Sia:I kinda hate this guy for his snotty attitude towards most humans (most are beneath him), but he can turn a phrase incredibly well, and being a founding member of the (former) Republicans against trump's - The LINCOLN PROJECT, I like to read him (but hate watching him). I have a paid subscription to his Substack because he is that good, even when I occasionally disagree with him.

Rick Wilson’s - Against All Enemies, Substack

The Danger After Trump

Why The Hate Machine Behind MAGA Won't Let Go

By Rick Wilson - Nov 12, 2025
∙ Paid

My upcoming book, The Hate Machine, is well underway. Today, I want to introduce you to the concept and tell you why it’s an existential threat to America, even after Trump.

Donald Trump will die someday.

For those of you who, like me, hit your 60s and have become very interested in the promising field of longevity research and the expanding range of genetic, pharmaceutical, and other treatments to extend our span of days, it’s too late for him to benefit.

We’re not quite at Longevity Escape Velocity yet, but that’s a story for another day.

Trump, that someday is sooner than later.

Setting aside that his gravesite will become the largest gender-neutral restroom in history, and that we will never be rid of the stench of his low corruption, his ticky-tacky trailer-park Versailles whorehouse design sensibility, and the wreckage he’s caused our economy, our national reputation, and our immortal souls, I have some additional bad news. (Sia: he really can turn a phrase!)

The comforting myth I hear whispered in Washington is that Trump was a brutal storm, and the calm comes after. I hear it from Democrats. I hear it from Republicans. I hear it from people who work “in the process” of lobbying and legislation. I hear it from reporters.

As they tell it, after Trump, we’ll go back to “regular order” and the world will spin quietly on its axis as we take on a new world without the Umber Apollo illuminating every corner of our politics.

It’s a story told to children to quiet them as the wind roars outside and the wolves howl in the night; comforting, but false.

We’ll wash off the graffiti, sweep up the broken glass, call the insurance adjuster, and get back to normal, right? That story sells well in green rooms and donor salons, but it misreads the moment.

Trump was not the storm. He was the barometer dropping so fast your ears popped. He was sui-generis, to be sure, and did more damage than anyone believed possible.

Most are preparing, either gleefully or dolefully, for Trump’s passing from the political stage and his passage across the Styx.

There’s one group, I call the Hate Machine, an emergent, leaderless assembly of parallel financial interests, political desires, and ideological demands, that isn’t just ready for his passing; they’re eager for it. For The Hate Machine, the post-Trump world means they’re leaving beta and launching FaaS: Fascism as a Service.

The Machine has tasted nearly unchecked power, and damn did it like the flavor. In four short years (2016-2020), a brief chaotic interregnum, and a malicious encore, it discovered how to bend institutions to its will through a mix of chaos, lobbyists, campaign cash, lawlessness, and procedural ruthlessness.

It saw how America mostly shrugged at masked troops and secret police in the streets. It watched as wild violations of American constitutional rights played out on MAGA influencer channels as entertainment. It saw that in the name of “stopping illegal immigrants,” Americans were even more willing to accept a surveillance Panopticon.

The courts, stacked for decades by Machine co-founder Leonard Leo, could be gamed when they weren’t supine. Inspectors general could be fired. “Independent” agencies could be captured by installing loyalists who read the law as a suggestion and ethics as a punchline. Reporters covering government could be banned, blocked, and replaced by stenographers. That lesson stuck: when referees won’t (or can’t) throw flags, the goon squad wins.

It also got damn near everything it wanted.

The deregulatory bonanza. The tax-code alchemy that turns private jets into write-offs and treats carried interest like a protected species. The persecution of enemies. The pardons for outright, unrepentant criminals. The judges, stacked like cordwood. The kneecapping of oversight. The wink-and-nod alignment with oligarchs, foreign and domestic, in Trump’s first term is now a swingers party, swapping partners and evil ideologies.

The Machine learned that if you keep the outrage agitporn firehose running, you can strip-mine the state in broad daylight, and most of the press will cover it like a weather report.

The Project 2025 goons, the Council for National Policy, and a vast constellation of far-right groups are all punching items off their checklists, perhaps not as fast as they’d like, but these are people who think in decades, not quarters.

Underneath all of it runs a boundless contempt for democracy, the republic, and the rule of law. Not theatrical contempt, not talk-radio cosplay.

Real contempt. Curtis Yarvin and Steve Bannon-level contempt.

Elections are acceptable only when they ratify the Machine’s preferences. Courts are legitimate only when they produce the desired outcomes. Congress is tolerable only as a rubber stamp or a hostage. The Constitution becomes a vibes document, interpreted by influencers and attorneys who treat authoritarianism like a feature request.

Back in 2016, the Machine needed a Trump.

It needed a shocking blend of celebrity, shamelessness, and sociopathic intent to break old guardrails and teach a generation of followers that the only sin is losing.

That prototype served its purpose. Now the Machine has refined the software, juiced it with AI. It can slot any reasonably compliant vessel into the frame: a governor with the soul of a reform school hall monitor, a senator with a lib-owning podcast, a tech baron dressed in hoodies and OnClouds.

The charisma requirement is lower. The obedience requirement is higher.

Meanwhile, the Machine is adopting and refining technology at a pace the pro-democracy side still treats like a panel discussion topic.

It builds persuasion funnels that personalize resentment. It weaponizes behavioral data, LLMs, and synthetic media to scale propaganda with near-zero marginal cost. It A/B tests rage. It automates intimidation. It runs always-on culture war micro-campaigns that never need a door knock or a press conference.

The other side remains trapped in the High Church of Consultants, interpreting focus group auguries like Roman priests read the guts of birds, writing memos to each other about broadcast TV GRPs, and “organizing” while the Machine trains models on your grandmother’s Facebook habits and your sweet nephew-turned-Groyper’s YouTube history.

The Hate Machine is also delighted to face a Democratic Party that does not understand the acquisition, use, and retention of power. (QED, this week and the Hateful Eight.) The party that should lead the pro-democracy coalition is a bag of cats on the best day, more interested in proving moral distinction than building a durable advantage.

The Machine is not confused. It studies power like a STEM subject. It counts votes, whips members, buys media companies, endows think tanks with budgets bigger than many nations, flips school boards, captures state legislatures, and funds state AGs. It does the boring, grinding, unglamorous work of entrenchment. It treats winning as table stakes and holding as the real game.

Because for The Hate Machine, this is not a campaign.

It is a culture.

Campaigns end. Cultures persist.

The Machine built an identity market with loyalty perks, status hierarchies, codes, and rituals. It replaced civic belonging with a grievance tribe, always outraged, always scared. The hats and slogans are the public-facing skin; the connective tissue is a network of media, social sites, meetups, churches, clubs, Telegram channels, Discord servers, small-dollar donor farms, merch, and (not inconceivably) billionaire PACs.

MAGA voters don’t vote for the Machine. They live inside it.

Follow the money and you see why it won’t stop. Wall Street, private equity, and the Valley learned they can arbitrage politics like any other inefficiency. They invest in deregulation when they have no competition, and regulatory capture when they do. They win tax advantages and enforcement holidays, then harvest monopoly rents.

The returns are obscene. Why would they quit? The Machine scouted and rewarded the right allies, wrote legislative wish lists, and staffed agencies with reliable assets who read “public interest” as “investor interest.” The partners got their exits. The limiteds got their distributions. The country gets the bill.

Along the way, they transformed the economy in fundamental ways toward a rentier, monopolistic model infused with crony capitalism and cheerful exploitation. “Sorry you can’t afford food. Care for a 50-year mortgage?”

Competition is a dead letter. Labor and workers, blue, grey, and white collar, are being squeezed to pulp by AI and exploitation, and it’s going to get much, much, much worse to ensure Meta, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, and the rest of the Machine’s tech division keep getting those trillion-dollar valuations.

Data has become a commodity, and you, dear citizen, are the strip mine. Public goods were privatized; private harms were socialized. The Machine does not pretend to love markets. It loves a moat. It loves a captive audience and a captive regulator. It loves a world where the check arrives at the table marked “externality.”

The culture war shock troops don’t win as much cash as the money men, but they keep the engine hot. They play a long game with school curricula, book bans, performative cruelty, and the monthly Two Minutes Hate aimed at the season’s out-group.

They measure progress by obedience, not policy, and their audience, fed on Fox and Facebook and Twitter rage-whoring scamfluencers, is more obedient than a certain conservative U.S. Senator whose dominatrix is in a bad mood.

That seems trivial until you realize obedience scales better than law. It gets inside people’s heads and tells them what is permitted to think, to say, to be. The victories are quiet: a chilling effect here, a fired teacher there, a library board cowed, a university preemptively silenced. The money boys don’t mind; it’s all just risk mitigation in another form.

And the alt-right current that was poison to most Republicans in 2016 has now been laundered, folded, and placed back in the drawer.

The Groyper culture metabolized the old taboos and turned them into merch, memes, and khaki-clad marchers.

What was once whispered on /pol is now recited on mainstream stages and from Tucker Carlson bro-ing out with Nick Fuentes.

Younger staffers in the Machine treat it as ambient ideology, like office air. The liturgy is all there if you listen: demographic panic, conspiratorial anti-pluralism, ecstatic illiberalism, hideous nihilism dressed up as ironic transgression.

The establishment’s reaction is not horror. It is a shrug. The integration is complete.

So what should you expect after Trump?

Expect the same project, sleeker, less noisy, better optimized.

Expect fewer tantrums and more outcomes. Expect operators who don’t need attention but crave authority. Expect technology that moves from persuasion to prediction to preemption. Expect elite impunity wrapped in efficient competence. Expect the weaponization of boredom, where abuses arrive as updates and swipes, not outrages, and the press treats the steady accrual of power like A/B tested messaging rather than a structural assault.

The Machine learned something else in the last decade: accountability is a choice made by elites who fear shame.

If you do not fear shame, accountability is negotiable. If all your allies share the same incentives, it is optional. If you can buy your way through the bottlenecks, it is avoidable.

The Machine will never fear shame. It will not fear hearings, subpoenas, watchdogs, lawsuits, fact checks, protests, or think-piece scolds. It will only fear sustained counter-power.

That means the answer cannot be vibes and hopes, statements and resolutions, or appeals to norms bulldozed by Trump and sold for scrap.

It requires a counter-Machine that treats power like a craft: build state capacity, compete for rule-making posts, reform the information commons, revive antitrust with teeth, fund uncaptured civic and alternate media outlets, wage lawfare against corruption as aggressively as they fund capture, create durable civic infrastructure, and modernize political tech until it actually contends in the same weight class.

Treat it like a multi-decade, multi-front campaign whose goal is not a news cycle but institutional resilience.

I’m sorry to say, but this won’t feel like a Hollywood finale.

It will feel like plumbing and procurement, talent pipelines and legal trenches, small wins that accrete into walls the Machine cannot easily scale. It will feel, in other words, like the work they already do while the rest of us argue over adjectives.

The danger after Trump is not a personality.

It is a system that discovered it could replace the personality without replacing the program. It tasted power and found it sweet. It got what it wanted and wants more. It despises the constraints that make us a republic. It no longer requires a singular demagogue to run the script.

It is learning faster than those who would oppose it. It has built a culture that reproduces itself. It has investors who love the yield. It has transformed the economy to suit its appetites. It fields a long-game culture war that never sleeps. And it has laundered its once-toxic racial politics into something both marketable and mandatory inside the tribe.

If you still think the storm will pass when Trump leaves the stage, please feel free to step outside. Feel the pressure drop. Hear the hum in the wires.

The Machine is still here, working tirelessly.

There’s no single leader, no conference room with big screens located in a volcano lair. It’s an emergent organism of groups that all want power and wealth, with the Republic optional and democracy a feature to be deprecated as soon as possible.

And unless we build something more substantial, more innovative, and more relentless, it will return to power with J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, or some other obedient stooge.

MAGA has always craved The Last Election, an end to all opposition.

The Machine is working to accomplish just that.