In the beginning of his inaugural cope with on Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump declared, “The golden age of America begins right now!”
A month later, Trump’s supporters amassed at the yearly Conservative Political Motion Convention, or CPAC, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, from Feb. 19-22 to have a good time the appearance of this golden age.
Gold glitter jackets, emblazoned with words like “Trump the Golden Era,” are on the market within the CPAC exhibition corridor. There, attendees decked out in different MAGA-themed clothes and niknaks community and mingle. They talk over with cubicles with politically charged indicators that say “Defund Planned Parenthood” and accumulate brochures on subjects like “The Gender Industrial Complex.”
Any other sales space with a yellow and black striped backdrop akin to a jail mobile’s bars used to be known as a “Deportation Center.” Attendees photographed themselves at this sales space, posing beside full-size cutouts of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan.
Former Jan. 6 prisoners, together with Proud Boys’ former chief Enrique Tarrio, have additionally been a visual – and arguable – presence at CPAC.
The convention’s complaints kicked off on Feb. 20 with an Arizona pastor, Joshua Navarrete, announcing, to loud applause, “We are living in the greatest time of our era – the golden age!”
Many next audio system repeated this word, celebrating the rustic’s “golden age.”
For lots of outdoor observers, claims of a golden age would possibly appear unusual.
Simply months in the past throughout the 2024 presidential marketing campaign, Trump stated that an American apocalypse used to be underway, pushed through a U.S. economic system in shambles and main towns overrun through an “invasion” of “illegal alien” “terrorists,” “rapists” and “murderers.”
Now, Trump’s critics argue, the U.S. is led through a convicted felon who’s enforcing insurance policies which might be reckless, silly and destructive.
Additional, those critics contend, Trump’s unlawful energy grabs are resulting in a constitutional disaster that would reason democracy to disintegrate within the U.S.
How, they marvel, may any person imagine the rustic is in a golden age?
As an anthropologist of U.S. political tradition, I’ve been finding out the Make The united states Nice Once more, or MAGA, motion for years. I wrote a similar 2021 e-book, “It Can Happen Here.” And I proceed to do MAGA analysis at puts like this yr’s CPAC, the place the temper has been giddy.
Listed below are 3 explanation why the MAGA trustworthy imagine a golden age has begun. The checklist starts, and ends, with Trump.
Elon Musk holds a portray of himself throughout CPAC in Oxon Hill, Md., on Feb. 20, 2025.
Saul Loeb/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
1. The warrior hero
Trump supporters contend that when the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assaults, which they believe a “peaceful protest,” Trump changed into a political pariah and sufferer.
Like many a mythic hero, Trump’s reaction used to be “never surrender.” In 2023, he again and again advised his MAGA trustworthy, “I am your warrior, I am your justice.”
Trump’s heroism, his supporters imagine, used to be illustrated after a bullet grazed his ear throughout an assassination strive in Pennsylvania in July 2024. Trump briefly rose to his toes, pumped his fist within the air and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight.”
The word changed into a MAGA rally cry and, in February 2025, it’s been stamped on CPAC attendees’ shirts and jackets.
After Trump’s 2024 election victory, many Trump supporters dubbed it
“the greatest comeback in political history.” MAGA populist Steven Bannon invoked this word at a pre-CPAC tournament on Feb. 19.
When Bannon spoke at the CPAC primary level on Feb. 20, he led the group in a raucous “fight, fight, fight” chant. He when put next Trump with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and known as for him to run once more for president in 2028.
That is even supposing Trump working for a 3rd time period would violate the Charter.
2. A wrecking ball
The MAGA trustworthy imagine that Trump is sort of a human “wrecking ball,” as evangelical chief Lance Wallnau stated in 2015. This metaphor speaks to how Trump supporters imagine the president is tearing down an entrenched, corrupt gadget.
The day Trump took place of business, MAGA stalwarts underscore, he started to “drain the swamp” with a slew of government orders.
One established the Division of Govt Potency, or DOGE, which is dedicated to getting rid of govt waste. DOGE, led through billionaire Elon Musk, has dismantled USAID and fired 1000’s of presidency staff whom MAGA perspectives as a part of an anti-Trump “deep state.”
Musk stole the display at CPAC on Feb. 20. Chatting with a cheering crowd, Musk held up a big purple chain noticed and yelled, “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy.”
Speaker after speaker at this yr’s CPAC have celebrated this and different wrecking-ball achievements on panels with titles like “Red Tape Reckoning,” “Crushing Woke Board Rooms” and “The Takedown of Left Tech.”
3. The Midas contact
A golden age calls for a builder. Who higher, the MAGA trustworthy imagine, than a billionaire businessman with a self-proclaimed “Midas touch.” This refers to King Midas, a determine in Greek mythology who turns the whole thing he touches into 24-karat gold.
“Trump Will Fix It” indicators crammed his 2024 marketing campaign rallies. And MAGA supporters word that Trump started solving the rustic on Day 1 through “flooding the zone” with government orders geared toward enforcing his four-pronged “America First” promise. Along with draining the swamp, this plan pledges to “make America safe again,” “make America affordable and energy dominant again” and “bring back American values.”
Those subject matters run in the course of the remarks of virtually each and every CPAC speaker, who be offering nonstop reward about how Trump is securing the rustic’s borders, expanding power independence, repatriating who they name unlawful extraterrestrial beings, restoring unfastened speech and decreasing govt legislation and waste.
CPAC audio system stated that Trump has already racked up a slew of successes only a month into his presidency.
This comprises Trump the use of the specter of price lists to carry different nations to the negotiating desk.
In the meantime, Trump supporters are happy that he has been operating to chop offers to finish the battle in Gaza and the struggle between Russia and Ukraine, whilst reorienting U.S. international coverage to concentrate on China.
Area Speaker Mike Johnson expressed the existing MAGA sentiment when he said at CPAC that Trump “wrote the art of the deal. He knows what he’s doing.”
CPAC attendees put on Trump-themed clothes on the four-day political convention on Feb. 20, 2025.
Andrew Harnick/Getty Pictures
American exceptionalism restored
The golden-age party at CPAC focused on Trump and his venture to “make America great again.”
Speaker after speaker, together with international conservative leaders from around the globe, paid homage to Trump and this message.
All through her CPAC speech, Liz Truss, the previous high minister of the U.Ok., said, “This is truly the golden age of America.” Truss, who does no longer have a present political place, advised the CPAC target market that she sought after to duplicate the MAGA playbook with a view to “make Britain great again.”
The MAGA trustworthy imagine that Trump is restoring an technology of American exceptionalism during which the U.S. is an financial powerhouse, commonplace sense is the rule of thumb, and standard values focused on God, circle of relatives and freedom are celebrated.
And so they imagine in a long term the place the U.S. is, as Trump stated in his inaugural cope with, “the envy of every nation.”
