What Happens When Trump Is Gone

There is a question that almost nobody is asking about MAGA, and it is the only one that matters in the long run. Not whether Trump will lose power. But what happens to the millions of people who made him part of who they are when he is no longer there to hold it all together. This is not a new question. It has been answered before. Twice. **The Pattern** In July 1943, Benito Mussolini was removed from power after twenty-one years of fascist rule in Italy. Within hours, the portraits came down. The party badges disappeared. Millions of Italians who had supported the regime, worn the black shirts, and repeated the slogan “Mussolini is always right” suddenly became something else. Overnight, everyone was a partisan. Everyone had always been against Mussolini. Everyone had secretly resisted. Historian Paul Corner at the University of Siena called this the Mussolini myth: a collective rewriting of the past driven by the need to construct a comforting version of history rather than confronting what actually happened. Italy never went through anything resembling Germany’s denazification. A neo-fascist party was part of Italy’s first postwar government in 1946. And the popular myths about fascism persisted for decades. Mussolini made the trains run on time. He was a strong leader. He modernized the country. The fascist mentality survived long after the fascist government fell, because nobody was ever forced to confront what they had actually supported. Two years later, on May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered. Millions of Germans who had supported the regime, voted for it, cheered at the rallies, reported their neighbors, and benefited from the system were suddenly faced with the same psychological crisis. The historian Tony Judt wrote that Germans “spontaneously denazified themselves” on that day. They simply stopped being Nazis, without any internal reckoning. And when the Allies forced them to confront what had happened, the universal response was the same three words: we didn’t know. The Allies tried denazification. They forced thousands of German civilians to tour the concentration camps in their own neighborhoods. They banned former Nazis from positions of power. They imprisoned 250,000 people. They distributed questionnaires called Fragebogen that required every adult to account for their relationship to the regime. And within a few years, it was largely abandoned. By 1951, only 25% of Germans believed denazification had been necessary. In Bavaria, 85% of teachers who had been removed from their posts for Nazi affiliations were back at work. The first chancellor of the new West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, opened his first address to parliament by saying the government was determined, where acceptable, to “put the past behind us.” These are not ancient history. These are the two closest parallels to what is happening in America right now. And the psychological research tells us exactly why the same patterns are about to repeat. **Why Losing Trump Feels Like Losing Yourself** William Swann’s identity fusion research at the University of Texas at Austin explains the first stage. When the boundary between personal identity and group identity dissolves, losing the group does not just change your political affiliation. It threatens your understanding of who you are. In a 2025 paper published in PS: Political Science and Politics, Swann and Philip Moniz studied identity fusion specifically in Trump supporters. Using a three-wave panel study spanning from before the 2020 election through 2024, they found that the more fused a supporter was with Trump, the more deeply they internalized his misinformation as their own personal truth. They did not simply agree with Trump’s claims. They absorbed them into their own sense of reality. In April 2026, Time Magazine profiled a retired police officer who had voted for Trump every time he ran. His son and daughter-in-law cut him off entirely. He lost access to his only grandchild. And when Trump is gone, the grandchild does not come back. The political identity disappears. The personal damage stays. This is what happened in Germany. The regime ended on May 8, 1945. But the families that had been destroyed by denunciations, by neighbors informing on neighbors, by children reporting their own parents to the party, those families did not heal because the war was over. The identity collapsed. The wreckage remained. **Why They Will Deny It Before They Leave It** Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance research from the 1950s predicts what happens next. Before people abandon a belief they have invested in deeply, they find new explanations for why the belief is still valid. Trump didn’t fail. He was betrayed. The deep state won. Republicans stabbed him in the back. It has been over 560 days since Trump took office for the second time. Prices are higher. He started a war with Iran that he promised to prevent. His own DOJ closed the door on the Epstein files. And the response from his base is still the same: but Biden. Germany did exactly this. “We didn’t know” was the universal explanation for two decades of support for a regime that built concentration camps in plain sight. The questionnaires the Allies distributed became, according to Cambridge University historian Frederick Taylor, tools that Germans used to “write away culpability.” They did not confront what they had done. They rewrote their own story until the version they told themselves was bearable. Italy did the same thing, but without even the pretense of accountability. The “Good Italian” myth held that Italians were inherently decent people who had been victims of Mussolini, not participants in fascism. It was a national exercise in cognitive dissonance that lasted generations. The belief survived because nobody was ever forced to confront it. **Why the Movement Will Eat Itself** José Marques’ black sheep effect, documented at the University of Porto in 1988, explains the next stage. Groups under threat punish their own members more harshly than they punish outsiders. The traitor inside the group threatens the identity more than the enemy outside it. In August 2026, Marjorie Taylor Greene went on TikTok and said the era of MAGA success was over. She walked away from Trump over the Iran war and the Epstein files. Within hours, the same people who had worshipped her for years called her a traitor. This is the black sheep effect operating in real time. Trump currently answers one question that holds the entire movement together: who represents MAGA? When he is gone, every faction will fight for that answer, and every other faction will be labeled a traitor. Germany fractured the same way. After the war, former Nazis split into those who claimed they had never truly believed, those who insisted the cause was right but the leadership failed, and those who went underground and maintained the ideology in secret. The movement that had been unified under one leader shattered into competing narratives the moment that leader was gone. In Italy, the fracture happened even faster. Within weeks of Mussolini’s removal, former fascists were fighting each other over who had been a true believer and who had been an opportunist. The Grand Council of Fascism itself had voted Mussolini out. His own people turned on him before the Allies even arrived. **The Quiet Walk Away** But the largest group will not fight. They will not apologize. They will not announce that they were wrong. They will just stop. Helen Rose Ebaugh, a sociologist at the University of Houston, studied this process and called it role exit. She found that people who leave roles central to their identity go through four stages: disillusionment, quietly searching for something else, a turning point, and then slowly building an identity as an “ex.” The critical finding is that people do not have to publicly repudiate a former identity to leave it behind. They simply disengage. This is how it ended in Germany for most people. Not with a reckoning. With silence. The party membership cards were burned. The uniforms were hidden. The photographs were destroyed. And within a decade, an entire generation had moved on without ever once saying the words “I was wrong.” In 1951, only a quarter of the population thought the process of confronting the Nazi past had even been necessary. In Italy, it was even simpler. There was no formal process to leave. No questionnaire. No accountability structure. People simply stopped calling themselves fascists and started calling themselves something else. The ideology did not die. It just went quiet. And decades later, when the political conditions were right, it resurfaced. A neo-fascist party was part of Italy’s very first postwar government. The fascist slogan “Mussolini is always right” was replaced by the softer myth that he had been a modernizer who made the trains run on time. The identity was never dismantled. It was simply repackaged. This is the version of MAGA’s future that should concern us most. Not the dramatic fracture. Not the public reckoning. The quiet fade, with no accountability, where the same mentality survives under a different name and waits for the next leader who knows how to use it. **What Remains** The political story of MAGA will end one way or another. Someone else will run. The Republican Party will adapt. Elections will continue. But the psychological story of the people who lived inside MAGA will take far longer to resolve. Swann’s research tells us that the identities built around Trump will not simply dissolve when he is gone. Festinger’s research tells us that the most committed will deny reality before they abandon the belief. Marques’ research tells us the movement will turn on itself before it turns outward. And Ebaugh’s research tells us that most people will leave quietly, without apology, and without ever confronting what they supported. Germany and Italy both walked this exact path. Germany was forced to confront its past, imperfectly and incompletely, and it took a generation to rebuild a democratic identity. Italy was never forced to confront anything, and the fascist mentality survived for decades, repackaged as nostalgia and nationalism. The question for America is which path it chooses. Because political movements can disappear in a single election cycle. The identities built around them, and the damage they leave behind, can take a generation to unwind. And if nobody is ever forced to confront what happened, the same psychology will simply wait for the next leader who knows how to use it. Like, Subscribe and leave a comment. I greatly appreciate it. Sources Moniz, P., & Swann, W. B. (2025). The Power of Trump’s Big Lie: Identity Fusion, Internalizing Misinformation, and Support for Trump. PS: Political Science & Politics, 58(3), 363-368. Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When Prophecy Fails. University of Minnesota Press. Marques, J. M., Yzerbyt, V. Y., & Leyens, J. P. (1988). The Black Sheep Effect: Extremity of Judgments Towards Ingroup Members as a Function of Group Identification. European Journal of Social Psychology, 18(1), 1-16. Ebaugh, H. R. F. (1988). Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit. University of Chicago Press. Corner, P. (2022). Mussolini in Myth and Memory. History News Network. Taylor, F. (2011). Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany. Bloomsbury Press. Judt, T. (2005). Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin Press. How Estrangement Has Become an Epidemic in America. Time Magazine, April 2026. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe