The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - What Does Life After Donald Trump Look Like? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Trump has adopted a leadership style similar to that of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. That means power is solely concentrated around him, and the party ideology and institutional foundation have been weakened. Without Trump, the Republican Party has no life force. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4hfJppF

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from the Sierra National Forest. This here is the Madeira Creek Headwaters. That's Madeira Peak up top. And over here we have Lady Lake. I'm obviously on my annual backpacking trip and I loaded up on a bunch of patron questions before I left. So let's go on a walk while I talk about politics. The question is, let's assume that tomorrow, Donald Trump is gone. Then what?

This is a great question because one way or another, Trump will eventually be gone, either because his term will end or because the fact that he's the oldest president we've ever had and his physical and mental attributes have been visibly affected in this past year. Anyway,

step one. The only way Trump leaves off as if his term ends or if he passes. He will not relinquish power in the way that Biden kind of did softly at the end of his term. You guys may have noticed, but Trump's got a pretty firm opinion of himself. And anyone who is around him is not around him because they're actually good at their job. They're around him because they cater to him. This is the least competent cabinet we've ever had as a country most notably in the national

security realm. And if you're looking at the official successor, that would be vice president, J.D. Vance, J.D. Vance is a junior senator from a mid-sized state who has no independent following. So the only way J.D. Vance or really anyone can succeed Donald Trump is if Donald Trump makes them the actual successor and campaigns for them on a day-to-day basis while he's still alive, that's not going to happen while he's still president. So whatever happens between now and the next federal election is going to be a little wild from a conservative political angle because you've got a president who insists that all the attention be his. I'm not going to deal with the possibility of a third term. That would be a disaster.

Supreme Court would have no problem ruling than that out. If we get to that point, I'll address it then. Anyway, the core issue is that the Republican Party is not what it once was. It used to be a coalition of not just conservative populists, but anti-abortion activists, business voters, national security voters, fiscal voters, law and order voters. But Trump has systemically purged those last four groups, law and order, business, national security, and fiscal. From the party to the point that he campaigned against all of their champions, and they're pretty much completely removed from the House at this point. There's still a few in the Senate. but he's already defeated a couple of them in Republican primaries to make sure that there are no

countervailing views as to what it means to be a Republican. It just means to be pro-Trump. And that means that what's left of the Republican Party simply doesn't have the votes to win a real election. So the party now is the party of Trump, and that makes it really hard for it to be the party of J.D. Vance or Rubio or anybody else. What we have seen over and over and over again is Trump's popularity with Maggot, does not translate to other candidates. His endorsement matters. Uh, but nothing else. And as to the endorsement, let's go this way, as to the endorsement, it's not focused on any sort of ideology or political agenda. It's just focused on whether or not Trump believes you are being sufficiently loyal. So it started with him campaigning against people like, say, Mitt Romney,

who were kind of the iconoclast Republicans. But in this last year, any person, including deep in the blood Maga people, who had been with Trump since the beginning, unless they support him 100% of the time on every single issue, he will campaign against them. And we saw that, for example,

with Nancy Mace, who is best described as a Karen, I think is the correct term. We've seen it with Corny and Teton and Taurus. Texas. I'll probably see it with Howley and Missouri here pretty soon. You break with Trump on one issue and that's it. You're out. So there is no policy depth here. And that is by design. If you dial it back two years to when Trump was out of power, he took over the Republican Party. And the first thing

he did was close down the recruitment arm and then the policy arm. The idea would be that there could be no independent ideas generated in Trump's party. And, and And any recruitment had to be based entirely upon loyalty to Trump as a person. So the Republican Party institution no longer generates policy papers or trains candidates or looks for candidates. It's just a question of who captures Trump's eye whether they didn't get that magical endorsement or not. And if you fast forward this to the next election, it does broadly suggest that the Republican Party is absolutely unelectable. but of course for that to be fully true the Democrats have to have an option for you to choose and that's going to be a topic for a different video.

In the meantime, how does this stack up to the other major powers? Well, it's actually very, very similar to what we're seeing in Russia and China right now. Let's start with China. When Xi Jinping came in, was it, 14, 15 years ago, he started a broad purge of all regional politicians, the bureaucracy, the media, the academia, and basically kind of like Trump. Anything that was anything except for personal loyalty to him was purged. And we're talking here well over 100,000 people. And I would argue that the last advisor he had that was any good was disposed of eight years ago now.

Since then, Xi has basically spent most of his day writing ideological treatises on that Jijing Ping thought. So it's basically intellectual masturbation. And now, I've written a bunch of books. And my newest one, the fiction one, comes out in January. It's a whopper. It's like 230,000 words. Jiu-Jing-Ping has written over, what is it? 30,000 pages? So just shy of 300,000 words while he's been premier. You know, writing books takes a while. But he's basically locked up in his office, making shit up. And there really isn't much of a governing structure anymore in China. The equivalent of the joint chiefs is just Xi Jinping and an inquisitor.

The cabinet is the smallest it's ever been. And so in many ways, Trump is leading us down a Chinese path to a complete collapse of decision-making and governing capacity. But the only thing that the Chinese government has that the American government right now doesn't have is there is a vision. It's one that will lead them into broken hell, but there actually is a vision for the local bureaucrats to carry out. Let's see.

Other big country, of course, is Russia. Vladimir Putin ran a cult of personality long before Donald Trump even thought about running for government. Keep in mind that Putin was first elected president or appointed president back in 1999. It's always been there for a bit. Here the problem is different. The Russian system is based on the alliance of the intelligence personnel at the higher level, the people who were running the KGB during the Soviet times, and organized crime, especially the Tombov group based out of St. Petersburg.

And as a result, the normal tools of statehood are not available to the Russian government. And so they can never really make people's lives all that much. better. So the deal that Putin has cut with the population is I will make sure that the country is stable and you can have no political opinions about anything. And until the Ukraine war started turning south this year, that's broadly held. I don't want to make a prediction about how long Putin can hold on. Russia and history is replete with leaders like him who look unassailable until the day it all shatters. But really the big moment was when one of his organized crime groups led by who prokerov sorry I can't check things right now he's the guy who ran

Wagner he was a chef and a bully and a murderer fun combo that Putin put in charge of a paramilitary group of former special forces folks and they basically went around killing people for the Russian Federation and not just in Ukraine anyway eventually he decided that Putin had gotten too soft. And so led a rebellion and basically drove his people, captured the city of Rastavandan, and then about a thousand mile drive, or a thousand kilometer drive to Moscow. What was really notable is that no one tried to stop him. Eventually, it was a phone call with Putin that got him to step down the attack, and then eventually Putin had him assassinated. But the point is, is that the Russian state is completely hollow at the top. And the number of people

who are part of the elite now is very, very low. At the start of the Ukraine war is probably less than 120. We've had a few people killed, a few people died, and they're just not capable of bringing in new people. And within that elite, there's an inner circle of just five people now, only two of which are really competent. And that's it. That's the Russian government.

So what Trump is doing here doesn't really stand out in terms of contemporary politics. We see something similar going to, on in several Latin American countries. We see something similar going on in Turkey. But that doesn't mean it's good governance. It does mean that when you do have change, since there's nothing behind the great leader, you should expect that change to be relatively catastrophic. Because Putin, like Xi, like Trump, they've not built up any institution to outlast them. For them, governance is them. They are the country, the country is them. It's very, very, very French. And when it goes, it'll go quick and it'll

go completely. As back to the United States a little bit, bottom line is Trump has no successor and he doesn't have a plan to have one. And if he decides to campaign for someone, that someone is going to have to lick his boots every day of the campaign right up until the vote. And that is not something that captures a very wide range of potential voters. Trump dominates the primaries. There's no argument there. He is the party. But moving beyond the primaries to the general election, I don't think that's something that what he has set up can do. All right, that's it for me. See you guys next time.