The ideological circle is a formulation John Kiriakou says he has long maintained, and which he offers when asked to place a given administration on the political map.
The shape
Asked in February 2026 how he would characterise the second Trump administration against the moment he blew the whistle, Kiriakou called it “actually a pretty tough question,” and began by conceding that MAGA as an ideology is “something that I think many, many Americans can agree with.”[1]
Then the framework: “I’ve long maintained that the ideological spectrum is not a straight line from left to right. It’s a circle. And at some point it meets the left and the right meet. In the case of MAGA and the progressive left, I think that that is on issues of war and peace.”[2]
His illustration of the meeting point is at the Pentagon budget reversal.
Where he declines to follow the circle
Kiriakou was careful not to convert the geometry into an endorsement. “My friends on the left would disagree with me if I said that that I believed that the Trump administration would go down in history as one of the more humanitarian administrations. I don’t think that it will, but that’s not to say that it’s necessarily a bad thing. Because on the other side, on the flip side, open borders aren’t humanitarian for anybody. And so we have to make a decision.”[3]
What the circle is for
The purpose of the frame, in his telling, is to argue that the division is manufactured. Kiriakou dated the depth of it against his own memory — see sitting on my father’s lap — and drew the prescription from there: “I think that the political parties have put us there. And I believe that we shouldn’t be loyal to political parties. We should be loyal to the Constitution… And I think people get distracted by this political silliness.”[4]