The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement was able to bypass the establishment that was able to marginalize the Tea Party for over a decade, according to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).
“The Tea Party sort of went dormant or atrophied after 2014, ‘15, ‘16, until Trump came on the scene. And he reignited it in a different form,” Johnson told The Hill.
The Tea Party, which Johnson was a part of, unfortunately became a “pejorative” for opposing the Obama administration.
“Unfortunately for the Tea Party movement, the establishment did a pretty good job of marginalizing it, turning the Tea Party into a pejorative. But the people that were attracted to the Tea Party movement, they found a new champion in President Trump, and he took it to a whole new level with MAGA,” Johnson said.
Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin told The Hill that “[W]hat we're seeing right now, what Elon Musk and President Trump are alluding to, it is not just is this a proper function and should we be spending at all, but who benefits and is there corruption? That's exactly the kind of thing we envisioned when we began the Tea Party movement.”
“The first protest we did in Atlanta in February of 2009, it was raining, it was cold. We didn't even have a sound system. We didn't know how to protest, we didn't know how to picket. We've learned how to protest, we've learned how to make our voices heard. But it's not enough to be angry. You have to be able to take that passion that people feel and turn it into meaningful action,” Martin continued.
President Trump had also spoken to protest the Iran nuclear deal at a 2015 rally organized by Tea Party Patriots Action. He also had praised the Tea Party during his 2016 campaign.
Trump’s mentioning of his desire for a balanced budget during his joint session to Congress was a nod to the Tea Party, even without it being mentioned explicitly.
“In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years — balance the federal budget, we're going to balance it,” Trump said.