Tea Party movement finds a new champion in Trump
Tea Party stalwarts who have seen their movement fizzle are finding a new champion in President Trump and see his second administration as a culmination and validation of their efforts.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who gave his first political speech at a Tea Party rally in Oshkosh, Wis., in 2009 as the movement was picking up steam, said he saw parallels when attending Trump rallies in recent years in terms of enthusiasm and the types of supporters it attracted.
“The Tea Party sort of went dormant or atrophied after 2014, ‘15, ‘16,” Johnson said in an interview. “Until Trump came on the scene, and he reignited it in a different form.”
Trump has prioritized cutting government spending by empowering billionaire Elon Musk to slash federal contracts deemed wasteful, and he has seized on the same kind of populist grassroots energy seen in the Tea Party movement.
The most powerful man in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), also has ties to the Tea Party movement. He spoke at a Tea Party rally in 2009 and attended an event on Inauguration Day hosted by Tea Party Patriots Action, a major advocacy group associated with the movement.
“Unfortunately for the Tea Party movement, the establishment did a pretty good job of marginalizing it, turning the Tea Party into a pejorative,” Johnson said. “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.”
The Tea Party movement launched in 2009 as a backlash to then-President Obama’s election and policies. Supporters were largely animated by opposition to what became the Affordable Care Act, and to ballooning government spending and deficits. Republicans won the majority in the House and gained seats in the Senate in the 2010 midterms thanks in large part to the enthusiasm of the Tea Party.
Trump himself spoke at a 2015 rally organized by Tea Party Patriots Action to protest the Iran nuclear deal, and he periodically praised the Tea Party during his 2016 campaign.
But the movement and its primary causes fizzled during Trump’s first term as Republicans signed off on big spending agreements and added to the federal deficit.
As Trump’s second term has gotten underway, those who were there for the Tea Party’s rise see a president who is finally delivering on what energized their supporters roughly 16 years ago.
Trump has prioritized slashing the size of government as well as federal spending, largely through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). His administration has identified billions of dollars worth of contracts, many of them through the U.S. Agency for International Development, that they deem wasteful and out of alignment with Trump’s agenda.
“What 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,” said Jenny Beth Martin, founder of Tea Party Patriots.
Martin argued the Tea Party movement and its grassroots supporters have adapted over the years and found ways to elevate their preferred causes.
“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,” Martin said in an interview. “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.”
The president himself has spoken multiple times in recent weeks about his desire to balance the federal budget, a goal that would be music to the ears of Tea Party supporters, even as it would require major cuts to Medicaid and other social safety net programs.
“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 during an address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, even some Democrats have invoked the Tea Party in recent weeks, but in reference to their own party.
Republican lawmakers have dealt with outraged constituents at town halls amid backlash to layoffs of government workers and freezes on government spending that aided at-risk communities at home and abroad.
Trump and other Republicans have dismissed those constituents as outside agitators coming in to cause a scene. But some prominent Democrats see it as a harbinger of the same kind of grassroots energy that helped Republicans make gains during the midterms when they were in the minority.
“It’s the Tea Party movement that we saw in 2010 beginning to gather in 2025 on the Democratic side,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), a potential 2028 presidential candidate, told The Bulwark.
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