What comes after Trump?
Watch my latest conversation with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller on the future of MAGA
Most of the political conversations I hear these days are about things happening in the next few months: developments in the Epstein cover-up happening in Washington, the midterm elections, and the various moments of infighting currently dogging the Democratic Party. But this week on Gloves Off, Tim Miller and I spent a good part of our conversation on a question that I think gets underexplored: what will the Republican Party actually look like or become on that fateful day (that WILL come) after Donald Trump?
Tim is uniquely positioned to answer that. As a former Republican strategist turned Bulwark host (he worked for Jeb Bush back in 2015!), he’s spent years watching his old party get hollowed out and rebuilt into something else entirely. His read on what’s coming next is more interesting than most of what I’ve been hearing from others- even as he has become fairly progressive on a lot of fronts in his anti-MAGA era.
His core argument is that the old Republican Party is dead, and there’s no path back to a Nikki Haley version of the GOP, at least not in our lifetimes. America First isn’t going anywhere when Trump leaves the stage. The real question, Tim says, is which version of America First inherits the movement. In our conversation, he laid out three scenarios: a Trump family monarchy, where Don Jr. or someone in the orbit gets anointed and we get more of the same grift in different packaging; a corporate-MAGA hybrid, most likely embodied by Marco Rubio; or an America First insurgency, where someone like Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene argues that real America First has never been tried.
Watch our full conversation here:
We also talked about what that transition could mean for the rest of us. If the GOP’s post-Trump future is some flavor of nationalist populism, then I certainly believe that the Democratic answer cannot be a return to the pre-Trump status quo. It has to be a real, muscular economic populism that speaks to the same grievances people like Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson are speaking to, without the bigotry and conspiracy theories. Whether the Democratic party is ready to do that is probably one of the most consequential outstanding questions facing them in the lead up to 2028.
Tim and I covered a lot more in this conversation, including Democrats’ Virginia redistricting win, the intra-party fight over Hasan Piker, why neither of us has a horse in the Democratic nominee fight yet, and of course - New Orleans Jazz Fest, because IYKYK. ⚜️🎺⚜️
You can watch this week’s full episode on YouTube, or listen on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to subscribe to COURIER’s YouTube channel for fresh content every week.