The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Does the Trump Administration Know What's Going On? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

On the whole, most presidential administrations have limited awareness of things like demographics, trade, geopolitics, and industrial policy. Naturally, government officials view things through a narrow lens corresponding to their background, such as business or academia. So, that's the baseline here.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3UuDIvr

Hello, everybody. Come to you from Yosemite National Park. I am on the north shore of... Where am I? Red Devil Lake, one of my favorite spots. Lots of good camping around here. Not too many bugs either this year. Yay.

Okay. Taking a question from the Patreon page. Specifically, I talk a lot about a lot of things that are going on in the world. Do I think there's any chance that there are folks in the administration that are actually aware of what is going on and the issues that I address, whether it's demographics, geopolitics, trade, the path we're on, all that good stuff. I would say the chances are pretty low. Let's start with how this is a normal administration and then move on to how it's an abnormal

administration. So first, when someone becomes president, you know, they don't have a staff of 300,000 before. They inherit that from the government. They come in with people that they have known their adult lives that have helped them with other issues, which is one of the reasons why have always liked governors over senators or congresspeople to be president because they've had to make something run and they can't make it run by themselves. So when you get a George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, they're coming with a degree of institutional knowledge about how to work with people and how to work with the government and they have people that come with them. They then tap the business community typically or academia or the party that they're part of in order to bring in additional

people to fill out high-level slots. And so you're always going to get this array of interests, but in service of the person in the big chair. So if you bring in just to say a name, the CEO of Chevron, you know, they're going to know a lot about oil policy, but they're probably not going to know all about demographics. So everything that they see, they're going to see through that lens. So they might make, say, a good energy secretary or state secretary. but you probably wouldn't put them in health and human resources.

Everyone has their own tunnel vision. And when you're all in service of the government, especially the person leading the government, that tunnel vision applies through your personal lenses. So a lot of the issues that I discuss, it's not so much that Trump's administration is unaware, although it is. It's that so was Obama's administration.

So to a certain degree was Biden's. So to a certain degree was George W. Bush. Everyone's focused on what they're focused on. And that doesn't change just because you like or dislike the guy in the big chair. So that's kind of piece one. Piece two, how the Trump administration is different. The Trump administration did not form itself the normal way because Trump was literally a real estate mogul and only a moderately successful one at that and a reality TV star and a very successful

one at that. So you can imagine some sort of people who were in his orbit who he then brought into government. in his first term he did not expect to win. And so he had to rely very, very heavily on the Republican Party rather than his own connections because he didn't have any. And he found the process deeply aggravating because he was bringing in all of these people who had studied policy their entire lives. And they knew so much about what was going on.

And Trump always felt like the dumb person in the room. And so he usually fired them. And he went through three times as many cabinet secretaries. in his first term as any three two-term presidents had until that point. In order to make sure that never happened again in his four years out of power, he took over the institution of the Republican Party, and among other things, destroyed the public policy arm. So there is no longer a roadmap for people who are on the conservative side of the equation

to learn about the world and then serve a political purpose. That was ended. So the political party that is the Republicans now is only an election. vehicle. So when Trump came in the second time, there was no Republican bench to tap. And in his time out of power, he didn't run anything. So he didn't make any new connections with people who knew how to do things. Most people in that sort of scenario would like figure out what they got wrong. No, no, no, no, no, no. It was just a lot of umbrage. Anyway, so he comes in and the only people who he brings with him are two people who had been with him for a while. Susan Wiles,

staff and Steve Miller as assistant chief of staff. And that was about it. A few people like, say, Chris Wright at Energy or John Bergram at Interior were elicited to come in because they were topics that Trump really didn't overly care about. But everyone else was an ideologue and probably an incompetent one at that. So we got people like Pete Hegeseth at defense, who was, let's be blunt, a failed reservist. But culture war. Okay. So where does that leave us now? Under normal circumstances, you would still have the institutional machinery of government reporting to the political leadership, whoever it is. But Trump was so furious in his first term of having people who knew things show him up that he went through the top 6,000 positions in the federal government, basically fired them all, and has replaced very, very few of them with his own people. Because there just aren't a lot of people who can be slavishly loyal to someone like Trump and actually know something.

And so out of those 6,000 people, I think only 1,200 spots have been filled. You may notice that with judges, we've basically at a standstill. Trump is not appointing judges because he can't find people who actually have law degrees who will do what he says on the bench. The fact that he's constantly maligning, for example, the Supreme Court justices that he himself appointed in his first term. And he would be judge exactly where they fall in the equation. And so all of these positions are just being left empty. And so we're paying for the entire federal government,

but it lacks a leadership that would interface with the president by design. So if things that I talk about with demographics and industrial policy and trade policy and de-globalization and the alliances and all that, even if it were being generated at the lower levels, there's no layer between them and the White House to take the information, assimilate the information, distill the information, and then present the information. I mean, hell, we had Tulsi Gabbard, it's DNI for the first year, and she's either a Russian plant or really, really wanted to be. So even in those circumstances where some would be can punch through the fog and actually say the truth around Trump, if it doesn't match his view, it doesn't really matter.

So, for example, early in the Iran War, Chris Wright, the energy secretary said, well, of course, if the Strait of Hormuz closes and 20% of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas goes off, line, of course prices are going to go up. And Trump's response was publicly basically, so no, I don't think that this administration really has any real idea on what's going on with military affairs, the economy, or anything else. And that's just how we're going to be for the remainder of this term. And keep in mind that whoever the next president is is going to inherit this lobotomized government structure. And assuming, the moment that it's someone who wants to actually run the government as opposed to lobotomize the government, it's going to take them a couple of years just to find the people that's necessary

to make it function again. So this is not just a Trump problem. It's a Trump plus a year or two problem. Best case scenario.