Transcription
Peter Zeihan, it's the 11th of April. I'm coming to you from Colorado and today we're going to talk about what's happening in the MAGA sphere over the last about 7 days.
We have had a number of personalities ranging from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Tucker Carlson to Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes to who is that really crazy Candace Owens. Oh my god. >> [gasps] >> Anyway, some of the worst of the worst people who have been spouting propaganda and lies and incriminations and just making up all kinds of conspiracy theories for the last decade. >> [snorts] >> All of them have turned on Trump all at once and they're now all saying things that you know, honestly would come out of the squad on the Democratic left really well calling Trump a mad king, genocidal, evil. My personal favorite, he's probably the Antichrist.
Let's start by saying that none of these are nice people. All of them are horrible. And all of them have basically lied to all of their followers for a long time. So if you're a follower and you're seeing this, you have been had over and over and over and over and over again. But the fact that they all switched almost on the same day tells me that this is not a one-off. This is an organized effort.
Now every single one of these people, if they're not active Russian agents, the Russians have a pipe into their brains where they've been funneling propaganda that they may go on to vomit in front of their followers. Nothing's new there. That's not particularly controversial even for them. But for them to all switch at the same time that suggests that the Russians sensed an opportunity.
See, one of the things that people get wrong about Trump and the Russians is that Trump doesn't owe Putin and Putin doesn't control Trump. Trump is just really easy to manipulate and Putin has been manipulating him. Now Putin has used all of these conspiracy theories to break up the Republican Party from the inside, basically break down the capacity of the business interests and the national security interests and the fiscal voters to basically control the rest of the party and so it's turned over into MAGA. And that means that MAGA is the single most coherent voting block that the United States has right now. Arguably the largest and most consolidated voting block that the United States has ever seen in its history. And as the most powerful force in American politics, that puts it on Putin's radar because Putin's goal has never to been to get a friendly person in the American presidency. Putin's goal, Russia's goal has always been to break the American political system so it can't function. And if MAGA is now the most powerful part of the American political system, then it is now a target and with the Iran war, the Russians have sensed an opportunity.
So the goal isn't for Putin to go after Trump per se, but to break the capacity of MAGA to function and if that drives a line between MAGA and the president, so much the better. So he's using these people who have been borderline to outrageously traitorous over the last few years to now turn all at the same time and basically set the Trump alliance on fire. It's a good strategy. It's a really good strategy because there really isn't anything else coherent in the American political system right now.
The question of course is whether Donald Trump realizes that this is how it's been all along because he's always assumed that all of these people including Putin worship him. That's never been true and he'll have to do an ego adjustment if he wants to come to grips with what's happening now. But it's unclear whether Trump has mentally degraded too far to even absorb that simple fact and if he hasn't, then we really are not just looking at the end of the Republican Party which I would argue already happened. We are looking at the end of MAGA as a unified political force. Whether that is good or bad of course depends upon how you view the country, the world, American politics and how things are going to evolve or devolve in the next year.