What Comes After Trump?
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How did Jon Favreau set up the episode and the stakes for 2025 politics?
This episode is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity, a company that bought land on the U.S.-Mexico border to stop Trump's wall, sued Elon Musk for $15 million for trespassing on that land, used profits from red states to fund abortion access, and paid people to give a shit about the 2024 election. Did they really? I was going to say, at first I thought that was a joke. How about that? Good for them. Cards Against Humanity is one of the only companies stupid enough to stand up to Donald Trump. pretty stupid right here. They don't profit from their political stunts, so if you want them to be able to afford a good lawyer, consider buying one of their new games, like Cards Against Humanity Tales, a book of fill-in-the-blank stories for horrible people, or Shitlist, a new way to play the game where you write the answers, or Party Mouth, a new party game about shouting obscenities as a coping mechanism for the hellscape we live in.
Sounds like my everyday.
You've got some good stocking stuff for ideas here.
Really good. Really good. We have some here in the office. Check them out. You listen to Crooked Media, so you're probably smart enough to figure out how to buy their stuff. Anyway, Cards Against Humanity apologizes for interrupting your podcast with their bullsh**.
We're just this big, distracted, divided, commercially-minded, busy, noisy country. And it takes a lot to break through the noise of our lives so that we can actually see clearly. I think there's a human temptation just to say, well, how bad can it be? It's never happened before.
I'm Jon Favreau, and you just heard from our last offline guest of 2025, author and journalist George Packer. One of the big themes of the show this year has been the future of American democracy in a world where so many forces, technological and otherwise, have made it so much harder to sustain. And I couldn't think of a person who's written more eloquently and brilliantly about the topic than George Packer. He wrote a piece for The Atlantic a few months ago called America's Zombie Democracy that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. And he's returned to fiction with his latest book that's also about this topic, The Emergency. It's one of my favorite discussions we've had. But before we get to it, I want to set it up with some thoughts I had about the year we just survived.
In politics, as in life, things change gradually, then suddenly. Donald Trump began 2025 at the peak of his political strength. He was more popular than he'd ever been, more powerful than he'd ever been. No other president in recent memory has had such free reign to implement their vision for the country. Trump had a Republican Congress ready to do whatever he asked, a Supreme Court that had just granted him immunity, businesses, law firms, media outlets, and colleges that capitulated to his demands. He installed loyalists that gave him direct control of the military, law enforcement, and just about everything else. Trump got his tariffs, his big bill, his deportation force with a budget the size of most armies.
He still whines about Jerome Powell and a few court rulings he didn't like. But 2025 has been the golden age of Trumpism, MAGA in its purest form. And guess what? Most Americans don't like it. Most people don't think the president is doing a good job. They don't think he's doing a good job managing the economy. They don't think he's doing a good job managing the government or immigration or our relationship with the rest of the world. That's what most people tell pollsters. That's why most people voted against the president's party in this year's elections, including a not insignificant number of Trump voters. I'm not saying Trump is imploding in magazine shambles, even if our YouTube titles might suggest otherwise, but things are not going great for them.
Trump is still quite popular with Republicans, but the cracks are starting to show. The guy lost Marjorie Taylor Greene. The House has revolted over everything from health care to the Epstein files.
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