I think it's impossible to understand the relationships here without really grokking that the MAGA set is both incompetent and incoherent. The movement is properly seen as an angry tantrum - a reaction to the state of the world, not a coherent ideology and plan for improving it. The coherent ideology and plan for improving it involves actually investing in domestic manufacturing, a strong push for labor rights and unions to make sure people are getting paid, a commitment to antitrust action, and, yes, protectionism of domestic industry (as a fun bonus, compare that to Biden's economic policies), but that's not what we've got here - we've got rage and anger and personal vendettas and wishful thinking as policy.
This is what I mean when I say the oligarchs have the tiger by the tail - from the time of the Moral Majority through the evangelicals of Bush's era through the Tea Party through MAGA, the business wing of the republican party has been cultivating the populist wing as an electoral strategy. They've managed to muddy the water with enough "government bad, immigrant criminals, trans athletes" rhetoric that what you've got now is a party and a movement that can _feel_ that there's something wrong - stagnant wages, inaccessible health care, deaths of despair, and Jeff Bezos - but the right wing message machine still has enough of a hand on the wheel that they can't actually get their way to things like labor rights and social security and all the other stuff we came up with last time this kind of thing happened.
Then you get Donald Trump, who well and truly does not give a shit about anything at all, and so he's absolutely fine to grab the wheel here and yank it hard into populism land, and now the oligarchs have a problem, because they've got a mafia boss at the head of an angry mob, and no part of that has any coherent ideology except Trump's crystal clear vision of people paying him a lot of money and treating him like a king, and now you've got tantrum as policy and no actual adults left in the room.
So, yes, America First and the MAGA movement are, depending on the day and time, anti-oligarch, but they're anti-oligarch like a dog is anti-car - there's not really a _plan_ there, just a lot of noise and motion and probably some teeth marks, but I don't really think it's gonna work out great for the dog either.
This is what I mean when I say the oligarchs have the tiger by the tail - from the time of the Moral Majority through the evangelicals of Bush's era through the Tea Party through MAGA, the business wing of the republican party has been cultivating the populist wing as an electoral strategy. They've managed to muddy the water with enough "government bad, immigrant criminals, trans athletes" rhetoric that what you've got now is a party and a movement that can _feel_ that there's something wrong - stagnant wages, inaccessible health care, deaths of despair, and Jeff Bezos - but the right wing message machine still has enough of a hand on the wheel that they can't actually get their way to things like labor rights and social security and all the other stuff we came up with last time this kind of thing happened.
Then you get Donald Trump, who well and truly does not give a shit about anything at all, and so he's absolutely fine to grab the wheel here and yank it hard into populism land, and now the oligarchs have a problem, because they've got a mafia boss at the head of an angry mob, and no part of that has any coherent ideology except Trump's crystal clear vision of people paying him a lot of money and treating him like a king, and now you've got tantrum as policy and no actual adults left in the room.
So, yes, America First and the MAGA movement are, depending on the day and time, anti-oligarch, but they're anti-oligarch like a dog is anti-car - there's not really a _plan_ there, just a lot of noise and motion and probably some teeth marks, but I don't really think it's gonna work out great for the dog either.