As Trump Sabotages His Own Campaign, My Heart Isn’t Breaking For Susie Wiles And Chris LaCivita

Messy, Noisy GOP Civil War On The Far Right Fringes

Racist loon Nick Fuentes wants that dot on JD Vance's forehead prosecuted

Over the weekend, Drew Harwell reported that some of the internet’s most influential far-right extremists are turning against Trump’s campaign, “threatening a digital ‘war’ against the Republican candidate’s aides and allies that could complicate the party’s calls for unity in the final weeks of the presidential race.”

Harwell started with proud neo-Nazi, unabashed racist and Trump dining partner Nick Fuentes, who tweeted that “Trump’s campaign was ‘blowing it’ by not positioning itself more to the right and was ‘headed for a catastrophic loss,’ in a post that by Wednesday had been viewed 2.6 million times.” And, no doubt in Fuentes’ claustrophobic little groypers world, this view makes total sense. Ditto for Laura Loomer’s lunatic universe, who whined on Twitter that Señor T’s “‘weak’ surrogates had unraveled his momentum and that his approach ‘needs to change FAST because we can’t talk about a stolen election for another 4 years.’” Another lunatic fringe MAGAt, Candace Owens, who has 5 million Twitter followers, “described the conservative infighting in a podcast Tuesday as a ‘MAGA Civil War’ fueled by anger that Trump’s policies and persona had been softened to boost his mainstream appeal. ‘I’m just not sure who is driving the MAGA bus anymore,’ she said, making clear that like other vocal far-right influencers, her problem is not with Trump but with his staff. ‘You’re losing that support from the people that believed in you… You need those people.’”

This flies in the face of establishment Republicans— politicians, consultants, strategists, pollsters, big donors, mainstream media figures— demanding Trump moderate his image and reach out to skeptical voters who worry about MAGA extremism.

But, as Harwell noted, “with millions of followers, the far-right provocateurs have long been one of the most reliable engines for winning Trump attention online, helping to build the viral energy that boosted his political career and his strong lead among predominantly White male voters. Trump embraced far-right internet celebrities before the 2016 and 2020 elections, even welcoming some to the White House for a 2019 ’social media summit.’ As Trump’s campaign grapples with slumping performance in the polls, the far-right activists argue that it has failed by not adopting harder-right positions on race and immigration. They have also called for the campaign to fire its co-managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, blaming them for a lackluster strategy. Many of the campaign’s hard-right critics said they still stand strongly behind Trump himself. But some of them have vowed to pummel the campaign online and at Trump rallies unless it changes course, presenting a challenge for campaign officials who have worked to publicly disavow or disregard extreme voices for fear they could alienate voters.”

Harder right on race and immigration? Trump is already vowing to start by deporting every undocumented migrant who has entered the U.S. since 2017. Vance has suggested deporting a million initially and working up from there, likely wrecking the U.S. economy. Numbers as high as twenty-million have been thrown around and MAGAts love screaming “Mass Deportations Now!” As for racism… I’m sure these people would like to repeal lynching laws if they could— or hear Trump announce that Vance's wife won't be allowed into the White House. In any case, they all recognize Corey Lewandowski as a fellow traveler and are happy Trump brought him in last week.

It’s worth bearing in mind that that last week Vance “called Fuentes a ‘total loser’ and said the proper response was to ‘ignore’ trolls like him until they ‘go away.’ But the far-right criticism has proved agitating for some of Trump’s most devoted online cheerleaders. Brenden Dilley, a pro-Trump podcaster in Georgia, on Monday asked whether Fuentes and others who had attacked Trump were all part of a secret psychological operation, or ‘psy-op,’ designed to ‘reinforce the Kamala Harris surge narrative. I’ve got a job to do, and these people are a problem,’ Dilley said. ‘Are they being compensated? Are they being deployed as a collective? I do not know.’ (Fuentes said he was not paid and took action only to further his views, which he defined as ‘far-right reactionary.’)”

Colin Henry, a researcher at George Washington University who has studied political extremism online, said influencers on the far right have grown visibly frustrated in recent weeks by Trump’s fading performance in the polls and the campaign’s disavowal of hard-line policy proposals, such as Project 2025. “They saw that as a shot across the bow from the mainstream folks, who wanted to do all this stuff with policy and institutions,” he said.

The anger of far-right influencers matters because they have proved adept at “punching above their weight” in conservative circles in a way that could bedevil Trump’s campaign, said Ben Lorber, a senior researcher at Political Research Associates, a think tank in Massachusetts that monitors right-wing groups.

“This movement has the ability to move conservative discourse and to open up space far to the right of acceptable conservative opinion for people like Trump to move further rightward,” he said.

During Trump’s conversation Monday with Twitter’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, Fuentes directed his followers via live stream to repeatedly post their views on Twitter, where several of their demands for changes in the campaign sailed to the top of the platform’s list of trending topics.

His followers led a parallel effort on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, and the messages, such as #NoMoreImmigration, still ranked among the top hashtags the morning after the interview. #FireLaCivita, with 20,000 recent posts, overshadowed even #Trump2024. Fuentes has also told his followers that they should start collecting the phone numbers and email addresses of campaign officials so as to contact them en masse.

In an interview, Fuentes said he intends to push his followers to adopt “guerrilla” tactics and “escalate pressure in the real world,” including through mass appearances at Trump rallies in battleground states such as Michigan, until the campaign meets their demands to stop “pandering to independents.” He has urged followers to withhold their votes for Trump, saying it is the only way to awaken a campaign that has “no energy … [and] no enthusiasm.”

“If they blame me for Trump losing, so be it,” he said. “He’ll have lost because he stopped talking to the MAGA base he had in 2016.”

…Collaborators of Fuentes have worked for far-right members of Congress, including Reps Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ). And at times, messages from Fuentes— who calls for a white ethnostate in the United States, in which even legal immigration is banned— and more established pro-Trump accounts have closely aligned.

Others say Trump isn’t losing because he isn’t racist and xenophobic enough but because he’s too racist and too xenophobic. Also too reckless, callous, nativist, rageful, shameless… Others claim he’s losing because his routine has become stale and boring and what was once exciting and entertaining is now tiresome and predictable. Yesterday, Matt Bai wrote that Trump now seems “played out,” the entertainer and comedian who’s no longer entertaining or funny— just “a bunch of leftover footage and montages of scenes we’ve already watched... a 20-year-old set list from a band that can’t stop touring.

A more serious reason that Trump is losing was meticulously outlined by conservative legal scholar and ex-Appeals Court judge J. Michael Luttig, laid out a powerful case against Trump as a threat to democracy: “Because of the former president’s continued, knowingly false claims that he won the 2020 election, millions of Americans no longer have faith and confidence in our national elections, and many never will again. Because of the former president’s knowingly false claims, many Americans— especially young Americans, tragically— have even begun to question whether constitutional democracy is the best form of self-government for America… Until January 6, 2021, there was a peaceful transfer of power from one President of the United States to his successor for almost 250 years. The peaceful transfer of power from one President of the United States to the next and the commitment of presidential candidates and their respective political parties to the peaceful transfer of power in the next election are fundamental tenets of our constitutional Republic. Adherence to these tenets is essential to American Democracy, American governance and government, and to the Rule of Law in the United States of America. Without the peaceful transfer of power, America would have no democracy… The Founders of our Nation and the Framers of our Constitution feared most of all this very moment in American history, when the American People would be tempted by the seductive demagoguery of a modern-day populist demagogue. In a letter to George Washington in 1792, over 230 years ago, Alexander Hamilton warned of this day and this demagogue, who would ‘mount the hobby horse of popularity’ and whose ‘objects’ ‘may justly be suspected to throw things into confusion that he may ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

This has led Luttig to make a personal decision and share it. “America’s two political parties are the political guardians of American Democracy. Regrettably, in the presidential election of 2024 there is only one political party and one candidate for the presidency that can claim the mantle of defender and protector of America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law. As a result, I will unhesitatingly vote for the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. In voting for Vice President Harris, I assume that her public policy views are vastly different from my own, but I am indifferent in this election as to her policy views on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, as I believe all Americans should be. In the 2024 election for President of the United States, there are no more important issues for America. It is our Democracy, our Constitution, and our Rule of Law that bind us together as Americans. We Americans must never allow ourselves to be put asunder from this that binds us by the siren calls of the politicians and the political sophists, the mercenaries and the opportunists, who entreat us that the only thing that matters in this presidential election is the candidates’ different positions on the sundry policies of the day. All, as if nothing had come before. We Americans know all too well what has come before. We understand what the political class does not want us to understand. That in the presidential election of 2024, the candidates’ policy differences are the least that matters to the United States of America.”