Religious Right: Focus on Christian moral issues
Tea Party: Focus on taxes and spending
MAGA: Focus on immigration and national pride
I disagree in part.
Immigration didn't just come on the scene as an issue in 2015.
President Bush had ran on guest worker programs and immigration reform in the mid 2000s and the 109th Congress attempted to pass reform. The house went with enforcement first/only and while the Senate passed the first of three attempts at "Comprehensive" Immigration Reform, which was derided by its opponents as amnesty, there was no attempt to reconcile these bills.
In 2006 elections, both houses of Congress flipped, with a lot of the media coverage listing immigration as a third rate cause after Iraq and the economy for the Republican woes. Bush tried again and this time the Senate acted first or at least tried in 2007. However, this bill finally saw the right mobilize in force with talk radio going after the bill relentlessly. The bill failed in the Senate with both caucuses split on it. I think 53 voted nay with 15 Democrats as part of the no vote, ranging from red state Democrats to Stabenow and I think even Sanders voted no.
The term tea party was applied after the fact to describe three different strains of opposition to the GOP establishment and the Democrats at that time.
1. The Paulite libertarian group
2. Opposition to Amnesty/Comprehensive Reform.
3. Opposition to the bailouts/spending that started in Bush's term and then intensified under Obama.
This immigration undercurrent was already there though and there were several Representatives knocked out in primaries in 2008 because of the Immigration issue, including TN-01 and UT-03. In the Presidential primary cycle, Romney was the primary candidate that tapped into the immigration issue but his narrow niche of rich suburbanites hemmed him in between more moderate suburbanites supporting McCain and rural populists and conservatives splitting between Huckabee and McCain.
The tea party basically wrapped the efforts of the Club for Growth together with that of NumbersUSA and the libertarians. The Immigration issue was a factor in opposition to Specter, Crist (because he backed McCain over Romney at a critical moment in 2008), Bennett and McCain, and thus by extension the elections of Toomey, Rubio, and Mike Lee, later on with Ted Cruz and the primary defeat of Dick Lugar. JD Hayworth ran against McCain in the 2010 GOP primary and Tom Tancredo ended up being the main candidate for Colorado Governor (convoluted mess, won't get into here). This was also the era of the AZ immigration law and likewise, the period after the 2010 elections saw state legislatures pass E-verify in many states, indicating just how important an issue this had become to the GOP base in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Trumpism and Trump obtained their opening precisely because the GOP establishment read the wrong lessons of the 2012 defeat and instead of comprehending that the GOP failed to connect with working class swing voters in states like Ohio, Iowa and the Midwest (the most natural alliance remaining for a socially conservative GOP), placed the blame at Romney's immigration positions being too extreme. And yes, that might have cost him Florida, Colorado and Nevada, but 1) he wouldn't be nominee without it and 2) Romney wouldn't have been President with FL, CO and NV. He needed Ohio, VA and one more state.
In its aftermath, Rubio pushing for a new comprehensive plan caused talk radio to back down and Hannity even endorsed the push. There was also a lot of top down pressure to embrace reform and several Republicans in the Senate got on board with this. Republicans in the house, always the more fervent border hawks understood this even though many border hawks in the SW had been eliminated by redistricting and trends advancing to do their magic, new ones in more rural districts like Steve King came to prominence and the House GOP well known for its difficulties and disunity in this period refused to act on the Senate bill.
You then had the rise of ISIS, the migrant child crisis and then the caravans, which caused the issue to come back in late 2014 and it played a role in the Republican victory and taking of the Senate. Iowa for instance had been polled in 2013 and had opposed comprehensive Reform, NC has long been hostile to amnesty and then of course you had AR And LA.
After two years of pressure, top down force feeding and talk radio ambivalence and silence, the GOP had self-nuked their golden boy rising star and come back to where they were in 2010, fully willing to use the issue as a wedge to win elections. Yet of all of the more serious Presidential candidates, the only ones that were solidly border hawk was Cruz and Cruz had limited appeal. All of the more business/Northern/Secular candidates either embraced reform, waffled on it, or kept changing their positions like Scott Walker every time he got a call from the Koch brothers.
Then Trump descended the escalator...
The Republicans got into this position because of demographics and their base was feeling demographic pressure both in the declining suburban majorities of the SW and also in the rural areas where migrant labor, wage depression and job displacement caused a racial polarization in many places that had heretofore been very white and less prone to voting behaviors based on racial polarization more commonly associated with the low country South, Cities and suburbs that had been the Dixiecrat to Republican base (think Mark Sanford style Republicans). These former areas had already started trending Republican because of life, guns and energy, but now immigration and trade were the other end of that thread that Republicans kept tugging on as they lost ground in more secular areas.
Whatever Republicans thought they could achieve with their top down approach of remaking the party on this issue, all it did was create a seething anger that was just waiting to be channeled by an aggressive populist not bound by traditional norms and behaviors.
MAGA is thus a core element of the Tea Party, that has ascended to prominence over that of tax cuts and life as the defining litmus test, as opposed to just being along for the ride back in the late 2000s, early 2010s.
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