“The MAGA Diaries” Goes Inside Trump’s Movement

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, we turn now to American politics, where our next guest was drawn to the conservative movement as a college student, that after internships and jobs that centered around right-wing talking points, she left that world behind. Tina Nguyen is a journalist at Puck and details her political journey in her new book, “The MAGA Diaries.” She speaks to Hari Sreenivasan about it.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Tina Nguyen, thanks so much for joining us. Your book is called “The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-wing and How I Got Out.” First, how do you become a MAGA person? Because as most of us are prone to stereotypes, they’re going to say, this doesn’t look like your traditional hardcore Trump conservative.

TINA NGUYEN, AUTHOR, “THE MAGA DIARIES”: Oh, absolutely not. Just look at me. I’m a woman of color with refugee parents who grew up in Boston. Like, it makes — it should make no sense. But for me, my journey into conservative world, as it were, came from two factors, which was, one, my parents may have been intelligent. And they may have somehow got me to a private school and a scholarship, but they did not know how American society works, and they did not know how to get jobs. They did not know how to build connections. It was just a totally foreign system for them. And then, the second factor was that I was a big geek about the founding fathers. Like, you grow up in Boston, you’re surrounded by the Revolutionary War at every corner. You’re just like imbued with the ideals of the American founding. And the moment I come across this school that is, one, very career-oriented and two, literally have these research institutions that are studying the founding fathers and individual freedom and the ideas of liberty, you’re just kind of like, oh, OK. Yes, let’s do this. And then there is a community that you go into. And that was my entrance into the broader conservative movement, which is just this vast, I guess, loosely connected network of interest groups, activist groups, politicians who all are part of this cultural — not like cultural conservatism, but a culture of being conservative for a living. The goal is to get conservatives into all aspects of American civic life. The law, the elected system, activists on the ground, maybe people in the administration lobbyists, what have you, and see these ideas into legislation, into culture, and then watch them pay off maybe decades down the road.

SREENIVASAN: Now, it does read a bit like a diary. I mean, you really kind of start out about how you, kind of, went to the college that you went to, sort of, chasing a boy that was a conservative. And how did, kind of, what you experienced in college translate into the first few jobs you got writing for the publications that you were writing, covering the conservative movement?

NGUYEN: I wanted to be a journalist pretty badly. And I was looking for internships in the summer of 2009 right at the height of the recession, and this opportunity pops up in our conservative jobs e-mail list called — at the Institute of Humane Studies where they’re looking for students who want a paid internship in journalism as long as they’re liberty minded, which was the exact phrase they used. And I applied for it. I got it. And they’re like, cool. Here’s your money. But you also have to come to these seminars where we’ll — you get to hang out with all of these other students who are interested in the same things that you are. And we’re going to talk about, you know, maybe the Affordable Care Act is like anti-free market. I don’t know why the media is not talking about that. When September rolls around, I get invited to the official mentorship program. The guy who runs that program, says, I am going to be your mentor. I am going to get you jobs and help you write your resume and connect you with people. And as I left college, though, I started noticing that this mentor was connecting me with groups that were increasingly less focused on journalism and more focused on putting out news that had a really intense partisan tilt to the point where they just like decontextualized what it was they wanted me to write for the sake of making a political point.

SREENIVASAN: So, you know, this could have been a book about someone that was young, getting into the Republican Party and finding her conservative roots. But what is the difference between, I guess, the Republican Party of 25 years ago and some of the people that you talked to and interact with in the book were from that era, and the MAGA movement specifically?

NGUYEN: The conservative movement did not have an immune system against populism, I think. They had this large infrastructure that had spawned from the movement, but I — but they were pretty firmly of the belief that they — believe that, like, they supported free markets. religious rights, anti- abortion, but that the Republican voter base wanted the same as well. And then the moment that Donald Trump comes in and the base is like, actually, we would like populism very much. The movement was like, all right, do we stick to our guns and try to promote a belief that is increasingly unpopular, or do we pivot to meet these voters where they are? We pivot Trump to where he — to Trump where he is because now, he’s the leader of our party in the free world, in order to maintain not just our power or our money cynically, but like the reason that we’ve done what we’ve done for 25 to 30 years. One of the things I keep noticing in the book over and over again was that people who left in response to Trumpism were immediately just out. They — like, their friends disavowed them. They’re calling — their institutions fired them. They no longer had jobs. And I was looking at the progressive movement for a while and it’s like this doesn’t really happen over here. That’s so weird.

SREENIVASAN: So, what is it about, sort of, Trump’s force, singularly, that was able to galvanize not just disaffected voters in the Rust Belt but young conservatives as well? I mean, you talk about the places that were looking for a leader like him.

NGUYEN: College conservatism is always predicated on the belief that there is liberal institutions on campus, liberal academia, trying to push a certain view of the world down your throat, and you need to resist against that indoctrination. And that’s only increased in subsequent years, especially due to the rise in online media, being able to, like, out you if you kind of step outside the line of what is considered acceptable on college campuses. And so, even though there are all these loud protests on college campuses about like Israel versus Gaza, the really deep tension that college students face is if I say something out loud, will I be canceled and ostracized and will people literally throw eggs at my face whenever they see me? And just because you’re not expressing your pro-Trump fuse and wandering around with a MAGA hat, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not going to go inside the voting booth and pull the lever for Trump.

SREENIVASAN: Right now, in almost every kind of political conversation or debate, what — you noticed very quickly is that the right is much better than the left when it comes to messaging, marching orders, singing from the same hymnal, call it whatever you like. And I wonder, can you diagram how that works?

NGUYEN: It’s purely reactionary. Conservatism as just a general American philosophy and idea. One of the texts that they always draw from is Edmund Burke, a philosopher from the late 1800s. And his entire — and most of his writing focused on the concept that society if it moves forward too quickly, it will lead to ruin. But fast forward to now, the idea that they have marching orders from one person, I think, is false. I think what it — what happens is that there’s a deep state of fear of what change looks like, and it’s automatically very easy, if not instinctual, to be like, no, we don’t like that. No, this bad. No, we will do whatever it takes to stop that. That’s not hard to coordinate. That’s incredibly easy to just get on the same page.

SREENIVASAN: How does the conservative movement or the MAGA movement in America find themselves, in any way, victims when you look at the tremendous amount of power that exists, for example, in the Supreme Court or lots of other avenues of society where it’s at best 50-50?

NGUYEN: Look, just because they have formal power doesn’t necessarily mean that they have absolute power. The Supreme Court, even though they have control over the Supreme Court, doesn’t necessarily mean they know exactly how these justices are going to be voting. A bunch of the right-wing judges are not necessarily conservative or MAGA justices. Clarence Thomas, I think, is sort of his own weird little thing. Roberts, is kind of independent from all of that. The — and then of course there is the existence of the liberal judges. So, they have seats. They don’t necessarily have control. One of the things I’ve written about recently at “Puck” is the idea that the Trump administration is being built and like waiting so they can specifically go in on day one and knock out everyone who had opposed the Trump agenda during the first administration. Purging, “The deep state that had worked to either stop what they were trying to do or roll it back or whatever stood in the way.”

SREENIVASAN: But when did you feel like you were perhaps out of step with the movement or when did you find your beliefs changing?

NGUYEN: The covenant that they broke with me was that they said I could be a journalist, and then when I tried to be a journalist, they were like, no, you can’t do that because we need to attack the Democrats. And that was just such a violation for me, personally. I still really like the founding fathers. I still believe in the American ideal. I worry that we’ll never be able to achieve it because we’re humans. But the idea that this institution was asking me to deliberately, like, decontextualize the truth or take an angle or, like, in some cases, outright lie under the guise of being a journalist was just like I can’t do this. I just cannot. There was one point in December 2011, and I write about this, that — I’m on my second job interview and there’s this group called the Franklin Institute that’s looking for a stringer in Madison, Wisconsin. And I’m like, OK, that’s cool. I’d love to report out of Wisconsin. And then they started asking me to specifically muckrake on teachers’ unions. And this around the time that Scott Walker and the teachers’ unions are having this massive battle. And I’m like, wait. Wait a second. I — no. No. This is bad. I can’t do this.

SREENIVASAN: You know, the irony is, is that these are some of the very critiques that conservatives hurl against what they perceive as liberal media bias, that reporters automatically have an ax to grind that they’re out to muckrake or the decontextualize the truth.

NGUYEN: I think there’s a difference, and this just from my point of view, between like growing up with a specific view of the world, going through specific journalistic institutions in order to get credentialed and slip through the door and then become a “New York Times” reporter, for instance. Then there is being part of a formal well-funded movement that is meant to specifically insert conservative ideas into the media. In this — in my case, under the guise of being a journalist, like, I think there’s a difference between being conservative media reporters, a whole separate issue in and of itself, but then also being asked to twist the truth while pretending to be a journalist.

SREENIVASAN: You were writing at “Politico”, and a few days before January 6th, I want to read the headline for your piece, and it said, MAGA leaders call for the troops to keep Trump in office. A growing call to invoke the Insurrection Act shows how hard edged MAGA ideology has become in the wake of Trump’s election loss. What were your editors thinking after January 6th?

NGUYEN: January 6th was just a hard thing for people to wrap their heads around, but I had been pitching so often these stories of like, here are these MAGA people coming into Washington. They are willing to use violence. They have violent ideology in their back pocket. And they truly believe that if the government is being taken over, they have the right as sovereign citizens to take up arms. And I think over time, there’s this really weird tension between them being like, OK, you were right, but then also editors having this inability to recognize, wait. No, what you’re reporting on is still true. It’s still so far outside of what we believe to be true that we just can’t accept it. That piece I wrote was, sort of, the precursor to the piece I pitched for January 6th, which was I want to report on people who have gone to the Capitol to try to harass lawmakers as they enter the building. And when I got there, this wasn’t so much a crowd that really was, like, whipped up into a frenzy so much as it was a crowd that did truly believe that the Capitol belongs to them and that they should be let through the barriers in order to tell the lawmakers to their face what to do. A little bit nerve wracking, a little bit scary, but I was like, all right, this makes sense. And then I met a Proud Boy for the first time. And he just kind of started hinting at like, oh, we’ve got a plan for today. We’ve got this totally cool plan. We’re going to see how the day, like, wraps up.

SREENIVASAN: Do you see any blind spots heading into 2024 similar to those blind spots that you discussed in the book about maybe how the press didn’t understand what was happening with the Trump movement the first time around? Are there things that we’re still not getting?

NGUYEN: I think it seems to be hard for people to wrap their heads around the idea that minorities could be pro-Trump. Like, Vietnamese-Americans are extremely pro-Trump. I think they — like, a majority of them do vote for Trump. But the growth in Hispanic voters going for Trump, Asian-Americans, possibly more black voters this time around to a surprising degree. And it does come from a place where they just cannot simply accept that racism does not necessarily mean, oh, I’m looking at the color of your skin and your background. You don’t belong here. Whatever. It is the idea that someone’s putting their scale on the thumb of who gets power, who gets jobs, who gets access, and tilting it towards underserved — undeserving minorities. But if you were to go to a working class, like middle class, maybe not — kind of, maybe, upper middle-class household of a non-white American, they would be like, socialism really scary. A lot of us escaped socialist countries and our entire livelihoods and lives were destroyed in the name of socialism. People are coming from across the border. We went around this the proper way, how dear Biden let them in now and they’re bringing in crime and we had to jump through hoops in order to prove that we were good American citizens and they love being in America. And the idea that like someone could take away that stability for them is like deeply traumatizing.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “The MAGA Diaries, My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-wing and How I Got Out.” Author Tina Nguyen, thanks so much for joining us.

NGUYEN: Thanks for having me.