The MAGA Trump Divorce, Six Months Later

0:00You can call it the straight of Hormuz or the Hormuz straight. I said, which is better? They said, either is okay. But you can call it either one. The only thing you can't call it is the Trump straight. They don't like that idea. Irreverence news talk opinion satire. It's Newsweek Radio. I'm Jesse Edwards. Top trending headline at Newsweek.com right now is my latest op-ed at Newsweek. If it's not up there yet, it will be here shortly. It's called the MAGA Trump divorce six months later. Back in December, I wrote that the MAGA Trump divorce had already begun, stating that Donald Trump would not be taken down by Democrats or the media, but by his own people first.

0:35It sounded a little premature to some people, I'm sure, at the time, but it was never supposed to be a prediction. It was just an observation of a pattern that has followed Trump for years, and one that tends to accelerate the moment his usefulness starts to fade. We can go down part of the list quickly. Of everybody who abandoned him during his first administration, you remember that, right? It was only a few years ago. It's been 84 years. You can start with Mike Pence, or his second attorney general, Bill Barr. His second Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. His chairman of the Joint Chiefs. His first Secretary of State.

1:07His first ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley. General H.R. McMaster. John Bolton. John Kelly. Mick Mulvaney. Betsy DeVos. The list goes on so much, we don't have time to cover the rest of it. We've got to fast forward to today. From Nick Fuentes to Alex Jones to Tim Poole to Megyn Kelly to Candace Owens to Tucker Carlson, Theo Vaughn, Joe Rogan, the list goes on here as well. The same voices that once treated Trump like the center of the political universe are now openly mocking him. These are the amplifiers, the ones who helped shape the narrative and build the audience and kept him in constant rotation while he was campaigning.

1:40When those voices start to shift, and they have, it changes the entire environment around Trump. I'm out. I'm done. I am off the Trump train. I am not voting in 26. if Rubio or Vance are on the ticket in any form in 28, I'm voting for a Democrat. He does look sick and he does babble and, you know, sound like the brain's not doing too hot. And so we just cut bait on Trump and we just mobilize against the Democrats. This is not funny. This is not good. But he's gone. And that's it. And Trump's like, I better back down. He did it in 2020. He's doing it again because Trump is a weak old man. I mean, I don't know about you, but I am sick of this shit.

2:21I'm just, I'm sick of it. Can't he just behave like a normal human? I mean, honestly, like the president, 3D, just shut up. Fucking shut up about that shit. So if Trump's aligning himself with the people that didn't support him, and the people that did support him are saying what he's doing is wrong, that doesn't mean that MAGA betrayed Trump. That means that Trump is betraying MAGA. Do you think Donald Trump has betrayed America first? I think that this war is something that he promised he wouldn't do, not once, but countless times. It depends to me, like, you think he has betrayed it. Yeah. I can't believe we went to this war.

3:03When we started bombing Iran, I was like, this can't be true. And what about Lebanon now? I know. Israel's invaded Lebanon. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, just fucking stop it. What do you need? Well, they're trying to, supposedly, they're trying to stop the terrorists. his power has never been purely political it's always been cultural and omnipresent and sustained by repetition and spectacle the president could do some of this shit i'm doing he dominates because he's always there and always being talked about and always forcing himself into the center of the conversation whether the moment calls for it or not i can't think of anybody in history that should get the nobel prize more than me and i don't want to be bragging but nobody else settled wars obama kind of dominance depends on cooperation from a team that is willing to keep feeding the machine even when it's counterproductive but the team just quit and this is exactly how it ends for donald trump it's not going to happen all at once with a clean break it happens in small visible ways as blind loyalty decays one voice takes him down another hesitates and a third just decides not to defend him anymore nothing like that's going to feel definitive on its own but together it adds up really quick.

4:15In December, I wrote that Trump was burning every bridge between himself and his base, and that loyalty around him flips faster than anywhere else in politics. One day it's total devotion, the next day total rejection. That was already underway at the time, but it's become incredibly more difficult to ignore in recent months, as the loudmouths across his media ecosystem continue to bail on him faster than a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz.

4:42That's not even to mention the unceremonious ousters of his own attorney general Pam Bondi this time around in Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Both of them pushed out as these cracks inside the operation widened. Politicians who stood behind him start to hedge their language and start carving out space for themselves as we've already seen with Marjorie Taylor Greene. What is happening to the man that I supported, you supported, The man that denounced what happened in Iraq. The man that said no more foreign wars, no more regime change. Promise it on the campaign. Donors start looking for alternatives without all the baggage.

5:17Party leaders start thinking in terms of what comes next rather than how to maintain the status quo. None of this requires a public break or a coordinated effort. It's just a series of individual decisions all pointing to the same direction away from the president. Thank God. Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective. The practical reality is that Trump's value to the Republican Party is tied directly to his ability to deliver results. And the moment he became a liability rather than an asset, the tide changed. And if Republicans struggle in the 2026 midterms as badly as they are predicted to, Trump becomes the easiest fall guy on the planet.

5:59And soon, Republicans are going to start acting like they never knew the guy. They'll say they had their doubts and that they were misled. They'll say that Trump went too far and that they were only by his side to protect us from his stupidity. I don't want a stupid person being president. They'll rewrite their own rules in the story and position themselves on the right side of what they will describe as an inevitable outcome. We've seen this pattern before. It always ends the same way. And while this is not Trump's first rodeo, it's his absolute last. But he wasn't toppled by his enemies. He was discarded by the people he needed the most the moment he stopped being useful to them.

6:35Which is some form of poetic justice, considering that's what he does to everyone else. Because you see, life teaches us that in every tragedy, there is a silver lining that points the way forward after the inevitable pitfalls of existence throw us off our game. And the same can be said about Donald Trump, now that it is safe to act like we're already in the post-Trump era. With the benefit of hindsight in the first year of his second term, long in the rearview mirror. It is easy to see how Trump exploited the right by attacking neocons like John McCain and Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham. Trump is a f***ing idiot.

7:07It looked like a new path forward for conservatism, but now it's starting to look more like a hostile takeover that hollowed out the party and replaced it with the same old neocon agenda that it claimed to oppose. Now, much over a year later, that instability is impossible to ignore. The right has fractured between the America First faction associated with figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and what remains of the diehard MAGA followers, many of whom don't realize that they've circled back to the same neocon politics they once rejected or, you know, simply refuse to admit it. Trump's always been the bull in the China shop.

7:45Whoa, watch out there. I think we've reached a point where all the dishes and teacups are gone. Shelves are broken and the walls are starting to get away. Watch out!

7:59The damage has already been done and what remains in the aftermath is the brutal realization that the spectacle is over and the consequences are just beginning. Now we're just standing here silent together, no longer shocked by the chaos and wondering what comes next. And I think as we take that next step together into the post-Trump era, we should be asking how we prevent this from ever, ever happening again. Because if we're not careful, it will. That's my latest op-ed at Newsweek, and that's all I've got for today. So until we can do it again, it's Newsweek Radio. I'm Jesse Edwards. Catch you next time.

8:32Bye. And we say bye-bye. Newsweek Radio is a member of the Trust Project. I'm out. I'm done. I am off the Trump train. We just cut bait on Trump. He's gone. And that's it. Because Trump is a weak old man. Can't he just behave like a normal human? That means that Trump is betraying MAGA. Do you think Donald Trump has betrayed America first? Yeah. Supposedly they're trying to stop the terrorists. That's crazy though!