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Another interesting aspect of the Speaker fight has been an additional datapoint on Trump's slowly eroding influence. Trump has explicitly backed McCarthy, and while Trump's endorsement had once been enough to clear state-level Republican primaries to get his preferred candidates to the general election, it hasn't done much in this fight. Indeed, Boebert and Gaetz have been openly flounting Trump's wishes, with Boebert confirming that Trump had called her and told her to "knock it off", to which she replied in a floor speech that she thought Trump should tell McCarthy that he doesn't have the votes.
Trump has been unique in his ability to survive scandals that would otherwise sink mainstream politicians, with it becoming almost a parody that many political prognosticators constantly said Trump was doomed, only for him to float along like nothing happened after a week or so. But I think this caused many people to overlearn about Trump's resilience into essentially thinking he's invincible. In reality, Trump's clout within the GOP and the nation have been declining slowly but consistently. The high point was obviously the 2016 election, but he suffered a minor-to-moderate defeat in the 2018 midterms before being rejected by the country as a whole in 2020, and now it looks like he's slowly being rejected by the Republicans as well; not just the establishment (which has always kind of hated him) but even the far right is looking for other options. Smart money now thinks Desantis is about twice as likely to win the R nomination in 2024 than Trump after Trump's candidates arguably cost Republicans the Senate chamber.
Trump was always more the avatar of the MAGA movement than the motivating impulse but its unclear to me wheather Trump himself was aware of this.
While that's true for some people, there's a nontrivial fraction are loyal to Trump no matter what. This could be for various reasons, including the notion that Trump was the only one who wasn't a RINO beholden to the GOP establishment, and that any "alternative" to Trump (e.g. Desantis) could be seen as a return to Republicans as "controlled opposition" so to speak.
"Non-trivial" in the sense that there are enough of them to play spoiler/kingmaker? Sure. Do they represent a majority or even a plurality? That was never my impression. What would become the "MAGA movement" had been percolating since at least 2012 and arguably a lot longer. Trump was just the one to give it a name and a face.
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