I'm interested in thinking through the question of how the Republican Party is likely to change once Donald Trump no longer has a future as the head of the GOP. The best way to explore that question in the present, I think, is to examine the factional rivalry between those who support Vice President JD Vance's seemingly inevitable campaign for the presidency in 2028 and those loudly rallying around Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio. That's one goal. I'll explore it in some depth below. But I also have another, divergent point to make'namely, that all such analysis is thoroughly hypothetical. All of it assumes a reality in which the wildest wild card in American political history has ceased to play his wild-card role while candidates are campaigning to succeed him. I'm talking, of course, about the 80-something Trump himself. If he has died or been rendered incapacitated by the start of 2028, then the reasoning I'll lay out in my examination of the rivalrous Vance and Rubio factions may prove illuminating. But in the event that Trump remains (relatively) lucid and vital as a political force as we head into the 2028 primaries and general-election campaign, all bets are off. In that case, the post-Trump GOP may well end up stillborn....

To be an 'influencer' on the American right in 2026 is to be a screamer'someone who believes his or her livelihood depends on blaring at maximum volume a five-alarm fire at every available opportunity. Indignation is the default emotion motivating these pronouncements. It's an anger provoked by panic and perceived injustice. Everything great about the country is in jeopardy. Freedom itself hangs by a thread. Our very integrity as a nation is at stake. Because they'our political opponents, our enemies'seek our collective destruction. Michael Anton used assumptions like these to make his case for supporting Donald Trump's presidential bid in the fall of 2016. He and his Claremont Institute colleagues made similar arguments in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest in order to justify Trump's effort to remain in office despite losing that election. By the start of the second Trump administration, the rhetoric of existential threat had spread across the MAGA-supporting right to become close to ubiquitous. Either Trump was #winning'or the country itself was on the verge of collapse, crumbling into the gutter thanks to the suicidal impulses of the America-hating left....

Scientists are raising the alarm about proposals from the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) that they say could severely limit academic freedoms at German universities and research institutes. The AfD is predicted to become comfortably the largest party in elections in two German states, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in September. Although most German parties currently have a policy not to enter into any coalition with the AfD at the state or national level, the AfD could form a government with a sufficient lead. The party is also currently leading in polls of voters at the national level. Education policy in Germany is almost entirely devolved to its 16 constituent states. In Saxony-Anhalt ' where recent polls have seen the party's support exceed 40% ' the AfD laid out sweeping proposed reforms to the state's university system in its election manifesto, in a response to what it sees as a 'deep crisis' in German science. Published in April, the manifesto includes calls for 'critical climate research', the setting up of a state institute for 'critical Islamic studies', the creation of a chair in population studies to investigate the 'dying out of our people', and the abolition of gender studies. It also says that moves over the past two decades towards the 'Anglo-Saxon' system of bachelor's and master's degrees have 'completely destroyed the German university', and proposes to reinstate German Diplom and Magister degrees (although both degrees are generally considered equivalent to a master's in Germany, they are not widely recognized internationally)....

In America the enemies of liberalism stole its name so we stole 'libertarian' from the left anarchists as a replacement. In Chile, as in much of the rest of the world, that never happened, so we can still call ourselves liberals. In those countries, so far as I can tell, some call themselves libertarians ' Chile has a libertarian party and my hosts have 'libertarios' in their name ' either to emphasize the connection to the American movement or to signal a more extreme version of liberalism. I was told that the Libertarian Party of Chile got 14% of the votes in the recent presidential election. That sounds impressive since the best the US Libertarian Party has managed is 3.3 %, but part of the reason is that Chile has its elections in two rounds, with the second round between the two parties that did best in the second round. A libertarian in Chile can vote for the libertarian party in the first round and his preferred major party in the second. A libertarian in America who votes for the LP gives up his chance to vote foe one of the major party candidates. That suggests an advantage for the Chilean system: It provides a way in which a minor party can show its strength and by doing so grow into a major party. Argentina has the same system, which may explain how Milei was able to create what is now the strongest party in the country....