Badlands Daily: 5/26/26 - GOP Civil War Escalates, Cape Cod Goes Viral, AIPAC Receipts

CannCon and Ghost open Tuesday fresh off Memorial Day with a show that does not waste a single minute. An Escondido army veteran who flew Trump flags outside his home dies from an unprovoked beating, and CannCon and Ghost frame it as the inevitable product of years of normalized political violence. Axios floats AOC, Elizabeth Warren, and Gavin Newsom for 2028 in the same breath it publishes a hit piece on Trump's "irreversible choices," and CannCon fact-checks every bullet point live. Ghost delivers his framework on why the Republican Party is not MAGA's party and never was, and CannCon plays the Cape Cod taxpayer speech that has been going viral as the model for what grassroots self-organization actually looks like. The GOP Senate civil war is front and center: Republican senators are threatening to tank the reconciliation bill over the anti-weaponization fund and the ballroom, both of which involve zero taxpayer money. Ghost plays Tim Burchett insisting AIPAC money is no big deal because Jews are only two percent of the population, then plays John Podhoretz saying out loud that Jewish money will be used to destroy any candidate perceived as antisemitic. Ghost then presents the Israeli government's own approved budget allocating $750 million to influence American politics through online influencers.