• The libertarian organization couldn’t survive the populist shift in the Republican Party.

FreedomWorks, the once-swaggering conservative organization that helped turn tea party protesters into a national political force, is shutting down, according to its president, a casualty of the ideological split in a Republican Party dominated by former President Donald Trump.

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In an exclusive interview with POLITICO Magazine, Brandon said the decision to shut down was driven by the ideological upheaval of the Trump era.

After Trump took control of the conservative movement, Brandon said, a “huge gap” opened up between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members. FreedomWorks leaders, for example, still believed in free trade, small government and a robust merit-based immigration system. Increasingly, however, those positions clashed with a Trump-aligned membership who called for tariffs on imported goods and a wall to keep immigrants out but were willing, in Brandon’s view, to remain silent as Trump’s administration added $8 trillion to the national debt.

“A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in [with] Trump, they tend to be much more populist,” Brandon said. “So you look at the base and that just kind of shifted.”

This same split was creating headaches in other parts of the organization as well. “Our staff became divided into MAGA and Never Trump factions,” Brandon said in an internal document reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. It also impacted fundraising.

“Now I think donors are saying, ‘What are you doing for Trump today?’” said Paul Beckner, a member of FreedomWorks’ board. “And we’re not for or against Trump. We’re for Trump if he’s doing what we agree with, and we’re against him if he’s not. And so I think we’ve seen an erosion of conservative donors.”

Brandon, for his part, said some donors would contact him to complain that the organization was doing too much to help Trump, while others called to complain that they weren’t doing enough to help Trump. “It is an impossible position,” he said.

In trying to balance these competing pressures, Brandon said he resolved to “keep a working relationship [with the pro-Trump populists] on the issues we agreed upon.” This too created conflicts.

In an interview with POLITICO Magazine last September, an ex-FreedomWorks employee claimed that the organization under Brandon’s leadership had turned its back on its values while Trump was in office; during this period, for example, the organization issued tweets spreading election conspiracies and deflecting criticism of the Florida legislation that came to be known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. “He let a bunch of right-wing nutjobs turn FreedomWorks into a MAGA mouthpiece,” the former FreedomWorks staffer said.

Source: Luke Mullins, politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/08/freedomworks-is-closing-and-blaming-trump-00156784