Donald Trump's America First movement is fracturing

Donald Trump’s America First movement is fracturing
Conservative criticism of the president is escalating — in potentially damaging ways

By Sophia Tesfaye
Senior Writer
Published November 15, 2025 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) Only one year after his reelection as president, Donald Trump’s populist America First movement is fracturing. Conservative criticism of the president is becoming widespread following a Democratic sweep of off-year elections across the country. From Capitol Hill to MAGA media, the pushback signals a major rupture in the ideological pact between Trump and his base, suggesting he may finally be losing credibility where it counts.

Trump built his political brand as a so-called disruptor. But as transparency demands mount on multiple fronts, he is increasingly closing ranks and often defending the very systems he once railed against and unsettling his previously steadfast base of supporters. With his legacy as outsider-in-chief rapidly unraveling, the right-wing influencers who built his MAGA coalition are no longer able to enforce populist standards that Trump himself can’t meet. Now his ability to control the narrative — which has been his greatest gift — appears compromised, especially without the united MAGA media shield that once protected him.

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Trump’s economic rhetoric is not matching the reality of many of his supporters — and his MAGA mouthpieces in the media are willing to admit as much.

“The price of everything feel[s] very expensive to people right now,” the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro recently noted on his podcast. “When President Trump says things are becoming more affordable, people don’t believe that they are becoming more affordable because they aren’t really more affordable.”

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“(Trump) has distanced himself from the MAGA base,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., told reporters this week. Massie is one of four House Republicans, along with Greene, who signed a discharge petition to force a vote next week on releasing the Epstein files, a move the president had gone to great lengths to block after campaigning on their release. On Wednesday, shortly after the federal government shutdown was ended after an historic 43 days, House Democrats released more than 23,000 documents from the Epstein estate that were recently obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Many of the files included references to Trump.

“Trump knew of it. and came to my house many times during that period,” Epstein wrote in an email on Feb. 1, 2019, several months before he was arrested on federal charges. “He never got a massage.” .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/15/donald-trumps-america-first-movement-seems-to-be-fracturing/