Behind the 'hot dog' MAGA men afraid of their own 'radical' movement

With MAGA collapsing into a circular firing squad as its leaders seek to apportion blame for the failures and chaos wrought by President Donald Trump, Vox contributor Zack Beauchamp has a novel metaphor for their attempts to wriggle out of responsibility for their own movement’s actions: “It’s a real-life version of the famous sketch on Tim Robinson’s show I Think You Should Leave, where a hot-dog-shaped car crashes into a storefront and a man in a hot dog suit says, ‘We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.’”

The MAGA infighting, asserts Beauchamp, is being fueled by such “hot dog men,” and there is no shortage of examples.

“In 2017, US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) offered what remains one of the most insightful explanations of Donald Trump’s rise from any elected official,” writes Beauchamp. “Massie, a Tea Party libertarian in the Rand and Ron Paul mode, was wondering why so many of his supporters could back an un-libertarian candidate like Trump. His conclusion was grim. ‘They weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a b—- in the race,’ Massie said. ‘And Donald Trump won best in class.’”

Massie’s criticism of the president only grew since then, ultimately resulting in his electoral loss when Trump targeted him in a recent primary. But, writes Beauchamp, at no point did Massie reflect “on how his own actions caused the problem. Massie’s years of vocal support for Trump, and his boundary-pushing Tea Party politics, had helped turn the GOP into the political chaos agent he once bemoaned.”

This, says Beauchamp, makes Massie a poster child for MAGA’s “hot dog men,” and the examples are mounting.

“Joe Rogan, who regularly sells his audience on conspiratorial mistrust of official narratives, is now denouncing conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts on Trump. The pundit Ben Shapiro has gone to war against right-wing podcaster Candace Owens, who he now calls an antisemitic crank — while barely acknowledging that he himself played an instrumental role in Owens’s rise. You can even see this happening with Trump himself, who has spent his presidency battling rumors about an elite pedophile network run by Jeffrey Epstein that he helped stoke earlier, and which arose from a MAGA movement he trained to see conspiracy at every turn.”

Their growing ranks, asserts Beauchamp, suggest that the “right-wing political machine is spinning out of control in ways that even some of its most aggressive and radical voices recognize as dangerous. And as the right searches for new leadership before Trump himself fades into history, nobody on their side has shown any proven ability to contain or redirect its worst impulses. In the absence of post-Trump leaders both willing and able to address the real problems, the future of the right — and, thus, in some sense, America — is dangerously unclear.”

“There are, at present, a disproportionate number of hot dog men in the right’s top ranks,” Beauchamp concludes. “This is not a coincidence. It’s a reflection of the right hitting a moment where its continuing radicalization has begun to elude the control of even the people who thought they were steering the ship.”

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