Episode Details

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm & Simone Collins break down the insane geopolitical wins stacking up for Trump in early 2026—wins so massive they rival the collapse of the Soviet Union, Napoleon’s early campaigns, or Cromwell’s rise, but with almost zero U.S. cost so far.

From the precision strike that took out Ayatollah Khamenei (and the sneaky Mossad magic behind it), to Maduro’s capture in Venezuela halting oil to Cuba and forcing blackouts, to Iran’s proxy network (Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas) getting defanged, the Collinses argue this is a new era of low-cost, high-impact American dominance.

They explore the risks of overreach (history’s villains who won too much too fast), why most of the Muslim world isn’t mourning Iran, the “frenemy” dynamic with China, why dumb white women seem to be the main group getting radicalized, and Trump’s unlocked hack: kill hated dictators surgically, threaten successors, let regional allies (Israel, Saudis, UAE) handle cleanup, and watch dictators self-moderate out of self-preservation.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. The world has changed so dramatically, and I think much more dramatically than people realize in the past few months, specifically in the past few weeks with what’s going on in Iran right now, the number of core geopolitical winds that Trump has had.

And I think even the right wing doesn’t seem to really grok the magnitude of this. There is no historical parallel in all of American history except for maybe the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that wasn’t exactly all our doing. A lot of that was internal. Yeah. The, the closest three historical parallels I can find, like series of wins this significant with this little early cost would be the beginning of h man’s campaigns.

The beginning of Napoleon’s campaigns or most of Oliver Cromwell’s life. Those are the only three that come anywhere near. And, and I think that this actually [00:01:00] highlights one of the big risks of where we are geopolitically right now.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: In the same way that if you look at Napoleon’s early career, just win, win, win, win, win, win, win.

Or the h man’s early military career. Win, win, win, win, win, win, win. Mm-hmm. Very low cost to his own troops. Very low cost to him geopolitically. What happened in, in both of those cases is they completely overdid it and ended up giant villains from history. Mm-hmm. And I can completely see the temptation from Trump’s perspective right now.

And for people who don’t understand what I’m saying right now. Trump has taken out first obviously Maduro and the Venezuelan, the new Venezuelan president. It, it appears to be working like she halted the oil shipments to Cuba, which now is forcing Cuba because Mexico did not restart the shipments. They, they, somebody out our last podcast we’re talking about this, said they restarted them.

They’ve halted oil shipments as well. So it looks like the Cubans are either [00:02:00] going to cave or be put into a permanent blackout because they don’t really have oil anymore. And if you don’t have oil, you can’t grow crops or move cars or anything. And none of their geopolitical allies have the ability to get them oil because like if China tries to send a ship all the way to them, the US will just.

Grab it like we’ve been with everyone else who’s trying to send them ships. And they don’t, and China doesn’t even seem to want to. And then Iran has been taken off the map with very little geopolitical cost. And we’ll explain why each of these has had so little geo, because that’s also weird, right?

And if you go through American history and you look at something like, say the Vietnam War or something like that, if we had overwhelmingly won the Vietnam War, right, like just completely won it early days, it wou