Donald Trump’s presidency will be unpredictable, but in our final show, we make some guesses about what’ll happen anyway. WIRED’s Tim Marchman sits down with reporters David Gilbert and Makena Kelly to talk about what could go wrong between Trump and Elon Musk, if Christian nationalists will get their porn ban, the rise of human brain organoids, and whether the new administration will finally declassify those UFO files.

Tim Marchman is @timmarchman. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

Mentioned this week:
The Crypto Industry Hails David Sacks, Its New ‘Czar’ by Joel Khalili and Makena Kelly
RFK Plans to Take on Big Pharma. It’s Easier Said Than Done by Emily Mullin
As FBI Director, Kash Patel Could Offer January 6 Rioters Retribution Against Their Enemies by Tess Owen

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Tim Marchman: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of science, politics, and security, filling in for Leah Feiger, who is unable to be here due to a personal emergency.

The election season is over and it’s our final episode of WIRED Politics Lab. One thing we do know about the next four years is that Donald Trump will be right at the center of things, shaping events, making everything about him, and he’s always unpredictable. Equally unpredictable is the, at least for now, apparent copresident, Elon Musk. And even beyond Trump and Musk, 2025 seems to have a lot of wild cards in store. What’s next for the far-right? How is the administration going to pay off the political debts it owes to Christian nationalists? How are the Lords of Silicon Valley going to both sidle up to the administration and doused with one of their own for influence and proximity to the president? And what can we expect from broader developments in the tech world, ranging from the continued growth of generative AI to the very uncertain status of TikTok as an entity able to legally operate in the United States? Joining me to take some educated guesses are two WIRED politics reporters, Makena Kelly. Hi, Makena.

Makena Kelly: Good to be here.

Tim Marchman: And from Cork, Ireland, David Gilbert.

David Gilbert: Hey, Tim. Good to be here one final time.

Tim Marchman: So let’s start with Elon Musk. Makena, let’s just assume, as we’ve already predicted on this program, that the Musk-Trump romance, the copresidency, will not survive. What already existing fault line do you think could cause it to explode?

Makena Kelly: I think, I don’t know if it’s any specific policy issue, but they have just two huge egos that I imagine Trump might get upset with Elon maybe getting a little bit more TV time or time on people getting excited about him on Twitter, that would be my main guess.

Tim Marchman: What about you David?

David Gilbert: I kind of felt, [inaudible 00:02:06] falling apart already because there were reports coming out a week after the election that he was overstaying his welcome, Elon Musk, and acting as co-president in certain respects. But he’s still there, he’s still meeting with world leaders alongside Trump. It’s amazing that it’s even lasted this long. I think he may hang around or he may be there until Trump needs someone to blame for not fulfilling all these wild promises that he’s made on the campaign trail in terms of efficiency in government or whatever else it may be, and he needs to blame Musk. The one problem I guess with that is that Musk is still extremely powerful, has a huge platform with X and huge amounts of money to hit back at Trump if needed. But who knows? It’s really hard to say, I didn’t think the relationship would last this long, but they seem to be going strong.

Makena Kelly: One thing too, people in Trump’s orbit are incredibly disposable. We’ve seen that when it comes to his cabinet. We’ve seen it when it comes to even people in his family, it feels like. And so I can imagine a world where we’re already seeing Amazon, Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy or Mark Zuckerberg, somebody who also has a ton of money and is also in the tech space maybe challenging Elon for that seat, maybe attending more meetings and then getting between that relationship and maybe casting him aside.

David Gilbert: Maybe we could have that Musk-Zuckerberg fight after all for—

Makena Kelly: Oh my gosh.

David Gilbert: … to sit at the right hand of Trump.

Makena Kelly: With all of the WWE stuff going on with this, you’d imagine that maybe we have a bigger chance of seeing that fight.

David Gilbert: There you go, Linda McMahon could get involved. What more do we need?

Tim Marchman: I would pay to see that. Makena, what do you see ahead for X and Truth Social, which is Trump’s social media network that now accounts for, I believe over half of his fortune. They’re kind of targeting the same audience, do you see them coming together or being a source of friction for the two?

Makena Kelly: They don’t seem like too much of a source of friction right now. It seems as if Trump is still continuing to use Truth Social as his main messaging platform. The ways that I’ve seen nominees announced was through Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary at the transition, posting screenshots of his Truth Social posts. And now we’re seeing Trump using X a little bit more. I think it was towards the end of the summer that we saw a lot of his Truth Social posts being cross-posted to X for the first time in quite a while. And so maybe Truth Social just kind lingers in the background and falls apart because of internal problems. And of course there’s already been struggles within the company running it. Devin Nunes has apparently reportedly fought with other executives, other executives who are there at the ground floor starting the app have exited. And so it might just be one of those things where again, personalities are colliding and X might just win out on top.

Tim Marchman: It certainly has a larger user base. David, can we talk a little bit about Musk on the world stage? You referenced the meetings with world leaders. It’s weird. He was on a call with Ukrainian president Zelenskyy, he’s also recently been palling around with the prime minister of Italy. Should we start thinking of him as a primary driver and financier of global far-right politics right now?

David Gilbert: Yeah, this is a fascinating aspect of it because we’ve seen the kind of growth in the network of far-right communities internationally in 2024. The ties have become much stronger between the US and Europe. We’ve seen that happening at a kind of lower level where communities are definitely forging closer ties, and Musk could potentially be a key figure in that in 2025. Just yesterday he was at a meeting with Viktor Orbán in Mar-a-Lago alongside Donald Trump. Viktor Orbán, obviously the Hungarian Prime minister who has instituted very repressive authoritarian policies in that country and a person who Trump has Lionized and Valorize repeatedly over the years. We’ve seen, as you’ve said, his very close relationship with Giorgia Meloni in Italy. This week he had to deny that he was in a relationship with Giorgia Meloni after [inaudible 00:06:23], the far-right influencer posted a suggestion that he was doing that, and Musk said, “No,” in response on Twitter. And one of the most interesting things to me is how there is now a suggestion that he is going to use his money to influence the next elections in the UK just as he used his money to back Trump this time around. There was a report I think a couple of weeks ago saying there was a hundred million was going to be invested, that was denied. But just yesterday, a billionaire in the UK, Nick Candy announced that he was going to be putting seven figures into Reform UK led by Nigel Farage. Again, a very close ally of Trump. And Elon Musk said this morning or confirmed this morning that he’s been in communication with Nick Candy about donating money. So it’s pretty clear that Musk is looking to build those relationships globally, not just in the US and that’s a pretty terrifying prospect.

Tim Marchman: I’m interested to know what the rest of Silicon Valley is thinking right now. We’ve talked about Bezos and Zuckerberg have both been trying to make nice with Trump. Who do you see as the likely winners and losers in Silicon Valley in the coming year? Let’s start with you, Makena.

Makena Kelly: Sure. What I’m seeing a lot of right now is just this week the Kids Online Safety Act was pushed to the next administration, and so I’m assuming with all of the excitement around protecting kids that law might find itself being passed next year, it’s looking a lot more likely than it has been for the last couple of years. And so that is a major loss for social media companies. I think the people that will see the most success in the Trump administration will be people in companies that have government contracts, whether that is with data centers, AWS, things like that. But when it comes to people running social media companies, except for Elon, right, people who run these platforms, I do see folks at the Justice Department, at the FTC, Andrew Ferguson was just nominated to be the chair of the FTC this week under Trump, I still see a lot of people wanting to incur some kind of wrath on these tech companies for censoring them allegedly.

Tim Marchman: What about you, David? Who are you looking at as winners and losers?

David Gilbert: What’s happening right now is people are just scrambling and fighting for position and for influence. Just the fact that Zuckerberg is calling Trump, he wants to remain part of the conversation, he doesn’t want Musk to be the only social media owner who has the presidency. So I think the winners will depend on ultimately who’s willing to bend the knee the most because that’s what Trump values as loyalty. And so whoever is willing to … We saw a post on Truth Social yesterday, I think from Trump where he said that, “Whoever’s willing to invest a billion dollars in the US is going to get, pretty much any tax break they’re looking for, is going to get all their environmental licenses approved even before they apply for them.” So he’s willing to give all of these benefits to whoever is willing to give him the most money. And so I think that’s what it comes down to is whoever’s willing to put their money where their mouth is and show their patriotism through investing huge amounts of money in the US are going to be the biggest winners.

Tim Marchman: I feel the need to point out there, the GDP of the US is about $27 trillion, which is 27,000 billion. So a billion is just not that impressive a figure in the grand scheme of things here.

David Gilbert: But he put it in all caps, Tim, so that makes it look much bigger.

Tim Marchman: [inaudible 00:10:06]

Makena Kelly: Should we address the crypto industry too?

Tim Marchman: We should, but before we do, I wanted to ask you, do you see all this feeding at the trough as a big change? It feels like traditionally Silicon Valley hasn’t actually run big lobbying operations.

Makena Kelly: They have, but not themselves. What we’ve seen—

Tim Marchman: Fair.

Makena Kelly: … there’s been millions and millions of dollars put into lobbying Congress specifically. But now I think after going through a first Trump administration, they realize that the way to get things done in Congress isn’t lobbyists. We haven’t seen basically anything done in Congress for so many years, no big changes since basically I would say the infrastructure Act and before that, maybe the ACA. Those are the main legislative wins that Congress has had. And so to get things done under a Trump administration, it’s going to be being around Trump. That’s the difference here is that you have CEOs now who are doing lobbying on their own behalf. Jeff Bezos, I wouldn’t know if he had any conversations with Obama, and now this is all playing out in public.

Tim Marchman: And it’s a fascinating thing because that’s so personality driven. Trump is so unusually driven by just vibes, and these are not the most dynamic personalities in the world.

Makena Kelly: He loves people who are successful. Lobbyists are just little, sorry if you’re a lobbyist, but people see them as like cockroaches running around Congress. Those are not the types of people that Trump sees as successful and people that he should be listening to.

Tim Marchman: So let’s talk about crypto now. I think we can all agree that the crypto industry is going to do very well under this administration. The idea of unregulated securities seems really big with some of these big personalities who are driving things. Let’s talk a little bit about that and what is on the table. One of the things that particularly intrigues/alarms me is the notion of some sort of federal backing for Bitcoin that’s been floated, which at least seems to me as an amateur economist, the absolute worst of all worlds in that you have an unregulated security, which the government is nonetheless backstopping the same way it would FDIC insured deposits or something like that.

Makena Kelly: The crypto industry is one of the biggest winners this election year. Trump made an entire new group of people, a Crypto Advisory Board, a Crypto Czar, which is David Sacks, a very influential VC and friend and Elon Musk and—

Tim Marchman: And a podcast host.

Makena Kelly: And podcast host, true, with all of his besties, is what he calls them. So there’s a whole new group here. And then when you look at the appointees that Trump has made to the important agencies like the Commerce Department and Howard Lutnick or the SEC and Paul Atkins recently, the people in these positions of power to do these things are very excited about crypto and wanting to create whatever this light touch framework is that the crypto industry wants. The crypto industry is always saying that they want to be regulated, they just want to be regulated in a specific way. So now it seems much more likely that we’ll actually see something get done.

Tim Marchman: So one definite potential loser in Silicon Valley is TikTok, which filed an emergency motion in court this week to try to stop the US from banning it. For people who don’t remember this, under the current quarter, TikTok has to be sold to an American owner or it will be banned in the US starting on January 19th. Makena, what do you think is going to happen, first with the court, but looking further out, what do you think TikTok looks like under Trump?

Makena Kelly: I imagine that this is going to be really, really hard for them to get out of now. Trump has said that he wants to save TikTok, that all of the stuff that he did in his first administration, he doesn’t really believe it anymore and he wants the app to stick around. The funniest thing that I saw recently from Trump was that he was actually posting pages of PDFs on Truth Social of all of his TikTok analytics and how well his TikToks did. So he loves the thing. But if this goes to SCOTUS, it’s going to take several months, I imagine, and I don’t know if someone like ByteDance wants to wait that much time and all of that uncertainty, they’ve already dealt with so much uncertainty whether the app could stay in the United States. And so I think we’re getting closer to the idea that maybe someone like Frank McCourt, a billionaire or someone like Larry Ellison and Oracle maybe take over the app. That might be the more appetizing position for ByteDance and TikTok come next year.

Tim Marchman: David, do you agree with that?

David Gilbert: Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens because of, will Elon Musk have an influence over this? Will Mark Zuckerberg be able to influence him on this? Do they even care?

Makena Kelly: Sorry, my chaos prediction would be that Elon Musk buys TikTok and then revives Vine. That would be the funniest thing that could happen, and maybe probably the worst thing. We already saw Elon Musk of course joking and doing a poll on X saying that, “Should I bring Vine back?” Because it was such a beloved app.

Tim Marchman: I would be highly in favor of someone bringing Vine back. I don’t know that Elon has proved to be a great product manager over the last couple of years.

Makena Kelly: No.

Tim Marchman: Obviously influencers and creators on TikTok and other platforms played a huge role in this election and really seemed to overshadow legacy media in a lot of ways. Musk in a lot of ways is the biggest example of that, philanthropist, billionaire, Iron Man, above all, he’s probably an influencer at this point. Who are each of you looking at as a breakout person over maybe the next year or so? And also is there anyone who’s influence you think might be on the wane? Let’s start with you David.

David Gilbert: We’ve had a lot of discussion over the last month or however long since the election happened where we’ve had this idea where the Left needs a version of Joe Rogan, even though Joe Rogan isn’t necessarily right-wing in all his views, but this idea that a new left-wing superstar or podcaster or influencer needs to come along and do what they believe Joe Rogan did in the election. But I think that’s just fundamentally flawed thinking. I think what happened more so is that there was just so many of these influencers and podcasters that the Trump campaign engaged with on a one-to-one basis. I was watching, for a story I was reporting the other day I was watching a … Five days before the election, Kash Patel, who’s now nominated as the FBI director, he was on a podcast on a platform called Pilled.net, which most people will never have heard of and never will hear of again. But he went on that podcast as part of the Trump campaign to, he was talking about going out to vote, getting people out to vote, and this was on a QAnon-adjacent show. And it’s just that level of engagement with podcasters and influencers who aren’t that prominent, I think that has had much more of an impact on the outcome, and that is something that I don’t think people from the Democratic side really got or get yet, and I think that’s what will need to happen.

Tim Marchman: Last week, WIRED had its Big Interview event in San Francisco, and Mark Cuban spoke a bit about that. He didn’t use this phrasing, so I’m loosely paraphrasing, but basically the idea being instead of looking for this person who’s going to reach 30 million people, you have to go out there and talk to tons and tons and tons of people who might be reaching 30,000 people a piece. And that this idea of finding a new megaphone is probably a bit dated. I tend to agree with that myself. Makena, I’m curious what you think about both that dynamic and if there are any individual people you’re looking at on the up and the down.

Makena Kelly: Yeah, I think what you guys are talking about, what Mark Cuban talked about is really important. The Democrats, however, did spend a majority of their money on micro-influencers, I think, when you look at some of the data, it’s people with under a hundred thousand followers. I think it has more to do, not with the influencers themselves, but the communities around them. Democrats and even Republicans in many ways, they see influencers as just a billboard of advertising when really what is important about them is that you want to engage with this not as advertising, but as organizing. And once you think about this as organizing, this is where we get into why people love Hasan Piker. Well, they like what he does, they like what he says, and engaging with him is fun. I was listening to an interview Hasan did on Tuesday night with FTC Chair Lina Khan. They’re talking about a Kroger’s decision, an antitrust decision, all of this stuff that typically would be fairly boring, but there was 40,000 concurrent viewers at the time, the chat was popping off and calling Khan based and all of this stuff. They were excited to participate, not just with Hasan, but with the people in the community. And so I think the important thing coming out of this election is not just finding the most wickedly talented or attractive or best communicator, but finding those engaged communities that can then influence each other as well. I think when I think about the biggest people who are winning, I am definitely surprised that Hasan Piker has the influence that he has now. He has been largely rejected by the Democratic Party as being someone that’s a bit more progressive, he’s pro-Palestine. He is louder on issues that the mainstream Democratic Party doesn’t really want to talk about all the time. And so he was invited to the DNC. He had a whole booth set up to stream and do his thing for an entire day until he got kicked out. But that’s another story. And then yesterday, he had Ta-Nehisi Coates on his stream, immediately after he had Lina Khan, and then he had a comedian afterwards. That is killer programming. That’s the kind of thing that I think Democrats would be better off considering than all of this spending and advertising that they have been doing. And on the right, I don’t necessarily think that the Nelk Boys are this far-right podcasting organization, but they have gotten really involved in politics this go around. They have created a voter outreach organization. They did multiple podcasts with Trump and the folks on their team, and that is the kind of audience that I think the Trump administration and the Republican Party is going after. They’re going after a more fratty atmosphere. They’re going after something that is a bit more Barstool Sports, and I think the Nelk Boys really fit in well there.

Tim Marchman: We’re a politics podcast, we’re also a tech podcast. And this is a very broad question, but I’m curious, what are the potential developments in tech that you have your eye on next year, AI, quantum computing, biotech, anything you’re just interested in, especially as it pertains to politics? Let’s start with you David.

David Gilbert: One of the most interesting conversations I had this year was with someone who is tracking dark web job boards and how Russian disinformation campaigns are advertising for AI experts, people who can build either large language models or they can develop tools that have no barriers because all the open source ones that are available at the moment have certain barriers on them that prevent these guys from doing things that they might want to do. So I think it would be really interesting to see if next year we actually get to the point where these disinformation campaigns have their own technologies that they can use and roll out at scale that will actually make a difference.

Tim Marchman: And how about you, Makena?

Makena Kelly: Something I’ve been reading a lot about that I’m obsessed with reading about is human brain organoids and how this very quickly has this technology been ramping up to the fact that you can use a biological brain created in a lab to run software. And I imagine that maybe we might see some folks putting a lot more research and funding into that. I think it’s fascinating, and I do think that there … I’m curious about when we talk about computing power and needing so much energy for crypto or AI, I want to see if this kind of new biological processing tech gets involved in it and all.

Tim Marchman: That’s a great answer. I am going to rudely answer my own question and say that I think Signal will be the defining tech of 2025. Everyone should download it and use it. It’s an end-end encrypted communications app. If you set disappearing messages and the head of the FBI wants to see your comms, he won’t be able to get them because they won’t exist. The obvious upside is privacy for journalists, researchers, congressional … Anyone who might come under the eye of Sauron from the administration. The downside is that there’s probably going to be a lot of communications that journalists have relied on being able to get out of the government, whether via the Freedom of Information Act or even discovery and lawsuits, that is just not going to exist anymore. And in the long term, this might even be a pretty significant challenge for historians and archivists, though probably no one is too concerned about them right now, although they should be. We’ll be right back to talk more about what’s coming up in Trump’s second term.

Tim Marchman: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. Let’s get right into it, which of the Trump cabinet picks, assuming they’re all confirmed, are you going to be watching most closely and why? Let’s start with you Makena.

Makena Kelly: I am going to pay the most attention to who is expected to be the new FCC chair, Brendan Carr. He posts all the time on X how much he wants to expand Starlink, an Elon Musk’s technology. And he also talks about, he’s gone after TikTok. He’s also of the mind that the FCC can regulate online speech, which is something that it has never done before and is not necessarily in its charter. So I am curious to see how far this goes or if it is this realignment Republican conservative mask that he may have been wearing for the last couple of years.

Tim Marchman: How about you, David?

David Gilbert: There’s just so many to pick from. Like what is Kimberly Guilfoyle going to do as ambassador to Greece? That worries me a little bit.

Makena Kelly: Chilling.

David Gilbert: But I think for me, I’m going to be very closely looking at what Kash Patel does as the head of the FBI. No more so for the reason that his appointment has reinvigorated the QAnon community to an extent that I haven’t seen it in quite a long while because he’s obviously quite linked to that community. He’s given it support in the past. He’s mentioned in two Q drops and they believe that his appointment as head of the FBI will usher in mass arrests, public executions, and this glorious new age for America.

Tim Marchman: I am going to be keeping an eye on RFK Jr. because he has said he’s going to stop the FDA’s war on sunshine, and I want to know how he carries that out. One of the big questions is whether the Trump Justice Department under figures like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel will pursue investigations of his political rivals, his enemies and various people he has claimed he will bring the weight of the law against. What do you think, David?

David Gilbert: I think if they can, they will. One of the things that they come back to constantly is this idea that they are going to eradicate the deep state, which is this kind of amorphous term for someone within the Justice Department or the federal government that has been working against Trump, which that’s core QAnon conspiracy belief, which has now become Republican orthodoxy, that there is this deep state working against Trump and he’s fighting back against them. And Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are two of the most loyal figures within Trump world, and they are, from what they have said publicly, willing to do exactly what he wants. So he said in, I think, a Meet the Press interview during the week that he wouldn’t be directing them, but at the same time, I think a minute later said that he wanted the people who were involved in the January 6th Committee to be prosecuted. So he’s clearly got a list of people he wants to investigate, and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel seem to be willing to do whatever he asks them. Now whether they’re allowed to do it from a legal perspective, I think that’s up in the air at the moment.

Tim Marchman: Yeah. Makena, what do you see as barriers either legal or political with investigations here?

Makena Kelly: I don’t know. That is a hard one because what are norms and what are systems anymore?

Tim Marchman: I think that’s a great answer, honestly. I think we should just move on. So one thing we’ve covered extensively this year is the Stop the Steal movement, which has been regrouping in the wake of Trump’s victory. David, I imagine you have some predictions on where the movement goes from here. First, who do you think Trump is going to pick to be his election czar, the head of the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency? Is he going to go with the MyPillow Guy?

David Gilbert: Yeah, Mike Lindell, when I spoke to him last month, he very clearly was willing to step up into whatever or any role that Donald Trump is willing to give him around elections to secure because the Stop the Steal movement is going nowhere. They’ve spent four years building this massive network, hugely well-funded and influential, and with a network of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of volunteers all across the country. They’re already talking about the midterm elections in 2026 and the fact that the war isn’t over, that everything they’ve done till now has only proven that the system was corrupt in 2020 and that they need to continue to make improvements to it. So the Stop the Steal movement is going nowhere. Whether Trump appoints someone specifically to oversee elections, I don’t know. The fact that he’s won now I think is all that he wanted. He doesn’t really care about the nuances of electoral law across the country and whether that gets better or not because, at the moment, at least come 2028, he won’t be running for election again.

Tim Marchman: Makena, Trump has obviously been made a sort of temporary monarch by the Supreme Court, which has said that pretty much anything he does as president, or at least anything he can semi plausibly claim was official business, he can’t be held accountable for it. He’s immune from prosecution. Is there anything you can think of that he would do that would cause a significant backlash even among his supporters? And I want to differentiate between two classes of supporters, one being the public, especially the hardcore MAGA base, and the other Congressional Republicans who unlike him have elections to look at.

Makena Kelly: At this point I do think Trump can get away with anything. When he was running for president the first time he said that, “He could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it.” And with all of the lawsuits and court appearances and everything, indictments that he’s undergone over the last couple of years, he’s gotten away scot-free. So I have a hard time believing anything can catch him at this point.

David Gilbert: I agree with Makena. I think he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. I think he can do pretty much anything he wants because he’ll be able to blame anyone, everyone, for failing to complete the promises, like for example, the mass deportations that he’s promising. There’s this rhetoric, this belief out there that on day one there’s going to be these massive sweeps of immigrant communities and they’re going to get rid of a million people in the first year, according to JD Vance. But when that doesn’t happen and it won’t happen, then people will just either forget about it and move on or Trump will claim that he’s doing something in the background and it’s happening and people don’t see it, or … These Trump supporters have been so convinced and so brainwashed over the years to believe anything he tells them.

Makena Kelly: Actually just thought of one thing. Part of the Heritage Foundation’s plan for a Trump administration was to ban porn. And with all the child safety bills that are going to affect, if they actually get passed next year and we’re required to do this online verification and porn gets banned, I can definitely see some people being pretty upset and being mad.

Tim Marchman: I agree with that, and I will also differ with the two of you in that I think foreign adventurism, the whole machinery of the imperial presidency tends toward it, no matter what Trump’s anti-war rhetoric is, it’s also matched by him loosely talking about things like invading Mexico. And with all the chaos in the world, especially in the Middle East, I think there’s a reasonably high percentage of something going catastrophically wrong involving the US military that gets hung around his neck and I think that would have the potential to really scramble what seemed to be very set politics right now.

David Gilbert: But do you think it’d make any difference because Trump’s not going to care if people turn on him, especially the voters because he doesn’t need them anymore?

Tim Marchman: I don’t think he does, but he does need Congress, which is pretty deferential right now, but that can turn, and we have seen that turn very quickly. So I’ll just say there’s some potential there. Christian nationalists helped Trump win the White House this year just like they did in 2016. What do you think they’re going to demand from Trump as payment, and will they get it? How about you, Makena? We may have just answered that question.

Makena Kelly: Yeah, I think there’s two things, maybe putting forth a federal abortion ban. That is definitely something that I imagine Christian nationals wanting, they’re already pushing for those kinds of things. And then of course, like I mentioned, a porn ban. And so I imagine those are maybe the two big things.

David Gilbert: David, I think quite a sizable proportion of them will want more. I think especially education is where they’ll want a major shift towards the right in terms of putting Christianity back at the center of the education system. We’re already seeing it in Florida where Liberty University has, a Christian university, has signed contracts with certain public school boards in the state, and that allows their students to go into public schools in Florida and teach classes and take part in the education there. So there’s already beginning to be a bit of creep there in terms of Christian ideology making its way into public schools. And I think that’s where a lot of the Christian nationalists I listen to at least want to see the biggest change.

Tim Marchman: Finally, this is a very important one for me personally, will Trump’s administration finally declassify information about UFOs and the JFK assassination? We’re talking Roswell, hidden files, videotapes, all sorts of things that are rumored to exist, and if so, what’s in there? David?

David Gilbert: What’s in there? Oh, wow, that’s a big question. They promised to do it. I guess there’s a chance that they will. If they do, I don’t think there’s going to be proof of aliens. Sorry, Tim.

Tim Marchman: What about you, Makena?

Makena Kelly: I feel like I have this folk story in my head, and maybe it’s real, I need to check, but of Jimmy Carter upon entering office, he saw some UFO files and wept, and he never said anything about it again.

Tim Marchman: I believe I’ve heard this too.

Makena Kelly: Yeah, and I don’t know if it’s real. I just tried to do some searching. And thinking about Trump finding these things out, I don’t know if he would release them. I wouldn’t be optimistic.

Tim Marchman: I don’t believe they’re going to release anything because he was already president and did not release the material in question. I believe that what the secret files would show if declassified is that the US engaged in a cover-up of Lee Harvey Oswald and his relationship to the Soviet Union in fears that if it were made public, it would lead to a nuclear war. And that much of the subsequent cover-up has been a cover-up of the cover-up. And I believe that the UFO files would show that extraterrestrial biological entities crashed in New Mexico in the 1940s and led the US government on a voyage of discovery about the nature of the universe, that includes aliens having created well-known religious figures throughout human history as guides to give humans instructions on how not to damage their bodies which are containers for souls that aliens are harvesting for energy. This has been the theory, at least that many UFO proponents have been putting out there since the 1980s, and I of course firmly believe it’s true, maybe Donald Trump will confirm that. Makena and David, thank you so much for being here. When we come back, it’s time for our last ever Conspiracy of the Week.

Tim Marchman: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. This is Conspiracy of the Week, that part of the show where our guests bring their favorite conspiracy theories and I will be judging in Leah’s place. The winner this week gets to brag about it forever, so I hope both of you brought something good. Makena, let’s start with you.

Makena Kelly: Yeah, I’m glad that you brought up aliens and the JFK assassination because I’m going to complete the trifecta with this. One of the conspiracy theories that I think has gotten its time in the sky, shall we say, this year, has been chemtrails. These are the trails that planes leave as they fly in the sky, apparently spreading all of these chemicals and ruining and poisoning us, when really it is just water vapor. Just earlier this year with the hurricane in North Carolina there were conspiracies about chemtrails taking place there. Lawmakers in Tennessee passed a bill having to do with something and regulating chemtrails, crazy stuff. But this week, oh my gosh, I lost it when I saw this. There was what appeared to be a satirical joke online about a Lufthansa pilot denying to spray chemtrails on his son while piloting a plane. He took a grandstand apparently and said, “I will not do it.” And the chemtrail, I guess we can call it the chemtrail community, was really thrilled with it. And it’s not true, it was a joke. Yeah.

Tim Marchman: All right. What do you got, David?

David Gilbert: I just want to say that chemtrails in Ireland, the conspiracy groups right now are huge. We seem to suddenly have the conspiracy groups here in Ireland, have seemed to discover chemtrails. So I must share that with them because they love it. So yeah, my conspiracy this week ca with Luigi Mangione, who is the alleged shooter in the United Healthcare CEO assassination. And soon after he was arrested and pictures of him came out, almost immediately, there were a ton of conspiracy theories about the fact that he wasn’t the actual shooter. He was either a patsy that Nancy Pelosi had placed there because of her links to his family, or many other conspiracies. My favorite one was the conspiracists who started analyzing his eyebrows because in the pictures that first came out, before he was identified, you could only see his eyes, so his eyebrows were kind of this big thing where people were looking at his eyebrows and because they’re quite impressive. But now when his identity has been revealed, people are zooming in on his eyebrows and claiming that it’s not the same person, that they have done a hair by hair analysis in some cases where people are looking at the eyebrows and saying that this cannot be the same person. There are avowed eyebrow experts on Telegram who are claiming that this is absolutely 100% not the same person. And as our colleague Tess Owen told me this morning, there is a conspiracy around that there is an eyebrow assassination group or a group of assassins with magnificent eyebrows that he’s a part of. So I’m looking forward to seeing where this eyebrow conspiracy goes in the future.

Tim Marchman: OK. I’m sorry, Makena, but I think we have a clear winner here, eyebrow forensics, assassins who can be identified by their magnificent eyebrows—

David Gilbert: It’s the new phrenology.

Tim Marchman: That is a great final conspiracy of the week. And I think with that, thank you again for joining me today, and thank you for having joined Politics Lab all throughout the year. Do you have any final words for our listeners?

Makena Kelly: I will plug one last thing, and that will be the newsletter, which we’ll carry on, so you can subscribe to that newsletter in the show notes.

David Gilbert: I would also urge everyone to subscribe to Makena’s newsletter because it’s really great, and I would like people to continue spreading the craziest conspiracy theories online because it keeps me entertained every week.

Tim Marchman: This is our last episode of WIRED Politics Lab. Leah, our usual host, was unfortunately unable to be here today, but she did pass along a note to share with you, which I will now read. She says, “My favorite part of hosting this podcast was being able to bring WIRED stories from across the newsroom, and particularly the politics desk, to this entirely new format. While this podcast is ending, these stories aren’t going anywhere. These reporters aren’t going anywhere. And with Trump 2.0 looming on the horizon, we’re more committed than ever to addressing extremism, disinformation, techno-fascism, the rise of Elon Musk, the rise of Pod Bros, and even the rise of Peanut the Squirrel, and dissecting that for all our audiences. A shout-out to you, our listeners who decided to take a chance on this podcast. This was such a privilege. I’m able to offer a few pieces of advice for the coming year, keep an eye on the news, but not too much. Keep an eye on your friends quite a bit. Keep your family and loved ones close, and find things that bring you joy. Always feel free to write to me at [email protected]. I so look forward to hearing from you, and thanks for listening.” And that does it for WIRED Politics Lab. You can still find WIRED politics coverage online and by signing up for the WIRED Politics Newsletter, which Makena writes week. If you have a moment, please subscribe to our other podcast, Uncanny Valley, which is excellent. Special thanks to our producer, Jake Harper and the rest of our production team that made the show possible. Pran Bandi is our studio engineer, Amar Lal mixed this episode, Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Global Head of Audio at Condé Nast. And I’m Tim Marchman. Thanks for listening to the show.