Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina August 21, 2026

EA-CEO Retort VideoCast: How Trump 2.0 Fueled Europe’s Far Right

Donald Trump opened his own version of Pandora’s Box after bulldozing his way through the Republican primaries in the 2016 Presidential campaign. Inside was an array of regressive policies and norm-breaking for hard-right groups.

These forces and factions, with their self-serving agendas, do not want MAGA to end with Trump. They don’t want the box to close.

But what happens when Trump leaves the political stage? He has held together a MAGA which is not a singular movement by ensuring that the different groups converge on him. So when he goes, competitors for power and influence will soon rise.

These competitors range from loyalists connected to the grassroots, such as Steve Bannon, to the uber-wealthy social media tech bros such as Elon Musk. There are contenders for Trump’s throne, such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. There is still, despite its defeat by the Trumpists, the old-school GOP.

The challenge for all these competitors: both to Trump and his base, MAGA is him and he is MAGA. As the dominant force for over a decade, he has left little room for others and put Republicans in
limbo. So what succeeds Trump for Trumpism?

Cutting Potential Successors Down to Size

Many have risen within the MAGA world only to fall like dominoes. Some of these have been banished; some are seeking influence within the movement still influential; some are waiting for Trump to leave the stage.

But Trump is so pervasive that even some of the banished do not want him to go. Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and then White House chief strategist for a tumultuous seven months the following year, has said, “I’m a huge advocate of President Trump’s third term.”

Bannon is still a MAGA presence. His podcast War Room is one of the 100 most-downloaded on Apple podcasts. But while that may carry some weight in the calculations of Trump’s inner circle, it is not enough to restore him to their ranks.

The world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk, lobbied for his place in the Administration as the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency”. However, he rose too fast. When there was talk of a joint Presidency, and as Musk alienated many within the White House, he found that Trump does not share the stage.

Vice President Vance shares Musk’s tech-centric views. A protégé of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, he understands the need to curry favor with Trump to protect his Presidential ambitions in 2028.

But that is not an easy task. Once tipped by Trump as a successor, Vance finds that he has been given the possibly-poisoned chalice of getting the Administration out of a failing war on Iran. Meanwhile, Trump has edged back to a contest between his Vice President and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Trump put Vance on notice, “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.”

Wrecking Ball

Trump taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing of the White House is symbolic of his Presidency: constant undermining of US democracy and elections; support for the hard right outside the US; ICE agents patrolling America’s cities like a private army; threats, cuts, defunding, and purging.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, was a significant part of this with the Trump camp’s interaction with big money, big tech, and social media. The “Department of Government Efficiency”. DOGE was an ideologically-driven instrument for Musk and the Trump
Administration to purge the federal government, cutting grants and programs and closing down entire agencies like the US Agency for International Development.

Unlike Musk, Steve Bannon was part of MAGA from the beginning. Like Trump, he continues to undermine the American electoral system. He argues for ICE agents to be deployed in polling stations across the US in the upcoming midterms: “President Trump has to nationalize the election. You’ve got to put — not just, I think, ICE — you’ve got to call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne [Divisions]
on the Insurrection Act.”

Bannon’s strategy is to create and maintain an environment of hyper-polarization. In a “permanent revolution”, it is difficult to create bipartisanship and civility. As conservative columnist David French notes, “You cannot be a part of MAGA, you cannot be a part of the ‘New Right’, if you’re not an aggressive, pugilistic figure, if you’re not a provocative figure.”

Once, J.D. Vance was a Trump critic, foreseeing him as America’s Hitler. But by 2021, he was arguing, “I think that what Trump should do — like, if I was giving him one piece of advice — fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in theadministrative state. “Replace them with our people.”

Secretary of State Rubio is another example of that metamorphosis within the GOP. Opposing Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries, he said, “Trump is asking us to basically make it a nation of a man instead of a nation of laws.” But now he serves that “nation of a man”.

Would Rubio or Vance offer more than Trump’s wrecking ball in the future? Or would they continue using it against what is left of order and norms in the US and across the globe?

MAGA After Trump

Donald Trump summarized earlier this year, “MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

He is the right-wing populist vessel by which many Americans have chosen to be their leader, ignoring whatever wrongs they see. In this cult of personality, devotees will follow him to the end.

In March, more than 60% of Americans disapproved of the War on Iran. Among MAGA Republicans, Trump had 100 percent support. “The bottom line is this: if you are a member of MAGA, you approve of Donald Trump,” explained CNN’s Harry Enten.

As Trump said during the 2016 Republican primaries, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

Trump’s constant tactic has been to keep his base riled, fed and
focused on culture wars and his opponents. However, Trumpism is not happening in a vacuum. Right-wing populism has been gaining ground.

So Trumpism is likely to continue even without its loudest proponent. The question is whether it will be championed by MAGA
influencers such as Bannon, or whether it will mutate with a new leadership under Vance or Rubio without Trump’s cult of personality.

Whichever path is taken, Trump’s legacy will be discord and division. Republican Sen. John Cornyn observed in June, “The President seems to revel in chaos, which is so different from any other leader that I’ve ever seen. I don’t know about you, but I like to minimize the chaos in my life.”