Americans don’t like to be told what to do. By anybody.
They don’t want their options limited by social justice warriors, EPA busybodies, or UN blowhards. They didn’t like Jimmy Carter telling them to put on a sweater and turn down the thermostat, and they didn’t like Michelle Obama lecturing them on what to eat. The entire elite political class is obsessed with lecturing their constituents. In fact, Donald Trump may be the first president in any of our lifetimes who doesn’t periodically take to the bully pulpit to tell us how to live our lives.
At every turn, Americans are told they are breaking the rules, written and unwritten, both legal and moral. This is a strange fate for a people whose nation was built upon individual liberty and a historic break with old-world tyranny. Liberty is the shield with which we have protected individuals, families, churches, and communities—including groups that can’t easily fight back by themselves.
Accompanying liberty is a healthy dose of skepticism about authority figures and experts who think they know best. That skepticism sometimes means listening to one wise farmer instead of a UN or EPA agriculture committee when regulations are suggested. It may mean listening to one online voice instead of the Silicon Valley cartel united against him—or one conservative professor censured by a left-wing Ivy League university. (Even the left understands this, even if they swear they don’t. They recently elected a bartender to Congress, after all, and claimed that was what made her worth listening to.)
A people this rebellious do not take kindly either to a government that intrudes into every area of our lives (in the name of everything from defense to ending poverty, while achieving neither)—nor do we take kindly to a media elite that tells us we can’t vote for an outsider presidential candidate. They can bury us in fake news aimed at training us to hate that outsider candidate, but Americans still don’t like to be told what to do.
In fact, that outsider candidate may start to sound more like a fellow rebel to them than like a threat.
The MAGA Doctrine is a book about what happens when the two political parties stop listening to the people and the people win anyway. We live in a democratic republic, but this is still a near miracle. We will examine how the most controversial president of modern times managed to transform American politics in just a few years and how politicians and pundits raced to keep up.
Throughout the stories of policy wins and political battles, we will explore two key ideas. The first is the false claim that Trump’s political base is not forward-thinking. The slogan Make America Great Again may use the past as the benchmark for greatness, but we are not advocating a return to mid-century America. Turn on the television or read newspaper columns calling modern conservatives backward-looking, and you can see why they consistently get President Trump wrong. They misread what is happening. They offer false predictions on what will happen next.
If you think we are not calling for a brighter future as a strong, dynamic country of free and equal Americans, you will never understand the revolution happening before your eyes.
Heading into the 2016 election, both parties assumed the presidency would be decided on the same old issues, presented in the same boring way. They prepared accordingly. The Republican base found a better choice, and caught a dying Democrat Party off guard.
Why has there been so much misunderstanding around the president’s popularity and plans? In the pages that follow, I’m going to argue that even members of his own party continue to misunderstand the permanence of the change among the base.
That brings us to the second, deeper idea here. Critics of the president can’t see that the giant, lumbering institutions they run—from the Deep State to the New York Times—are the ones not well prepared for the future. The reasons they feel so smug about running the country for decades to come are, in fact, the reasons they will soon lose control of everything.
They find Trump’s constant battles against the urban elite puzzling. A television celebrity attacking the media? A billionaire attacking billionaires? A Manhattanite in a suit winning over stadiums full of farmers? What they don’t understand is that the masses have been looking for someone to stand up to the powerful, and who else could get away with it? Trump may be the freest man in the world.
What is the MAGA Doctrine? Bigger is not always better. The role of government should be so small that it is barely noticeable. Yet, over the past several decades it has ballooned into an enormous enterprise thanks to both political parties. Too many institutions created to counter the power of government, from the media to Wall Street, have practically joined forces with it. Fake news is out of control and defense contractors have taken unprecedented advantage of the American taxpayer.
Protecting individual liberty from the tyrannical forces of government is the idea our nation was built upon. It is the only way to protect the individual’s rights, the family, local churches and schools, and other groups who can’t fight back themselves.
Be skeptical of everything, especially your government. Ask questions, fight for your rights, and never surrender.
President Trump has been under attack from the moment he declared he was running. Neither electoral challenges nor impeachment threats can erase the Trump legacy. He has brought about a reawakening. I have actually been a supporter of Donald Trump since well before his 2016 presidential campaign. Way back in 2011, I tweeted to him, “Run Trump Run! Your country needs you!” I guess you could say I was MAGA before it was cool. I was thrilled eight years later when, as president, Donald Trump said, “I want to thank Charlie. He’s an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He’s done an amazing job.”
From the first time I briefly met Donald Trump Jr., son of the future president, at the 2016 Republican National Convention to my hosting events through the organization I founded, Turning Point USA (themselves drawing tens of thousands of student activist participants), the past few years have been an amazing journey.
Now, I should reveal the philosophy motivating it all—and motivating the president.
Turning Point USA started before the Trump 2016 presidential campaign but exploded in size around that time, as the student activists who make up the group’s ranks began to hope that they might soon have a president who heard their voices. The group doesn’t exist just to cheer on one politician—our well-attended annual events such as the Teen Student Action Summit, Young Black Leadership Summit, and Young Jewish Leadership Summit attest to that. We are strictly an educational organization dedicated to preaching the values of free markets, the Constitution, and American exceptionalism.
But Turning Point USA participants, including former Turning Point USA staff member and BLEXIT founder Candace Owens, have a shared philosophical impulse, and a basic political desire, that is roughly summed up in President Trump’s slogan, seen on the ubiquitous red hats of his supporters: Make America Great Again, abbreviated MAGA. As I will explain, MAGA is more than just a slogan. There is a set of principles, however roughly hewn, behind the president’s vision of national renewal—one that is both familiar and eternally in need of clear, firm restatement. The MAGA Doctrine didn’t spring into existence in 2016—because it is the core philosophy by which our whole society has come to be over several centuries.
I’ve seen President Trump speak in front of high school students, my fellow young conservative activists eager to hear him—and afterward, I often hear students ask me, is there a key book or manifesto I can study to really understand the philosophy behind this burgeoning movement? Behind this rising new sensibility that is partly conservative, partly libertarian, partly populist, partly nationalist, and yet not just an old-fashioned, textbook case of any of these strains of thought? Now there is. I would not presume to speak for the president, but I will try as best I can to explain the old ideas underlying the fresh thinking he brings to a country that desperately needs it.
One important reason to offer a defense of the MAGA Doctrine as Donald Trump faces reelection is that if those of us who support him do not make our case, our political opponents will not hesitate to “explain” the MAGA Doctrine for us. We know what their description of our philosophy will be: Trump supporters are racist. Trump himself is a fascist. Trump’s policies fly in the face of common sense and shred the Constitution.
They will claim our thinking is un-American even as they trash the American traditions of liberty and limited government they claim to be defending. These elites deride Trump supporters even as their own philosophy threatens to demolish the very things that made America great.
What philosophy is considered hip among many people from my millennial generation? Socialism! One of the most disastrous ideologies ever devised. To that rival faction in particular, I offer these stats (some of the many such facts I like to share on my Twitter feed and podcast):
Two hundred years ago,
All thanks to the free market socialists want to destroy. If anything, economic growth rates and progress have slowed in the past few decades as the welfare state, to which the socialists give all the credit for such advances, grew. The new socialists and Democrats steadfastly ignore these facts. And it is this delusion that makes the MAGA Doctrine more important than ever.
The MAGA Doctrine is, in part, a path back to the brave, pioneering spirit that made not just survival but explosive growth and visionary changes possible in America. Join me now in tracing that past and pointing the way, with Trump’s help, to an even brighter future.