What exactly is the republican game plan here?

I'm less and less convinced there is one. Sure, there was one. There were actually many! Libertarian think tanks have been brainstorming ways to cut the federal government down to the military for decades, the theocrats have been working on their Dominion theory, the war hawks have been planning their wars against Iran and China, but the people calling the shots have no idea what they're doing. They're just acting out the most dumbed-down versions of those factions' propaganda because that's where their comprehension meets its limits. The entire edifice is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality and they're all busy acting out their fever dreams in real life. It's pure nihilism; destroy for destruction's sake. And it'll continue until it hits a resource constraint; until there's a crisis because the ports are empty or the market finally crashes because the smart money's done ripping the copper out of the walls and needs foreign safe havens to escape to, or someone's itchy trigger finger starts a conflict that the country cannot win, and that's when gravity'll kick back in and everyone will feel the empty air beneath their feet and the scrambling will start.

Destroying every institution is a necessary part of rebuilding it the way they want.

i dont know how this is a mystery. You have money, privilege, and delusion coming from a single sector of the empowered elite they exalt power and their own ideas of strength, they're disgusted by what they perceive as weakness, and for a lot of power and control reasons they want womens rights rolled back, they want social life policed so strongly that it doesnt make sense to tolerate queer or any kind of deviant-from-norm lifestyles. They consider true knowlege and understanding to be a threat and an expression of power, and as such they want the average person to be significantly more ignorant. They want kids to work because if you can start young, you can raise a person to basically be their job - which under a fascist view can range from early exposure to corporate life for the privileged, to really fucked up shit like, in tandem with rolling womens rights back, the earlier you can condition them to their assigned role, the less likely they are to want to break out of it.

They want us more atomized and dumber, for the sake of control. They want the privileged to be highly specialized and locked in, too busy striving to survive to make trouble. They want a world where the weak die and the bonds that tie us together need not cross paths with anything like empathy or compassion

these people are psychopaths. There's a reason these freaks all worship Odin and exalt their half baked ideas of norse identity. There's a reason they're willing to tear all this shit down. Their view of a climate collapse world is one where only the strong need be bothered to allow survival.

These folks have always been around, but since being rebuked in WW2 they've spent decades acquiring more wealth, more power, and making sure that they have credible smokescreens. The pageantry of 20th century fascism will start a fight, so they trade in confusion, illusion, and ignorance, rather than WWE-esque shows of strength. JSOC instead of the SS. the death camps made even more remote

it's the same worldview and it's the same money and it's the same basic bullshit, but with more obfuscation, and more concessions to the fact we live in a world where they can't pretend their ideas of elite excellence or whatever is localized to a single culture or skin color.

there's different camps, and party lines imo has nothing to do with it. the neoliberal types (more and more modern AI techbro fucks) want to privatize functions of the government for themselves. others just want to right-wing libertarian destroy everything that rich people don't need.

they forgot about the "riot tax" but they'll be reminded soon enough the more and more they squeeze people.

don't ever forget too: the Clinton administration destroyed welfare more than any administration ever. hell, the senate democrats voted for the house republican's spending bill just last month.

Because right now even the chuds are having second thoughts about their party

no they're not

"There's copper in them there walls!"

It's the 90s and you're a business ghoul trying to claw your way up to entrench yourself further and claw your way up above your peers. You shop around for fringe ideologues whose ideas would end up advancing your position, and invest some money to get them into into think tanks, advertising firms, talk shows, and the like. The reach of broadcast media explodes, the industry expands and everyone who got in early rises to the top, including your useful idiots. The propaganda industry gets better at its job, and you're still listening to the TV. You bought these messages because they were convenient to you, but they're so good at their job now that they've convinced you too. You're now a true believer in whatever nonsense was tactically convenient to you 30 years ago.

(As fun as this narrative is, I'd like to point out that adding more details makes a story less likely to be true while making it sound more likely to be true.)

These American institutions keeping them in check are also fundamentally liberal-reactionary institutions that should not be defended by leftists. Attacking Harvard and Columbia and higher ed/research funding does suck for many reasons but it's not an attack on "the working class" by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is firing government bureaucrats. The only admin actions that really constitute attacks on the working class are the ongoing attempts to destroy the NIH and the postal service as well as the trade war. Even then, it's not as clear cut as "rich vs. poor". Hedge fund managers and MNCs have been some of the most vocal opponents of the trade war so far. Many of those opposing the university and research cuts are highly privileged, at least in terms of social and cultural capital.

Peter Turchin predicted all of this. It's elite overproduction and intra-elite conflict to a t. Bourgeois solidarity is broken (at least to some degree). That's how you have a cabinet full of billionaires and mega-multi-millionaires starting beef with other billionaires. On a lower but still important level, you have ideologues like Bannon and Rufo and BAP playing their own roles as counter-elites. When things get bad, the rich don't hesitate to eat their own. It's poor people being used as cannon fodder on both sides and poor people suffering the collateral damage.

Barring a geopolitical black swan like Canada invading the US, the Republicans are going to lose in the midterms and probably lose 2028. But it doesn't matter as the game has fundamentally changed. Intractable polarization, delegitimization of central authority, increasing incidence of stochastic terror, etc. Newsom might win in 2028 but it'll hardly matter.

Most of what's coming isn't Trump's doing, he's just the messenger. We started down this path after WWII, Nixon and Reagan stayed the course despite increasing pressure, and Obama put the nail in the coffin.

I need to refresh myself on the details, but I’m reminded of Sam Brownback getting to enact the entire republican playbook in Kansas at the state scale, and it had fairly awful consequences for the state and everyone in it if I recall correctly. This feels similar, except at a way more threatening and potentially permanent scope.

Edit: corrected Arizona to Kansas.