by Stu Cvrk
Same playbook, same coalition.
In 2009, a grassroots revolt against bailouts, bureaucratic overreach, and a bipartisan Washington consensus was met—within a few short years—by a coordinated squeeze from four directions at once. The squeezers included the Democrat Party and Obama White House, their legacy media sycophants, the Republican establishment, and the trade associations and consultants who depend on both parties maintaining the status quo.
The Tea Party didn’t die of old age. It was out-funded, out-litigated, and out-narrated by a coalition that had far more to lose from its success than from its failure.
Fifteen years later, a strikingly similar coalition—Democrat officials and strategists, most of the legacy media, a bloc of Senate and House Republicans still oriented toward the pre-2016 political order, and a subset of online right-wing commentators who’ve concluded the project is either failing or captured—is running a comparable playbook against the America First/MAGA/MAHA coalition.
The methods have modernized, with X threads and Substack in place of cable news panels, court injunctions in place of some IRS forms, but the underlying logic is the same. Both movements threatened the machinery—earmarks, revolving-door contracts, regulatory capture, “electability” consulting feeds, and agribusiness and pharmaceutical lobbying arrangements—that both parties’ permanent power structure and their allied industries are built on.
The analysis below compares the two campaigns tactic by tactic.
THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT: FUND THE “ELECTABLE” OPPONENT, STARVE THE INSURGENT
Then: After Tea Party victories in 2010 rattled the party establishment ahead of the 2012 Senate elections, particularly through candidates Christine O’Donnell and Sharon Angle, GOP strategist Karl Rove launched the Conservative Victory Project in 2013 explicitly to steer money away from grassroots-backed nominees toward establishment-vetted ones—a move so contentious it triggered what The Washington Post called an “internal GOP clash.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce followed in 2014, publicly pledging tens of millions to back “pro-business” candidates against Tea Party challengers in primaries, largely over the Chamber’s disputes with fiscal hawks on trade, the Export-Import Bank, and the federal budget.
Now: Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and allies, including Mitch McConnell (R-KY), John Cornyn (R-TX), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA), have been characterized in conservative press as slow-walking Trump priorities—from ICE/Border Patrol funding in the reconciliation package to President Trump’s Ken Paxton endorsement over incumbent Cornyn in the Texas Senate primary—while Cassidy broke with the administration to back a War Powers resolution limiting the president’s authority on Iran.
Establishment-aligned money is again flowing to “electability”-branded candidates in contested 2026 primaries even where the MAGA base has coalesced around someone else, echoing the Rove/U.S. Chamber model down to the justification.
THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY AND COURTS: SLOW-WALK IT, LITIGATE IT, OR QUIETLY GUT IT
Then: Starting in 2010, IRS staff in Cincinnati began systematically flagging nonprofit applications from groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” or “9/12” in their names for extended delays and invasive questionnaires. An internal email from exempt-organizations director Lois Lerner called the issue “very dangerous” as early as February 2011. IRS leadership denied any targeting to Congress for two years before Lerner publicly apologized in May 2013.
Nonprofit paperwork, not indictments, was the weapon used, and it worked by attrition, tying up volunteer-run groups in compliance costs and uncertainty through an entire election cycle.
Now: MAHA’s food and pesticide agenda has run into a parallel headwind of court rulings and internal reversal rather than an IRS-style paper trail. A leaked second MAHA Commission report dropped the pesticide restrictions and ultraprocessed-food limits the first report had flagged after the White House reportedly assured agriculture lobbyists those lines wouldn’t be crossed, which prompted even sympathetic voices like Fox’s Laura Ingraham (“Behold the power of Big Ag and Chemical Companies”) and commentator Jeffrey Tucker to accuse administration officials of being “in the pay of Big Food [and] Pharma.”
The mechanism differs—industry capture from inside rather than IRS obstruction from outside—but the effect is the same. A popular policy gets slow-walked into irrelevance by the political machinery it threatened.
THE MEDIA: MOCK IT, THEN PAINT IT AS EXTREME
Then: When Rick Santelli’s February 2009 CNBC rant sparked the first Tea Party protests, media outlets including MSNBC, Talking Points Memo, and The Huffington Post treated it—per the Columbia Journalism Review’s own retrospective—with derision (using the “tea-bagger” epithet and mocking cable-panel humor) before pivoting to a second-phase narrative casting the movement as covertly funded and extremist. CJR’s own conclusion was this: “neither strategy—derision or conspiracy theory—worked,” largely because the mockery read as condescension to the people attending the rallies.
Now: The derision-to-extremism arc has compressed into just the second half. Coverage of MAGA over the past two years has centered on the “threat to democracy” framing that Joe Biden made explicit in public statements calling MAGA Republicans an “extremist threat.” This framing is being amplified by the legacy media into 2026 midterm coverage, arguing that MAGA messaging itself constitutes disinformation.
Where the Tea Party got laughed at first and demonized second, the campaign against MAGA—already a well-known quantity to the legacy media from Trump’s first term and 2024 campaign—mostly skipped straight to the demonization framing.
DEMOCRAT OFFICIALS: NATIONALIZE IT AS AN EXTREMIST THREAT, NOT A POLICY DISAGREEMENT
Then: The Obama White House and DNC treated the Tea Party less as a policy movement to rebut than a fringe to be delegitimized, dismissing it publicly, while privately, the IRS scrutiny described above proceeded on a parallel track.
Now: The rhetoric has escalated from dismissal to explicit “threat to democracy” language, deployed by Biden as president and carried into current DNC-aligned midterm messaging. Democrat campaign committee chairman Sean Patrick Mahoney has said Republicans and Democrats are “in agreement” that the MAGA agenda is “extreme.”
The strategic logic is the same as 2010-2014: reframe a policy and personnel fight over spending, immigration enforcement, and federal agency power as a question of legitimacy, which forecloses the need to engage the underlying grievances at all.
RIGHT-WING GATEKEEPERS AND DISILLUSIONED INSIDERS: THE COALITION EATS ITSELF
Then: Establishment conservative media was more muted in publicly savaging the Tea Party than the left-wing legacy media were, though figures aligned with the establishment Rove wing provided air cover for the “unelectable” narrative used to justify the Conservative Victory Project.
But the more corrosive insider threat was financial rather than editorial. Insider-led national groups and super PACs that claimed to represent the Tea Party—such as FreedomWorks, Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots, and various related fundraising vehicles—rapidly professionalized and commercialized the originally grassroots fiscal-conservative uprising by relentlessly soliciting small-dollar donations from ordinary supporters through emotional direct-mail and email appeals that promised to back “true” candidates and causes.
In practice, the vast majority of the tens of millions raised went to overhead, high consultant and vendor fees, lucrative salaries, media promotion deals, and further prospecting rather than to actual candidates, local organizing, or policy advocacy. A Politico analysis of 33 such PACs found that they raised $43 million from small donors but spent only $3 million on ads and candidate support against $39.5 million in operating expenses.
This diverted resources from authentic Tea Party chapters, eroded donor trust and grassroots energy, and ultimately fragmented and hollowed out the Tea Party into irrelevance. FreedomWorks, which raised over $23 million in the 2012 election cycle, had just $117,000 on hand by mid-2018, and Tea Party Express raised nothing at all in that cycle.
Now: This is where the current campaign has a genuinely new front the Tea Party era lacked at scale: a cohort of formerly pro-Trump online figures—Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, and Nick Fuentes among them—publicly breaking over Iran policy, the handling of the Epstein files, and unmet campaign promises, with Fuentes going so far as to declare “MAGA is dead” in November 2025 and Owens calling for invoking the 25th Amendment in April 2026.
Whatever their individual motives, the practical effect mirrors what the establishment Republican achieved through funding in 2013–14. It fractures the coalition’s public face and hands the “even conservatives agree” line to hostile media coverage without the Democrat or the GOP establishment having to lift a finger.
INDUSTRY AND K STREET: DEFEND THE ARRANGEMENT, NOT THE PARTY
Then: The Chamber of Commerce’s 2014 primary spending wasn’t ideological; rather, it was a direct response to Tea Party fiscal hawks threatening the Export-Import Bank, trade deals, and appropriations riders the Chamber’s members relied on.
Now: MAHA’s threat to agribusiness, ultraprocessed food, and pharmaceutical revenue models that were facilitated outside public scrutiny by the federal bureaucracy produced the same reflex from the same class of institutional actors. The difference this time is that the influence campaign came from inside a friendly administration rather than through an outside super PAC, which arguably makes it harder for the America First/MAGA/MAHA base to see or resist.
WHY THE TWO CAMPAIGNS?
In short, to protect the automatic federal spending that was being threatened by both grassroots movements.
Both the Tea Party and America First/MAGA/MAHA movements arrived after Washington had spent fifty years building a spending machine specifically engineered to run on autopilot, insulated from any single election. Each posed a direct threat to a different load-bearing piece of it.
The Shift to Omnibus Spending Bills
The starting point is the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed to formalize congressional control over spending. The process it created has been broken almost from the start. Congress has passed every required appropriations bill on time in only four of the last nearly fifty years (FY1977, 1989, 1995, and 1997). In 13 of the last 15 fiscal years, lawmakers passed not a single spending bill by the 1 October statutory deadline. Since 1998, it has taken an average of 117 days into the fiscal year to get final spending law, and in 12 of the last 15 years every appropriations bill was folded into an after-deadline omnibus rather than debated individually.
A 2,000-page bill negotiated by a handful of leadership staff in the final 48 hours and passed on a take-it-or-leave-it vote is functionally immune to line-item scrutiny by rank-and-file members, let alone interested voters, which is exactly why “something for everyone” omnibus packages became the default vehicle rather than the emergency measure they were meant to be.
Enter Continuing Resolutions
Continuing resolutions do the same work from the other direction. They auto-renew last year’s numbers and remove any occasion to debate whether a given program should exist at all. Meanwhile, the debt ceiling has become a recurring, choreographed showdown in which a routine increase is treated as inevitable rather than as an actual check on borrowing (currently more than $40 trillion).
Add Political Bribery and Its Protection Racket
Layered on top of all that is the money that financed the political class who benefit from that process. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002—McCain-Feingold—banned unlimited “soft money” contributions directly to parties and, in doing so, pushed the same money into 501(c)(4) nonprofits and, after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010, into super PACs that don’t have to disclose their donors. These PACs are “dark money” by statutory design rather than by accident!
The FEC—split evenly 3–3 by party—was structurally built to deadlock rather than aggressively enforce campaign spending laws. And it does so routinely on the exact question of which non-PAC groups should have to disclose their donors, which the Brennan Center has called “Probably the single greatest proximate cause of the ongoing surge in dark money in federal elections.”
A commission engineered to tie is not an oversight failure; it is oversight that was never supposed to happen.
Integrate the Federal Bureaucracy into the Spending Machinery
That dark money machinery increasingly runs through the administrative state’s own grantmaking apparatuses, not just election campaigns. Congressional testimony gathered in 2025 identified more than 35,000 nonprofits that receive a majority of their funding from federal agencies, with State Department and USAID grant pipelines singled out for funding NGOs that critics say recycle money back into the same political and personnel networks that authorized it. Officials who approve grants later join the NGOs they funded at high salaries while NGO-linked donors fund the campaigns of the officials who appropriate the next round of funding.
A funding stream that never has to win a floor vote is largely shielded from appropriations riders and rewards insiders on both ends of the rigged process. This is exactly the kind of “automatic” spending that both the Tea Party and America First/MAGA/MAHA movements were built to interrupt, if not terminate outright.
This is what motivated the creation of DOGE. Unfortunately, the NGO and grant funding pipelines were vigorously defended by lawsuits and federal agency resistance such that DOGE essentially ran out of political gas after making headlines in exposing around $215 billion of the targeted cuts of $2 trillion. Fortunately, the President’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud carries on the mission of DOGE.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
None of the spending mechanisms described in the previous section are particularly exotic or secret. Each was built, amended, or left unreformed by both parties over five decades, and each converts a piece of the public’s money into something closer to a fixed cost that no single election can touch (which adds to the public’s frustrations by design).
That is the throughline: the Tea Party took aim at the omnibus/CR machine and the agency (the IRS) enforcing compliance from the grassroots up. America First/MAGA/MAHA has taken aim at the NGO/grant pipeline and the federal agencies like the State Department, USAID, and the EPA that are funding compliance from the top down.
Both movements threatened to gum up the works and convert “automatic” spending back into spending someone has to justify through regular order and fiscal debate in Congress—which is exactly why the same institutional coalition assembled to stop both. Both movements represent existential threats to the interests feeding freely at the trough that is continuously being filled by U.S. taxpayers.
The ongoing campaign to stop the America First/MAGA/MAHA coalition can only be thwarted by U.S. taxpayers’ attention to this matter.
Stu Cvrk
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/28/repeating-the-tea-party-takedown-process-on-the-america-first-coalition/
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