While the "establishment" managed to "marginalize" the Tea Party movement for more than a decade, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., says President Donald Trump's revitalized Make America Great Again movement has given the Tea Party Patriots validation, new life, and a voice again.

"The Tea Party sort of went dormant or atrophied after 2014, '15, '16, until Trump came on the scene," Sen. Johnson told The Hill. "And he reignited it in a different form."

The senator gave his first speech at a Tea Party rally in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 2009, but its movement was squelched and turned into a "pejorative" for its opposition to the Obama administration and its policies, he said.

"Unfortunately for the Tea Party movement, the establishment did a pretty good job of marginalizing it, turning the Tea Party into a pejorative," the senator 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."

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. — no relation to the senator — also has ties to the Tea Party, The Hill reported, noting its revival has a leader's voice for cost-cutting in the House, too.

"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," Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin told The Hill.

The Tea Party flag-wavers have evolved, too, she added.

"The first protest we did in Atlanta in February of 2009, it was raining, it was cold," she said. "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."

Trump's recent boast at this week's joint address to Congress, vowing to work toward a balanced budget, waved the Tea Party flag without a specific mention to it.

"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 Tuesday, noting the administration's efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending and foreign aid.

The movement is growing so populist that even Democrats are starting to talk like Tea Party members.

"It's the Tea Party movement that we saw in 2010 beginning to gather in 2025 on the Democratic side," Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat bandied about as a 2028 presidential candidate, told The Bulwark last month.

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