For many people who care deeply about issues like civil rights, combating child sex abuse and thwarting corruption, there has never been anything cool about the MAGA movement.
But now it seems that others inside the tent are coming around to that realization as well, albeit a bit more slowly.
President Donald Trump and his allies have used everything from misinformed emcees to gamer memes to project an air of coolness around the MAGA movement. But evidence suggests the air is beginning to evaporate, even among supporters of the president. Multiple polls this year have shown Trump’s support among young men, the group arguably most responsible for propping up this facade of coolness, has hit new lows, compared to where it was during the 2024 election.
A Politico report on the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend underscored this trend, citing multiple conservative young men who said Trump’s warmongering in Iran was turning them off ahead of this year’s midterms. The New York Times published a similar dispatch from the conference, highlighting young conservatives’ disillusionment with MAGA.
And all of this seems relevant to Vice President JD Vance’s recent attempt to downplay a complaint from Trump-aligned podcaster Joe Rogan, who disparaged MAGA for attracting “dorks.”
In his NSFW rant, Rogan (who endorsed Trump in 2024) complained about the slogan “make America great again” and Trump’s movement supposedly becoming “a movement of a bunch of dorks.”
“A lot of them are these really weird, f–––ing uninteresting, unintelligent people,” Rogan said, before griping that some “genuine patriots” in the movement get “lumped into this one group” with the “dorks.” The critique isn’t all that different from the one Hillary Clinton made about a decade ago, when she referred to some people in the movement as a “basket of deplorables” who espoused bigotry.
Rogan also argued that former President Barack Obama was more effective in deporting people than Trump has been.
Vance took umbrage with both claims during an interview with far-right propagandist Benny Johnson last week. The vice president said he would text Rogan to rebut the claims, but on the topic of MAGA “dorks,” Vance said, “We have many, many fewer dorks than the far left. But we love our dorks. We love our cool kids. We love anybody who wants to save the country.” Is it puerile that two conservative thought leaders were seriously discussing whether the so-called dorks could sit with them at lunch? Absolutely. But it also speaks to the superficiality of the MAGA movement, which perceives “coolness” as a very real political currency. And one that Trump appears to be losing rapidly among some noteworthy constituents.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
