As we begin approach the 100th day of the second Trump administration, the apparent division between MAGA populism and DOGE libertarianism remains one of the major stories of this new era. The MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon and the DOGE impresario Elon Musk are the public faces of this divide. Bannon, in particular, has been vocal in his denunciations of DOGE as a fundamental betrayal of basic commitments of MAGA populism, describing Musk as “evil”, an “oligarch”, and a “parasitic illegal immigrant”.
Yet as Musk is reportedly being ushered out of the administration, there is reason to be sceptical of overheated reports of a fundamental rupture.
Points of divergence are obvious, to be sure. MAGA represents a repudiation of older neoliberal orthodoxy, the article of faith once held by the mainstream of the Republican Party and the triangulated centre-left of the Clinton-Blair and Obama years. Capturing the GOP through the gravitational force of Donald Trump, MAGA rejected the imagined globalist free-market paradise in which products and workers flowed freely in a borderless, flattened world. Dreams of a liberal international order led by US and European elites have been shattered as old allies now regard each other with deepening mistrust. Deportations, tariffs, and a focus on regional hegemony have become the centrepiece of a robustly America First reorientation.
DOGE, by contrast, appears to be a reconstitution of a longstanding libertarian agenda. While MAGA emphasises the need for a powerful government acting forcefully on behalf of its citizens, DOGE has revived Reagan-era commitments to downsize and outright eliminate vast swaths of the federal government. It promotes an agenda of deregulation and economic and individual liberty. Its commitment to a more porous economic landscape is now muted, but not forgotten.
The techno-libertarians preference for open borders (at least, for some classes of newcomers) has been silenced for the moment by the furious MAGA response to then-DOGE co-director Vivek Ramaswami’s efforts to increase the number of H1B visas for engineers from Asia. Musk’s dreams of colonising Mars likewise reflect DOGE’s deepest commitments not just to a borderless world, but a borderless humanity, as does his most recent claims on X that biological humanity is a “boot-loader” for “digital super-intelligence”.
Yet stories about the divide, mainly from journalists in mainstream newspapers and journals, increasingly seem to be born of a lack of political acumen and an excess of wishful thinking. A yearning for a crack-up and attendant dysfunction has blinded many political observers to the more complicated reality of coalition politics. American politics invariably gives rise to political coalitions that are always to some degree internally incoherent.
However, philosophical incoherence does not equal governing inability or paralysis. The success of all political coalitions depends in equal parts on deeply shared animus against a common enemy, on the one hand, and overlapping consensus in some key areas, on the other. If those two main conditions persist, then a successful political agenda, even amid a degree of constrained internal conflict and compromise, is not only possible, but likely.
This was true during the Reagan administration — when pro-business libertarians, Cold War Hawks, and social conservatives were able to maintain a working coalition; and it was true during the two terms of Obama, when the woke “identitarians”, the old labour Left, and neoliberal technocrats were able to maintain an esprit de corps.
Like those two administrations, the Trump coalition enjoys a common enemy and an overlapping consensus. For that reason, the MAGA-DOGE coalition will persist in relative comity at least until the start of the next campaign cycle, which begins in fewer than two years. Even after that point, MAGA-DOGE will be the working coalition to which presumptive 2028 Republican candidate, Vice President J.D. Vance, will seek to appeal and ride to victory.
Indeed, there is no better figure than Vance to provide a window into the reasons why this coalition is not in the midst of fracturing. Not only has Vance studied with seriousness their respective intellectual sources, but as a matter of deeply personal biography, he understands himself as a cohesive combination of those two intellectual and political streams. In three notable speeches, Vance has already begun to lay out his vision for both his own and America’s political future, one which is notably attentive to rendering the apparent contradictory MAGA-DOGE coalition into a complementary whole.
The first speech was delivered on 11 February, 2025, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. The second speech — arguably his most impactful to date — was delivered three days later at the Munich Security Conference. The third speech was delivered on 18 March at the American Dynamism Conference. All three spoke at least implicitly about the relationship of the two parts of the Trump-Vance coalition, with the latter of the two offering the most explicit effort to date to synthesise the two seeming opposites.
The first of these speeches appeared to be the most “DOGE”-friendly, with Vance chiding Europeans especially for their eagerness to place peremptory limitations on AI developments. He lauded recent advances in AI, offering a firmly “techno-optimist ”spin characteristic of the DOGE worldview. In his encouragement of a “deregulatory flavour”, the influence of the likes of his benefactor Peter Thiel is evident, particularly in Thiel’s expressed concern for the ways that fears of apocalypse have thwarted innovation and led to an era of technological stagnation.
However, in other respects, even in his most DOGE-friendly speech to date, Vance simultaneously emphasised how AI developments stand to benefit those of a MAGA persuasion. Several times, Vance nodde to the common enemy of both DOGE and MAGA, the weakened Leviathan of woke progressive authoritarianism. Highlighting their shared animus, Vance insisted before his largely European audience that AI should “remain free of ideological bias” and be deployed in ways that avoid being co-opted as a “tool of authoritarian censorship”.
But his most MAGA-inflected point was to underscore AI’s potential to generate new jobs in a plethora of industries. Vance rejected a common fear of MAGA technophobes (such as that expressed in Tucker Carlson’s support for at least a temporary ban on driverless trucks), stating that “AI, I really believe, will facilitate and make people more productive. It is not going to replace human beings. It will never replace human beings”.
He expressed his excitement over the ways that AI development was “grounded in the real and the physical economy”, emphasising the hands-on work of doctors, manufacturers, and soldiers. To further the appeal to MAGA denizens, he emphasised current US leadership in this technological space, one that translates into benefits for American national security. Foreshadowing his other major speeches early in his term as vice president, Vance constantly emphasises how MAGA ends and DOGE ends share considerable overlap.
“Vance constantly emphasises how MAGA ends and DOGE ends share considerable overlap.”
The widely discussed Munich Security speech again had elements intended to reflect, and appeal to, both elements of the Trump-Vance coalition. Again, the “common enemy” was identified: the oppressive regime of progressive speech and idea regulation. Vance called out European liberal elites for their promiscuous use of government power to suppress disfavoured views and even disqualify candidates and entire political parties from electoral consideration.
The “free-speech” dimension of Vance’s remarks reflected the libertarian commitments of the DOGE constituency, while the clear efforts to liberate “Make Europe Great Again” views from legal and political constraint are the necessary precursor to populist electoral success. In effect, Vance was signaling that (in this case) DOGE means are necessary for MEGA ends. Only a more libertarian approach to speech and political expression would clear a path to a comparable populist movement in Europe, one emphasising the need for secure borders, a producer economy, and greater military realism.
These themes were reiterated in a more recent speech by Vance, this time in Washington at a summit organised by Silicon Valley disruptors such as Marc Andreessen. At that event, Vance confronted head-on the dominant narrative of a divide between “techno-optimists” and the “populist Right” of the Trump coalition, declaring that he rejected the idea of an unbridgeable divide between the two as a “proud member of both tribes”. Vance echoed themes from his Paris speech, emphasising not only the desirability and even inescapability of innovation, but praising its potential to benefit workers — even citing Saint John Paul II — according to their work lives ever greater dignity.
But in a speech before a Silicon Valley audience, Vance underscored a main MAGA point: “deindustrialisation poses risks both to our national security and to our workforce”. While acknowledging the potential loss of meaning that technological disruption of older industries poses to the industrial workforce, Vance emphasised a point intended to win over both MAGA and DOGE constituencies: globalisation’s “hunger for cheap labour” has been bad both for American workers and bad for innovation.
Strengthening the American manufacturing sector, he noted, would have the benefit of reintegrating what globalism has separated: design from manufacturing, engineers from assembly, thinkers from doers. Indeed, speaking in quasi-Marxian language of the dangers of “alienation”, Vance in fact articulated a view that could be easily shared by the most pro-union factory worker and the most libertarian technologist: work and products improve with integration.
An oft-repeated theme in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk is how the Tesla and SpaceX boss rejected the Steve Jobs model of “designing” in Cupertino and producing in China. Instead, in every one of his manifold endeavors, Musk has sought to bring into close proximity the engineers and the fabricators, believing with considerable evidence that their separation leads to the inability of each to learn from the limitations and insights of the other. Rather than discerning a DOGE-versus-MAGA narrative, Vance stresses how the aims of each align, even as they seek to defeat a common enemy.
More clearly and consistently than anyone in this not-yet-100-day-old administration, Vance loses no opportunity to articulate the basic alignment of DOGE and MAGA. As with any coalition, there are and will continue to be tensions (as Vivek discovered). Vance may yet be proved wrong that technologies such as AI will prove beneficial not only to workers, but to humanity at large (I, for one, hope that humanity is not the “biological boot-loader for digital superintelligence”).
But Vance is not only intellectually and biographically, but politically as well, the “child” of DOGE and MAGA. Like any child, he aims to articulate the virtues and compatibility of his parents. Those who believe, or hope, that the coalition is on the verge of dysfunctional collapse may be surprised by how durable it is — and will remain under a successor administration.
