The Cycle can Break: President Trump’s Profiteering and a Cult in Decline

‘When will MAGA wake up?’

Many of us have been asking this for years. The answer may, at last, be… 2026.

Optimism in the face of explosive headlines may seem fanciful, but as the teacher and philosopher Michel Foucault—or someone misquoting him during a university seminar—once told me:

‘A discourse is always at its strongest right before it dies.’

We could be there very soon. To understand how, and why, we need to take a little step back…

President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are through the floor following the brutality of ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere, his recent decision to sue the government he leads, and the transparently insane assertion that America has the right to invade Greenland. As is often the case, writing these things down feels like an exercise in dystopian fiction and not the policy positions of an Australian ally.

That’s even before we get to the staggering amount of times Donnie appears in the documents relating to professional paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Is there anyone out there who still believes Epstein took his own life?

It’s definitely time for an alarm clock. The cult can’t stay in a trance forever.

But we’ve been here before, or somewhere very much like this. The Trump University scandal is the perfect microcosm for the inevitable decline of the MAGA movement in the United States.

The Grift

In 2005, Trump University was launched to offer its students seminars on how to conquer the real estate industry, like Trump and other nepo slumlords before him. Spoiler: it wasn’t a university. The grift was to target financially desperate Americans, fleece them until they were left cold and penniless, and then move on to their successors. In Trump’s world, there is always another eager dupe to target and exploit.

After the university scam exploded, and Trump was ordered to cough up a sizeable settlement to his victims, many would think the career conman had been definitively exposed. That would be logical. What happened, instead, was that the grift expanded and Trump found a larger base to lie to…

The MAGA movement is Trump University on amphetamines. What Trump is selling—what he has always been selling—is the idea that poor people are simply rich people who haven’t made it yet. He targets the neediest citizens he can find and assures them that with his hutzpah, his know-how, and his hats, his coasters, his candles, his decanters, his ‘never surrender’ bibles, and his golden sneakers, you too can become filthy rich and morally reprehensible. Just donate. Show your love. It’ll all come back to you.

Those who are already inclined to put their stock in faith, particularly evangelical Christians, are very susceptible to the kind of magical thinking that leads the desperate into debt. Many have dropped their core belief in charity and mercy for empathy-free alternatives like ‘prosperity theology’—something former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison still preaches to the gullible—while swapping their crucifixes for NFTs (non-fungible tokens, often with Trump’s face superimposed on a superhero’s body).

But the thing about scams, grifts, and cults is that they all lose their energy eventually and reality finds a way of creeping back into the fame. ‘Are we really going to be the Gestapo?’ asks podcaster and cultural commentator Joe Rogan, who has been a longtime advocate for many Trumpian policies. It’s tempting to reply ‘Um…yeah, Joe. Are you waking up now?’

Legitimate comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler have been viral for years, and the comeback from Trump supporters has been ‘TDS’ or ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’, a glib catch-all to deflect or denigrate Trump’s critics. As a sidebar, it’d be hilarious to try this with another politician and see if it can hold any cultural weight at all: ‘ODS’ (Obama Derangement Syndrome) could explain all the tea party hysteria of fifteen years ago; ‘ADS’ (Albo Derangement Syndrome) could be thrown at apoplectic One Nation supporters now.

With respect to Rogan, who, if nothing else, is a vocal champion of the working class and a public ally of Senator Bernie Sanders, the idea that Trump and his backers weren’t always going to make ICE (or some other horrible, SS-adjacent secret police force) their endgame is incredibly naïve. Besides selling snake oil, Trump’s only other trick is to give poor people a scapegoat to pin their grievances on: ‘It’s the immigrants’; ‘it’s the liberals’; ‘it’s everyone’s fault except the rich.’

At the same exact time, Trump’s personal profiteering has soared. He and his children—even hapless Eric—have taken absolute advantage of their supporter base. Writer and, importantly, professional fact checker, David D. Kirkpatrick breaks this down in The New Yorker:

Ethics watchdogs say that no other President has ever so nakedly exploited his position, or on such a scale. Trump recently explained to the Times why he cast aside his former restraint: “I found out that nobody cared.”

The Break

With cost of living and the price of groceries skyrocketing in the United States while Trump gets ever-greedier and ever-fatter, people may start caring now…

Marjorie Taylor Greene has admitted that her blind adherence to the Trumpian doctrine may have been misplaced. Once a dedicated mouthpiece for QAnon and other MAGA conspiracy theories, Greene now describes herself as a political orphan. This is a position many former followers of extremist politics—on both sides of the aisle—are beginning to identify with. We are moving toward the end of cult politics.

Katherine Speller, writing forHuffpost, has picked up on the change in the air, and the palpable change of heart from Rogan, Greene and others. Speller reminds us, however, not to take this opportunity to revel in the accuracy of our dire predictions:

Of course, in less dire circumstances with lower stakes, the opportunity to unleash a righteous “I told you so” can be pretty gratifying. Like when you tell someone that a show you thought was going to suck did, in fact, suck, or when you said, “I think we should’ve taken the back roads instead of the highway,” and you run into stand-still traffic.

As Speller acknowledges, sowing further division is not a productive way forward. Outside of cultism, all politics is an art of constructive compromise. That’s how the tension between progressivism and conservatism is supposed to function. If Marjorie Taylor Greene can begin to appreciate that fact, then optimism may not be so fanciful after all.

Watching the internet bonfire crackle away, one may be fooled into thinking that the goal in a healthy debate is to ‘destroy’ one’s opponent. You hear this all the time: ‘I destroyed that liberal’, ‘I cut that conservative down’. Speaking personally, I see it whenever I write something complicated, and the fire spits my way. It’s as if we’ve tricked ourselves into believing that there will be a clear definitive political winner now and for all time, and therefore the only purpose of engagement is to flatten the opposition and grind them into dust.

Politics isn’t a video game. It’s notMortal Kombat.

Politics is the exploration of ideas and the pursuit of solutions. For America to actually be great again, it needs to return to the negotiating table. Australia, likewise, could benefit from more talking and less ‘destroying’. Maybe just for the sake of variety, we could experiment with introspection before total obliteration.

Of course, it’s difficult to be cool-headed. When children are being dragged into the snow by ‘extra-judicial’ thugs, when innocent protestors are shot for speaking out or attempting to provide medical assistance, when rioters who shat in public offices and assaulted the police offers defending them are somehow not only released from prison but rewarded and recruited, it takes enormous restraint not to add to the flame and feed the cycle of vengeance.

When someone asks us to look inward and admit that we too have succumbed to some woolly cult thinking, as described by David French, Charlie Cook and many, many others, then the first instinct is to ‘destroy’ that narrative. ‘Destroy’ that opinion, as though it were possible. ‘Destroy’ any idea that makes us uncomfortable with ourselves. Or worse…‘destroy’ that person. History has shown us how that impulse has lethal consequences.

But if the MAGA cult is breaking, then this age of destruction may be breaking too. This cycle doesn’t have to be endless…

The Awakening

The people who followed Trump blindly are now finally opening their eyes, so do we have it in us to welcome them back to sanity and plan a way forward together? If Joe Rogan, with his extraordinary global influence, is now questioning Trump’s policies and sharing his misgivings with his wide network of listeners, is there anything to gain by alienating him and his audience with a churlish “we told ya so, d—khead?”

And what if Trump himself is breaking too? His attempts to bully Greenland into submission have failed, the absurdity of defending ICE when we all have eyes and ears has sent his popularity into freefall, European powers are (belatedly) standing up to defend their common interests and their common humanity, and the MAGA base is expressing real doubts. The grifter is old. He’s tired. This could be it.

The final word goes to The Guardian’s Benita Kolovos, who has penned an excellent piece on cultism. Kolovos flags the trickery of ‘coercive groups’ who ‘offer simple solutions to complex problems.’ The problems in Australia, much like the problems in the United States, are indeed complex: housing supply, tax reform, the balance of immigration and infrastructure, saving a moribund education sector, funding healthcare, protecting the environment, caring for vulnerable people, making sure minimum wages actually cover a family’s budget…you can add to the list.

It doesn’t make one popular to say so, but breaking this complexity down into ‘goodies and baddies’ is toxic to democracy.

Why not make this the year we all wake up and try something different?