The MAGA Faithful Eye the Exits
There are fourteen hundred and sixty-one days in a Presidency. When I met a former White House official for coffee last week, he kept mentioning this number. It had been drilled into his brain during a training he had attended, at a conservative think tank, sometime before joining the Administration. “In the early days, you go really hard, really fast—you know, get rid of U.S.A.I.D., stuff like that,” he said. “The great purge.” We were in a sitting room at the St. Regis Hotel, in downtown D.C. He’d recently returned to the private sector, and that afternoon he fell into reminiscing about the “halcyon days,” as he put it, at the start of Donald Trump’s second term: “Getting the January 6th prisoners out; the DOGE kids kicking in the doors at the Institute of Peace; withdrawing from all these globalist organizations.” He reached out to try to kill a mosquito with his hand. “That was early energy,” he said. “We’ve lost a little bit of our initial vibe. But not everyday can be a dramatic showdown.”
This stage of the Presidency, he went on, was for a different kind of work: “competent government officials” enacting “five hundred tweaks the conservative agenda has wanted for years.” I told him that, to an outside observer, it might seem like the early bombast had continued: just that week, the Administration had ordered a raid of the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s Washington home and was contemplating live-streaming a public execution; Trump was on Air Force One with Mike Tyson. But the ex-official wasn’t the only one to speak longingly about a bygone phase. “Those first couple months—holy shit. We were locked in,” a current Trump staffer told me. “In the tome of this Presidential era, it’s like we’re in the hangover now.”
I’d met this staffer early in 2025, when it seemed like everyone around him in Washington was trying to find a way into the Administration. These days, he told me, you networked to find a way out, or at least away from certain corners. Positions in the executive agency where he worked were still highly regarded, and he found himself besieged by those trying to leave departments that would taint them by association. “I’ve never had so many men come up to talk to me at parties,” he said. “People from D.H.S. are practically handing me their résumés.” When I met a senior Administration official for lunch the other day, she admitted that she might not be able to hang on much longer. “I’m so bored and turned off,” she said. “But I don’t remember what anything else is like.” Not long ago, Trump’s takeover had seemed so complete that she spoke about it in almost revolutionary terms. Now, she said, “if the Democrats win, we’re going to get spammed with all these subpoenas that distract us from our jobs and keep us from getting anything done.”
In September, the President hosted a midterm convention at the American Airlines Center, in Dallas, seemingly to remind everyone that the Trump show would go on. But cracks in the façade had been forming for some time. When I asked a staffer with the Republican National Committee about the first day’s schedule, the mask slipped for a moment. “It runs from three to ten, depending on how long-winded one of the speakers is,” she said, clearly referring to Trump. Some of the core cast members of the MAGA road show had dropped off the tour. A man who calls himself the Retribution Pastor, a reliable fixture at such events, told me that he no longer bothered to come. “This incompetent Administration is not what I worked so hard for,” he said. I watched a speech by Dr. Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, from a jumbotron outside the arena. “Politics is very similar to surgery,” he said. “Except it’s much bloodier, and we don’t use anesthesia.” He told the crowd that the only difference between this moment and the last time they’d all gathered—at the Republican National Convention in 2024, which anointed Trump in the aftermath of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania—was that people looked more “gazelle-like” now that everyone was on Ozempic. This was all thanks, as Oz put it, to TrumpRx, a new prescription-drug website that the Administration had rolled out. That night, Trump spoke for two hours, promising everyone five thousand dollars if Republicans kept control of the House and the Senate.
Later, I ran into some MAGA types I hadn’t seen since the Inauguration, when they’d been gloating about their takeover. “I’m going to Argentina,” a Trump-aligned influencer told me, ducking out of an afternoon panel in a suburban strip mall. “Like, moving there. We’re all going to be indicted. Anyone who was ever close to this is going to be targeted. They’re going to come after us even if our fingerprints aren’t on anything.”
As the weeks went on, a pro-Trump super PAC sent out increasingly melodramatic fund-raising e-mails, warning that the end might be near. “Do not make me say goodbye,” one subject line read. A photo of the President waving from the door of a train was captioned “Farewell to Trump.” He was reportedly flirting with the idea of granting preëmptive pardons to all his White House aides. According to the Wall Street Journal, members of the Administration, “from cabinet secretaries to midlevel staffers,” were hunting for lawyers. The Front Row Joes, a group of Trump’s most loyal superfans who dutifully attended every single rally, told interviewers that they were “heartbroken” about how the term had panned out. House Speaker Mike Johnson was musing about going home, to Louisiana, to start a lawn company.
In mid-October, I had lunch with a senior official who was waiting to be confirmed for a major role in the Administration. He’d already had a bruising hearing in committee, but his floor vote in the Senate hadn’t happened yet. “If we lose, I probably won’t get confirmed, and they’ll haul us in front of the TV cameras,” he said. At this point, he wasn’t sure that his pre-government job would take him back. He told me that his interest in Trump started at a rally in 2016. “There was a guy next to me with no feet,” he said. “He lost them in Afghanistan. I liked what Trump said about no more wars.” A friend had called him early in the morning after the President announced the start of the military campaign in Iran. “He just kept saying, ‘We’re fucked,’ ” the official told me. “It’s a complete betrayal.” He went on, “I don’t think it will be a mark of Cain to have worked in this Administration, but I think we’re all ready for this to be over.”
Others insisted that it was only the beginning. “I know a top adviser who was offered a seven-figure salary to leave the Administration,” the former White House official told me. “He’s not taking that because he’s confident we will win, in the ultimate sense.” A strategist who used to work for the President maintained that Trump was not winding down but ramping up. “We’re already in a brave new world, and the next two years will be on hyperdrive,” she said. How many times, she asked me, had we all lived through predictions that Trump was finished? Trump was going to complete an epochal realignment, she said, a “big reset” encompassing everything from “rebuilding Gaza in the image of whatever the heck he wants” to “making sure cryptocurrency gets anchored in.” Some of the true believers I knew had faded out of these conversations, and were focussed on the future. Ahead of the midterms, a group of them left Washington to attend a four-part lecture series given by Peter Thiel, who cautioned that the next President might be the Antichrist.
One autumn evening, I went to the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, a grand space for black-tie soirées and weddings on the National Mall. The treaty establishing NATO was signed there, in 1949. At the top of a staircase, photographers were waiting to capture the entrance of Javier Milei, Argentina’s President and the evening’s guest of honor, for an event called the Official Hispanic Heritage Gala. Inside, on a makeshift red carpet, reporters were gathered around Eduardo Bolsonaro, the brother of Flávio, the (since defeated) right-wing Brazilian Presidential candidate. Matt Schlapp, the chairman of CPAC, wandered around with a drink. After the first Trump Administration, he’d mainly been in the headlines following accusations of unwanted groping by a male staffer and several other associates. (He denies them.) I watched Paolo Zampolli, Trump’s special envoy for global partnerships, make his way to the red carpet. Zampolli got to know Trump at the Kit Kat Club, in New York, back when he was a modelling scout visiting from Milan. He came over to give me a copy of his business card—just his first name, underneath a golden governmental seal—and then started to role-play being questioned in a congressional hearing. “Mr. Zampolli, did you buy the plane? How much was the plane?” he said, in a fake-serious voice, mimicking a Democratic member of Congress. He was referencing how he had made enthusiastic use of his diplomatic position to promote Boeing sales. (“Whenever people see me, they want something—they want access to the President,” as he put it on one podcast. “I tell them, ‘Buy Boeing.’ ”) He switched into playing himself, responding to the Democrat. “Yes, I bought the plane. It was a big plane, a beautiful plane,” he said, nodding in an exaggeratedly sombre manner. “I admit it! I make great deals for the American people!”
We entered the auditorium, where the tables were half empty. (Congress had been adjourned until after the midterms, leaving a void of typical networkers.) A large mockup of a limited edition one-dollar gold coin with Trump’s face on it was positioned to the left of the stage, where a speaker was saying, “We’re here to kick the butt of the socialists.”
Zampolli had been in the news that day—leaked e-mails revealed that he had been chastised by Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau for all the off-the-books meetings he had been setting up with foreign governments. (Landau had instructed Zampolli to stay in his narrow lane of “cultural diplomacy.”) Since I’d last seen Zampolli, a couple of months before, he’d also been accused of rape, which he denies. He told me that he didn’t care about the midterms. “I just get things done, make money,” he said. “All they do is attack us, and it’s getting worse. Look what happened to poor Kimberly.” Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Ambassador to Greece and former fiancée of Trump’s son Don, Jr., had just been asked to resign after messages showed her pressuring a G.O.P. donor to pay her hundred-thousand-dollar Amex bill in exchange for access to Trump. “Honey please,” Guilfoyle had implored. (She has suggested that the messages were fabricated.) Milei was onstage giving a long speech in Spanish. We were joined by the U.S. Treasurer, Brandon Beach, who had supervised the creation of the Trump dollar coin at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and a young man who said that he’d met Zampolli in the diplomatic-passport line at an airport. “I spent the whole summer in Bedminster with Barron,” the man said. He and Zampolli compared watches. Zampolli showed me his, a Cartier that he had encrusted in diamonds. “Just because it’s aftermarket doesn’t mean it’s fake,” he told me, holding out his wrist so I could take a picture.
Every day, it seemed, Trump was announcing the dawn of a new golden age. In October, he showed up at an Anduril event in a Baltimore shipyard to tell a group of assembled sailors that America was the hottest country in the world. The first beats of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” started to play as Marine One came into view over the water. As the helicopter approached the dock, the song blasted, “No one’s gonna save you from the beast about to strike.” The chopper whirred; Jackson howled. Inside the shipyard, Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump adviser, was pacing a darkened hallway and talking on his phone as he awaited the arrival of several Baltimore Ravens players he’d invited to meet the President. “Trump made the Party culturally relevant,” he told me. “He’s actually able to reach across the barriers in terms of pop culture. Before him, the Republican Party was dead in that regard. He made the Party cooler, and then he also taught them how to fight.”
Despite the dismal polling, midterm rallies were a chance for Trump to relive the journey of 2024—what he called the greatest political comeback in history. Rallies during that campaign were often punctuated by medical emergencies in the audience. Trump would stop speaking while medics tended to whoever had gone down. Sometimes the crowd would sing or pray as the stretcher carried the person out. These days, the interruptions usually came from hecklers. “Hey, Bone Spurs—release the files!” one shouted. At a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, I met a couple of Bikers for Trump, a group of volunteers who have long cast themselves as Trump’s vigilante security force. “Wild Horses,” by the Rolling Stones, was thundering in the arena, so I asked if we could step outside to talk. They looked reluctant. “If there’s a fight, I want to be involved,” one said. He stood with his arms clasped, surveying the risers with the same posture as the private-security guys. Later, he sidled past me in Hoka sneakers and a leather jacket to offer his assistance to the Secret Service. Midway through the rally, a protester in the audience stood up to scream “Fascist,” and someone immediately starting punching her. They fought underneath a scoreboard that read “45–47.” Trump, looking on, called her “low class” and a “fat guy.” Another man put her in a headlock and pulled her to the ground, until a Biker for Trump, a cop, and one of the private-security guys joined the melee. After they dragged her out, they fist-bumped.
At some of the rallies, it felt like Trump was a champion in decline who had returned to the scene of his old glory. “Nobody appreciates me,” he repeated ten times one evening. Over and over again he invoked the golden age. “We’re right now in the golden age,” he said. “The golden age of America is upon us.” He flirted with renaming the Atlantic “Trump Ocean.” At one rally, he said, “I could say the stupidest things and you’d still clap.” His voice got hoarse from talking so much. “I’m a frickin’ genius,” he said, eighty minutes into an appearance in Arizona. “If I didn’t do ‘The Apprentice,’ would I be President now?” he mused, in Ohio. “They blame the people that put on the show.” He caught sight of a repeat attendee, a guy dressed in a border-wall costume, standing in the front row. “I think in my last speech, I’ll wear that,” the President said.
Back in Washington, the Trump staffer asked me what it was like on the trail. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the Grateful Dead,” he told me, after I summarized a recent rally. “In the eighties, they got massive and they started playing stadiums—they would take over entire towns. But by the end of the decade it became a much darker scene, where the local criminality would come, sell all kinds of drugs, there’d be violence. A lot of the old Deadheads decided it was too dark.” Each time I saw this staffer, over the course of the past eighteen months, he had less and less contempt for the system he’d come into government wanting to destroy. “We’ve been through the fucking fire with Trump,” he told me. “I don’t want the Democrats to win, but I feel ready for some new programming.” Before joining the Administration, he had convinced himself that the 2020 election really was stolen from Trump. But he found himself irritated by the President’s recent warnings that the Democrats were trying to steal the midterms, too. “Before, it was a Trump-versus-the-world vibe,” he said. “The broader narrative of them stealing from us felt directionally true. We were dispossessed, and we were robbed of a Presidency. But now? We took over and we just kind of fucking botched it. The Democrats didn’t create some bullshit. We had a generational opportunity and we basically squandered it. Look at the coalition we had in 2024. Those people might not ever vote again in their lives.”
One of Trump’s latest rally bits was to talk about how much money he was raking in while voters deal with record-high prices. “So, we’re making hundreds and hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars,” he told a crowd in Georgia. “But my people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir, because people are paying a little higher.’ . . . But I said, ‘I don’t give a damn. I’m gonna say it. We’re making a freaking fortune.’ ” Corruption had emerged as the No. 1 issue for many voters, and examples of self-dealing were all over D.C. Democrats were announcing their “target list” for congressional investigations. “Washington is evil and godless and soulless,” an organizer at an event for Democratic candidates told the crowd. “But we’re sending so many people there. There’s finally going to be a moment when we can hold these creeps accountable.” The senior Administration official told me that the companies and business leaders who’d bent the knee to the President were now reconsidering their positions. “They’re testing out whether they can tiptoe back across the Rubicon,” the official told me. In the meantime, “they’re already preparing. They know they’ll have to testify.” The former White House official told me that he thought all the talk of investigations was overblown. “The stories of financial corruption are the left stringing together isolated cases into a narrative. President Trump has said he wants corrupt appointees prosecuted by the D.O.J.,” he said. “Probably about fifty people have clearly broken the law. They’re mongrel-species types doing Balkan-style corruption. They don’t have Wasp values. They don’t have names like William Heatherwick III. I know of probably ten really corrupt deals across twenty-five hundred political appointees. I can think of one person who should go to jail.”
That week, at a breakfast hosted near K Street, a chief of staff to a Democratic senator mused about the possibilities of a reinvigorated Congress. “Everyone wants to get their pound of flesh, but I hope we don’t spend too much on the investigations,” she said. “How much more do the American people want to hear about Don, Jr.?” We were drinking orange juice and coffee in a dark room that felt like a cocktail party happening very early in the morning. Upon entering, attendees were given markers so that they could fill out nametags labelled with their favorite A.I. chatbots to use at work. They pinned them up on a whiteboard. (Claude was the overwhelming winner.) The Senate staffer told me she was most curious about what would happen during what she called the “interregnum” between November’s elections and January’s swearing-in. “How much are Republicans going to dump on us in those months?” she asked. She also wondered how much the Senate would really accomplish, even if Democrats did control it. “Something like a third of the senators will be running for President, or the future Cabinet, so how will they balance doing the work with going out on the trail and trying to find a winning message?” And they would be besieged with lobbying as the private sector tried to realign itself. “Corporations will have to navigate cozying up to the new power, but they’ll also have to try to keep the President happy while he’s still in office,” she said. The strategist who used to work with Trump told me that she could continue to advance her clients’ priorities, no matter the result of the midterms. “You want to find the right partners on the Hill and get your stuff grafted in now so that there’s no Administration post-Trump that can ever undo it,” she said.
Conversation at breakfast centered on artificial intelligence. “There’s basically six people deciding the future,” a consultant said, referring to the heads of the A.I. companies. “They’re the ones who make a difference. People want to meet Jensen Huang, not a senator.” For all the talk of a new era, a lot stays the same. At a cocktail party that evening, I ran into a defense operative who used to work for a European government. “I’m so busy,” he told me. He was now a fixer for one of the Gulf states. “I’m always busy. If only we could stop dropping bombs on everyone!”
On a rainy Saturday night in October, Trump was hosting donors to his MAGA Inc. super PAC at a fund-raising dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, sat in the white-and-gold ballroom next to the President. In Washington, Zampolli, who had just been fired from the Administration, was hosting an after-party for a black-tie dinner at his Dupont Circle town house. Signs that read “National Guard: I want you to leave” were plastered around the neighborhood. When I walked into the vestibule, there were official portraits of Trump and Vance on the wall. Upstairs were framed photos of baby cheetahs and Hermès blankets thrown over all the couches. An Hermès ashtray sat on the table next to large plastic renderings of the number forty-seven, and piles of mixed nuts in a blue briefcase that read “UZBEKISTAN.” Women in floor-length sparkly gowns mingled with men in tuxes. It was one of the first cool evenings of the season. Nobody was on the outdoor patio. “All the criminals are inside,” a partygoer joked to me.
Near the buffet, a few people were looking at Polymarket bets on their phones. “I’m a patriot, so I’m betting on Republicans,” one said. I stood with a person close to the Administration, who told me that he had started telling his dreams to A.I. in the morning. He pulled out his phone to show me Claude’s four-act analysis of the previous evening’s anxiety reverie, featuring a cast of Administration officials. He said the most interesting part of life after the midterms would be watching the warring factions within Trump’s government try to take one another down. “I can’t wait to see everyone coöperating with the Democrats to try to send their enemies to jail,” he said. “It’s going to be chaos.” We were joined by a former Administration lawyer who told me that he was thinking of starting his own firm soon. There was going to be so much business, so many new clients. “He’s my friend who’s absolutely most likely to be indicted,” the person close to the Administration said a few minutes later, just after the lawyer walked over to another group. “When he was trying to get a job in the Administration, he said he would go away for five years for Trump. He called me back to say that, actually, he could only do three. The fact that he modified it so precisely makes me think he is actually serious.” ♦