Donald Trump's Maga cult is finally crumbling | Arwa Mahdawi

It took a dead child sex offender and a disastrous war to do it, but it looks as though the Maga faithful are slowly beginning to lose confidence in dear leader. As Donald Trump’s approval ratings drop to record lows, some of his most fervent supporters are turning on him.

See, as exhibit one, Trisha Hope, who was once a proud member of the Front Row Joes, a group of Trump superfans who follow the president to rallies around the country. They have custom-made T-shirts! They have branded baseball caps! They even have the attention of Trump himself, who frequently shouts out the group. He did once accidentally call them the “front row Jacks and Joes”, but who can expect a man of his calibre to pay attention to the plebs, eh?

During Trump’s first impeachment, in 2019, Hope stationed herself in Washington DC for weeks, trying to drum up support for the president. But she’s not doing that again. In an interview with Politico published on Monday, Hope declared: “If we do lose the midterms and [Trump] is impeached again, I will be walking the halls of Congress in support of that impeachment.”

What caused this change of heart? Hope cites the Iran war and the Epstein files as significant factors. So too does Rick Frazier, another defector from the Front Row Joes interviewed by Politico. “Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex … those are big nos for me,” Frazier said.

Hope and Frazier are just two people with limited influence, but there’s another, much more powerful, Joe who has soured on Trump. Earlier this month the podcaster Joe Rogan, whose endorsement of Trump in 2024 is widely credited with helping him win the election, distanced himself from the president and his “rabid” supporters. “Trump supporters are fucking nuts, man,” Rogan said on his podcast. In the same episode, Rogan admitted that “I did kind of help Trump”, but insisted it was because he thought he’d drain the swamp. “Obviously, it’s not been ideal in that regard,” Rogan added.

It’s very satisfying to watch people wake up to the fact that the convicted felon in the White House is out for himself and nobody else. But Trump is a lame duck now. With the end of his very lucrative reign in sight, does it really matter that people like Hope are calling him “a fraud and liar”?

In the long term, the answer to that question is complicated. But growing disgust with the president certainly matters for the November midterm elections. Trump has asked voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot” and many have taken that advice to heart. A recent PBS News/NPR/Marist poll found that 45% of voters overall said their largest motivating factor for the midterms was voting against Trump. While he still has a loyal following, the midterms are likely to be a rebuke to his presidency, with Democrats now on a path to flipping the Senate as well as retaking the House.

Trump’s desperate gimmicks and grandiose assurances aren’t landing the way they used to. This month, the president promised a $5,000 (£3,775) “Trump dividend” if Republicans retain control of Congress after the midterms. According to one poll, only 13% of voters believed him.

If Trump is worried about the midterms – and the possibility of a third impeachment that comes with a Democratic victory – he’s not letting it show. But Republicans more broadly are clearly stressed, not just about the midterms, but also about what sort of trouble they may be in when Trump 2.0 comes to an end. “After the first Trump administration, my family spent money we did not have on lawyers because of multiple partisan Democrat-led investigations into President Trump,” Katie Miller, the podcasting wife of Trump’s right-hand man, Stephen Miller, tweeted earlier this month. “You can’t convince me Democrats won’t do this again.”

I hope they do. And this time I hope they do it properly, so that Trump and his enablers are at last held accountable. People who are finally leaving the Maga cult are angry at Trump, certainly, but they’re also angry at a world in which the powerful seem to get away with everything. To stop that anger from propelling another Trump-like figure into the White House, there needs to be a reckoning with the systems that created him. Let’s make Maga’s legal bills high again.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist