The MAGA Doctrine by Charlie Kirk
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The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future
By Charlie Kirk
Broadside Books, 2020
It’s not often that the critical appraisal of a book starts as early as its title, but this is the case with The MAGA Doctrine by young right-wing mouthpiece Charlie Kirk. “MAGA” stands for Donald Trump’s campaign tag-line, “Make America Great Again,” which originated, like everything else in Trump’s campaign (and subsequent administration), from a maniacal hatred of Barack Obama. So there is no “MAGA Doctrine” without Donald Trump, obviously, and this is the first glaring flaw of a book that’s composed almost exclusively of glaring flaws. Not only does Donald Trump lack the mental capacity to formulate a “doctrine,” but he lacks the temperament to follow one. If Charlie Kirk presented Donald Trump with “the MAGA Doctrine,” Trump would be tweeting against it in part or in whole within a day.
So: Charlie Kirk manages the not-inconsiderable feat of telling a lie even in his book’s title: this isn’t “the MAGA Doctrine,” it’s “the Charlie Kirk Doctrine.” Like literally every other person who has ever known Donald Trump, Kirk is using Trump to further his agenda.
What is the MAGA doctrine, he asks rhetorically? Here’s a start:
Bigger is not always better. The role of government should be so small that it is barely noticeable. Yet, over the past several decades it has ballooned into an enormous enterprise thanks to both political parties. Too many institutions created to counter the power of government, from the media to Wall Street, have practically joined forces with it. Fake news is out of control and defense contractors have taken unprecedented advantage of the American taxpayer.
That a Trumpist should make a series of declarations that refute themselves is by now expected; the principle of instantaneous self-refutation is, after all, demonstrated every day by Donald Trump himself, whose every declaration is a direct contradiction of something he’s said or tweeted six years ago. Same in this passage - among its many other problems, two stand out: 1) Donald Trump filled his cabinet with Wall Street billionaires and crafted a series of tax cuts that benefit them alone, and 2) Trump’s 2020 military budget, the huge majority of which will go to defense contractors, is the largest since World War II. Kirk and other Trumpists brand any reports that point these things out as “fake news.”
“Protecting individual liberty from the tyrannical forces of government is the idea our nation was built upon,” Kirk writes. And since he can’t ignore the many public comments Trump has made in which he yearns for tyrannical power (or claims he already has it), Kirk writes them off as jokes.
“Be skeptical of everything, especially your government,” Kirk writes. “Ask questions, fight for your rights, and never surrender.” But the head of the government regularly tells his rallies that what they’re seeing is not really happening - that they should place 100% of their trust in him to describe reality for them. Not: “Ask questions, fight for your rights, never surrender.”
“The MAGA Doctrine,” Kirk writes, “is not a threat to other nations but an invitation to deal with each other out of practical self-interest instead of ultimatums, displays of might, reckless adventures, and big crusades against small-bore enemies such as Afghan villagers or Latin American coca farmers.” Trump was impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine specifically in order to further his practical self-interest, and in February of 2020 the Trump administration signed a peace treaty with the Taliban.
“It’s an immense historic irony,” Kirk writes, about the Trump administration’s passing of the First Step Act, “that a populist president often accused of being an authoritarian - overly sympathetic to police officers - managed, by contrast, to push through a big criminal justice reform bill … in part by being more pragmatic, more realistic about than his predecessors.” Kirk has called Trump’s immediate predecessor, President Obama, a Marxist. Kirk calls Donald Trump, who’s been evicting, dispossessing, and cheating working people for 55 years, a populist. And Kirk claims the First Step Act passed because Trump was being more pragmatic than Obama, who’d proposed similar legislation. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has bragged many times in the last four years about how successful he was in blocking virtually all of Obama’s legislative bills; Obama’s sentencing-reform bill was one of those. It failed because of rabid partisan racism, not because it wasn’t “pragmatic” enough.
And so on, throughout the book. On every page, Kirk writes something that’s either trivially, casually wrong (he calls right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool a “far-left commentator,” for instance) or just bipartisanly ridiculous, as when he can somehow make himself type the words: “Trump has a sense of duty to something larger than himself. He takes the important things seriously.” Just in the last week, in a demonstration of how seriously he takes important things, Trump has repeatedly said he has a “hunch” that US COVID-19 deaths “will soon be zero” and has put a young-Earth Creationist science-denier in charge of all US efforts to combat the virus.
Kirk is forced to write such lying nonsense because of the aforementioned pragmatism. He needs to connect Trump to his “doctrine” in order to pitch his book to Broadside Books and sell it to the small fraction of Trump’s base that reads, so he’s forced to read his “doctrine” into Trump’s behavior over the last four years. And since that behavior doesn’t in any way display that “doctrine,” Kirk spends most of his book lying through his teeth.
None of this is aimed at codifying things that Trump has done during his presidency (at its heart, that codifying only requires four words: “Barack Obama is black”). Rather, it’s aimed past Trump, at future claimants to Trumpism’s autocratic kleptocracy. “When you’re nominated,” The MAGA Doctrine’s author is really saying in these pages, “here is the ideological cover you’ll want, in book form. And if I myself am nominated, well …”
—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.