From Antonia Hitchens' 11-2-26 NEW YORKER article entitled "The MAGA Faithful Eye the Exits":
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 [...].
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 [...].
In mid-October, I had lunch with a senior official who was waiting to be confirmed for a major role in the Administration [...]. 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” [...].
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 focused 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.
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.” [...].
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.”
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