Is MAGA Really Conservative Anymore?
Students for Trump supporters at the 2019 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore.
Independents are now the largest political party in the country. So, why is it that Americans still largely understand the world through the prisms of Democrat and Republican? The Marxist critique of ideology states that ideologies are a system of values that serve the interests of the ruling class while fracturing the collective power of the proletariat. The United States is perhaps the best example of this systemic polarization, with two parties that have, for decades, divided Americans between two rigidly competitive ideologies. Liberals generally seek progress, racial and sexual diversity, and more government intervention. Conservatives generally favor tradition and restraint and advocate for less government intervention.
This system has been totally shattered by Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. To be sure, Trump and MAGA not only participate in the conservative culture war, they’ve reshaped it to their liking. Many of Trump’s executive orders since the beginning of his second term, such as ending birthright citizenship and banning transgender athletes from women’s sports, are certainly conservative. However, on a broader scale, Trump, and more so his MAGA movement, have shown that they transcend ideology in their focus on American greatness and populist uprising—exactly what against is subject to much debate. Though many MAGA supporters still see themselves as conservative, the reality is that they support a movement that often explicitly rejects that political ideology. Should liberals rejoice?
First, look at the personal lives of Trump and his de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk. Trump has had three wives, been accused of sexual assault by at least 26 women, and infamously proclaimed about women: “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” He is no poster boy for the traditional family values long heralded by conservatives. Neither is Musk, who has now allegedly fathered a 14th child, like many of his previous children, out of wedlock. The DOGE boss, by his own admission, also uses ketamine on a frequent basis—an attribute that would have surely given the old War on Drugs Republicans a heart attack au naturel.
As such, the guiding force of the New Right does not so much appear conservative as it does permissive and post-ideological. This post-ideological transition is not only anecdotal: Trump, unlike any former Republican president, supports marijuana legalization. When Floridians were considering a ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana last year, Trump, a resident of the state, posted to Truth Social, “I believe it is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use.” He promised that as president, he would work to pass “common sense laws” and ensure “safe banking for state-authorized companies.” His most vocal opponent? None other than old school Republican, and MAGA exile, Governor Ron DeSantis.
Trump, who once touted how he personally ended Roe v Wade, did not mention the topic at the 2024 Republican National Convention (RNC). The RNC also dropped national abortion limits from its party platform. Trump has even made some notable gains (yes, you read that correctly, gains) on women’s rights. In February 2025, he signed an executive order expanding access to in-vitro fertilization—a pro-choice move. In an unfortunate series of events, this led Trump to cringeworthily call himself the “fertilization president” at a Women’s History Month event in March 2025. Let’s just hope we don’t get a harem in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
On the topic of harems, none other than Barstool conservatism is now the dominant cultural force of the MAGA movement. Despite the name, Barstool conservatism is not really conservative at all. It has radically shifted right-wing discourse: the new archetype of the promiscuous MAGA babe has effectively killed the homemaking, caretaking trad-wife. Who are these MAGA babes? Influencers like Ashley St. Clair, with whom Musk allegedly had his 14th child; Riley Gaines, the women’s sports advocate who showed up to Trump’s executive order signing wearing a short skirt and heels in 40-degree weather; and Raquel Debono. A self-proclaimed Hermès-slide-wearing “cuntservative, ” she’s an executive for the right-wing dating app Date Right Stuff and host of “Make America Hot Again” events aiming to bring young right-wingers together—most recently in Trump Tower. As Kat Rosenfeld writes for The Free Press in “The Raunchy Right Has Triumphed,” many of these MAGA babes, including St. Clair and Gaines, were featured in a seductive calendar, “all bedroom eyes and pouting lips, their backs arched like fossilized velociraptors in postmortem lordosis.”
On other fronts, too, Trump and MAGA have proven that they are simply not conservative. Historically, conservatives have been for free trade, whereas Trump’s favorite word is “tariff.” Tariffs, extensively implemented on April 2nd, 2025, are intended to raise revenue, renegotiate unfair trade deals, and protect American workers from the cheap manufacturing sought by multinationals in the Global South. By effectively ending the bourgeois tyranny of the neoliberal world order, Trump appears to seek a larger, more prosperous American middle class—a long-time Democratic priority.
Republicans have also long been the anti-union party. Trump, however, attained the support of the majority of rank-and-file members of the largest union in the country in the 2024 election, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He has appointed the most pro-union Republican in modern history as Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Clearly, Trump has not taken Reagonomics 101, nor does he believe that he should.
Steve Bannon, the architect of the president’s rise into the mainstream in 2016, makes a point of rejecting the conservative label, preferring the term “economic nationalism.” Bannon also believes in increasing taxes on the wealthy—a sort of “Eat The Rich” vibe à la Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Vice President JD Vance, during his time in the Senate, routinely broke with the old GOP establishment in support of pro-worker policies, including then-President Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act. He commended the chair of Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan. Vance also supports a higher minimum wage. The Cato Institute and Reason Magazine have crusaded against Vance. Trump still chose him for vice president.
Similarly, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement of the president’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is itself categorically at odds with the longstanding conservative principle that the nanny state should not regulate what foods Americans are able or encouraged to eat. The secretary has been questioned for these perspectives by older Republicans like former Reagan speechwriter and Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham, and this makes sense. Kennedy was a Democrat until 2023 and a frontrunner to lead Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency. Remember the relentless attacks on Michelle Obama and her healthy eating program (and original iteration of MAHA) Let’s Move? Though Kennedy’s movement is certainly not without controversy, it has generally been the hip, Whole Foods-shopping liberals—think contrarians like Joe Rogan—who cared about raw milk access, vaccine rights, and organic food. Healthy eating and living are not conservative, but it has become a significant part of the MAGA base.
On foreign policy, too, Trump has broken, at least in rhetoric, with the dominant hawkishness and crusading neoconservatism of his predecessors. He has called out failed U.S. military actions that have led to death and despair in places like Libya and Iraq. The president’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is a former Democrat who has long advocated for a more pacifist foreign policy. She went so far as to secretly meet US adversary and then-president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, to devise a strategy to more effectively combat ISIS in 2017. The American Conservative, a Project 2025 board member, endorsed Democratic candidate John Kerry over George W. Bush in the 2004 election, over precisely these same foreign policy concerns.
Thus, Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric is now directly at odds with the overwhelmingly neoconservative, Atlanticist uni-party that seeks NATO expansion and underestimates Russia and China’s place in the multipolar world order. The Atlanticists are normally a larger, more hawkish presence in Republican administrations. Take the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs’ own Mike Pompeo, who was CIA Director and Secretary of State during Trump’s first presidency. But in 2025, Trump’s stated foreign policy goals are more of a nuanced and even historically left agenda, aspects of which have gained the support of lifelong liberals and former anti-Trumpers who nonetheless support Trump’s apparent pacifism, like Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs.
One of Trump’s closest confidants, Tucker Carlson, sympathetically interviews Sachs while he derides neoconservatives within his own party like Texas Senator Dan Crenshaw as “an enemy of everything you voted for” and as “eye-patch [John] McCain.” However, ideological (or post-ideological) revolutions do not happen overnight, nor is Trump categorically a left-realist or paleoconservative. His policy on the Middle East is notably very neoconservative—to the ire of many within the MAGA movement—even to Carlson himself. This alone, however, should not distract from the overall vibe shift happening within the Republican Party. Trump himself will leave at some point. So far, every indication suggests that what will replace him is a more anti-interventionist New Right.
The reality of the situation is that the MAGA movement—often even more than the president himself—has increasingly transcended into a post-ideological space answering a single question: what makes America great again? MAGA presents itself as a popular movement of many factions, one that, on the whole, leans more permissive, even more contrarian, authoritarian, and nationalistic than anything the Republican Party has ever seen before. Long gone are the days of the Moral Majority; the GOP is now young, a demographic that doesn’t tend to appreciate moral posturing.
I don’t like placing political labels on myself. Most of my views are conventionally described as left-wing. I also see many of my views represented in the New Right, though certainly not Trump’s policy of disappearing foreign students or extorting universities. Even so, I believe that leftists should be celebrating this death of ancien conservatism in favor of a new Republican order that is more sexually promiscuous, likely to see government intervention in the economy as necessary, and committed to world peace. Though mainstream media still treat Trump as an heir to Reagan and Bushes, isn’t some of the MAGA agenda what leftists have always wanted? What happens when a movement you despise turns out to agree with you more than its ideological predecessor? Do you recoil into partisan animosity or meet reality where it is?
Consider Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon. An avowed “MAGA Lefty,” she describes Trump as “a 21st-century FDR: socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue-collar workers as the backbone of this country and the locus of our power and democracy.” I do not go as far as Ungar-Sargon. But I agree with her central point: The GOP of today is no longer your grandfather’s laissez-faire, prudish Republican Party. MSNBC may not take note, but you should.
Nikos Mohammadi (CC ‘28) is a staff writer for the Columbia Political Review.