President Donald Trump‘s MAGA movement effectively created a coalition of the frustrated out of libertarians, populists, America Firsters and other groups whose principles and priorities don’t otherwise align with each other.
Thus configured, MAGA has essentially replaced the Republican Party (or subsumed it), with GOP lawmakers who don’t subscribe to the President’s agenda finding themselves cast out — primaried or pilloried, a la Mitt Romney.
But the melding together of these disparate factions didn’t erase their core differences, and issues like the explosive Epstein Files continue to threaten the powerful but still potentially fragile coalition.
[NOTE: Any movement linking Second Amendment absolutists, anti-abortion proponents, Christian nationalists, Jewish Zionists, Southern Evangelicals, tech bros, anti-government conspiracy theorists, small government conservatives, anti-vaxxers, and libertarians — to name a few groups that align under the MAGA banner — will face factionalism. See Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) voting with Democrats on a petition to release the Epstein files.]
Former VP candidate Tim Walz, the Democratic Governor of Minnesota who has just announced his run for re-election, is questioning how well these MAGA groups really fit together, as Democrats hope post-election splintering will impact Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP.
From Walz’s perspective, nobody is doing more to trigger a MAGA revolt than Trump himself, as he uses the executive branch of the federal government to wield unprecedented power over citizens and free market capitalism by sending military troops into cities and taking investment positions with taxpayer money in private companies like Intel.
In the video below, Walz essentially asks for help from critical MAGA constituencies, asking them to see in Trump’s actions exactly the kind of government overreach and authoritarian impulses that they claim to abhor.
Tim Walz: "I'll tell you what doesn't make people feel safe — a tank next to Chipotle. It's stupid and it's for the cameras … where are the 'don't tread on me' people?" pic.twitter.com/0mZjer5PpD
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 17, 2025
“I’ll tell you what doesn’t make people feel safe,” Walz said, “a tank next to Chipotle. It’s stupid and it’s for the cameras … where are the ‘don’t tread on me’ people?”
“We were told for years that we needed to be prepared about an overbearing federal government that would step in over local control,” Walz continued. Addressing the Don’t Tread On Me contingent who issued these warnings, Walz said again: “Where are those people? I would just ask them to rise up.”
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