Et tu, Brute?
It won’t be the resistance liberals who bring down Trump. And right-wing populism won’t disappear when he goes.
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a mysterious character warns the populist Roman dictator to ‘beware the ides of March.’ He dismisses the soothsayer as a crank and walks mindlessly into the Senate, where he’s stabbed to death by his enemies and some he thought were his friends. Et tu?
Lately, even some in the mainstream media, despite years of portraying Trump’s voters as mindless, cult-like followers, have noticed the potentially fatal fracturing of his electoral coalition.
The cracks in his base have been described many times before, but they were mostly simplistic caricatures around the Epstein files, Nick Fuentes, or Tucker Carlson versus lunatic Laura Loomer, as if his MAGA critics were just a bunch of antisemites who are more racist than Trump.
In November, CNN did a typically condescending piece called ‘The key issues that are suddenly dividing MAGA.’ In it, they list in order of importance ‘Epstein files,’ ‘Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes/antisemitism/Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories,’ ‘tariffs,’ ‘H1-B visas,’ and ‘the ballroom.’ They give ‘Trump’s foreign focus’ a minor mention at the end, but the word ‘war’ never appears anywhere in the article.
But since his murderous and reckless attack on Iran, the fissures within the MAGA world have become impossible to ignore. Some are now admitting that Trump’s complete betrayal of his core campaign promise—to keep the US out of war—is a primary reason for the rupture.
On March 6, Bloomberg News wrote, ‘MAGA Is Split: Trump Digs in on Iran War, Divides Loyalists.’ Warning that the ‘Iran war has emerged as a grave political vulnerability for Republicans ahead of a midterm election...’
What’s really going on here is that Trump has completely capitulated to the neocon warmongering wing of the Republican Party led in the Senate by decaying but still malignant Mitch McConnell, charlatan Tom Cotton, and the despicable Lindsey Graham. And in doing so, he’s sold out a large portion of his voters, especially many of the younger voters he won over in the last election. On a recent episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room, Curt Mills, of the American Conservative, called Trump’s war on Iran ‘an open betrayal of the base,’ asking, ‘What Bush-era neocon is not for this today? Find me one.’
But unfortunately, that wing of the Republican Party is closely aligned with the interventionist wing of the Democratic Party. Despite the public charades and name-calling, they, too, are ‘for this.’ I’ll point out that the only member of Trump’s cabinet to be approved overwhelmingly by every single Democratic senator, including Bernie Sanders, was Marco Rubio. Rubio, the neocon plant bankrolled by anti-Trump right-wing vulture capitalist Paul Singer and Netanyahu lover Miriam Adelson, is now ascendant and will soon be touted as the heir apparent and successor to Trump in 2028—and not J.D. Vance.
The late Marxist writer Michael Parenti, in his counternarrative to Shakespeare’s version, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome, describes the assassins not as noble patriots but as wealthy elites and greedy aristocrats. They killed Caesar not to protect democracy from an autocrat but to restore and protect their privileges that were being undermined and threatened by a populist and traitor to his class.
In Trump’s case, at least for now, it’s his populist base that is turning on him as he surrenders his presidency to greedy warmongering oligarchs and their bloodthirsty ghouls in the Senate, Pentagon, State Department, and CIA.
Unlike Caesar, Trump has survived every effort by the ruling elite to destroy him. What we are seeing today is Trump’s own self-destruction as he abandons his voters and turns on his libertarian and anti-war conservative supporters. When he goes down, those voters, elected leaders, and influencers will not go away. So long as we have a desperate and dying capitalist system dependent on perpetual war and rising inequality, we will have a tumultuous and dangerous political force on the right.
Until a viable, coherent left emerges—one that is fundamentally anti-war, unapologetically populist, and capable of uniting a multiracial working-class electorate—the anti-establishment right will remain a resilient and resurgent force. The last time such a force existed on the left was the Rainbow Coalition, led by the late Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, who was buried last weekend. Its absence today is our political crisis.
