Elliot Williams

uh i you know i don't think you can pluck donald trump out of maga and just put somebody else in and have the same movement right you can't it's it's a charismatic figure whether you like it right it's a cult around if you want to call it that around one person so one what does it look like in 2026 and two someone has to run for president somebody

And someone can, whether it's JD Vance or Marco Rubio or whoever else, and can purport to be carrying the mantle of MAGA, right?

But what's that going to look like?

And it's going to, like, will it be factually correct?

It's going to be worse.

It's going to be, right?

yeah and look i i repeatedly on air made the argument about uh merrimum domini as he was running saying you know everybody he's actually tapping into a lot of the arguments that donald trump tapped into totally just in different packaging a lot of people that's crazy he's a socialist he's a this he's that and i'm like no there's a venn diagram and you don't get that far front to jump from zora believe me version of donnie to donald trump like there are corners

of folks who are curious about them something you know um you know i know you mentioned my book at the top of the show something that comes up when i interviewed this this guy bernard gets the subway vigilante shooter um in the book and hearing this man from the 1980s this this sort of bigoted white guy and all kinds of stuff but hearing him talk about his politics i i said and i put it in the book

This this guy is at the intersection of RFK, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, like his views of populists, of the media, of mainstream media, of fat cats and everybody scratching their back for some political game.

And it just takes one smart politician.

The first time it was Donald Trump.

It'll just take another smart politician to figure out what that special sauce is that brings those folks together.

But no, I think, you know, to your point about what happens to MAGA, just so I don't mispronounce it again.

All those forces are, I don't know if they're going to break up MAGA into the Nick Fuentes wing, into the Marco Rubio foreign policy wing, into the economic conservative or social conservative.

Who knows, right?

Who knows what it's going to look like?

But a lot of it right now is around Donald Trump, the guy, not MAGA the movement.

Totally.

No, I would say the fissures are happening and the support was always, not always, has been somewhat soft.

When you speak about, if one were to look at Latino men in the sand in the Rio Grande Valley, for instance, who flipped quite dramatically to Trump.