Corruption charges once propelled MAGA. Now they may doom it You can find the origins of the MAGA movement, now hurtling toward its rendezvous with the midterm electorate, in many places.

The most obvious, straight-line antecedent is, of course, the Tea Party revolt of 2009 and 2010. The bipartisan backlash against the bailouts of Wall Street and Detroit fused with the conservative outrage at ObamaCare became the dominant voice in Republicans’ wilderness era.

That was where Donald Trump joined the fray, latching on to the idea from the swamps of the suddenly very-online right, that then-President Obama was a stealth Kenyan — the Manchurian candidate, but for Islamism. You all know the story about how, at the moment when Trump succeeded in forcing Obama to release his birth certificate, the then-host of “The Celebrity Apprentice” attended the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Obama and headliner Seth Meyers roasted Trump repeatedly to the howling delight of the audience. Legend has it that Trump decided to run for president himself that night.

For a nice full-circle moment, watch the opening montage for Obama’s speech, which uses Hulk Hogan’s theme song “Real American” to mock lowbrow patriotism, and the use of the song to introduce the Hulkster himself endorsing Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention. The Obamanauts no doubt believed they were actually mocking Trump’s own vulgar expressions of patriotism and xenophobia, but like a lot of late Obamism, it seemed pretty smug.

And even if many of the Trumpsters were quietly LOL-ing at the yokels who unironically love pro wrestling like they love a Trump and Lee Greenwood-branded Holy Bible (still just $59.99) they weren’t letting it on to the marks.

It was 13 long years from the triumph of Obama (the birth certificate dinner was the same week he announced the killing of Osama bin Laden) to the political apotheosis of Trump in which he, having survived an assassination attempt just days earlier, took the stage at his Hulkamaniac nominating convention in 2024. And propelling it all was the same kind of rage that had given the Tea Party its start: the belief among many “real Americans” that the game was rigged against them and that Trump, whom Dave Chappelle famously called “an honest liar,” would help tear it all down.

Another, less remembered forerunner of MAGA was Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential candidacy and the Reform Party it birthed. That was actually where Trump first dipped his toes into presidential politics, with a short-lived campaign for the party’s 2000 nomination. If you’ve never read Matt Labash’s dispatch from the abortive Trump effort, do yourself a favor. The idea is that Trump was a logical heir to fellow businessman Perot: a candidate too rich to buy and too famous to be silenced.

It was in the zeitgeist back then, when the whiff of Iran-Contra was still in the air, campaign finance reform was a hot issue and the scandals of Bill Clinton, ranging from the slightly sordid to the outright sleazy, had dominated political news from the time he launched his candidacy to his final day in office. Perot had a lot of way-out ideas, but the central argument of his candidacies was that Washington had been overrun by lobbyists and special interests and that he would set things right.

“If someone as blessed as I am is not willing to clean out the barn, who will?”Perot liked to say. It’s a far cry from Trump’s “I am your retribution,” but there’s some overlap there: the big man, the outsider, the hard edge, the unlikely savior. Perot was playing it like Marshal Will Kane, while Trump was doing more of a Tony Soprano take, but the idea of the tough guy, willing and able to do hard and necessary things, has always been very appealing to Americans concerned about the accumulation of power by remote elites.

In his first term, Trump leaned into that persona. He made a show of announcing which government agency would be getting the proceeds of his presidential paycheck — veterans, schools, health programs, infrastructure, the National Park Service etc. In the second term, I could find only one such announcement: a claim in August of last year that his paycheck was going to White House renovations.

Similarly, he went to great lengths in the first term to at least pay lip service to ethical restrictions on his and his family’s business activities during the presidency. It’s not that he or they followed those rules to the letter, but, as the saying goes, “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”Critics may have scoffed at Trump’s claims that he was giving up greater wealth and comfort to serve, but for those inclined to believe him in the first place, it was a pretty good pitch. When Democrats came after Trump for penny-ante stuff like profiting from the hotel stays of foreigners seeking favor with the administration, it didn’t land.

But in Trump 2.0, hypocrisy was out and brazenness was in. The billions Trump has raked in, the obsession with an opulent ballroom for the White House, lavish gifts from abroad and the government contracts for his family were bad enough, but probably the most damaging politically has been that at a moment when Americans are extremely anxious about the coming disruptions from artificial intelligence, Trump is enthusiastically on the same team as the other billionaires. As with the unfulfilled promises in the Jeffrey Epstein probe, Trump no longer seems to be leading the angry mob, but instead deflecting its rage.

Many were surprised to see that in the most recent Fox News poll, corruption was a top concern for 90 percent of voters, ahead of even high prices. They shouldn’t have been shocked. There are two main flavors of American populism: economic and cultural. What unites them is the belief that the system is rigged against their interests. If Trump has put his party on the wrong side of the mob he once led, there will be hell to pay next month.

Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill, veteran campaign and elections journalist and best-selling author of books about American political history.