What Comes After Trump?
Offline with Jon Favreau
Crooked Media
4.7 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2025
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does 21st century authoritarianism look like in the United States? Author and Atlantic staff writer George Packer joins Offline to talk about America’s zombie democracy, who could be the most dangerous MAGA heir, and how Democrats should be fighting for the country. For our last episode of 2025, George and Jon connect the dots between Trump, polarization, oligarchs, AI, social media, Charlie Kirk and more.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity, the 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. |
| 0:16.2 | Did they really? |
| 0:16.9 | I was going to say, first I thought that was a joke. |
| 0:18.8 | How about that? Good for them. Cards Against Humanity is one of the only company stupid enough to stand up to Donald Trump. |
| 0:24.6 | 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, |
| 0:35.4 | a book of fill in the blank stories for horrible people, |
| 0:37.6 | or shit list, |
| 0:38.6 | a new way to play the game where you write the answers, |
| 0:40.8 | or party mouth. like cards against humanity tales, a book of fill in the blank stories for horrible people, |
| 0:37.6 | or shit list, 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 every day. You get some good stocking stuff for ideas here. Really good. Really good. We have some here in the office. check them out. You listen to Cricket 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 bullshit. |
| 1:06.2 | We're just this big, distracted, divided, commercially minded, busy, noisy country. |
| 1:16.1 | And it takes a lot to break through the noise of our lives so that we can actually see clearly. |
| 1:25.7 | I think there's a human temptation just to say, well, how bad can it be? |
| 1:30.4 | It's never happened before. |
| 1:39.6 | I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from our last offline guest of 2025, author and journalist |
| 1:45.5 | George Packer. |
| 1:46.8 | One of the big themes of the show this year has been the future of American democracy |
| 1:50.5 | in a world where so many forces, technological and otherwise, have made it so much harder to |
| 1:56.4 | sustain. |
| 1:57.3 | And I couldn't think of a person who's written more eloquently and brilliantly about the topic than George Packer. |
| 2:02.7 | 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. |
| 2:08.6 | And he's returned to fiction with his latest book that's also about this topic, The Emergency. |
... |
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