It should be intuitive that conservatives would not warmly regard Biden’s record of shutting down domestic energy transit networks and reducing America’s capacity to explore new oil and gas leases that counter Russia’s petro politics. It should be understood that Republican voters would oppose policies like waiving sanctions on the Nord Stream II pipeline and unilaterally extending outdated arms control treaties with Russia. Biden is undoing the achievements of the Trump years that the MAGA wing has promoted as great successes. A moderately competent political strategy would involve pointing that out. And yet, MAGA Republicans somehow managed to forget these elementary political imperatives.

How did the loudest MAGA voices find themselves in a state of such confusion about what the members of a movement they seek to lead actually believe? Quite simply, they bought their own hype. They convinced themselves that Republican voters no longer viewed conventional displays of strength like force projection as a measure of national potency. They obsessed over the cultural objectives of their domestic adversaries to such a degree that it rendered them vulnerable to emotional manipulation by malignant actors abroad. And they bought into the idea that Trumpism was an epochal Jacksonian realignment rather than a cultish fad.

The nationalist right overinterpreted its moment, and subsequently lost it.