Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks. It is the 14th of July, and last night Donald Trump was lightly injured in an assassination attempt. I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow of what went down because the details are still very sketchy. It looks like it was a 20-year-old registered Republican who donated money to Democrats, which tells us absolutely nothing.

The Secret Service, of course, will be doing their own investigation in league with local law enforcement and the FBI. We will wait for more details to see where that takes us. But I wanted to put this all into context. There are a lot of things going on in the world right now that suggest we’re going to be in a more politically volatile period.

The first big thing is that America is going through its once-in-every-generation political rearrangement, something that Trump is part of. The Americans have a first-past-the-post, single-member district political system, which means that you vote for a single person who will then represent a very specific geography. You don’t vote for a party. In doing this, American parties tend to be fairly weak, and so they tend to be coalitions of coalitions. You get multiple political factions banding together around a single tent in order to get one more vote than whoever comes in second.

Today, for example, the Republican Party has traditionally been made up of people who are concerned with budget deficits, national security, business regulation, and social conservatives. As technology, demographics, and economic patterns evolve, the factions make less sense. The factions rise and fall within the coalitions, and if things get stressed enough, they end up falling out of the coalition altogether, maybe becoming swing voters or maybe going to the other side. What we’re seeing right now is that in spades for the Republican coalition. The business community, the national security community, and the fiscal community have all been basically ejected from the party, but Donald Trump has been successful in drawing other groups away from the Democratic coalition.

For example, union voters are no longer considered Democrats by their voting patterns, and Hispanics have shifted quite a bit. This is still very much a work in progress. Donald Trump is benefiting from this as much as he is losing from this. But if you think about what’s happened in the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve had the rise of hyper-globalization and now its fall. We’ve had the height of the baby boomers in the workforce and now their retirement. It’s not exactly a shock to think that we are going to manage our political system differently.

So that’s the first big piece: America politically is in movement. Second, the world economically is in movement. The whole point of the post-World War II global consensus was that the Americans would take care of the guns and keep everyone safe. The Americans would open the market and make the global sea safe for everyone’s commerce if, in exchange, you sided with the Americans in the Cold War. That provided the basis for everything from the alliance with Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to NATO. That’s created the world that we know. It’s also created the economic backdrop and the security backdrop that made the rise of China possible, because during the late Cold War, China was one of those allies.

Well, that whole system is breaking down. Two reasons: number one, the Americans can’t pay for it anymore and don’t want to. The Americans have refashioned their navy, so instead of hundreds of ships that can patrol the oceans, they have a few clusters of ships that are really good for fighting wars. So the ability to have that global coverage isn’t there. Americans politically are tired of paying the economic price of keeping the world open for everyone because it’s put everybody else at an advantage versus American workers. That just doesn’t fly in today’s populist era.

The second issue is that when you do economically develop, when you do industrialize, you also urbanize. After seven decades of urbanization, people are having fewer and fewer children around the world. Well, if you have fewer children for seven decades, it’s not that you’re running out of ten-year-olds and twenty-year-olds. You’re running out of fifty-year-olds and increasingly sixty-year-olds. This decade, the 2020s, was always going to be the decade that a lot of countries slipped away from having a workforce that can support the globalized system in the first place. After all, if you don’t have consumption, you don’t have trade.

So this whole system, the American political network, is evolving, and the global economic network is collapsing and reforming. What this all means is there’s a lot of change out there in the way we live, the way we work, who we service with our businesses, and where we get our goods. When things change, people with a vested interest in the system don’t always make it. People get scared, and people get angry. That is when you get violence. We’re going to get it at the state level with a series of military conflicts. The first of those is already happening in Ukraine. We’ll probably get one in China before long. In terms of political change in the United States, that’s when we get our domestic political violence.

It happened in the 1930s with the Great Depression and that political reorientation. It happened with Reconstruction, and it happened with the Civil War. So I don’t want to suggest that this is the beginning of more of the same. I’m saying that the factors that define our world are evolving, and we’re going to change with it. For the United States overall, this is a net gain in many, many ways. But going through the process of getting from where we’ve been and what we’re comfortable with to where we’re going, something that’s unknown, is unfortunately going to generate a lot of stresses along the way. We saw some of that last night.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from the lost wilderness in Colorado. I’m just outside of Devil’s Playground. 

I was backpacking in New Mexico last week when the presidential debate happened on purpose. Because I didn’t want to watch it live. Because I still have a hangover from one four years ago. anyway, I’ve since watched it, and I have. 

How should I put this? Received a river of requests, for an update. And what this means to my forecast for the election. Some of you have been really, really rude about it, and you guys can stuff it. But for everybody else, Joe Biden obviously did not have a good day. he appeared confused, a little lost. 

It wasn’t clear that he knew exactly where he was. And a lot of his responses, especially in the early half of the, debate, were just almost nonsensical. The term for what is happening to Joe Biden is that his mind is diluting. He’s losing control of the contact between the context of his memories and his life and the reality about him. 

And this makes him slow and confused. And for anyone who has been watching him for the last year, you’ll notice that this is not a new thing. This has been happened with greater rapidity. 

it’s been happening in press conferences and the Oval Office and briefings. it’s it’s getting bad. 

now, I’m sure there are a lot of us out there who have parents or grandparents who are diluting, and it’s painful and it’s awkward, and eventually you get forgot. And it’s there are good days and there are bad days, but that’s not what you need for a president, because as you get older and Joe Biden is already 81, the number of bad days eventually tends to overwhelm the number of good days. 

And he is no longer fit for office. He shouldn’t be running for president. He shouldn’t be president. And a vote for him is a vote against national stability in the United States. Let’s talk about the other guy now in the debate. I’d argue that 75 to 80% of everything that came out of Donald Trump’s mouth was boldfaced lies. 

Most of those lies have been proven wrong in court on multiple occasions. he did have a few new ones that he brought out. Most of those were from Vidic River. if you remember, back to the Republican primaries earlier this year. Romsami, he was clearly the candidate who was most detached from reality. 

The term for what’s going on with Donald Trump is that his mind is demented. he’s very sure of where he is because he just made it up. he lives in a bubble of his own mental creation. And when you’re like that and somebody pokes into your bubble, you get very, very, very angry. this is something we’ve seen out of Donald Trump for some time, but it’s really accelerated since he lost the presidential reelection me, three years ago.And he definitely doubled and tripled down on that in the debate. We all know someone who’s going through this either themselves or caring for them. caring for somebody with dementia is awful because you get yelled at a lot and it’s difficult to reconcile, you know, a loved one’s broken view of the world with who they used to be. 

There are good days and there are bad days. But I think we all agree that as you get older and Donald Trump is now 79, significantly older than Hillary Clinton was when he said that she was too old to run for president. As you get older, eventually the bad days outnumber the good days, and Donald Trump is no longer fit to be president. 

And a vote for him is a vote against national stability in the United States. And these are our choices. And so in the next part, I’m going to tell you how this is going to go. But we’ll do that from a different vista. 

So where does this take us? I see two paths forward. The first is the path I identified a year and a half ago now. And we will include a link to that original video, in this one and in the written supporting materials. all of the things that I pointed out at that point still remain true. 

I will pull out one that is even more relevant now, and that’s independents. Now, when I say independents, I’m not talking about the roughly 30 to 40% of Americans who are not registered as a Republican or a Democrat. No, no, no. of that 30 to 40%, almost all of them, vote with one party or the other 90% of the time. 

They’re not independents. I’m talking about the true vote splitters, the 10% in the middle that have decided every American election in modern history. they don’t like either candidate. I’m one of those independents. Makes me a little sick to my stomach myself. Biden may have gotten a decent start, but he’s clearly not there anymore. He may have an okay team, but that’s not enough. 

you need the person at the top. Top to be capable and conscious and cognizant. That’s not Biden anymore. however, on the other side, we have Donald Trump, who, part of his dementia is that his insistence that he the election was stolen from him, despite the fact that members of his own administration who were in charge of election integrity, say that it was the cleanest election ever. 

his particular dementia threatens independence because he’s telling people that the general election doesn’t matter and everything should be decided in primaries where he does well. And of course, he does well in primaries, because the MAGA crowd will do whatever he says and they will show up in force to the primaries even when he’s not campaigning for them. 

His ability to sweep the primaries without lifting a finger this time around, that was actually really impressive. But if you’re an independent, it means that your vote goes away. so it’s a choice between someone who’s deluded or someone who’s 

Dementia will destroy your ability to vote from the future. And, you know, that’s a no contest. also, never forget that there are more Democrats than Republicans. 

So Joe Biden does not need to capture the independent vote to win if the independents just don’t show up because they’re disgusted with both, that’s a victory for Biden. And so my general assessment that this is Biden’s election, no matter what happens, as long as he remains alive, stands a little sick to my stomach. This is an ugly choice, but it’s not a particularly difficult one. 

There is one other way that this could go. friends and families and colleagues of Joe Biden are now advising that he consider stepping down and let a more capable candidate, run, which I think would be a great idea. Now, there’ve been people on both sides, maintain the Democrats and old school Republicans, people who are Republicans. 

Before Trump took over the party, who insist that if either side were able to float a better candidate, that they would just sweep because these two candidates are so broken and I understand where they’re coming from. The problem is the process of getting to that. the primaries are functionally over. and on the Democratic side, it’s very weird for you get to get a meaningful challenger, for the nomination. 

when you have somebody who’s already in office and that this is no exception. the difference this time around is that Biden might willingly step down. And if he does that, we will have what’s called an open convention. But that is not a slam dunk. and for this, I blame Barack Obama. one of the reasons why I think Barack Obama will go down in history is one of the bottom 10% of presidents we’ve ever had. 

One of the many reasons is he functionally destroyed the Democratic Party’s ability to generate talent. when he ran for president, he formed his own organization and ran in parallel. And then when he got enough momentum, he basically co-opted the Democratic Party institution for his own purposes, something similar to what, Donald Trump did. in doing so, he made it all about him. 

And then for the next eight years, he sucked all the oxygen out of the room and prevented a new generation of political leaders from rising up within the party. And so that’s why we have folks like Schumer and Pelosi who are almost as old as Biden, who are the powerbrokers in Congress. And a new generation is really having a hard time getting going now. 

they’ve started, but it’s probably too late, certainly too late for the cycle. And that means that the only people who are willing to run for president in the primary system are those ideological idiots like, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, who can draw national support and kind of like Trump with MAGA, get people to show up in numbers to the primaries, even if people would normally not consider themselves Democrats. 

if you have an open convention, those ideological idiots will be there. But the advantage of an open convention is you might get normal politicians, God forbid, there. So I have always been a fan in the American political system of the governors, because they have to deal with day in, day out issues and actually make the trains run on time and they have to govern across the aisle. 

And we haven’t had a meaningful governor run on the Democratic side for a bit. And on the Republican side, it’s just been overwhelmed, by Donald Trump 

So for an open convention, we might actually because it’s just going to be for like a few weeks instead of this endless campaigning system that we seem to have normally, a governor could throw his or her hat in the ring, not have to deal with all the shit of all the ideological wars, and actually get a good candidate. 

And that is a way that the Democrats could have a complete blowout of the system of the election. It is possible, but it’s also possible you could get Elizabeth Warren, who was like one of three people on this planet that Donald Trump could beat. This can’t happen on the Republican side. Donald Trump has destroyed the Republican Party. He’s purged of anyone who was against him. 

And the real, breakpoint was back in March when he took over the Republican National Committee. And the first thing he did was purge anyone who had anything to do with polling or candidate selection or basically fact gathering. Anyone who had any experience in politics, and basically replaced them all with his flunkies. So Trump, even if he dies tomorrow, will probably still be the Republican nominee this round. 

His grip on what’s left of the Republican Party is that firm. 

Okay. That’s it for me today. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of delusion versus Dementia and its After Effects. as always, with all of my domestic political, videos, I invite you to send outraged messages to the collection email spot, which is [email protected] that’s [email protected]. And I promise I will put personally review and respond to each and every None of them. Until next time.