Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the home office in Colorado. I’ve received a small flood of requests for me to do a video on what I think of Trump’s, cabinet appointees and who some of these guys are doozies. I mean, we’ve got a guy who’s supposed to be the top health authority in the country who thinks that WiFi causes cancer. 

The person who’s supposed to manage the military is a culture warrior, and the guy who is supposed to lead up national law enforcement. While his only past experience with law enforcement is being the subject of an investigation into sex trafficking of minors. So, you know, we got some real winners here. But rather than go on a blow by blow, I think it’s better for use of everybody’s time to talk about the Trump relationship with the government, especially at the top people he picks and how that is kind of taken in an interesting direction. 

So first off, the nature of the cabinet secretaries that Trump is selecting here, the primary job of the people who lead the departments in the US government is not necessarily to implement policy. I mean, that’s obviously on their to do list, but it’s mostly to generate a degree of awareness for the president. The US is a big place. 

The world is a bigger place, and there’s a lot going on, and no one can be aware of any of everything. And no one can be an expert in everything. So it’s primarily the job of the cabinet secretaries to become experts on their topic and use their departments to generate a series of briefings on context and awareness, to present to the president so that the president always has the best information available and can always make decisions in an informed manner. 

A couple problems here. When it comes to Donald Trump, number one, he insists on believing that not only his is he always the smartest person in the room, but he’s always the smartest person in the room on any given topic. So from his point of view, the cabinet secretaries are not there to generate awareness because that’s not necessary. 

The cabinet secretaries are there to be servile, to basically rubberstamp and congratulate him on everything that he does. If you remember back to for his Trump term, most of the cabinet meetings opened with everyone talking about how wonderful Trump was. It was almost like a cult meeting. Now, when you insist that you live in an echo chamber and you get to choose your own people, an echo chamber tends to be what you get. 

So I urge you to not pontificate over what this person or that person’s appointments are, that this or that department happens to be, because that’s not really the point of what Trump is doing here. He’s building an inner circle that will not be entrusted with leadership, but are simply designed to tell him that his leadership is really what everybody needs. 

If you’re interested in policy, for whatever reason, you’re better bet. Rather than looking at tweets appointing is to look at his appointment schedule, because Trump tends to do whatever the last person to flatter him once. That was a much better guide in his first term, and I see no reason for that to be different in this. 

True. So it’s really hard for me to get excited over this or that Trump appointee, whether it’s somebody I like or someone I despise because they’re really not there to do the normal job, they’re there to be toadies. And if they were competent at doing their job and telling the president what he needs to hear. Well, as we saw in his first term, he just fires them. 

And so they don’t have to tell him. No, they just have to tell him. Yes, but could you can also consider and that’s enough. Remember that Trump went through more cabinet level appointees than any U.S. president in history, because anyone who tried to do their job got axed. So second, a far more illuminating thing to ruminate on is to find out just how far gone the Republican Party really is. 

And we’re going to get an answer to that question before the end of January. The Republican Party used to be known as the party of adults. There were three factions at the core of it the national security community, the fiscal conservatives who wanted to balance the budget and the business community. And if there’s one thing that these three factions agreed upon, it’s it’s successful leadership required a degree of organization or delegation, two words that are not ones that Trump uses a whole lot. 

So Trump purged those factions, all of them. He relied upon them heavily in his first term because he was new to the field. But when they didn’t match his personality, then fired him pretty quick. So he purged them from the entire system, starting with his administration, then moving on to the Republican Party as an institution, and then even going after their champions in Congress. 

Then he spent most of his time in the political wilderness ensuring that these three factions could never come back, leading us with an institution of the Republican Party that has basically been gutted, of what used to make it the Republican Party and reducing it to what it is today, which is a Trump echo chamber. Or if you want to use that technical term, a cult of personality. 

Now, what is wrong with Trump’s cabinet picks is not going to be a secret. Normally the process goes like this. The president elect selects his people. He submits them for security checks to groups like the CIA and the FBI and all that good stuff. And they come back to him with a report of what kind of skeletons are in their closets. 

And considering that one of these nominees, likes to drop off dead bears in Central Park or chop off whale heads on beaches, we can imagine. And, we cracked the skeletons. We’re going to fight anyway. Once he has his report in hand, he can change his mind about whether this is the person he really wants to be in his administration. 

But if he decides it’s all okay, the report isn’t squashed. It’s handed over to the Senate. Who has to do the ratification. And even if the Senate decides to confirm an appointment, that might be a little. Whoops. Some version of that report will ultimately be released to the public. So we’re going to find out everything there is to know about some of these people. 

And some of these people are seriously sketchy, but it’s the Senate that’s the key factor in all of this, because while Trump has basically co-opted the Republican Party, the Senate’s kind of like the last cluster of holdouts, if that’s the right term. You see, in, in the Republican Party itself, it’s a non-elected institution. So Trump and Trump’s people can basically go through there and bit by bit, use, advocates and party activists and his real core supporters to just basically flood through the whole system and kick out the people they don’t want. 

And that has been done in spades. And then the House of Representatives has elections every two years. So again, it’s very vulnerable to the political whims of the moment, especially if your party leader wants something done. But the Senate’s different. Only one third of those seats are up for election every two years. So it takes six years to get your first flush, if that’s the right term. 

And so while Donald Trump has now been at the top of the American conservative pile for the last eight years, and so he has just been through his fifth consecutive period of being able to shape the House to his own norms. She hasn’t even been through two full cycles for the Senate. So there’s a number of senators still ascribe to the old Republican ideals of the business community, national security issues and fiscal jurisprudence. 

And so if there are people who are going to oppose Trump, that is where they’re going to be clustered at the moment. And it’s the Senate that confirms presidential appointees. And so Trump is attempting to get the Senate to do something called a recess appointment. In the Constitution, there’s a clause that says that if the Senate is not sitting for an extended period of time, then the president can just appoint people he wants and they don’t have to go through the confirmation process at all. 

Well, the time limit established by the Supreme Court is ten days. So Trump is basically asking the Senate to not even do their job, not even short to work for the first two weeks so that all of his appointments could just flow right through. Now, normally, I wouldn’t give this any credence at all, because it would be an unprecedented surrender of congressional power and would basically gut the Senate as an institution. 

But there’s a lot about Trump that is unprecedented, and he has already made the request. And so the question is whether it will be acceded to agreement. And if the Senate does meekly accede to Trump’s demands, then the Republican Party, as we once knew it, is well and truly dead. We might as well just take down all the bunting and the labels and the bumper stickers and label it MAGA, because that’s that would be what it is that. 

Third, there are two Trump appointments that don’t kind of match this pattern. And they are worth of a deeper look. The first one is Robert Lighthizer. Now, Robert Lighthizer served as the US Trade Representative under the first Trump term. And he was one of the very, very few people that any policy autonomy and actually served the entirety of his four year term. 

Now, Trump has already approached him about taking his old job back, and apparently Lighthizer and Trump were in negotiations over the specifics of what this role would look like, whether or not it’s just the US, a TR position, or more of an oversight position, that would all be over the office of the Trade Representative as well as the Commerce Department, in order to have more overarching authority over trade policy. 

Now, Lighthizer is somebody who has earned repeatedly the respect of the business community. He’s been in and out of trade law and in the administration level ever since Reagan. And he’s very, very good at what he does and the trade deals that were negotiated under the Trump administration, NAFTA to Korea, Japan, all of these were done by Lighthizer personally and their deals that greatly increased, America’s authority over trade law on a global basis. 

He’s a solid choice, and he is definitely worthy of the position. If Trump will have him back, the only question at this point seems to be the details over the level of authority that he would have. We should have an answer to that within days. And if he was appointed, I have no doubt that he would sail through the Senate. 

The second person is on the other side of the equation. That’s Tulsi Gabbard. She used to be a, representative in the House of Representatives from Hawaii. She was a Democrat. She, switched teams to MAGA. Not too long ago. And, who, the job she’s been nominated for is the director of national intelligence. Now, there are over a dozen arms of the US government that have some sort of intelligence capability or central intelligence. 

Obviously, the FBI, the DEA, Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and the DNI, whose job is to basically ride herd over all of them and collaborate and manage all of the agency so that no one is working across purposes and that in a single person, you can have somebody that is so wired and so aware that the president has a one stop shop when they need information. 

Now, Tulsi Gabbard has never been in a managerial position ever. Not even a fast food restaurant. She’s never run an agency. She’s never managed people. She’s never managed multiple agencies. She has no background in intelligence, as an operative, as an analyst, as a manager. And that’s before I start saying the bad things about her. She’s an active cult member, not the mega cult. 

She has her own culture. You. Can you be a member of two cults? I’m really not sure. She’s a conspiracy theorist. She’s a friend of the Syrian government. And it’s the general opinion of most of the American intelligence community that she’s been an active Russian agent for years. All of this will come up in her vetting document. Gabbard is the singularly least qualified person who has ever been nominated for any cabinet position, and we have had some real bozos in years past, being pushed into big chairs. 

She couldn’t pass a security check to work in a daycare center, and DNI has to pass the most rigorous security check of any American ever, because they are literally the nerve center for all secret information that the United States captures and manages. Now, unfortunately for all of us, Trump’s cabinet picks really don’t matter much. Because he’s not picking people for competence or to help him govern. 

They just don’t have much authority over him day to day policy. And in doing so, it means that they just aren’t going to have much of an impact, for better or for worse. So whether you love him or hate him, whether you love or hate the picks, I. I’m afraid to say that it really doesn’t matter too much. 

The one exception, of course, is Gabbard. In that position, this person could do an immense amount of damage, and I know for certain that the Russians are sour, waiting at the possibility of having their girl at the heart of the US intelligence system. 

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a hotel room. I forgot my microphone today. I was planning on doing this from the beach, but there’s a hurricane out there anyway, so it wouldn’t have worked. So, the federal elections did not go the way I was anticipating, so I thought it was worth doing a postmortem. I’m going to remind you how I got to my conclusion, and then we can pick apart what changed.

In the last 30 years, most elections, especially at the presidential level, have been decided by a group of Americans who self-identify as independents. It’s a much smaller set than the people who self-identify, though roughly 30% of the American population self-identifies as Democrats, roughly 30% as Republicans, and the 40% in the middle call themselves independents.

But over three-quarters of that group will vote for one party or the other almost all the time, more than 90% of the time. So it’s really only a thin little sliver of 5 to 10% that has been the balance of power within the American political system for decades. They put in Obama twice, they put in Trump twice, they put in Biden, and they kicked Trump out.

When I looked at what was happening with the American political system, I thought, okay, this is the nut. This is what matters. Watch that group. Focus your predictions on that group.

When we got to the 2022 midterms, Donald Trump had spent the last two years telling independents that their votes didn’t matter and that everything should be decided at the primary level rather than the general election level. The collective response of America’s true independents was, “Hold my beer.” All but one of the races that Donald Trump put his finger on, the Democrats won. What was supposed to be a red wave in the midterms turned into, at best, a red fizzle.

My thinking was: independents are fickle. They tend to switch sides every two or three elections. They get buyer’s remorse, and it took Donald Trump really pissing them off to their core to show up twice and vote the same way twice in a row. Since he didn’t change his rhetoric, my anticipation was that the independents would do what they had done in 2020 and 2022 again in 2024.

Look at these two maps.

This first one shows what happens if the independents split 50/50. You can see how, while it is an advantage to the Democrats, there are plenty of possible ways that the Republicans can pull it out of the fire. But if you get something like what happened in 2022 when the independents break very, very strongly, the second map shows a very different scenario—one that is very, very difficult for the Republicans to have any chance of success.

Some version of the second map is what I anticipated happening in 2024.

Now, we are not going to have final, comprehensive exit polling or political identification polling data until the Pew Research Group finishes their assessment. They started the day the election ended, and I doubt we’re going to get the full results of that study until probably the end of the first quarter of 2025.

But we do have expert-polled data, and we now have the final results from pretty much all of the states. Arizona and Nevada just reported, so we have some pretty good data to work with. At the onset, it appears that my prediction for the independents basically proved true. For three elections in a row, they broke very strongly against Trump.

The problem was that everyone else voted differently.

It’s like we’ve been in this lockstep for, especially the last 12 years, where you’ve got a hard-core group that’s MAGA leading a hard-core group that’s more elite-led. There hasn’t been a lot of movement in those groups. But what we saw in this federal election is a lot of bleed-over as the elite-led group just lost support over to Trump.

To give you an idea of how extreme it was:

The Democratic Alliance, as we understand it today, is based on three pillars of support. You’ve got coastal, primarily white, primarily college-educated elites; you’ve got minorities of all flavors; and then you have organized labor. What happened this time is that a lot of those pillars broke.

Women, especially unmarried women, are a big part of that alliance, but they switched to Trump by five points. Eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds—the youth, which almost always work for the Democrats—broke toward Trump by 6%. Black men went to Trump by 7% more than before. Nonwhite college graduates shifted by 9%. Asians shifted by 11%.

People who are in the lower income bracket, ages 30 to 49—people who you’d like to think of as “welfare queens” or whatever—broke 12% for Trump. But Latinos? Latinos shifted by 17%, with Latino men shifting 22%.

So, we saw a lot of these groups that we’ve always associated with being fairly tightly linked to the Democratic grouping break. That changes a lot.

For those of you who are on the left and are going through a lot of kicking yourself and soul-searching, I’ve seen a lot of hot takes in the last week. Just keep in mind that the voters are always right, especially when they don’t show up.

We’ve got three things going on here now that we need to keep an eye on.

Number One

We are in a period of political realignment, and party loyalties are obviously shifting. It’s very much in play. How much in play, unfortunately, is still unclear. The biggest difference we had—aside from the demographic breakdowns between 2020 and 2024—is that voter participation dropped by over 10%. Trump just doesn’t have the pull, for or against, that he once did. That makes drawing any conclusion a little fuzzy.

Number Two

With political factions in motion, a new party is being born. I can’t say right now if the current alignment that brought Trump to power for his second term is a permanent feature of MAGA—it is MAGA. This is not the Republican Alliance; it’s something new. But what I can say is that it is the end of what we think of as the Democratic Party.

Remember the Democratic pillars: minorities, organized labor, and educated white coastal elites. Well, organized labor is now, at best, a swing vote. Over half of them voted for Trump. But minorities are really where it’s at.

The fastest-growing demographic in the country, largely due to immigration, is Hispanics. People always seem to forget this: Hispanics are the group in the United States most opposed to migration in really any form. When Donald Trump made a lot of his pitch about the southern border, that really resonated with the people who, at one point, crossed. Losing those two legs—Hispanics and organized labor—out of the Democratic Alliance means that any places where those two pieces matter for local politics are, at best, up for grabs.

Without some significant soul-searching—and, more importantly, some significant alignment shifts—white, coastal, educated elites? That’s not a party. That’s a book club. It can’t win federal elections.

Number Three

We’re going to have a constitutional crisis in the next couple of years.

If you can put your personal political preferences and passions to the side for a moment and go back and look at pretty much any interview or rally speech that Donald Trump gave in the last three months, I think if you’re honest with yourself, you will see that the guy is failing.

Even if you can’t be honest with yourself, you have to admit that he is older now than Joe Biden was when Joe Biden became president four years ago. The chance of Donald Trump serving an entire term without losing his mind is vanishingly small.

Unlike Joe Biden, who has a group of peers, friends, and confidants who can tell him the truth and nudge him to make decisions—Donald Trump has no one like that. Donald Trump’s MAGA party is a cult of personality. He has purged it completely of anyone who might be able to challenge him.

What we know so far about his new cabinet is that there are going to be no members of his old cabinet who ever told him “no” or “yes, but.” That includes people like Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley.

So, how do you get rid of a president who has lost his mind? Do you have to wait for him to die?

This is a constitutional crisis for the country because we’ve never been in this situation before. It’s also a leadership crisis for MAGA because Trump is MAGA.

How we shake out of these general trends—a little degree of voter apathy, the demise of the Democratic coalition with no clear replacement, and the coming demise of Donald Trump with no clear replacement—it’s going to be a lively time.

I’m sure I’m going to have a lot to say in the next four years. So, stay tuned.