MAGA Betrayed Us A Long Time Ago
Why I left the American right before the 2020 election.
Before we begin, I want to thank The Imperial for giving me the opportunity to write for them. I look forward to seeing how far he and the rest of us can grow this publication. I plan to make writing for The Imperial a regular part of my weekly schedule, so I wanted this first article to provide somewhat of an introduction to myself for the readers, as well as an analysis on the failures of MAGA in upholding America First values. Going forward, my articles will most likely be more analytical and less personal in nature.
Most people who know me through politics know me as a dissident left-winger, as I have been for most of my adult political career. However, I have been incredibly invested in politics ever since I was a freshman in high school. When President Donald Trump first joined the Republican Presidential primary, I, like any other politically-curious American high school boy, was enamored by the rogue political outsider who was Donald J. Trump, but there were two other reasons that had me captivated by Trump and MAGA that I don’t think many others share.
Living in Palestine during the 2014 Gaza-Israel war, I developed a deep anger towards the American government, and Obama and the Democrats in particular, for supporting Israel as it killed family members of my Palestinian friends in Gaza. My family moved from the American Midwest to Palestine when I was in the 2nd grade, where I attended a 99% Palestinian school for about 8 years before moving next door to Jordan for high school. My parents worked with various NGOs that provided refugee relief, and my dad was also working on research for a PhD on Christian and Islamic theology. What better place than the Holy Land itself for that?
Because of my upbringing, I have been a staunch supporter of Palestinian liberation since 2014, and a detester of Democrats like all of my grandparents as well. My parents were more moderate conservatives, they didn’t hate Democrats like my grandparents, but they didn’t like them. So when Trump ran for president as someone who seemed to be a political outsider and an anti-war candidate, I naively thought he would be tough on Israel if they didn’t make a good deal for the Palestinians that ended the occupation.
When I say I lived in Palestine, I mean that where we lived was within the 1967 borders of Palestine when I moved there. My first few years in Palestine, there was an Israeli checkpoint to the West of our apartment building in East Jerusalem, where beyond that checkpoint you would be out of the West Bank of Palestine and in Israeli territory. Then the Israelis moved the checkpoint to the East of our apartment, so the Israelis basically annexed the Palestinian territory we were living on right before our eyes.
There was also a time when an IDF officer drew a gun on my 4 year-old sister, which could’ve gotten her or my dad killed if he had made a wrong move trying to protect her. I was once interrogated by the IDF at a checkpoint for over an hour and then wasn’t even allowed to cross back to the side my family stayed on because they thought I was a Palestinian faking being an American, even with my U.S. passport and obviously American name. And there were multiple times when the Israelis shot tear gas near my elementary school, which the wind carried onto the playground and burnt our eyes and made it hard to breathe but, worst of all, ended our soccer games. I have more fun memories to share, but the lesson is that even when you come from a WASP American family, you’re still a Gentile in the Jewish state. Granted, at least we were second-class citizens, whereas if you’re Palestinian you’re subhuman to the IDF.
The second thing that was so captivating to me about Trump was that he always reminded me of my grandfather, who is one of the most important people in my life. For that reason, I have always loved Trump almost as if he was my grandfather, but I have never been able to vote for him. I would have in 2016 if I wasn’t too young, and I am about to get into why I didn’t in 2020.
My grandfather and I bonded over our shared love of Trump from 2016 until 2020. Even though Trump didn’t support Palestine as much as I would have liked, throughout his term there weren’t any sort of confrontations between the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis like what I had seen in 2014, which my younger self appreciated. I opposed the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but after it happened, I brushed it off as a symbolic gesture that didn’t really matter. Trump allowing the Israelis to annex the Golan Heights was probably the main move that he bothered me with, but it wasn’t enough to get me to stop supporting him in the 2020 election. On the surface, he looked like he was trying to stop the wars in the Middle East that had angered me for as long as I could remember, which would be a significant upgrade for the Middle Eastern people I was raised among and for my own country America which I believed could make better use of taxpayer dollars than an almost $1 trillion dollar annual Pentagon budget. I was an isolationist Republican until I was almost 20 years old, and a staunch defender of capitalism.
In hindsight, the appeasement of Israel should have been an early warning sign of Trump’s establishment nature. There were always signs that Trump was never really a “political outsider,” especially considering his long-standing involvement in New York City and State Democratic Party politics, or just the fact that he was a billionaire. It was COVID that caused me to believe Trump was not the person I thought he was, and not (surprisingly) Palestine.
Trump’s response to COVID was a harsh reality check for people like myself who believed in the myth of the “free market.” The Trump Administration spent 7.4 trillion dollars in 2020, and more significantly, printed 3.3 trillion dollars in 2020 over three and a half months from February to June. No one ever talks about this, and how Biden really isn’t to blame for the inflation we have felt over the past 4 years as much as the former Trump administraiton is. When our government prints money, we don’t feel the inflationary impacts until at least a year later. When they print money, they use it to buy back bonds from major financial institutions. The fed purchased 3 trillion dollars worth of bonds from major financial institutions in 2020. This is not “free market economics.” This was a bailout of the so-called “free market” that was four times greater than Obama’s $800 billion dollar bailout of Wall Street in 2008.
This was why I left the right in 2020. I was religiously capitalist, and Trump’s response to COVID completely destroyed my worldview (I was also an options trader whose short positions were wiped out by his response, I must confess). So I was done with the right. Whether this was a good reason for giving up on the right, I’m not sure, but it was what did it for me. I never got to experience the thrill of January 6th. I didn’t vote in the 2020 general election because I still hated the Democrats I grew up hating. I didn’t think much about whether or not Trump had the election stolen from him, he betrayed me and my almost religious belief in capitalism. He didn’t “Drain the Swamp” like he had promised, he bent the knee to it. American elections have been predetermined for decades, and maybe 2016 was an exception, but because Trump failed his first term to stand up to the deep state that has been rigging our elections for decades, he allowed himself to be ousted in 2020. I still love him, because he still reminds me of my grandfather, but I wish he didn’t break my heart like he did. I go back and forth on whether Trump was forced to make the political errors he did, and that he deep down did not want to make many of the blunders his administration did, but we cannot be in complete denial of the fact that he bears some responsibility. I will pray for him, as the leader of our country, to prove me wrong this term.
From 2020 to 2024, I was heavily involved in pro-Palestine, anti-imperialist political organizing. I started a Students for Justice in Palestine Club at my university, and organized with many other left-wing groups as well. Until 2023, if you wanted to fight against Israeli propaganda or for Palestinian liberation, the only real public outlet to do that was through left-wing circles. Trump had revealed that the “free market” was a scam to me through his administration’s COVID response, I wasn’t a capitalist anymore (and still am not), so I had no problem working with and being a part of dissident left-wing circles.
Today, I am willing to work with any dissident, on the left or the right, who puts America First. As long as you recognize the importance of protecting our nation from foreign influence, and see how Americans putting our country and our people first is in the interests of the entire world, you are an ally of mine. In 2016, MAGA was about nationalism vs. globalism. Over the past 8 years, MAGA has been completely hijacked and is now just another establishment movement pushing left vs. right culture war propaganda. Political dissidents in America have a responsibility to take us beyond the left/right false dialectic that MAGA began to take us past in 2016. It is time for a post-right and post-left America built on the principles of Christianity, Economic and Political Sovereignty, and Demographic Realism. We must look to our founders like Alexander Hamilton and George Washington for inspiration, as well as the leadership of revolutionary historic figures from around the world, especially Jesus Christ.
I have not returned to MAGA since 2020, and will not either. MAGA is dead. There are people who are acting like Trump’s base of supporters is still MAGA, but that’s also an incorrect and outdated analysis. Trump’s base is no longer MAGA. Trump’s base, his revolutionary base which was born in 2016, is now America First. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Charlie Kirk and TPUSA, Caitlyn Jenner, Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire, they are now MAGA. Mass legal immigration and “colorblind meritocracy,” tech-bro oligarchy and “freedom of speech not freedom of reach,” blank checks for Israel and “all hell will break out in the Middle East,” that is what is now MAGA, and the signs have been there for a long time. It is imperative that those who believe in the revolutionary potential of the American people understand that while that revolutionary potential may have existed in MAGA in 2016, it is gone. All we can do now is be America First.