Is Something Worse than Trump Coming?

The unstoppable force of American conspiracy culture is colliding with the immovable object. What comes next?

It was bound to happen eventually: The Trump administration have painted themselves into a corner, having gotten elected partially on the promise that the government is in possession of the list of elite pedophiles who the conspiracy cookers all believe control the world. Now the cookers kind of want them to cough it up, and they’re being a little more insistent upon it than Trump apparently expected.

First thing, and I think this should kind of be basic knowledge when you’re dealing with conspiracy theorists—don’t do that. Don’t make direct, tangible promises to them. If you see an easy path to victory in your campaign for king of the zoo that involves getting all of the 700 pound gorillas on your side, then it’s a good idea to maybe make some assurances that your policies will lead to a general increase in the weekly banana ration across the duration of your term. It’s a bad idea to say “there is a giant vault in the zookeeper’s mansion containing six million bananas and I will open that motherfucker on day one.” If there is no such vault you’re not going to make it six months in before you have a crowd of gorillas outside asking “where are the bananas, Donald?” with an increasingly stern tone.

I'm a hominid, Donald, my vision isn't based on movement. You think I'm Tim Pool or something?

I get it, he thought everyone was going to forget about that shit if he just cranked the “racism” dial all the way to the right and overloaded his supporters’ id with MS-13 invasion slop until they couldn’t remember any of the other stuff he said about pedophiles and egg prices. He was wrong, though, and now he’s got Catturd and Mike Cernovich and Ian Miles Cheong picking up their pitchforks.

It is very enticing to believe that this might be the thing that finally brings Trump down, but I need you to understand something: What’s bringing him down is not better.

It would be lovely if, like, the Democratic party or the universities or, god, you know, somebody respectable made a united front against this turd, but the fact is that we’re starting to have to face the uncomfortable notion that Donald Trump is no longer crazy enough for his base. If the Trump voters reject him for being too much of a normal politician now, they’re not going to start voting toward the more moderate end of the coo-coo bananas train.

We’ve spent so much time thinking about Trump being the worst American president in history that we haven’t had the guts to complete the sentence: Worst American president in history so far.

What further cacodaemoniacal horrors could be possibly await us in the next election cycle? I don’t mean JD Vance, by the way. JD Vance is sufficiently evil but he’s midway through a DeSantis speedrun between dangerous contender and unelectable dipshit. Let’s look at some unfortunately plausible scenarios:

President Jones

Okay, long-timers know that I’ve said this before, and you run on long enough it’s only a matter of time before you start repeating yourself. Also I’m allowed to repeat stuff I said back when I had like a hundred and ten subscribers. By the way, all you folks, thanks for sticking with me.

Back when I first floated the concept of an Alex Jones presidential run I was still trying to comprehend Donald Trump and I was basically trying to dare myself to come up with a comparably bonkers pop culture media figure to grant unlimited power to. I couldn’t just say, like, Crispin Glover. It had to be a particular combination of nuts and evil. The only person who fit the bill was Alex Jones.

It's always been very difficult to picture, but less difficult now than it was in 2015 when Jones was still just the “chemicals in water turning frogs gay” guy who conducted radio interviews with the interdimensional shapeshifting lizard theory dude. For decades he was the local radio broadcasting-out-of-a-parked-caravan caricature that half a dozen X Files characters were based on. But that’s what’s actually in demand right now. The primary meltdown about this administration certainly isn’t over its insufficient cruelty—it’s over its failure to deliver to American conspiracy culture.

It's a really hard pill to swallow, but these guys would have been MAGA as fuck

As I said a few weeks ago, the big hurdle that this administration faced from the outset is that it’s conspiracy culture catching the car. In other words, the Republican capture of all three branches of government means that they have no obstruction and thus nobody to blame for their failure to disclose alien contact, reveal who killed JFK, present the truth about 9/11, or—most importantly at the moment—release the Epstein Client List.

These conspiracies are as bullshit as they have ever been, but the conspiracy core of the GOP base isn’t going to accept that the president can’t release this information because it doesn’t exist. The only explanation they are going to tolerate is that they haven’t found a president with the balls to do it. They thought Trump had those balls—he was, after all, once the most prominent spokesman of a constellation of Obama conspiracy theories that included Obama being born in Kenya, his father being a communist spy, him being secretly gay, him being secretly Muslim, and his wife Michelle being transgender.

Let’s not forget the tan suit

The alarming conspiracy batshittery of the Trump base can be clearly shown by the frightening success of Robert Kennedy Jr’s independent presidential run. Kennedy doubts the germ theory of disease, believes in chemtrails, and kind of might believe Jews are responsible for Covid. So many GOP voters wanted to make him president on these credentials alone that Trump had to offer him a job to stop him dividing the vote.

You might think “Well, surely Kennedy’s established desire to be president makes him a more likely 2028 contender than Alex Jones.” I’m not sure that’s true, though—the Trump base, I think, see Kennedy as a softer and less charismatic version of Trump, with a narrower range of policies. He’s an anti-vax raw milk and seed oils miasma theory crank, which is all fantastic qualities to lead the Health Department but he doesn’t have a lot to say about the Mexican invasion or Pizzagate. Alex Jones is a much more well-rounded conspiracy celebrity, someone who’s been doing this shit since the days of Satanic Panic and Bohemian Grove. Oldschool stuff.

I sincerely think Jones would easily win the Republican primary if he ran in 2028. I would never have said that a year ago, but then Trump won again on an even crazier ticket than he ran on last time. That said, I think that if he won the presidency he would likely just defer everything to his staff, kind of like, you know, Trump is doing now. It probably wouldn’t actually feel much different to now, which is why, stunningly, I’m going to call the Alex Jones presidency the best case scenario on my list.

President Musk

Thank God for the Constitution, right? Let’s hear it: Give me an Article 2! Give me a Section 1! Give me a Clause 5! What does it spell? No Person, except a natural born Citizen…

Okay, here’s the deal: The Supreme Court is a rubber stamp for whatever the Republican Party wants to do, and it stopped pretending to use the Constitution as the backbone of its decisions some time ago. Last year it ruled that a president is allowed to commit crimes, even though a president’s duty as outlined in the Constitution is to see that the law is upheld. Just last week, it gave Trump the green light to bypass Congress and unilaterally dismantle the Federal Department of Education, which is also ostensibly forbidden, and didn’t give an explanation why. And while they haven’t outright declared the 14th Amendment void in order to pass Trump’s executive order abolishing birthright citizenship, they have ruled that you’re not allowed to get in his way, so it’s basically the same thing.

Elon Musk has decided that he’s no longer a Republican, though. His latest ambition is to build a new political party, reportedly inspired by Curtis Yarvin’s white nationalist “CEO king” political philosophy. While he hasn’t outright said that his goal is to be that CEO king, you can hardly imagine who else he could see in the role.

Unless… hey, does anyone remember what even happened to this guy? Is he dead or what?

The good news is that the political party thing is incredibly unlikely to take off. Registering a party in all 50 states with all of their individual rules and regulations is arduous and expensive and requires an army of lawyers, and he’s not allowed to fund the whole thing himself, which means the world’s richest human being is going to need to go panhandling.

Besides, he’s already distracted himself by turning his antisemitic Grok robot into an anime companion that takes its clothes off.

"Have you heard about the white genocide in South Africa, lover?"

But if the MAGA movement turns against Trump in favor of a further-right and more dedicated white nationalist, they might skip the nuisance of abandoning one party to join another and simply pledge the same fealty to Musk that they once pledged to their disgraced orange god-king. They’re going to have to replace Trump eventually anyway—the dude’s old and has shitty legs.

If the Republican Party wants Elon, they’re going to get Elon. The Supreme Court will almost definitely see cause to dispense with the natural born citizen clause. They don’t have to say why.

It is difficult to even begin to imagine what a United States under the unitary control of Elon Musk would look like, but it would be the end of the country that any of us remotely recognize. Trump, for all his excesses, still maintains the desire to keep the fundamental veneer of the country. He might abolish government departments but he’s not going to abolish, like, the Senate.

You have no such guarantee with Elon Musk, because his single minded ambition is becoming the most powerful and important human being in history. As the death toll caused by his unilateral shuttering of USAID shows, there is no upper limit to the number of poor people he is willing to grind up to achieve that goal.

What works in our favor here is that he’s very easily distracted. It’s kind of important now to make sure he keeps gooning to Anime MechaHitler.

President Carlson

I’ve been coming back to this idea over and over again in my head, and not just recently, but practically ever since he was fired from Fox News, but I can’t find anyone else talking about it. A Tucker Carlson presidency is frighteningly plausible, isn’t it?

MAGA, like Trump himself, was forged in Fox News, and they trust and venerate it to an extent that they love installing its personalities into positions of power. For many years, Carlson was the face of Fox. Since parting ways with the network, he’s pulled his fans with him, and while the focus has been on figures like Trump and Musk, Tucker has been rising and rising and rising.

And he scares me! He’s a toadie, but not a sycophant. He’s Trump, but smart. He’s Trump, but actually presidential. He knows how to play the game. He’s very good at the game.

A fact that hasn’t attracted a lot of coverage during this most recent drama is that Carlson is kind of quietly rising as a leader of the anti-Trump wing of MAGA. Of course, anti-Trump is still too strong a term to use for what’s boiling, but the former “Daddy’s home” guy has been “just asking questions” of the president lately. An increasing number of stern questions.

After Fox cut his strings, he’s been getting bolder as a leader of the far right, now regularly attacking mainstream Republican figures like Ted Cruz to their face on his show. And look, I know the whole wolf behavior turned out to be a myth, but he really does look like he’s dominating the other high status males on the way up to issuing a challenge to the Alpha.

Or, if you prefer, he’s climbing up that battle tower thing in Mortal Kombat.

What’s frightening about Carlson is that, unlike Musk or Trump, it feels like he’s less interested in self-serving than he is in actually carrying out the ideological mission of a far right autocratic regime, so he’d probably be much less “TACO” about obliterating Medicare, deporting non-whites, and enacting a brutal protectionist and/or isolationist revolution.

Also, obviously I’m going to hear about it in the comments if I don’t mention the fact that he’s in bed with Russia to a degree that would give Robert Mueller a triple conniption. So America, like, please don’t.

I'm writing a whole book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era tumbled down the fascism pipeline and set about smashing up the world out of hubris and spite, and how they worked their way into the deepest corridors of power.The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: