The MAGA War on City Dwellers Is Backfiring

The GOP’s contempt for cities will destroy their winning 2024 coalition

Last Tuesday, Republicans got absolutely hosed pretty much anywhere they were on the ballot—a result that provided the first incontrovertible evidence, beyond the endless downward churn of Donald Trump’s approval polling, that a majority of Americans are deeply displeased with his second siege on the federal government. One significant reason for those losses is that the Trump administration has declared war on urban America, believing it can simultaneously carry out a vast, militarized mass-deportation campaign and punish what the new far-right elite views as the feckless college-educated progressive political class in the nation’s big cities without any collateral damage. That roll of the dice also came up snake eyes last week.

If you have breathed air in the United States this century, the GOP’s loathing of cities is nothing new. It has been more than 17 years since Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, started using the language of “real America” and “real Americans” to describe people who live in small towns and rural areas. Palin’s rhetoric offered up the mythical “Main Street” as the kind of place deserving of renewal and attention, implicitly or sometimes explicitly contrasted with Barack Obama’s Chicago—which in the right’s delirious imagining is a haven of gang violence and rampant elite-led community organization. An early preview of where this brand of politics was headed was when Palin quipped in her 2008 Republican National Convention speech that “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Palin and the far-right radicals who succeeded her staged a successful takeover of every national Republican institution, guided by the dogmatic conviction that cities are full of not just violent minorities who need to be pacified with relentless state violence and incarceration but also teeming with what Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts called in his 2024 book Dawn’s Early Light “parasites,” including “pantsuited girlboss advertising executives, Skittle-haired they/them activists, soy-faced pajama-clad work-from-home HR apparatchiks, Adderall-addicted dog mom diversity consultants, nasally voiced Ivy League regulatory lawyers, obese George Soros–funded police abolitionist district attorneys, hipster trust fund socialists.”

With this breathtakingly venal appraisal of millions of their fellow citizens, Roberts and his fellow travelers on the far right sometimes sound like they are just a few short rhetorical hops away from Pol Pot’s maniacal plan to empty out Cambodian cities and return their surviving denizens to subsistence labor. Roberts may seem a particularly extreme example of this kind of abstract, algorithm-driven loathing, but its core precepts are now lodged in the heart of the MAGA movement. As a para-intellectual proposition, this stereotyped view of perverse urban wrongthink seems to be drawn from a widespread misreading of the theory of “elite overproduction” attributed to University of Connecticut data scientist Peter Turchin. Turchin’s actual argument is that as the number of ultra-wealthy Americans has exploded, all toting degrees from the same 10 or 15 elite universities, the number of aspirants to the small number of truly powerful political positions has vastly outstripped the supply of such openings. This concerted pressure directed at the summit of elite power has produced, in Turchin’s telling, a kind of plutocracy on steroids, in which the filthy rich compete with one another for power while inequality soars.

Somehow, the far right has distorted Turchin’s theory to argue that urban progressivism as a political movement is driven by over-educated, miserable people—the so-called Professional Managerial Class (PMC). These hapless souls tend to be trapped what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” and demand social and economic policies that are unrealistic or actively harmful to the real working classes. Writing after Zohran Mamdani’s New York City primary victory in June, Breitbart’s John Carney called the wealthy parts of big cities such as like Brooklyn “enclaves of educated precarity” and “zones of post-industrial drift, populated by non-profit managers, freelance writers, overburdened teachers and software engineers who live paycheck to paycheck despite six-figure incomes.”

Carney’s is actually among the most sympathetic portrayals of city-dwellers you will find on the right; he was, improbably enough, making the case that conservatives need to appeal to these voters.

The obsession with nonprofits that characterizes the Trumpian counter-revolution is also odd. In 2022, there were only 1.3 million nonprofit employees in the whole state of New York, whereas there are close to 2.7 million people in Brooklyn alone. You can add all the teachers, professors, tech workers, and writers to that mix and still come up vastly short of any kind of explanation of the economy of megacities like New York or Chicago, let alone the smaller cities where the vast majority of America’s urban population actually lives.

The idea that all of them, or even some substantial plurality of the people who live there, are rendered hopelessly miserable and susceptible to radical socialism because they can’t afford to buy a house or carry student debt is simply not a very astute sociological appraisal. Statistically, many of the largest employers in places like Boston or Chicago are healthcare systems—places where all of these parasites go to take care of each other, I guess. And Brooklyn is not full of “downwardly mobile” people with graduate degrees, but rather is rife with fairly prosperous professionals, many of whom are there by choice and have no illusions that it would be possible to have access to all of New York’s cultural amenities while also being able to live in a five-bedroom house with a yard.

A desire to dismantle the hated PMC—particularly universities, grant-funded nonprofits and government workplaces—is central to the newest iteration of the MAGA project. And because most of today’s Republicans have become instinctively hostile to cities, and convinced that they can win without the support of more than 15 or 20 percent of the country’s urbanites, the president recently felt comfortable posting an AI-generated video of himself clad in a crown, flying a fighter jet and dumping shit all over No Kings protesters in urban neighborhoods, including a place that the video’s producers apparently intended to be Times Square. Trump’s day-to-day rhetoric about America’s big cities makes Sarah Palin sound like a radical municipalist—in September he posted a picture of himself crouched in front of the Chicago skyline in flames, labeled “Chipocalypse Now,” and wrote, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” above the legend: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”

Regarding cities as full of unnecessary, parasitic, globalist elites doing pointless work with taxpayer money is one of the many reasons why national Republicans are 100 percent on board with one of their most politically destructive projects: turning places like Chicago and Los Angeles into war zones where the threat of sudden, arbitrary violence comes entirely from the state. The harassed and terrified residents in these cities have grown accustomed to the specter of heavily armed, masked ICE agents leaping out of unmarked cars to seize anyone suspected of being an “illegal,” or else deploying their tinted-window SUVs as battering rams, immobilizing cars with dangerous maneuvers, pulling people out of their vehicles, off the streets or even out of daycare centers with wildly unnecessary force and spectacle. That the project of mass deportation would necessarily make itself disruptive and unpopular by ensnaring US citizens in the dragnet of carceral violence, uprooting long-standing members of communities and creating a climate of fear and chaos was entirely predictable. Yet MAGA leaders have mostly shrugged at the political fallout from their urban offensive, seemingly on the grounds that vast number of people living in American cities don’t qualify as part of the ”Real America” fetishized by right-wing demagogues.

In particular, what Republicans didn’t reckon with, and still seemingly do not grasp, is that the most acute political alienation would be most closely felt by many of the very voters who propelled Trump’s 2024 victory—Black and Latino voters in big cities frustrated with the cost of living and the perception of unfairness in immigration policies produced largely by the Biden administration’s total inability to manage its own border policies or push back on right-wing governors depositing busloads and planeloads of migrants in blue cities.

Last Tuesday’s results suggest that you can’t set out to make life a living hell for (presumably white) “soy-faced HR apparatchiks” in our cities without also alienating large swaths of working-class neighborhoods. In those locales, which saw Trump gain significant ground between the 2020 and 2024 election cycles, actual “economic precarity” is the norm, and the expectation of Trump voters was that they had elected someone to make groceries cheaper, not to invite a semipermanent military siege of their neighborhoods by their own government.

One lesson that both parties should have learned over the past decade of American politics is that no matter how badly you’re doing with some subgroup of voters, you can always stumble into performing worse among others in a highly consequential way. When Democrats won the popular vote in five of six presidential elections between 1992 and 2012, they consistently won around 43 percent of the white vote. When that figure dropped to 37 percent in 2016, it brought Donald Trump to power.

One of the other keys to Republicans’ returning to the White House in 2016, remaining competitive in 2020, and then winning their first presidential popular vote in two decades was cutting Democrats’ big-city margins back to pre–Great Recession levels. Last year, Trump netted 20 percent support in most major urban districts, compared to the 15 percent showing that the GOP mustered there during the two elections with Obama on the ballot. Had this trend continued, and had Republicans been able to keep inching upward toward the one-third of the big-city vote that they got during the 1970s and 1980s, it would have been curtains for the contemporary Democratic coalition.

That’s why it’s politically indefensible for Republicans to treat cities and the people who live in them with not just naked contempt but a desire for punitive violence packaged as spectacle. In New Jersey last year, Trump won 41 percent of the vote in Latino-majority Union City; Republican Jack Ciattarelli won 15 percent of the Latino vote in the state’s 2025 gubernatorial election—worse even than Trump’s 2020 or 2016 showing.

Trump achieved his gains among urban voters last year by appealing directly to them about affordability and the migrant crisis, even if he offered no specific answers beyond demagoguery. He wasted little time in ditching both appeals after his second inauguration. Not only is he angrily waving off talk of affordability after last week’s GOP defeats; he’s also made it clear that mass deportation is so central to his agenda that he thinks nothing of American citizens of Latino descent being forced to exist in a more-or-less permanent state of trepidation and fear. The political calculation here was to hope that the populations menaced by MAGA’s ICE raids would blame them on the sanctuary-city policies pushed by progressives rather than on Trump and his ghoulish immigration consigliere Stephen Miller. Snake eyes again.

Trump’s rolling ICE sieges in our cities mean that he’s completely blown it with Latino voters and inadvertently reassembled the coalition that once delivered insurmountable margins for Democrats in cities like Philadelphia during the Obama era. As a result, Republicans will be fighting 2026 and 2028 in the worst of both worlds. Without Trump on the ballot, they are likely to do worse anyway, and he is going to bequeath the next GOP presidential candidate a shattered coalition, with young voters, Latinos, and Black voters having returned, according to exit polls, to Obama-era levels of Democratic support. Add to that the fired-up radicalization of PMC liberals who are currently donning their first “Fuck ICE” T-shirts and running patrols around their kids’ schools like it is wartime, and you have the recipe for an epic blowout. All the Democrats would need to do in this scenario is to depart from their own recent self-destructive patterns, and pick a candidate who doesn’t regard the party’s own base as the enemy.