The MAGA Movement Is Falling Apart

After studying how authoritarian movements and cults collapse throughout history, one pattern keeps appearing. These movements do not fall apart all at once. They fall apart in levels. Each level leaves for a completely different reason. And the order is always the same.After World War II historians studied exactly how the Nazi movement collapsed. The supporters did not all leave at once. They left in a very specific order. For very specific reasons.MAGA is following the exact same pattern.Here are the three levels of MAGA and how each one falls apart.Level One: Casual MAGAThese are the flag wavers. The hat wearers. The people who shared the memes and went to the rallies.They were never really fully in. They just liked being on the winning team for once.Psychologist Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol spent decades studying why people join political and social groups and why they leave. He called it Social Identity Theory. Tajfel found that people with low commitment to a group stay only as long as that group makes them feel like a winner. The moment it stops they walk away and find a new group to belong to.In Germany the casual supporters disappeared the moment the war started going badly. Winning stopped feeling like winning and they were gone overnight.In MAGA it worked exactly the same way. The rallies stopped feeling exciting. Being MAGA stopped feeling cool. And just like that the flags came down, the red hats disappeared into the back of a closet.No explanation. No announcement. They just moved on. Quietly. Now they do not want to talk politics. It is a sore subject.Soon they will never admit they ever supported Trump.This first level is pretty much already gone.Level Two: The True BelieversThese people are different.They built their whole identity around the movement. All their friends. All their social media. Their whole sense of who they were was MAGA.Psychologists call this the Sunk Cost trap. The more you invest in something the harder it is to walk away. But everyone has a breaking point. And that breaking point is always personal.Their grocery bill went up. Their healthcare got cut. Their job disappeared. And the pain became impossible to blame on someone else.Andrew Schulz, the comedian who hosted Trump on his podcast Flagrant before the election and voted for him, is now publicly saying Trump did the exact opposite of everything he promised. His exact words: “I voted for none of this.”Joe Rogan has the biggest podcast in the world with 29 million YouTube subscribers. He endorsed Trump and helped him win young male voters in 2024. This past week Rogan called MAGA a movement of dorks. Weird, uninteresting, unintelligent people. His words.A group called Leaving MAGA had 1,500 subscribers at the start of 2025. By July they had 35,000.These are not people who hated Trump. These are people who loved him. And the moment he hurt them personally they started slipping out the back door quietly without ever saying why.After World War II researchers found that most ordinary Germans still privately believed Nazism was a good idea. Just badly applied. They did not change their minds. They just stopped saying it out loud. They went quiet. Changed the subject at dinner. Moved on without admitting anything.NBC News polled over 20,000 Americans and found that out of every 100 MAGA Republicans 8 of them stopped strongly supporting Trump in a single year. Not because they woke up. Because it started hurting.This level is fracturing fast. And with the loss of support here the erosion is going to accelerate quickly.Level Three: The FanaticsChristian nationalists. Proud Boys. Militia groups. The people who stormed the Capitol.These people are not leaving. Ever.Psychologist Leon Festinger infiltrated a doomsday cult in Chicago to study what happens to true believers when everything falls apart around them. The cult believed the world would end on a specific date. Members quit their jobs. Gave away everything they owned. Said goodbye to their families.The date came. Nothing happened.And the most committed members did not walk away. They got louder. They told everyone their faith had saved the world.Festinger called this Cognitive Dissonance. The more someone sacrifices for a belief the harder their brain fights to protect it. Because admitting they were wrong means everything they gave up meant nothing. That kind of pain is too much for the brain to handle. So instead of leaving they double down and get more extreme.Seven years after World War II ended, after the death camps were exposed and the country was completely destroyed, 25 percent of Germans still had a favorable opinion of Hitler. They never admitted they were wrong. History just made them irrelevant.That is exactly what happens to the MAGA fanatics. They do not get converted. They do not wake up. They just become the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving that nobody argues with anymore. Not because he won. Because nobody has the energy.They will get louder as they get smaller. And then one day they will just be gone.The fanatics are always the last ones standing in a burning building. No army behind them. No power. No future. Just a red hat and a grudge.What Comes NextThe first level of the MAGA movement is already gone. The second level is walking out the back door. What is left are the fanatics.Fanatics are always the smallest group. And without a movement behind them they have no power.But they only fade if we never stop pushing. Keep going. Accountability is already on its way.SourcesSocial Identity Theory Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.Tajfel, H. (1981). Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology. Cambridge University Press.Sunk Cost Trap Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140.Cognitive Dissonance Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. University of Minnesota Press.Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.Post-War German Public Opinion Kershaw, I. (1987). The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford University Press.Denazification polling data via Wikipedia citing Kershaw and Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach surveys (1952).MAGA Polling Data NBC News poll of over 20,000 Americans tracking MAGA Republican approval shifts (2025).Leaving MAGA Axios reporting on the Leaving MAGA organization subscriber growth (October 2025).Andrew Schulz Variety, The Daily Beast (July 2025). “Andrew Schulz Turns on Trump: ‘I Voted For None of This.’”Joe Rogan Mediaite, Newsweek (March 2026). “Joe Rogan Rips MAGA as ‘Bunch of Dorks.’” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe