Michael Steele Just Tore Into Trump: Is the MAGA Movement Officially Fractured and Dissipated?

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele questioned Donald Trump's grip on the Republican Party after Trump-backed candidates suffered setbacks in Minnesota and South Carolina.

Appearing on MS NOW's On the Line on Wednesday, Steele said the results pointed to a MAGA base that had become 'fractured and dissipated,' while arguing that economic pressure and the continuing fallout over the Epstein files were weakening the President's political influence.

This was after Trump's endorsed candidate Mike Lindell lost the Republican primary for governor of Minnesota on Tuesday. In South Carolina, Senator Darline Graham Nordone, whom Trump had backed to complete her brother Lindsey Graham's term, failed to secure an outright victory and was forced into a runoff.

Trump has long presented himself as a Republican kingmaker. His endorsements have been used to reward allies, intimidate dissenters and signal to Republican voters which candidates deserve their support.

Michael Steele Just Tore Into Trump Over Endorsements

The two setbacks did not amount to a clean collapse of Trump's influence. His preferred candidate, Tom Tiffany, won the Republican nomination for governor in Wisconsin on the same day. That complication matters. A kingmaker whose candidates sometimes win and sometimes falter is not powerless, but the aura of certainty around his endorsement has taken a hit.

During the panel discussion, host Menendez said Trump appeared to blur the South Carolina setback by claiming he liked all the candidates. Menendez suggested that his response showed he knew the question of his kingmaker status was now 'in the ether.'

'It's very, very much in the ether,' Steele replied. 'The MAGA base has fractured and dissipated in a number of ways for a number of reasons.'

Steele identified two forces behind that fracture. The first was the economy, which he said was placing downward pressure on Trump supporters as well as Democrats. The second was the Epstein files, which he described as a major narrative within the MAGA movement.

In Steele's telling, Trump's focus on elections, voting and fresh political disputes helps fill the information space, creating noise while more difficult questions remain. It was a sharp assessment, shifting the story from a couple of disappointing primary nights to a broader test of whether loyalty to Trump still guarantees obedience at the ballot box.

Michael Steele Just Tore Into Trump's MAGA Argument

Steele also questioned how much personal attention Trump gives to candidates who carry his endorsement.

'But at the end of the day, you know, as he said, they're all trumpers, and he doesn't really care one way or the other who the nominee is,' Steele said.

He argued that primary contests were less important to Trump than projects he could control, citing 'an art' and 'a ballroom.'

Campaigns, by contrast, require him to deal with candidates, voters and the unpredictable business of politics. 'He has to actually deal with human beings. And he doesn't really like that so much,' Steele said. 'So the reality for him, for those candidates, is you're out there swimming on your own.'

The Wisconsin result brought a different criticism. Tiffany's victory, Steele said, would amount to 'the ultimate corruption' if voters placed a known election denier in the governor's office. He linked that warning to Georgia, where he said voters could react angrily if officials appeared to have accepted Trump's version of the 2020 election dispute.

'These things don't happen in a vacuum,' Steele said. 'You cannot discount the outrage from the citizenry and the voters out there when hearing that text or hearing those tapes, then realizing that their governor cheated, stole the votes from them.'

His wider argument was that the Republican Party had become invested in feeding Trump's chaos, rather than insulating candidates from it. That may sound familiar, but the primary results give the claim a more tangible political frame.

Lindell's defeat damaged the image of an endorsement that could overcome a crowded field. Graham Nordone's runoff showed that even a Trump-backed candidate with a powerful political connection was not guaranteed a first-round win.

Still, 'fractured and dissipated' is Steele's characterisation, not an official measurement of the MAGA movement. The Wisconsin victory offers a counterpoint, and the Minnesota and South Carolina results alone cannot establish that Trump's power is permanently collapsing.

What they do show is a Republican primary landscape in which candidates cannot simply assume that Trump's backing will do all the work for them. For now, some are swimming on their own.