular with core Brexit supporters, would have been a losing message with swing voters.
The debate between "near-zero immigration" and "continued mass migration but managed competently in the interests of the existing population" (at least in the UK, described as a "Canadian or Australian-style points system") is an intra-right one, not a battle for the median voter. From the point of view of the median voter, the immigration issue is closer to "nobody is illegal open borders extremists should be kicked out of the Overton window yesterday".
Turkey being accepted into the EU seemed like a real possibility before Erdogan went all strongman, so was it really a lie at the time of Brexit?
No, it wasn't. There was no way in 2016 that someone could credibly claim that Turkey had zero percent chance of EU admission within, say, the next 15 years.
I'll go further.
Brexit only "failed" because post-Brexit politicians in Britain made all the same mistakes as their EU counterparts : mass immigration, heavy-handed regulation, anti-speech tyranny, etc...
Brexit was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the revival of the British nation.
Despite everything, the UK is better off due to Brexit because it makes reform possible. Things can sometimes pivot quickly, and maybe within 5 years the reform party can take power and lead the country to a better path. But it would be a lot tougher with the EU barring the way.
Almost no reform was genuinely blocked by EU membership. Even stuff like mandatory ECHR membership doesn’t matter, because other member states routinely ignore rulings with impunity. The UK would never have been serious punished by the EU executive because there are always at least 2-4 other countries angry at Brussels for whatever reason. It was completely pointless and achieved nothing other than hugely accelerating mass immigration from the third world for no reason.
True, politicians could have worked around the EU if they wanted to, but they didn’t want to. Thus the performative shock when anyone suggests ignoring the EHRC.
Leaving the EU was necessary not because it gave politicians more power, but because it removed their biggest excuse for not using the power that they had.
(That, and avoiding Ever Closer Union. The EU as it was in 2016 was a moving target, explicitly focused on making it ever harder to leave. It felt very much like a now-or-never moment.)
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