I went to the US's peak MAGA conference to gauge the state of movement. Here's what I found
It’s 9pm in downtown Phoenix, Arizona and the city is overrun by loud, enthusiastic Donald Trump supporters. Young men in cheap suits are ambling across Central Avenue in and out of hotels, women with overly made-up faces are clacking their heels down the sidewalk. Make America Great Again caps and badges abound.
This is the first night of AmericaFest, an annual festival of all things Christian and nationalist, run by Turning Point USA – the creation of assassinated activist Charlie Kirk. It’s only a week before Christmas, and the rest of the country is winding down and heading home after a chaotic year. But 30,000 conservatives have flocked to the desert to spend four days basking in their collective victory and debating America’s future.
I’ve come here to gauge the state of the MAGA movement after a year of Trump’s return to the White House, at a time when the focus of many young foot soldiers is turning to what – or who – comes next. But sitting at the bar at Hanny’s, a dimly lit, upmarket joint a block from the vast convention centre where AmericaFest is held, Nora Christine warns me I might already be too late. “I don’t want to say I’m part of MAGA because I think MAGA’s kind of dead,” she says. Christine, a conservative activist from Florida with a fledgling podcast, casts her eyes around the bar. “They’re not going to tell you that.”
The conservative coalition that propelled Trump back to the White House a year earlier has had a rocky few months. Some of it stems from people breaking with Trump over policy decisions; his bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities or his fraternising with regime change in Venezuela; his fondness for Big Tech and foreign worker visas, his initial reluctance to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/i-went-to-the-us-s-peak-maga-conference-to-gauge-the-state-of-movement-here-s-what-i-found-20260121-p5nvnm.html
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