When Donald Trump reenters the White House next month, he’ll be flanked by an army of outside enforcers prepared to squeeze any Republican who resists his agenda. It’s a political weapon the president-elect did not possess during his first term as president.
That work is already underway, with Trump-affiliated groups and activists pressuring wary Senate Republicans to confirm the former and future president’s executive branch nominees—some controversial and others not conservative. Exhibit A is Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, with a pressure campaign on social media, streaming video podcasts, and talk radio. Once Trump is inaugurated, this MAGA-aligned network will shift to strong-arming obstinate House and Senate Republicans to support the president-elect’s agenda, be it executive orders or legislative proposals.
Critically, MAGA insiders tell The Dispatch, they won’t be sitting around waiting for direction from Trump to join a particular fight. Much of their activism will be organic, although they will take cues from the president, plus Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, and top MAGA influencers like Donald Trump Jr., and Charlie Kirk, who runs the populist group Turning Point USA and hosts a talk show on the Salem Radio Network.
“The ecosystem on the Right is going to be a force multiplier,” Steve Bannon told The Dispatch on Monday during a telephone interview. Bannon—whose War Room podcast airs for several hours daily—is yet another major MAGA player trying to keep congressional Republicans in line behind Trump. For the next few weeks that will take the form of Senate confirmations, but it will shift to passing legislation once the president-elect’s Cabinet is installed.
“What I think you’re seeing now is the institutionalization of what had been a self-organizing effort,” added Bannon, who was early to support Trump in 2016, served on the president-elect’s first White House campaign that year, and advised him in the West Wing for a time.
What Bannon is describing amounts to the rise of a new Republican establishment, complete with well-funded activist groups and influential media figures.
And, just like the faded GOP establishment of the pre-Trump era that grassroots conservatives and independent-minded lawmakers chafed under, this institutional support for the incoming 47th president enforces loyalty to party leadership and support for that leadership’s legislative agenda. In addition to Vance, Bannon, Kirk and Turning Point USA, and Trump Jr. (who hosts the Triggered With Don Jr. podcast), big names in the party’s new establishment include the Heritage Foundation and its sister organization, Heritage Action for America and the Article III Project, helmed by attorney Mike Davis.
“His outside supporters, especially at the Article III Project, are going to be with [Trump] every step of the way—on every nomination and legal issue, and his legislative priorities,” said Davis, whose group specializes in supporting the president-elect in issues involving the courts.
But a key feature of the activism on Trump’s behalf, say Republican operatives inside and outside the new establishment, is that it will operate bottom-up too. Participants will jump into the fray on various issues immediately after Trump takes office on issues ranging from the scope of his promised “mass deportations” of illegal immigrants to the shape of the “budget reconciliation” bills expected to include the meat of Trump’s legislative agenda.
The broader MAGA movement will take some cues for getting involved in legislative debates (and fights) from Trump, of course, as well as prominent figures and organizations who support his agenda.
“It puts Republican leaders in a difficult position. Since we aren’t activated, we can’t be told to shut down,” said Kurt Schlichter, an attorney in Los Angeles who guest hosts for Salem Radio’s Hugh Hewitt. Schlichter emphasized that for all of the online activism behind Trump in the first term, it simply wasn’t as developed or cohesive as it is shaping up to be this time around.
“You had, essentially, citizen journalists—it was all new then. But now we’re experienced and we have expectations,” explained Schlichter, who has roughly 542,000 followers on X, the social media platform owned by Trump acolyte Elon Musk and preferred by the president-elect’s supporters.
Incidentally, Musk—who spent $250 million of his personal fortune to help Trump defeat Vice President Kamala Harris and is leading Trump’s effort to streamline the federal government—is prepared to keep the money spigot open to bolster the incoming administration by supporting Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections. (If the GOP maintains control of Congress in those contests, Trump would gain two more years of nearly unfettered power.) Attracting donations from wealthy GOP donors and grassroots Trump supporters, who contribute in small amounts, is yet another reason groups aligned with the president-elect are expected to be active on his behalf—unprompted—over the next four years.
“It helps show Trump who his friends are,” said a veteran Republican operative without MAGA roots, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the president-elect’s supporters. “It helps show him and donors: ‘We will spend your money on causes that matter.’”
Pushing for the Senate confirmation of Trump’s provocative Cabinet picks presented the refashioned Republican establishment with its first opportunity, post-election, to beta test strategy and gauge its influence on Capitol Hill. Attempts to browbeat skeptical Senate Republicans into supporting the confirmation of, for instance, Kash Patel for FBI director, Tulsi Gabbard for national intelligence director, and Hegseth has provided a glimpse of what efforts to pressure congressional Republicans to back Trump’s legislative agenda might look like.
As has been the case with the bid to win confirmation support for Hegseth, the strategy has been partially coordinated from the top down and partially organic. As reported in detail by the New York Times: “The campaign to revive Mr. Hegseth’s nomination was led internally by Mr. Vance and orchestrated externally by a small group of Mr. Trump’s most aggressive allies.”
Similar campaigns are already continuing.
“Senator Bill Cassidy has drawn a formal primary challenger. Remember he voted to CONVICT Trump during his second impeachment trial,” Kirk posted on X last week, warning the Louisiana Republican who is often critical of Trump not to step out of line. “Former Rep. John Fleming is challenging Senator Cassidy. This is just the first of many to come. … We are watching closely to see if Trump gets his cabinet!”
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