So, Max, over the weekend, I was talking to somebody about what Trump would do with another term.

Sounds like a chill time at brunch, Aaron.

It was an Instagram DM fight with someone who had posted a story claiming that both parties were the same, actually.

And something occurred to me.

That it would be terrible?

That, and we're missing one very important piece of information.

And what's that?

We know what Trump wants to do because he won't stop talking about it, and we know what he did

last time, but we know a lot less about what the people around him would do.

Oh, that's a great point, because so much of Trump's first term was him getting boxed in

or let around him policy by his own inner circle.

Right, but there's only so much we can know about an inner circle that doesn't exist yet.

Well, Aaron, I have some good news for your next Instagram argument because a flurry of recent

reporting just revealed that a kind of shadow White House has quietly formed with Trump's

blessing, and we know a lot about what they want to do because they wrote it down.

This is going to be like that scene in the South Park Imaginationland episodes when all the evil breaks out of evil imagination land. Right?

It's going to be worse.

I'm Max Fisher. I'm Aaron Ryan. And this is how we got here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question.

Our question this week, what would the people around Trump do with a second term?

An important, terrifying question.

But it's hard to know how to read the tea leaves since infighting and bungling were such big features of Trump's first term and, frankly, his entire career in business as well.

Yeah, it's exactly that chaos that the shadow White House I mentioned earlier formed in part to try to avoid in a second term by having everything in place and ready to go.

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