The system failed and propaganda took it over

**David Pakman** (0:00)
Today, we're going to take a look beyond the daily Trump circus and check out the machinery being built underneath it and why this danger is not going to disappear when Donald Trump finally does. We also have the United States burning through missile stockpiles all for a war. Trump can't win and can't even figure out how to end. As Tucker Carlson warns, this could become a nuclear conflict. Meanwhile, measles is surging as Fox News personalities pretend we don't know why. And the White House responds to mounting crises with bizarre AI propaganda declaring a golden age, nauseating. We're also going to look at what I got wrong about Trump and how the country became used to conduct that once would have ended a presidency and how a Republican who is competent could advance much of the same extreme agenda war propaganda institutional failure. We're going to look at all of these things today on the program.
The Republican plan for after Trump is a lot worse than you think. And I want to talk about this today because very few people are talking about this. There's this, I think, comforting idea to many that comes up whenever Donald Trump does something especially unhinged. And it's the following idea. If Republicans could just get rid of Trump and replace them with a normal Republican, everything would basically be fine. And there's this idea that if you could, you know, bring back someone like a John McCain or maybe if Mitt Romney decided, oh, I want to go back and run for something that you just put in someone like a McCain or a Romney as president. Everything basically would be OK because they are far more normal than Donald Trump. Now, that would be better in some ways. If you put in a conventional Republican, it would be less chaotic.
I presume that they would be less obsessed with revenge compared to Trump. They would be less likely to spend every day posting deranged conspiracy theories and AI slop fine. And I've even said I would rather go back to when we were arguing about the top tax rate rather than doing election denial, authoritarianism, threatening political opponents, threatening media that you don't like. Of course, I would rather be in that situation. But even that framing is deceptive. And I'll tell you why.
All of that talk creates this imaginary Republican Party where they're basically like us, but you want to slightly lower tax rate and a little bit less government spending. That doesn't exist. OK. And to the extent that I've suggested that accidentally, I'm sorry, because that is not what I mean to imply.
Trump did not create the Republican agenda. Trump took the Republican agenda and he made it louder, uglier and more personal. And if you were to replace Trump with a polished Republican with more discipline and fewer scandals, they might actually be more effective at putting more of this radical agenda into place. Start with elections, for example. The Republican project beyond Trump still includes insane gerrymandering, voter restrictions, partisan election administrators, a judiciary that protects Republican policies. And then Trump adds to that election denial. But the effort to lock in minority power predates Donald Trump significantly. That doesn't go away when Trump leaves. OK, that's number one. Elections. Number two, federal government. Trump wants to fill agencies with people that are loyal to him. A normal Republican might talk about efficiency and accountability. The practical result is probably still agencies are weak. Career experts are pushed out and there's very little government oversight. Not that much of a difference from Donald Trump. Topic three deregulation. Republicans say we've got to cut red tape. What it means is fewer people enforcing labor laws, fewer people enforcing environmental protections, fewer people enforcing civil rights rules and fewer consumer safeguards. Trump will announce it with a ridiculous stunt. But a competent Republican like Marco Rubio would do a lot of the same stuff. They would just do it quietly.
We then get to the economic agenda. Trump's agenda and a normal Republican would have a very similar economic agenda. Tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy.
Let's weaken unions. Let's cut regulations. Let's put pressure on the reduction of programs, welfare programs that people use. We can benefit. We can weaken benefits through tougher eligibility rules and work requirements and privatizing. It's a lot of the same crap. And then finally, on abortion, Trump is incoherent on abortion because I think personally he's fine with it, first of all. And secondly, Trump knows that abortion is a dangerous issue politically. But the broader right wing movement still wants to ban medication abortion, go after contraception, do fetal personhood, maybe go after fertility treatments. It's kind of all the same stuff. So the point here is, if you look at all those areas or you could look at mass deportation, normal Republicans still want to do workplace raids and surveillance and detention facilities. They might just not do it as cartoonishly as Donald Trump does it. Education, your normal Republicans are not that different from Trump. So is Trump uniquely dangerous? Yes. His election denial is dangerous. His personal corruption is dangerous. His authoritarian instincts are dangerous. His fixation on revenge is dangerous. But if you replace him with someone who is basically the same but accepts election results, is it an improvement? Yes, it's an improvement, but better than Trump is a really low bar. And a normal Republican might have calmer press conferences. They might have fewer scandals, but they would still push the same damn underlying agenda of minority rule and upward redistribution, weakening public programs, abortion restrictions, mass deportation, deregulation, conservative control of the courts. All of that would stay. And so our challenge, what we really have to think about is we don't want to confuse a normal presentation with normal policy. You could get rid of the Trump circus and then fewer people might recognize the emergency. And if you put in a quieter, smarter Republican, they could just get better at achieving a lot of the same crap that Donald Trump wants to do. So this is an important framing for us on the left to keep in mind as we go into twenty twenty six, but more importantly, twenty twenty eight, which is it is very plausible. It's not a guarantee, but it's plausible that whoever ultimately ends up being the Republican nominee in twenty twenty eight in terms of tone and appearance is going to seem way more normal than Donald Trump. And as a result, we are maybe going to think that they are far less dangerous. But understand that they might just be better at passing a lot of the same stuff Trump would pass if he could do it. And we don't want to take our eye off the ball in that respect. And it is very important, you know, in that this is just a hypothetical. Rand Paul is a Republican who sometimes because he's a libertarian, civil libertarians and left libertarians will sometimes overlap with some of the stuff Rand Paul wants. Not all of it, not nearly all of it. They'll be terrible. But sometimes we can hear Rand Paul and we go, oh, that sounds kind of reasonable. What we don't want to end up is in a situation where someone like a Rand Paul is the Republican nominee in 28, which I don't think he will be. But imagine and we let our guard down because we go, this is so much less dangerous than Donald Trump, maybe less cartoonishly dangerous, but potentially much more effective at getting terrible policy passed. So that's the warning we have to keep in mind. And we'll certainly have more time to talk about it as we get into and beyond 26 and start approaching 20, 28