The heir war of MAGA by Kingsley Cobb

The modern MAGA movement is no longer fighting its enemies on the outside. It is devouring itself from within, locked in a bitter succession battle over who gets to inherit the followers, the rage, and the monetizable devotion once consolidated under Charlie Kirk and the broader influencer class that turned grievance into industry. What looks like ideological disagreement is really a turf war, and the casualties are coherence, credibility, and any remaining pretense of populism.

Charlie Kirk built something powerful, a digital megachurch of resentment, where politics is stripped of policy and repackaged as identity. But movements like this never survive their adolescence. They fracture when ambition outgrows unity, when acolytes stop preaching the gospel and start fighting over the pulpit. MAGA has reached that stage. The knives are out, and everyone wants to be the next high priest.

Into this chaos steps Vice President JD Vance, the most grotesque caricature of the movement’s future. Vance is not merely divisive; he is synthetic. He is what happens when opportunism is polished by elite grooming and sold back to a base that despises elites but worships confidence. His politics are not beliefs so much as costumes, changed depending on the audience, the donor, or the current algorithmic mood.

Vance’s rise is instructive because it exposes the hollowness at the center of MAGA’s succession fight. He did not come up through grassroots struggle or long-held conviction. He arrived through proximity to power, through calculated reinvention, through saying whatever needed to be said at the moment it was most profitable to say it. He once spoke the language of critique against Trumpism, then seamlessly adopted its aesthetics when he realized where the power was flowing. That is not growth. It is adaptation in the most cynical sense.

What makes Vance especially dangerous to the movement is not that he is extreme, but that he is managerial. He offers authoritarian impulses wrapped in Ivy League syntax. He translates raw grievance into policy-shaped threats, making repression sound like responsibility and cruelty sound like realism. For a movement built on vibes and outrage, this is both appealing and terrifying. Appealing because he promises permanence. Terrifying because he strips away the illusion that MAGA was ever about rebellion.

The fight over Charlie Kirk’s followers is really a fight over what comes next after Trump’s gravitational pull weakens. Influencers, politicians, and media figures are scrambling to secure loyalty before the center collapses. Some want to keep the movement loud and chaotic, a permanent culture war circus. Others, like Vance, want to institutionalize it, to turn rage into governance and conspiracy into law. That split is tearing MAGA apart.

The irony is that the base senses the con, even if it cannot always articulate it. There is something viscerally offensive to many MAGA loyalists about Vance. He feels rehearsed. He feels fake. He feels like someone who studied them rather than lived among them. In a movement obsessed with authenticity, nothing is more disqualifying than the whiff of performance.

Yet performance may win anyway. That is the bleak lesson of this internal war. The most ruthless actors are often the ones willing to discard sincerity entirely. Vance does not need the movement to love him; he only needs it to follow him. He does not need belief; he needs obedience. That is why his ascent alarms even hardened MAGA operatives. He represents the moment when the grift graduates into governance.

MAGA is tearing itself apart because it was never built to last, only to extract. Charlie Kirk’s empire, Trump’s brand, and Vance’s ambition all feed from the same source: monetized anger. When the supply chain fractures, so does the movement. What remains is a struggle over who gets to own the wreckage.

In that struggle, JD Vance stands out not as a leader of the people, but as their would-be handler. An apprentice con-man fascist, yes, but more importantly, a mirror. He reflects back what MAGA becomes when it stops pretending it is anything other than a quest for power without accountability.