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Episode: MSNBC prime time post election analysis special

Author: Rachel Maddow, MSNBC
Duration: 01:40:50

Episode Shownotes

Rachel Maddow and some of her prime time colleagues discuss the outcome of the 2024 election. 

Summary

In this special episode of 'The Rachel Maddow Show', Rachel Maddow and her colleagues analyze the implications of the 2024 election outcomes, underscoring the choice between democracy and authoritarianism. They emphasize the necessity for active civic engagement to defend democratic systems against potential threats from authoritarian forces. The episode discusses the shifting Latino vote towards Trump, potential mass deportations, and the impact of Trump's administration on international relations. It calls for strategic action among Democrats and a reassessment of legal strategies as activists prepare to counter extreme policies and uphold democratic principles.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (MSNBC prime time post election analysis special) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
All right, you guys. We were made for this. We were made for this. This is what we trained for. Have you taken your deep breaths? Have you, in fact, hydrated? Have you had any sleep? I know you didn't. We didn't either.

00:00:15 Speaker_03
But, you know, we now have got stuff to do. We really were, in some important ways, as Americans, made for this. If this was an election that was not just a choice between two candidates,

00:00:28 Speaker_03
But it was a choice between keeping the American system of government or trading it in for a strongman authoritarian system instead.

00:00:36 Speaker_03
then the decisive result of this election gives us not just an answer to the question as to what Americans want to do along those lines, it also gives us a really big to-do list as Americans.

00:00:47 Speaker_03
If you are an American citizen who does not want to ashcan the American system of government, who doesn't want a strongman authoritarian system where the whole government is one guy and everything else just exists to serve him, if that is not the kind of country that you want,

00:01:05 Speaker_03
then yesterday's election means you have more to do for your country than you have ever done before. Because now is when the rubber really hits the road, right?

00:01:13 Speaker_03
We don't just flip a switch and the American system of government is gone, democracy is gone. It doesn't work like that. I mean, not to be boring here for a second, but just getting very real.

00:01:27 Speaker_03
We now are just another one in the list of countries that has decided to, you know, hey, what the heck, let's try the strongman thing. Let's let democracy go, let's put in an all-powerful guy instead, see how it goes.

00:01:44 Speaker_03
There are many more countries in the world governed by that kind of a system than there are governed by ours. We are the only 248-year-old multiracial, pluralistic democracy in the world. And shall we keep it?

00:01:57 Speaker_03
A lot of our fellow Americans say we shouldn't. Now we know. Now we know for sure. But a lot of Americans, tens of millions of Americans, say we should keep that system, which means time to fight for it.

00:02:13 Speaker_03
And yes, Americans did fight for it by working on this election, by trying to get the candidate elected who was both the Democrat and the small-D Democrat. She didn't win. The strongman candidate won instead. But now history doesn't end.

00:02:29 Speaker_03
Time doesn't stop. Now we have the benefit of knowing how this has gone in every other country that has been through a democracy to authoritarian transition. And sadly, there are a lot of them.

00:02:43 Speaker_03
We have the benefit of seeing what's happened in those other countries, though. And what we know is that the more ground the authoritarian takes, the harder it is to ever get that ground back.

00:02:55 Speaker_03
And so, the first order of business is to stop them from taking any uncontested ground right from the outset, when it comes to what our system of government is and what our democracy is.

00:03:05 Speaker_03
We know from other countries' experiences that quickly, I mean now, in the next few weeks, if not the next few days, they are going to start pushing to see how far the country is going to let them go without pushback, without protest.

00:03:21 Speaker_03
And part of this is because it's just psychologically advantageous for them to do this now, right?

00:03:26 Speaker_03
They're counting on the half the country that voted against them, the half the country that doesn't want to give up our system of government, they're counting on all those tens of millions of Americans to be despondent, to feel powerless, to check out.

00:03:39 Speaker_03
which of course would mean letting them do what they want, letting them run the table.

00:03:45 Speaker_03
What they really don't want is for the half the country that voted against them, the half the country that wants to keep our democracy, what they really don't want is for those tens of millions of Americans to wake up tomorrow feeling scrappy as hell.

00:04:01 Speaker_03
feeling sure regretful about the election outcome but also frankly freed up from having to spend all of our time working on the election so now we can work full-time on being freaking pirates, on being a thorn in the side to anyone who now intends to try to turn this country into some tin pot tyranny.

00:04:21 Speaker_03
What they want least of all

00:04:25 Speaker_03
is to realize that half the country went to bed sad tonight, but then woke up tomorrow fired up with a new sense of purpose, knowing that apparently this is what we're on this earth to do as American citizens in this generation.

00:04:41 Speaker_03
Because history did not just end. Time did not just stop. We just got marching orders from the universe and the electoral college that as of today, American citizens who do want to hold onto democracy,

00:04:56 Speaker_03
We know exactly what we're going to be spending the next days and weeks and likely years of our life working on.

00:05:04 Speaker_03
And the strategic first moves come into focus quickly when you think about what other countries have shown us about how hard it is to regain democratic ground once an authoritarian leader has taken that ground.

00:05:17 Speaker_03
And the work that has to be done now, it has to happen in sort of every aspect, every corner of our society. The U.S. military needs to give the American people binding assurances that they will not deploy U.S.

00:05:34 Speaker_03
military force against the civilian population in this country. They can give those assurances, and now they should.

00:05:42 Speaker_03
The free press needs to give the people of this country assurances that they will not become state TV, that they will stand and fight together. They will put aside rivalries and petty professional differences.

00:05:54 Speaker_03
They will stand and fight together as the free press.

00:05:57 Speaker_03
As the fourth estate, as an institution that is a pillar of our democracy, as these guys on the other side inevitably start picking off individual journalists, individual publishers, individual news organizations, to try ultimately to turn us all into some American-accented version of RT.

00:06:16 Speaker_03
If the Democratic Party takes the House, expect Article I of the Constitution to come under attack. By which I mean, expect efforts to hollow out the power of Congress, to make Congress a just-for-show institution, right?

00:06:34 Speaker_03
There's a reason actions of the Russian Duma never make news, right? Expect efforts to attack Article One to make it a just-for-show institution that has had its real powers taken over by the executive, by the dear leader.

00:06:48 Speaker_03
We are gonna need a plan and some steel spine inserts among elected officials in Washington to head that off. We're gonna need the whole country to recognize that risk in advance, to call it what it is when they try it, and to actively resist it.

00:07:02 Speaker_03
Depending on whether the courts can provide a check on this administration, expect Article 3 of the Constitution to come under attack as well.

00:07:12 Speaker_03
It is already a fetish and a laugh line on the right to brag about how court orders really mean nothing and physical force and violence is what ultimately really decides what's allowed.

00:07:24 Speaker_03
Well, we have to decide if that laugh line from them is going to become our reality or whether we're going to resist that. We need a plan and some steel spine inserts among members of the judiciary to head that off.

00:07:37 Speaker_03
We're gonna need the whole country to recognize that risk in advance. We're gonna need every lawyer in the country to recognize it as their calling to fight it.

00:07:45 Speaker_03
We're gonna need to call it what it is when it inevitably happens, and we're gonna have to actively resist it. And then there's civil society. Is there a more boring term in the world that doesn't include the word committee or budget? No, there isn't.

00:08:00 Speaker_03
Civil society, though, is kind of where the rest of us are at, right? Civil society is one of the things that I think of as soft food for authoritarians. They often don't even have to bite that hard to crush it. All the organizations,

00:08:15 Speaker_03
membership groups, advocacy groups, professional associations, every voluntary group of every kind in the country. Everything in organized American life and culture that is not business and not the government either, that is civil society.

00:08:29 Speaker_03
And authoritarians need to crush that. Because it's not about them. Strong men leaders have a tendency to become not just leaders of the government, not just dictators, but totalitarians.

00:08:42 Speaker_03
Because they can't have anything going on in the country that isn't about them or for them. And a strong civil society, therefore, must be crushed, right?

00:08:51 Speaker_03
If you have a strong civil society, that gives people breathing room to think for themselves, to organize in their own interests, to speak with the power of more than just one person.

00:09:02 Speaker_03
We need assurances from civil society leaders today that they're not going anywhere and that they will fight for our democracy too. And frankly, it's not just the leaders.

00:09:14 Speaker_03
We all need to participate in more civil society things than we have before to make sure that we are taking up space that otherwise they're gonna try to take for the government and the dear leader. And what I mean by this in short is join something.

00:09:29 Speaker_03
Doesn't really matter what it is, but you want right now to be connected to other Americans and not isolated on your own. So deep breaths. Hydrate. Maybe time to get back in shape. Do you have any burned bridges in your past? Unburn them.

00:09:50 Speaker_03
Reconnect with people, whether it's your family or the people on your block or in your town, your old friends from school, that book club, that indivisible group, maybe. Reconnect or connect for the first time. Join something. Join something.

00:10:05 Speaker_03
If this election was about one candidate who stood for the American form of government and another who stood for getting rid of that because America's a garbage can and I alone can fix it, just give me all the power and I'll do it all.

00:10:21 Speaker_03
If that was the choice in this election, then the aftermath of the American people making the choice they did in this election is not just the end, right? It's not just, oh, it's over. It means we're now entering into a contest.

00:10:36 Speaker_03
It will now be an effort on his side to put that into practice, right? To put strongman authoritarian government into practice.

00:10:43 Speaker_03
And it will be an effort on the other side, an ongoing, continuing, and now newly urgent effort on the other side to let him know that it's not gonna be easy.

00:10:53 Speaker_03
These next few days and weeks, if they really are gonna try to dismantle the American form of government, including firing all federal employees, including rounding up their enemies, including opening internment camps to hold millions of people, threatening military force against their perceived enemies, if they really are going to try to undermine the American system of government, which is what they've made this campaign about,

00:11:19 Speaker_03
then in the next days and weeks they are going to be testing to see what they can get away with without pushback. They are going to do the things they can do easily, and they will have to put off the things that turn out to be hard.

00:11:33 Speaker_03
So what's going to be hard for them? That's where the American people come in. We do not only work for our country and for our democracy in elections.

00:11:43 Speaker_03
We work for our country and for our democracy against anyone, anywhere, anytime who seeks to do it harm. And so there's a lot to do. Time doesn't stop. History doesn't stop. We have stuff to do.

00:11:58 Speaker_03
Millions of Americans woke up today to the realization that although you worked as hard as you could to try to bring about the election outcome you wanted, you did not get the election outcome you wanted.

00:12:07 Speaker_03
And so now what that means is that there is a whole new raft of stuff to do. Hope you are feeling scrappy. Hope you are tapping into your inner pirate energy. Because it is one thing to be a defender of the realm.

00:12:24 Speaker_03
It is another thing to be in opposition. And opposition can be a lot of things. It can be dangerous. It can also be fun. It would have been nice to win the election. Didn't. Okay. Time to save the country.

00:12:40 Speaker_17
And no pressure at all. Once you're hydrated, you need to connect with the fact that a defining feature of Trump 2.0 is the promise to decimate American communities by targeting immigrants for mass deportations.

00:12:54 Speaker_17
Now, this could amount to the expulsion of millions, millions of people who are already contributing members of our society and who live here with their families.

00:13:03 Speaker_17
On election night, MSNBC's Paola Ramos joined mixed status families in Phoenix, Arizona to monitor the outcomes and to listen to their fears and concerns. And here is what some of them had to say.

00:13:18 Speaker_01
It's something very scary and it gives me a lot of anxiety to think about what this will mean for the immigrant community. Being the daughter of undocumented immigrant parents, it also gives me a lot of anxiety.

00:13:38 Speaker_00
Right now I don't know what to feel. I think it only gives me a lot of fear, not only for my family, but for all the families in my community.

00:13:47 Speaker_17
Now, having heard that, it must be said that Donald Trump made major gains with Latino voters, particularly Latino male voters, last night. And joining me now from Phoenix to unpack all of that is MSNBC contributor Paola Ramos.

00:14:01 Speaker_17
She is the author of Defectors, The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, the perfect person to talk to on this point. Paola, talk about the family that you were with. They talked about some of their fears.

00:14:16 Speaker_17
Say a little bit more about that and what they're expecting to happen starting next January.

00:14:22 Speaker_11
Yeah, Joy, this is when it feels real, right?

00:14:25 Speaker_11
I spent the night with those families that we just saw, mixed-status families, that I have to say, at the beginning of the night, were holding on to some form of hope, believing that this country, maybe for a minute, would reject Donald Trump's vision for America.

00:14:39 Speaker_11
At the end of the night, though, they understood that this is a country that shows mass deportations, which has become the core of Trumpism. a country that chose to separate families like them.

00:14:49 Speaker_11
And so I think this is the moment when things start to feel real, Joy.

00:14:53 Speaker_11
These words, these visions, these things that Donald Trump has said, it's real now, now on January 20th, because this is the moment when Renata and Regina, those two young girls that you saw,

00:15:04 Speaker_11
Right now, as we're speaking, her parents are actively thinking about self-deporting to Mexico. Fidel, the young Latino man that you saw, his mom, who's undocumented, is completely overwhelmed with fear.

00:15:15 Speaker_11
Today, I spoke to immigrant families, a woman called Lupita, who's thinking about who is going to have custody of her child, of her daughter.

00:15:24 Speaker_11
And so I think what's important to stress here is that this isn't just another reality in a place like Arizona. There are over 22 million people in this country that live in mixed status families. We're talking about over 10 million U.S. citizens.

00:15:36 Speaker_11
And so, what is happening is that we have pushed a new chapter in American history that may see, may see a chapter where we will see mass deportations, mass family separations of American people.

00:15:50 Speaker_17
And we've seen that a spokesperson for Donald Trump says the incoming administration will, in fact, begin the largest mass deportation effort in history. They said it was a promise that Donald Trump made to his constituents.

00:16:02 Speaker_17
And so, they're going to do it. So, this is not a theoretical thing at this point. So, you have talked to people in Border Patrol who have said to you, oh, it won't be racial profiling, how it's going to be done.

00:16:13 Speaker_17
Walk us through what that would actually look like if a family like the one that you spoke with was subject to this.

00:16:21 Speaker_11
Look, I think we don't know many things, but we do know what you just said. They will try. They will try no matter what.

00:16:27 Speaker_11
And I think what's important to realize, particularly given this idea that over 40% of Latinos voted for someone like him, we have to realize the following.

00:16:35 Speaker_11
If you're a black and brown person in this country right now, inevitably, inevitably, we will all be part of the racial profiling that will inevitably ensue if these mass deportations unleash.

00:16:47 Speaker_11
We don't know who will be sort of deemed American enough in the eyes of Trump's America, right? This is a moment when Trump gets to look at us and decide who is American looking enough. History has already taught us something.

00:17:00 Speaker_11
You and I have talked about this, Joy. Operation Wetback taught us that they didn't just deport over one million Mexican immigrants And part of those over one million people that were deported also included U.S. citizens. Why?

00:17:11 Speaker_11
Because it was an administration that literally targeted people that were Mexican-looking.

00:17:15 Speaker_11
And so now we are staring at the real possibility, you know, this real question that we've been talking to for many, many, many months at this point, which is, who looks undocumented? Who looks like an immigrant?

00:17:26 Speaker_11
And we don't know the answer to that question, but we do know, to Rachel's point, that this is a time to organize, to resist, and to do what people in Arizona have done for a really long time, which is protect their immigrant communities.

00:17:38 Speaker_11
This is not new for them.

00:17:40 Speaker_17
One of the things, in terms of this mass deportation—and we're talking about up to 11 million people—Donald Trump, just during the campaign, has talked about expanding workplace raids to identify and apprehend undocumented immigrants, meaning small business owners could see their business places raided to see who is documented and who is not, invoking—and Donald Trump has said this himself—invoking the 1798

00:18:02 Speaker_17
Alien Enemies Act to declare an invasion, and that was the law that was used to intern Japanese Americans during World War II. So, we're talking about something for which there's already law on the books, and building new detention camps.

00:18:14 Speaker_17
I was in South Texas in Tornillo, and I saw that they know how to do this. Like, they've built detention camps before, so this is not theoretical. This happened when the child separation policies happened.

00:18:24 Speaker_17
And so, given all of that, you wrote the book, and I am reading defectors right now, and in many ways, it's quite depressing. to think that Latinos would be in favor of this. But some are, and you've spoken with some of them.

00:18:37 Speaker_17
A majority of Latino men voted for Donald Trump. In your view, did they vote for him thinking that somehow he didn't mean them? Because some of them likely live in mixed-status families, too.

00:18:52 Speaker_11
Absolutely. Look, I think this is a story that has yet to be determined. We don't know many things, and that is the answer, right? We don't know the story of the Latino vote. But here's what we do know.

00:19:01 Speaker_11
We do know that Trump was able to tap into, to your point, very real racial and ethnic grievances. He was able to tap into a very real moral panic. He was able to tap into sort of this romanticized version that we have with authoritarianism.

00:19:15 Speaker_11
And I don't know that these are things that sort of right-worship I do not know, Joy, if these are things that we can explain just through politics, right, just through Trumpism.

00:19:23 Speaker_11
I think we may have to dig deeper, dig deeper to our culture, to our history, to sort of the weight of colonialism, understand the way that sort of this racial baggage that we carry from Latin America, perhaps that explains.

00:19:35 Speaker_11
some of the anti-immigrant narratives that have suddenly become so embedded within us.

00:19:40 Speaker_11
Perhaps the sort of traditionalism, the weight that that has had on our moral values, perhaps that helps explain why this anti-trans message really resonated with Latino men.

00:19:50 Speaker_11
Perhaps our own very complicated history with authoritarianism, maybe that helps explain why some people do sort of find strongmen rule appealing. And so I think

00:20:00 Speaker_11
What we do have to do is kind of take a step back and understand that we don't know a lot of these answers. We don't know what is happening.

00:20:06 Speaker_11
And it is OK to understand that we are not a monolith, right, that Latino voters today have sent a very, very, very different message, and we need to understand what that means.

00:20:16 Speaker_17
Indeed. Paula Ramos, an excellent, exceptional journalist. And we know that you will be one of the people doing the groundwork of journalism that we're going to need in this moment. Paula, thank you very much. Much appreciated.

00:20:26 Speaker_03
Rachel.

00:20:28 Speaker_03
Paula, I will say, Paula's book on the appeal of the far right to Latinos in this era, in this political moment—Jen, you just said in the break that it's going to be—or, Chris, you just said in the break that it's going to be the what's the matter with Kansas for this election, that I think it is going to be seen as a little bit of a Rosetta Stone for people to try to understand the biggest electoral—the biggest single crosstab, right?

00:20:51 Speaker_03
The biggest electoral shock in terms of the polling and understanding the shift in the electorate.

00:20:56 Speaker_07
Yeah, I think one of the things we, Paolo was on my podcast a few weeks ago, actually, we had long conversations, the run-up, and I think, you know, all this stuff is complicated.

00:21:05 Speaker_07
And I just like, when we're doing this always, just to, like, remember that we're talking at these enormous demographic groups of millions of people across all sorts of different places.

00:21:15 Speaker_07
And, like, when we start doing the analysis, we, like, you know, a bunch of different people's aggregated decisions. It is very clear there is a big shift of Latino voters towards Donald Trump.

00:21:25 Speaker_07
We can see that in the actual, not just exit data, but like the physical data, like the precincts in areas. Like, we know this happened. It's not a mirage.

00:21:34 Speaker_03
A bigger shift than any other individual demographic shift that we can imagine.

00:21:37 Speaker_07
Latino men, although it also appears that Latino women moved towards him, but not as much, right? The reasons that happened are, like, complex and overdetermined.

00:21:48 Speaker_07
And one of the things I just want to always be careful of in sort of post-election analysis is, like, a little bit of these sort of, like, thinking about, like, demographic electoral colleges. Like, well, you won Minnesota, and you won Kentucky.

00:22:00 Speaker_07
And it's like, all this stuff is margins. Like, there's millions of people, and people are, weird and strange, and they move in all sorts of different ways. There are real trends happening here.

00:22:12 Speaker_07
And one of the last things I would say, and Paola and I talked about this in my podcast, is people sometimes view Trump's comments about immigrants through the lens of race, and that's 100% understandable because it is a racial appeal.

00:22:26 Speaker_07
But people across the world, demagogues, have had a lot of success with xenophobia against people that were not racially different than them. There are huge demagogic political movements in Colombia about the Venezuelans who are from next door.

00:22:43 Speaker_07
Pakistan just kicked out a whole bunch of Afghan refugees. Like this idea of the foreigners are coming does not necessarily appeal to people's racial solidarity if they see the foreigner as different.

00:22:55 Speaker_07
And that is something that is potent politics across the world in all kinds of different places from Asia to Africa to Latin America to Europe to the US.

00:23:03 Speaker_17
But can I just say that, you know, coming from an immigrant family, there is this sort of trying to be super American when people come here, because I know some African immigrants who are. all the way Trump.

00:23:17 Speaker_17
And it's this idea of, I want to be with the side that's waving the biggest flag. I want to fit in. And there is a huge element, to be honest, of anti-blackness in a lot of this, anti-black Americanness specifically.

00:23:30 Speaker_17
And Paola and I have talked about this, that there is a part of that, that anti-blackness is a piece of it, even though Enrique Tarrio, who's the head of the Proud Boys, is a black Latino, but he's down with white supremacists. down with them.

00:23:45 Speaker_17
And there's this idea that I'm black, but I'm not black. I may look black to you. I may be black if I'm walking through Bloomingdale's and get followed around.

00:23:53 Speaker_17
But in my mind, I'm identifying with whiteness because whiteness means privilege, and it means not being a black American. This has to be unpacked because this shift among Latino men is significant.

00:24:05 Speaker_17
And it says something about where we're going in this country, about whether we can create an appeal.

00:24:09 Speaker_17
There's also the last thing I will throw in is this the creation of the idea that everything that Vice President Harris was proposing is communism, is communism. That is a potent argument for a lot of Latinos. And it worked.

00:24:21 Speaker_16
I was just going to add, I mean, I think we were just talking before the break about kind of this moment and everybody wants an answer because you want a solution. And if you have an answer, then you can fix what just happened last night.

00:24:33 Speaker_16
And I think this moment calls for a lot of humility and maybe not over concluding. Right. What every big demographic group, why they moved in a certain way.

00:24:41 Speaker_16
And so your point on communism, if you talk to Latinos in Florida and Latinos are, of course, not monolithic communism, socialism to some abortion, it's not the the agenda that they want to align themselves with. Right.

00:24:58 Speaker_16
So so as I was listening, which is it's horrible to hear everything she was just saying. This is something we should be talking about. Donald Trump is telling us what he's going to do.

00:25:06 Speaker_16
But I also think we don't yet know exactly why each of these groups voted for Donald Trump. And we need to listen. We need to not overly conclude. And we need to be humble about what we don't know in this moment.

00:25:18 Speaker_03
I think Paula, I think to her credit, is saying that and saying, like, this is what I've been studying. This is what I just wrote my book about.

00:25:23 Speaker_03
And now as a country, if we really want to understand this, there's so much more work that needs to be done completely in order to unpack it. I just feel like her honesty on that is really

00:25:31 Speaker_08
Well, let me take the humility note and begin with I don't know what Donald Trump's going to do. I have no idea what he's going to do. And I especially don't know what he's going to do just because he says he's going to do something.

00:25:45 Speaker_08
So is mass deportation going to become repeal Obamacare? I don't know. What I do know is it was not in his speech last night.

00:25:55 Speaker_08
What I do know is in that moment when he had the country's attention, there were only two words in the speech that were policy, and that was cutting taxes. That is what he did do before.

00:26:05 Speaker_08
That is what I'm willing to bet he will do this time, is cut taxes. But, you know, Donald Trump knows he saw that vote, right? The Republican Party saw that vote, that very significant Latino male vote. Do they then want to go attack that community?

00:26:23 Speaker_08
Do they then want to go into the homes of those voters and their cousins and start to try to extract people from that bedroom and leave the others in that bedroom?

00:26:33 Speaker_08
Just as a political matter, just as politicians, a Republican Party of politicians, do they want to do that? The way I'm going to cover this is when they do it.

00:26:44 Speaker_08
I'll report to you what they say, but I will not believe what Donald Trump says is what Donald Trump's going to do, except cutting taxes.

00:26:56 Speaker_03
If there is one mantra that I considered having tattooed on myself at the end of the first Trump term, it was, watch what they do. not what they say.

00:27:05 Speaker_03
And I do feel like we sort of coined that out of necessity in the moment, and I have never, ever, ever felt like anything was more truly derived from a news environment than that.

00:27:15 Speaker_08
And just one footnote, sorry, one footnote to mass deportation, and this is something we can all do and will be doing in our shows, the logistics of this. Let's report on the logistics of this.

00:27:26 Speaker_08
What would it take to move 11 million people out of the country? How many personnel in law enforcement? They don't exist in this country. How many would it take to get one million people moved out of this country?

00:27:40 Speaker_08
We will get into reporting the logistics of this, and you're gonna see we do not have the law enforcement personnel who can possibly do that, and you're not gonna be able to say to state police forces in California or elsewhere, hey, we'd like you to do this job for us.

00:27:55 Speaker_17
And if you're going to do it, the only people who can appropriate the money is the House. And if Hakeem Jeffries is speaker of the House, that would be a roadblock.

00:28:01 Speaker_03
What I'm interested in here is not what it would take to do it, but what it would take to stop it.

00:28:05 Speaker_10
That's it, too.

00:28:06 Speaker_03
Coming up next, someone I'm very excited to talk about in this moment, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker magazine, David Remnick, is going to be here on set with us. Stay with us.

00:28:13 Speaker_03
So you're absorbing the news today, you woke up and you thought, oh yeah, this is real, this is happening.

00:28:19 Speaker_03
And then as you're going about doing your stuff that you gotta do over the course of the day, individual realizations keep stopping you in your tracks. The names being floated to potentially take top positions in Donald Trump's second administration.

00:28:33 Speaker_03
anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and chemtrails villain. RFK Jr. in charge of public health.

00:28:41 Speaker_03
Eccentric far-right billionaire Elon Musk promising a massive austerity program that he is explicitly warning will create, quote, hardship for American families.

00:28:53 Speaker_03
Rick Grenell, best known for traveling the world on Trump's behalf, offending and angering all of our allies, bringing them to sputtering rage. How about him for secretary of state? What a world.

00:29:05 Speaker_03
Right-wing authoritarian leaders around the world celebrating Trump's win as a validation of their own visions.

00:29:11 Speaker_03
The president of Ukraine, Ukraine now in its third year of fighting a Russian invasion, posting a note of congratulations to Trump that doubled as effectively a desperate plea for Trump not to cut off Ukraine.

00:29:26 Speaker_03
to not have the United States effectively switch sides to Russia's side in that war, as Trump is widely expected to try to do. It's a lot. What to make of all this? We have the man who you might most want to ask if you had the choice.

00:29:42 Speaker_03
David Remnick, for over a quarter century, has been the editor-in-chief of the preeminent English-language magazine in the world, The New Yorker. David, thanks for being here.

00:29:51 Speaker_09
It's great to be here, I think. What is your... I saw RFK Jr. 's name and I just worry not only about vaccines, am I gonna have to go to France to get toothpaste to smuggle in because it has fluoride?

00:30:05 Speaker_09
This is, it's not funny at all, but it is bizarre world and the possibilities are endless. Grinnell as Secretary of State or National Security Advisor, it's upside down world.

00:30:19 Speaker_03
I want to talk about America in the world and the reaction from world leaders. And I'm sure you saw that social media post from Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Imagining a world in which America is allied

00:30:34 Speaker_03
For example, in that war, not with Ukraine, but with Russia.

00:30:37 Speaker_03
Imagining a world in which Elon Musk, who's apparently being given the job of being in charge of the government, is having ongoing secret communications with Putin, including turning on and off his satellite network to benefit Russian troops and hurt Ukrainian troops.

00:30:51 Speaker_03
I mean, it's a profoundly different world. It doesn't make the world spin differently on its axis, but it might mean that we're in the axis instead of in the allies this time. How do you see it?

00:31:01 Speaker_09
Well, it's hard to imagine somehow the spectacle of Vladimir Putin laughing, but I guarantee you that was his expression and that was his reaction and his glee when he received the news of this, not only Trump's victory, but resounding victory.

00:31:20 Speaker_09
This is everything he hoped for and imagined when he went to the Munich Security Conference and basically declared, not just opposition to the West, but a kind of, waging a kind of new Cold War against the West.

00:31:36 Speaker_09
And, you know, Trump is his fondest dream. It's not just a matter of he's going to go to Zelensky, Trump is gonna go to Zelensky and say, enough already, and time to give over the Donbas and Crimea and call it a day.

00:31:51 Speaker_09
He, Trump's presence on the scene, his rhetoric, his lack of any fealty to the truth, is exactly what Putin believes in. Putin is the ultimate relativist. He tells you that there is no democracy. There's only hypocrisy.

00:32:10 Speaker_09
So therefore, any pretense to global leadership or human rights, it's all a farce. And this is at the center of Trump and Trumpism as well. And it's going to have even more tragic consequences, I fear, this time around than last time.

00:32:27 Speaker_08
David, I think Washington, for generations, has defined the world in terms of serious countries and the less serious around the world. And that one of the definitions of the serious country is the serious people who have the serious jobs.

00:32:44 Speaker_08
And so when Vladimir Putin hears the list that Rachel just recited about who could be in this government, who might be Secretary of State, with your experience in Moscow, what is his reaction to that?

00:32:57 Speaker_08
And was he ever trying to assemble a group of clowns, or did he think, no, I want my best foreign minister I can get?

00:33:05 Speaker_09
Well, he has this sense that he can do it all himself, first of all, that all important decisions he can make. He has not a great deal of interest in information and fact and learning or history. Trump is a very skillful demagogue.

00:33:23 Speaker_09
He's a very skillful autocrat, we've found out to our pain. But there's no respect for, regard for, or interest in a sense of what's right or a sense of history.

00:33:37 Speaker_09
And I think Putin, who is, alas, very intelligent and is very skillful, just sees him as a dupe. We saw this in Helsinki. We saw this over and over again. And that's not going to change.

00:33:51 Speaker_09
So all the people today who are giving us moral instruction on how we should calm down and who are saying that the reason this all happened is because of woke or the 16 other reasons that have been laid out in front of us ought to wake the hell up.

00:34:10 Speaker_09
and realize that the consequences that are going to be exacted on the global scene, human consequences, whether it's in the Far East or in Ukraine or Russia itself,

00:34:26 Speaker_09
are going to be grave, assuming that everything he... You said, watch what people do, not what they say. I actually think, with respect, I think one should listen very carefully to what Trump says.

00:34:39 Speaker_09
I think he's the guy that comes out and says, this stuff that's on my teleprompter, don't pay attention, listen to what I'm saying. And I think he's usually pretty good I think he reveals himself and he acts on it.

00:34:54 Speaker_09
He acts on impulse completely, and that's where I think foreign affairs is going. We're slave to the impulses of Donald Trump.

00:35:04 Speaker_08
Do you see more potential damage in foreign policy than domestic policy? Do I have to choose?

00:35:10 Speaker_09
No, you don't. No, you don't. How do you begin to compare them? You just had a guest on who was astonishing, describing the possibility of mass deportation.

00:35:19 Speaker_09
the cruelty of that, the politics of that, the divisiveness of that, the cost, the human cost of that. On the other hand, I was talking to Ukrainian journalists in a kind of Zoom literary festival. This is all they wanted to know.

00:35:39 Speaker_09
What will Trump mean for us? A look of terrible desperation on their face. And they've been through hell.

00:35:48 Speaker_09
And they have held up the banner for independence and liberty and sovereignty, everything we supposedly believe in now for a couple of years, at tremendous human cost to their country, tremendous material cost to their country.

00:36:03 Speaker_09
And now suddenly it could turn on a dime and get horrifically worse.

00:36:09 Speaker_07
I want to ask about one other world leader who was celebrating last night, which is Benjamin Netanyahu, clearly, who's been in constant contact with Donald Trump and who engineered a series of maneuvers in the last week clearly timed to the American election, which involved implementing the so-called Generals Plan, which was essentially a kind of full evacuation and pummeling of northern Gaza.

00:36:30 Speaker_07
It has now been declared, like, I don't know what the—you know, evacuated. This is very controversial in Israel. He then fired the very popular defense minister, Yoav Galant, who has been part of the unity government. Who's hardly some left-wing figure.

00:36:45 Speaker_07
No. He's a Likud, right? Yeah. This has provoked protests in the country. And I think my interpretation of this from abroad is that Netanyahu was sort of waiting to see who won, to see what he was going to do and whether he was going to resettle Gaza.

00:36:56 Speaker_09
He fired him on the day of the election.

00:37:00 Speaker_07
What do you think the implications are of Trump's election for that?

00:37:07 Speaker_09
Trump's message to Netanyahu was, do what you have to do. Do what you have to do. Now, I think it's incredibly complex.

00:37:16 Speaker_09
To me, Gaza and the obliteration of Gaza and the tens of thousands of deaths there is one set of moral questions, and I think it's horrific.

00:37:28 Speaker_09
There is also the question of the very true encirclement of Israel by Hezbollah, by Iran, and what's to be done there. That's another set of questions to me.

00:37:41 Speaker_09
But this requires people with a sense of strategy and tactics and intelligence and patience and the deployment of American power. I can't say by any stretch of the imagination that the Biden administration deployed its influence in an optimal way.

00:38:00 Speaker_09
I mean, at great human cost. I think that argument can be made and I would make it. But it is a deeply complex set of questions that, you know, I don't think that Donald Trump has the slightest interest in, say, for the mercenary interest.

00:38:19 Speaker_09
And one topic that hasn't come up, I think, in the last 20 minutes, but it probably will, is the depths of corruption that come along with an autocrat like this.

00:38:28 Speaker_09
you know, the family's own enrichment, the enrichment of the oligarchs that surround Donald Trump, is going to be spectacular to hear that Elon Musk is going to be in charge of an austerity plan. It's really wild. I mean, you can't make this up. Yeah.

00:38:45 Speaker_09
An austerity plan.

00:38:47 Speaker_03
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, it is kind of you to break away from your labors to be here with us today. It's a privilege. It's good to have you here.

00:38:54 Speaker_03
If you are the governor of a state that pretty publicly, pretty emphatically disagrees with Donald Trump and his professed agenda, your job as a governor just got much, much, much more important to the country and potentially to the world.

00:39:09 Speaker_03
One of those governors is gonna join us next here live. Stay with us. So the last time he was president, Donald Trump picked a lot of fights with blue state leaders.

00:39:19 Speaker_03
He deliberately withheld disaster relief funds from places like California and Washington. He slow-rolled COVID aid to places like New York and New Jersey. He threatened to unleash the National Guard on protesters in blue states.

00:39:33 Speaker_03
In that time, Democratic leaders in the states emerged as a check on Trump's instincts and on his power.

00:39:41 Speaker_03
In Massachusetts, to name just one state, then-Attorney General, now-Governor Maura Healey took then-President Trump to court dozens of times on issues ranging from environmental policy to insurance coverage for contraception.

00:39:56 Speaker_03
Now that Trump is coming back, Are the blue state governors ready? Are they more ready than they were the last time? Lawrence.

00:40:04 Speaker_08
Well, joining us now is the governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey. Governor, thank you very much for joining us on this important night. As you know, Donald Trump has lost in Massachusetts three times in a row.

00:40:18 Speaker_08
You know that you have citizens of Massachusetts who are afraid of what is coming in a Trump presidency. What can the people of Massachusetts and what can people of other states expect from their governors?

00:40:31 Speaker_08
What can people in Massachusetts expect from you in this Trump administration in situations where you might find yourself opposed to the Trump administration?

00:40:42 Speaker_14
Yeah. Well, good evening, Lawrence. And look, this is a challenging time for our country. And, you know, I will say it quite simply, and that is we're going to show up and do our job.

00:40:56 Speaker_14
Tomorrow, I'll be traveling out to Holyoke, Massachusetts, to open a new veterans home, you know, as we celebrate, commemorate Veterans Day next week.

00:41:05 Speaker_14
I think it's really important and what you'll see from my colleagues is we're going to show up and continue to work on the issues that really matter to constituents in our state. I'm a state of 7 million people. 36% of them voted for Donald Trump.

00:41:21 Speaker_14
So, you know, while Massachusetts went blue, I also am a governor for everyone and I think that's how we all look to serve. I can tell you, though, that what you have been talking about, what Trump laid out, he's given us the playbook.

00:41:36 Speaker_14
Whether he looks to implement or make good on it, we will see. But we know what the playbook is. And I can assure you that I will work closely with my colleagues.

00:41:46 Speaker_14
And you will see state governors, attorneys general, other elected officials, mayors working together to hold the line once again on the rule of law, on democracy, and on looking out for residents in our states.

00:42:03 Speaker_14
And that includes protecting rights and freedoms that we hold dear.

00:42:08 Speaker_08
If the Trump administration requests it, would the Massachusetts State Police assist in mass deportations?

00:42:18 Speaker_14
No, absolutely not. But, you know, let me say this. I do think it's important that we all recognize that there's going to be a lot of pressure on states and state officials. And I can assure you we're going to work really hard to deliver.

00:42:33 Speaker_14
Some realities also need to be noted, and that is in 2016, we had a very different situation in the courts.

00:42:42 Speaker_14
And while I'm sure there may be litigation ahead, there's a lot of other ways that people are going to act and need to act for the sake of their states and their residents. There's regulatory authority and executive powers and the like.

00:42:57 Speaker_14
There's legislation also within our states. So I think that the key here is that

00:43:02 Speaker_14
You know, every tool in the toolbox has got to be used to protect our citizens, to protect our residents and protect our states, and certainly to hold the line on democracy and the rule of law as a basic principle. Right.

00:43:14 Speaker_14
The other thing, though, Lawrence, I just want to encourage people at home listening tonight. we need to do, as the vice president said today, which is get engaged, stay engaged. You know, elections happen every year in our country.

00:43:28 Speaker_14
They happen for school committee, for city council, for state legislature. It's super important that people not get checked out, that they actually work for and continue to work for the kind of government and representation that we want.

00:43:44 Speaker_14
You know, I don't believe that Trump supporters and voters actually wanted to elect a king. I don't believe that Trump voters wanted to elect an authoritarian. And, you know, I think that's important.

00:44:01 Speaker_14
I think the Democratic Party, we have work to do and we need to learn the lessons from this election when, you know, So many Americans, well over 60 percent, are living paycheck to paycheck.

00:44:12 Speaker_14
I believe that the democratic policies are actually the ones that deliver for people on higher wages, on health care, on better access to education and opportunity. So we've got a communication issue, as well.

00:44:26 Speaker_14
But it's going to take work by all of us, not just those with the privilege of serving in office, but also those out there who are at home and are wondering what to do. Get involved. Go to meetings. Post. Write your paper.

00:44:41 Speaker_14
Run for office or support those who are running for office in local and state elections.

00:44:46 Speaker_14
You know, I do think we see glimmers of hope in what is, I will say, knowing Donald Trump very, very well and knowing what he did for four years in this country to so many people that really took us backwards and hurt so many.

00:45:00 Speaker_14
I will say there are glimmers of hope. You know, in North Carolina, two Democrats were elected in statewide office as governor and as attorney general. We had 10 abortion initiative, ballot initiatives on and around the country.

00:45:14 Speaker_14
The vast majority of those were successful in protecting women's access to reproductive health care and abortion. And that's something that I know I will fight for and work to maintain here in Massachusetts and my Democratic colleagues will as well.

00:45:27 Speaker_14
We also had Wisconsin. credit to Governor Tony Evers. You know, he fought hard for fair redistricting maps. And as a result, the Wisconsin state legislature changed and Democrats, you know, picked up a number of seats.

00:45:41 Speaker_14
So, you know, look for the glimmers of hope. Let's continue to do the work. I'm certainly going to fight hard to hold the line and to protect people here in our states, and to meet people where they are, particularly around affordability.

00:45:55 Speaker_14
You know, I know when I lowered taxes last year, I know when I was able to pass a bill that's going to create a lot more housing in our state, drive down costs. That means something to people.

00:46:06 Speaker_14
You know, we've we've worked to lower health care costs in the state. We've got to we've got to continue on that front.

00:46:13 Speaker_08
Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts, thank you very much for joining us. It's good to be with you. Rachel?

00:46:18 Speaker_03
It's good to have her here. Good to hear what she's actually got to say there. Living in Massachusetts, I know a lot about a lot of what she's talking about. It's good to hear it.

00:46:26 Speaker_03
Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill is going to join us at the top of the hour. Stay with us.

00:46:33 Speaker_07
Welcome back to our second hour of our special election coverage. Everyone today, I think, is making sense to the extent it's possible of what happened last night.

00:46:42 Speaker_07
It's fair to say that most of the people watching right now, all of the people I think up here on this panel, think it was a very bad outcome for the country. I certainly do.

00:46:50 Speaker_07
But there's a question of why it happened and what comes next, and I do actually think it's really important to be as clear-eyed as possible about why it happened and what happened.

00:47:00 Speaker_07
Donald Trump won a majority of votes in the Electoral College, and for the first time in his three presidential runs, he appears poised to win the national popular vote.

00:47:08 Speaker_07
But if you look at why he won, I also think it's clear it was primarily the driver, a rejection of the status quo in a period where many voters feel alienated from their leaders and squeezed by high prices.

00:47:22 Speaker_07
The right-track, wrong-track numbers were 2 to 1, people saying the country's on the wrong track. And here's the thing that's really important.

00:47:28 Speaker_07
They feel that way across the Western world, where incumbent parties left, right, and center have met the exact same electoral fate post-COVID in an era of exploding inflation that no one had experienced in 30 years.

00:47:41 Speaker_07
This was an election defined by a rejection of a status quo that big majorities did not like, even people that voted for Kamala Harris.

00:47:51 Speaker_07
Now, the thing about this is Trump and Republicans have an interest, vested interest, in interpreting this as a mandate for all of their worst governing impulses.

00:48:00 Speaker_07
All the Stephen Miller-style Project 2025 dark fantasies of smashing the administrative state. But those ideas were never popular. Remember, we've been through this. They were polling at 6%.

00:48:12 Speaker_07
Trump tried to distance himself every chance he had from them because they polled so terribly. When you wrote down what they wanted to do, people didn't like it. That was not the source of this victory.

00:48:24 Speaker_07
You can see it all over America in last night's results. You can see what happened down ballot in North Carolina.

00:48:29 Speaker_07
Voters picked Trump by a slight margin at the same time they elected Democrats as governor and lieutenant governor, attorney general, school superintendent.

00:48:36 Speaker_07
They may have flipped enough legislative seats to take away the Republican supermajority in veto power. And you can see it in referenda around the country.

00:48:43 Speaker_07
And in seven states, including the Trump states of Arizona, Missouri, and Montana, voters approved measures enshrining abortion rights. Voters in deep red Missouri and Alaska also approved raises in the minimum wage.

00:48:55 Speaker_07
They joined Nebraska in mandating paid sick leave to workers. Just to add to all that, New Jersey elected its first Asian-American senator. Maryland elected its first black and female U.S. senator. So did Delaware, meaning the U.S.

00:49:07 Speaker_07
will have two black female senators for the very first time in its history. Delaware has given Congress its first openly trans member.

00:49:17 Speaker_07
What I want to say is that this is an audition that, because of last night, has suddenly signed on wholesale to the far-right agenda of MAGA and Trump and the Republican Party.

00:49:25 Speaker_07
But we know they're going to interpret this election as a mandate for precisely that, for full MAGAism. And we also know they have a plan. It really is a destructive plan to the American Constitution, to American democracy.

00:49:38 Speaker_07
most importantly to so many of our fellow Americans. Mixed status families, trans folks, women, working class voters are going to take it on the chin from tariffs and gutting labor law. And we also know Donald Trump is an aspiring authoritarian.

00:49:51 Speaker_07
I mean, the guy does not have a democratic bone in his body. He tried to overthrow the constitutional order of violence. We all saw it happen on national television. He celebrated, talked about using political violence repeatedly in his campaigns.

00:50:04 Speaker_07
And because of all that, we know they're going to try to do things to subvert and alter the constitutional order.

00:50:10 Speaker_07
But the most important thing to those of us who are committed to stopping them is to remember their success is not foreordained in any way. They're going to try, and there are going to be a lot of people who try to stop them.

00:50:22 Speaker_07
And the outcome of that is as yet undetermined. And I'm not saying this from some place of airy hope. We've been covering Trump since 2015. We covered his first term.

00:50:32 Speaker_07
He tried to do lots of bad things and failed to do them because he is completely distractible and inconstant, because he's a vortex of chaos, because he cannot be stopped from doing stupid, self-destructive things all the time.

00:50:44 Speaker_07
None of that changed because he won an election. They're all the same people. He's the same guy. Are Republicans better prepared this time? Are they more loyal and suggesting more in their favor? Yes, yes, and yes.

00:50:57 Speaker_07
But does that mean the outcome is foreordained? No. The reason I say that is that public opinion, mass opinion, it's not a fixed thing. It's a real force, and it changes, and it flows, and it reacts to events.

00:51:09 Speaker_07
And even Donald Trump has backed down when he found himself on the wrong side of it. He has tried to move away from his most extreme anti-abortion position. He's tried to distance himself.

00:51:20 Speaker_07
He understands it's unpopular because there was mobilization against it.

00:51:26 Speaker_07
One of the most monstrous things he did in his first term, as documented in my colleague Jacob Soboroff's incredible documentary and book, Separated, was to essentially kidnap migrant children from their families.

00:51:38 Speaker_07
And as the press reported this, and as the courts reviewed it, it became clear this was both cruel and illegal.

00:51:44 Speaker_07
And while it was a federal judge that first blocked it, freezing it, the thing that ended child separation was a full rejection by the Democratic polity.

00:51:55 Speaker_07
Thanks to organizing and mobilization and protest, Americans across the spectrum rightly came to see it as monstrous, rejected it loudly.

00:52:04 Speaker_07
In the end, Trump signed the executive order ending the practice and then, classic, tried to take credit for getting rid of the heinous policy he had implemented. But in the end, they had to abandon it because it was so unpopular.

00:52:22 Speaker_07
That's just one example. There will likely be things he doesn't abandon, but in the face of that, it really is important not to concede in advance that politics don't matter. They do. Public opinion still matters.

00:52:35 Speaker_07
Politics didn't go away in America because three out of 100 people switched their presidential vote, which is, to be clear, what happened last night between 2020 and 2024.

00:52:49 Speaker_07
And politics depends on the work of organizing and mobilizing and persuading our fellow Americans. None of those tools have gone anywhere. In fact, all of them are even more important this time around.

00:52:58 Speaker_07
We have to pick them up, and we can't let anyone pry them from our hands. Rachel.

00:53:05 Speaker_03
I bless you, Chris. I really wanted to hear that from you tonight. Thank you.

00:53:10 Speaker_03
Because this will be Trump's second go-around in the White House, one of the things we might profitably look to when trying to make the kinds of strategic decisions Chris is talking about here, when trying to mount effective opposition, when trying not to concede in advance that he'll get away with things because he wants them, one of the things we might profitably look to is the roster of people who made tracks and who made a mark countering him the first time around.

00:53:37 Speaker_03
Among them is our next guest, Sherrilyn Ifill, founding director of Howard University's 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy, former president and director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Sherrilyn Ifill joins us now here.

00:53:50 Speaker_03
Sherrilyn, it's really nice to have you here. Thank you for coming in.

00:53:52 Speaker_12
I wish it were under different circumstances, but glad to be here.

00:53:55 Speaker_03
Me too, but given the circumstances, you're one of the people I most wanna talk to.

00:53:58 Speaker_03
Let me just first ask you to respond to some of what you've been hearing around this table, some of what you just heard from Chris and what we've been talking about in the last hour, and ask if,

00:54:07 Speaker_03
You think we're getting any of this the wrong way around, or if you really see any of this fundamentally differently?

00:54:10 Speaker_12
You know, I agree with much of what you all have said. The only piece that I think is missing is what I think is essential for us to figure out how to manage this period, which is we have to engage in a forensic examination of how we got here.

00:54:28 Speaker_12
And that forensic examination compels us to confront issues that we, progressive people, and also just people who support democracy, have not sufficiently dealt with and confronted.

00:54:42 Speaker_12
Obviously, you know, for me, one of them is ongoing racism and white supremacy, which is such a part of this country. And it has been kind of the gateway drug.

00:54:52 Speaker_12
Trump couldn't have come to power without it, without making appeals to our ongoing flirtation, encounter, embrace of racism and white supremacist ideology.

00:55:05 Speaker_12
And every time he wasn't stopped, every time we treat this as though it is not a deal-breaker for leadership in this country, we open up the door to the danger that Trump has represented.

00:55:16 Speaker_12
When Trump said that Judge Manuel Curiel could not vote and be impartial because he was Mexican, there was no response, for example, from our United States Supreme Court.

00:55:26 Speaker_12
But everyone lauded the Supreme Court when Chief Justice Roberts said there's no such thing as Obama judges. and Trump judges. But why didn't he say there's no such thing as Mexican judges on our federal courts? And people just let that go.

00:55:39 Speaker_12
And we let Trump flirt with David Duke and flirt with the Proud Boys until we got to Charlottesville, and that was kind of a moment. And then, this campaign has been filled with racist vitriol, filled with misogyny.

00:55:52 Speaker_12
And none of those things have been deal-breakers. I lay a lot of this at the feet of the press, not because Americans can't make up their own minds, but because the press is the curator.

00:56:02 Speaker_12
This was to help us understand what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. Not everyone is a nerdy politico like you and me, and, you know, I've been watching conventions since 1972, you know. Everyone's not like that.

00:56:13 Speaker_12
We count on the media to sift it for us and tell us, like, this is out of the mainstream, this is out of bounds. And we didn't get enough of that. We got a lot of stenography. And it didn't help people understand what was off the rails here.

00:56:27 Speaker_12
And so, I think, without that forensic, without understanding why Americans were vulnerable—I mean, Trump is truly a vulgarian. You know, everything about him is repulsive in the sense in which we think about people who make good politicians.

00:56:42 Speaker_12
And simply saying he's appealing and he's entertaining, why were we so vulnerable to someone who basically runs a campaign as though it's a reality show? And I don't think we've sufficiently examined ourselves to understand the places we are weak.

00:56:57 Speaker_12
And the reason why I think it's important is because I believe we are weaker now than we were in 2016 or 2015. Then we still had our sense of what the rules were. We had some sense of norms and some sense of ethics.

00:57:09 Speaker_12
I hate to use this word, but Trump has groomed us. He has allowed us to accept more and more things that are off the table, to the point that we've actually shifted. And I don't mean just the people who support him or the MAGA people. We've all shifted.

00:57:22 Speaker_12
Because we've been compelled to accept things that would have been unacceptable.

00:57:26 Speaker_12
Does anyone remember when Trent Lott had to step down from being head Senate Majority Leader because he said that, you know, maybe if Strom Thurmond's way had been the way, we would all be better off? That was literally what he said, one sentence.

00:57:38 Speaker_12
And he had to step down—he understood he had to step down as Senate majority leader. Does anybody think that would happen today? We've moved the line ourselves.

00:57:47 Speaker_12
And so, we're not the same people, myself included, who were able to stop many of the things that Trump did in that first term, because the line has moved in terms of what judges think is unacceptable,

00:58:00 Speaker_12
what people who would sit on juries think is unacceptable, what that public, popular opinion will be. And if we don't recognize that, we will think that we have more strength than we have to counter him in the way that we need to.

00:58:13 Speaker_12
And, you know, we can maybe get started on talking about the rule of law also, which we all like to say held the line, but mostly it failed. So we have to really take stock.

00:58:25 Speaker_12
We only have a very little bit of time to take stock of what we got wrong and where we went off the rails and try to create some guardrails for ourselves to understand that and begin to re-educate

00:58:39 Speaker_12
ourselves and American institutions, the media, business, the press, faith institutions, all of whom have allowed their moral compass to be set by Donald Trump. This is a dangerous time.

00:58:54 Speaker_03
How do we get that compass? Pointing back to North, how do you think we do reset? I mean, understanding that we've let ourselves, as you say, be shifted to no longer be shocked by things that would have shocked us even a short number of years ago.

00:59:06 Speaker_03
I mean, it's a very compelling case to make, but what do you imagine would be literally the mechanism by which we reset our sense of propriety, our sense of what's appropriate in this country, and our expectations in terms of norms and the rule of law?

00:59:22 Speaker_12
Yeah, I'm writing about this in my book, Is This America?, but I've already begun doing some of this work. And I will say one thing I'm heartened about is my own profession.

00:59:30 Speaker_12
I have been railing about the legal profession and how we allowed ourselves to experience these excesses.

00:59:36 Speaker_12
And we have seen our profession, you talked about the letter from various bar associations this week that went out talking about what the job of lawyers should be. in a contested election.

00:59:46 Speaker_12
I sit on a task force on the American Bar Association, co-chaired by former Homeland Security Secretary Jay Johnson and by Michael Ludig, a task force on democracy that has been talking about lawyers and what we should do, what it means to take an oath, who are we as officers of the court.

01:00:01 Speaker_12
So, there are pockets that are trying to reset us. And my belief is that, particularly in different fields, it's important that you do it yourself. The media should be able to do it themselves.

01:00:12 Speaker_12
And every time we push at the media, they get very defensive. The media itself, I think—I don't want to impose it on you any more than I'd want you imposing it on my profession.

01:00:21 Speaker_12
I think the media should be able to sit itself and engage in this forensic. I've been talking with faith leaders and participated in a conference called the Test of Faith. Where have you been?

01:00:32 Speaker_12
You know, faith institutions are democratic institutions, but when you have leaders standing up saying we're white Christian nationalists, where are all the other Christians? Where's my church? Where's the black church?

01:00:40 Speaker_12
Why aren't people saying that's not a thing? You know, and saying it strongly and saying that is contrary to my faith. So, my hope is that within our own separate institutions, the institutions that undergird healthy democracies,

01:00:56 Speaker_12
We can begin to have these conversations ourselves so that we will be strong and equipped and ready. Otherwise, we're just all over the place, and he will set us even further down the road. Right.

01:01:06 Speaker_03
Not only does it make those institutions weak to not have that self-awareness and that appreciation, but it also takes us off the table in terms of us standing up for the country. Yes. Sherrilyn Ifill, every time I talk to you, I get smarter.

01:01:18 Speaker_03
I really appreciate you being here with us today. Thank you. I want to read you guys a little bit of what Sherilyn wrote today in her newsletter, her Substack newsletter.

01:01:25 Speaker_03
She lists five things, forgive me, we'll read this in your voice, that she believes people should prioritize now.

01:01:30 Speaker_03
This is item number four that she says, quote, our spirits will be assaulted in the coming months by coarse and crude language, by open displays of violence. of privilege and of unchecked power. We may feel as if we are occupied by a hostile force.

01:01:45 Speaker_03
This feeling will combine with our grief to weaken and exhaust us. We must hold on to the things that refresh our spirits. Time with family, music, art, nature, hobbies, food. We must protect our core.

01:01:59 Speaker_03
I will say, having lived through the first time America elected Donald Trump and having lived past this last few hours, boy, does that resonate for me. Cheryl and Eiffel, thank you for reminding us, among other things, to take care of ourselves.

01:02:10 Speaker_03
Thank you, Rachel. We'll be right back. Stay with us. We still do not know which party is going to control the U.S. House of Representatives come January.

01:02:20 Speaker_03
At the moment, Republicans have 207 seats in the House, Democrats have 187, but there are 41 races still uncalled. Now, the magic number for control is 218. It could be days, it could be potentially many days before we know the results.

01:02:38 Speaker_03
A lot of these uncalled seats are in California, which notoriously counts its votes slowly, and they don't wanna hear about it. They're very happy with it, thank you. We do know that Republicans will retake control of the Senate next year.

01:02:50 Speaker_03
Next week, Republican senators will elect their new leader. Remember, Mitch McConnell is giving up that role, so who's gonna be the new head of the Republican Party, the head of the Senate? This could get interesting.

01:03:02 Speaker_03
The two main candidates for the top job are Senator John Thune of South Dakota and Senator John Cornyn of Texas. John versus John.

01:03:12 Speaker_03
But last night, after winning reelection by a decisive margin, Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott announced that he will also throw his hat in the ring.

01:03:20 Speaker_03
He has tried this in the past and failed, but we will see if that contest gets a little spicy next week. Steph, I don't know if you've been following internecine Republican warfare along this front, but what are you expecting in Congress?

01:03:34 Speaker_02
Listen, what we're about to see, we don't know. There's obviously races right in Pennsylvania. Tons of people here are looking at Bob Casey and David McCormick. You know, the people who I cover on Wall Street, what do they love? A divided government.

01:03:47 Speaker_02
You know, as much as people might be enthused to see Donald Trump in the White House, if you look at the market today, it's through the roof over this idea that we'll be done with Lena Khan, we'll be done with Gary Gensler.

01:03:56 Speaker_02
And they love this idea in the short term that there'll be no rules. There will be less regulation, of course, until there's a blow-up, and then it will be a disaster. And it will be an absolute disaster.

01:04:06 Speaker_02
But, you know, they still have this idea, well, there's going to be some guys there to rein in Donald Trump. And, you know, just today, I saw a list— Honestly, people think that? They make that argument.

01:04:17 Speaker_02
But just today, I saw a list of names of potential big, you know, as they say, real guys who could potentially join the Trump administration.

01:04:25 Speaker_02
And I'm amazed because it's very successful, smart people who in the last administration didn't vote for Trump. But it's incredible to me that they're still like that. I could change that guy.

01:04:35 Speaker_02
I know he's the worst boyfriend ever, but I'm going to change him. And it'll be amazing if we see it happen again. Because Trump has basically blown up and burned every single person that he's come in contact with.

01:04:45 Speaker_02
So it's going to be extraordinary to see who now surrounds him.

01:04:48 Speaker_07
Can I offer a contrarian take? Please. I, in 2016, was like, you should not go in and work in the Trump administration. I think I feel differently now. What? Yeah.

01:04:58 Speaker_03
Tell us.

01:04:59 Speaker_02
Well, it seems to me— Chris is announcing he's leaving. I know.

01:05:02 Speaker_03
I know.

01:05:03 Speaker_07
I mean, I don't mean—I mean, I guess I mean this for sort of Republicans. One of the things that really hit home to me in the January 6th committee's work was, like, but for a bunch of people inside that operation,

01:05:17 Speaker_07
they would have done the coup, like Mike Pence and the chief counsel.

01:05:21 Speaker_03
Yeah, but those people were like doing good works, hiding out, waiting for the moral crucible, whereupon they revealed themselves.

01:05:27 Speaker_03
It was just that they did 10 million terrible things, and then the 10 million and first one, they were like, eh, that one, I can't.

01:05:34 Speaker_07
Right, but wouldn't you want, like, would it be better if even more, like if you rerun January 6th, and you take the people who are willing to do all the bad stuff, but not the last bad thing.

01:05:44 Speaker_07
And you replace him with people who are willing to do all the bad stuff and also the bad things? Wouldn't that be worse?

01:05:50 Speaker_17
Marco Rubio used to be that guy. We used to describe Marco Rubio as, oh, you know, he seems to be the kind of Republican that wants a future in mainstream America. He's willing to do all the things, all the coup. Lindsey Graham, who

01:06:02 Speaker_17
Everybody pretty much understands despises Donald Trump personally. Mitch McConnell, those kinds of Republicans don't exist other than the people who are on some of our shows. And those people aren't going to be hired by Donald Trump.

01:06:13 Speaker_17
It's going to be all the extremists. It's going to be all. the people who are willing to do all the things.

01:06:19 Speaker_03
I don't think they have enough. I think he has a way of folding people in such a way that whatever morals they go in there with, they don't keep going.

01:06:28 Speaker_02
It's gone. I think that's true. Howard Lutnick, who's running the transition team, has said, the number one thing that you have to have is loyalty to Donald J. Trump.

01:06:39 Speaker_07
I just, I feel like staffing the government is a big job, an important job, and it needs a lot of people. And I guess my feeling is like, do I want the absolute dregs worst of the worst? Or do I want, like, honestly, that's the question, right?

01:06:54 Speaker_07
Like, do I want people with any conscience in there?

01:06:57 Speaker_03
I feel like I want some people with some conscience. I think there'll be a screening process for those folks this time around.

01:07:03 Speaker_07
All I'm saying is it's a big government.

01:07:06 Speaker_03
Ari, on the issue of Senate and House control, obviously the Republicans have control of the Senate. It's an open question as to whether or not the Democrats have control of the House.

01:07:14 Speaker_03
If they do, what do you expect in terms of a Hakeem Jeffries in the middle of a second Trump presidential term?

01:07:22 Speaker_06
That's the big question and the thing that's obviously hanging over from last night. Who leads the Democratic Party up through the summer? It was President Biden. We all saw that shift to the vice president.

01:07:34 Speaker_06
She conceded rather graciously today and talked about continuing a longer fight.

01:07:39 Speaker_06
But we talk about realignments and how much do you credit, how much happened, how much of it was about a desire for Trump versus a rejection of incumbents, as Chris pointed out in an excellent breakdown of how many places has happened around the world.

01:07:51 Speaker_06
But for the Democrats, if you take the House, you have one remaining opposition leader in Hakeem Jeffries. If they don't take the House, he's, of course, the minority leader.

01:08:01 Speaker_06
But there'll be big questions about how the larger team of Democrats, and you can count the president, the defeated vice president, like it or not, Senator Schumer, defeated in the Senate with a tough hand to play, and the assorted other Democratic elites who oversaw everything this year, given this outcome,

01:08:20 Speaker_06
I don't think most of them will be the first choice to re-up from their caucuses in the terms of the Senate and the wider Democratic conversation.

01:08:27 Speaker_06
So that's something to watch that'll be really interesting, which is how do you take this message from the voters, even if you sift it out and

01:08:35 Speaker_06
knowledgeably look at macroeconomic factors, international factors, and other things, but still say the Democratic Party has some growing to do and might need some new leadership.

01:08:45 Speaker_03
In terms of the practicalities of it, I mean, imagining Hakeem Jeffries in Washington, part of it is going to be what can get funded.

01:08:53 Speaker_03
pointing out earlier, Joy, that there's no expectation that the Democratic Party, if they were in control of the House, would go along with anything that needed to be funded in terms of the Trump administration.

01:09:03 Speaker_03
But then I think the second order of business, then, is protecting the Congress from effectively being abolished by a new president, would-be authoritarian leader, who doesn't have any respect for the tripartite system of government that we've got.

01:09:16 Speaker_17
And knowing that we've got a Supreme Court majority that are full of monarchists, and that who've already stated that, you know, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is inoperative when it comes to Donald Trump, and that the parts of the Constitution that they would enforce if a Democrat was in office are inoperable when it's Donald Trump, and that they've said they need him to have bold action.

01:09:36 Speaker_17
That was one of the things that was very important to John Roberts, that he can be bold. So if Congress tries to stand up against him, know that they will curb them.

01:09:46 Speaker_17
I mean, and know that, by the way, had Vice President Harris succeeded and become president, they would have tried to be her board of directors and curbed her.

01:09:55 Speaker_17
So, I mean, the problem that we have now is that Donald Trump not only is an autocrat, but that the people who are supposed to be the checks and balances on him are autocrats. And the Liz Cheney's of the world are out of power.

01:10:08 Speaker_17
There's nobody like that in the House. Everyone in the House are the Matt Gaetz types. So it's going to be it's going to be a

01:10:16 Speaker_06
And one brief point on that is I think everyone understands how vital it is to hold the line. These are called co-equal branches of government for a reason, and everybody takes an oath to uphold the Constitution.

01:10:28 Speaker_06
As Chris was just discussing, not everyone followed it in the Trump executive branch.

01:10:34 Speaker_06
The Democrats also have to do more than just rerun the past oversight committees, now with a very defiant executive branch, and a Jan 6th committee and a sort of investigation. They have to do that, and they took an oath to do that.

01:10:48 Speaker_06
But they also have to figure out through policy and, more importantly, a story, a clear, simple story about what they want to do for the American people going forward. That's really important. You could do two smart things. You could do both.

01:11:02 Speaker_06
But there might be a lesson here in the Trump era of how many campaigns and how many governing periods have been seen as largely responding to Trump and criticizing Trump. You can do both, but you need a story for the American public.

01:11:17 Speaker_06
I actually think Hakeem Jeffries is someone who's really talented at that and cares a lot about middle class families and working people and has a philosophy. And maybe we'll learn more about that. But it can't just be with no shade.

01:11:29 Speaker_06
It can't just be Jamie Raskin saying, we've issued a sternly-worded letter about Donald Trump, and that's what we're doing this week.

01:11:35 Speaker_03
Well, it just can't be anything about Donald Trump. It has to be changing the narrative off of him.

01:11:39 Speaker_03
All right, much more ahead, including a key figure who successfully battled one of the worst and most morally offensive policies of the first Trump administration, legal alert of the ACLU on his plans for a second Trump term, right here when we come back.

01:11:55 Speaker_17
Donald Trump has vowed to completely upend the immigration system in this country. His plans would include conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S.

01:12:03 Speaker_17
history through the use of mass raids, as well as detention camps for undocumented migrants.

01:12:09 Speaker_17
We could see a return to the inhumane child separation policies from his first administration, which President Biden is still trying to clean up and reunite those families.

01:12:19 Speaker_17
Trump has also announced that he will not only re-implement his travel ban that focused on Muslim-majority countries, but expand the number of countries that it would cover.

01:12:29 Speaker_17
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed more than 400 legal challenges against Trump's first administration, have been busy this year preparing plans to respond in case Trump was successful in his presidential bid.

01:12:44 Speaker_17
And I'm joined now by Lee Gallant, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. Lee, thank you so much for being here. So, let's start with mass deportation.

01:12:53 Speaker_17
Donald Trump has vowed to use an 18th century law that is on the books still that would allow him to do it. I think it's the Alien Enemies Act. So that's on the books. How would you stop him?

01:13:06 Speaker_05
So we think it would be illegal to use it for immigration. The law is very clear that it has to be a foreign government doing an invasion. That's not what's involved in immigration.

01:13:16 Speaker_05
So we have been preparing since the winter time for this challenge if he actually does go ahead and use it. And so we will say that there's no foreign government attacking us. There's no invasion.

01:13:27 Speaker_05
These are immigrants looking for safety, looking for a better life. This is not what it was intended to do. This is a law that was used during Japanese internment and only declared wars. It's really unthinkable to try and use it for immigration.

01:13:41 Speaker_05
Will the courts uphold it? That's the question. Exactly. But we will be challenging it.

01:13:46 Speaker_17
The way that Donald Trump has characterized the immigration system in the country is an invasion. He's been using that term probably pretty deliberately. He's not he's not some genius.

01:13:55 Speaker_17
I'm sure that Stephen Miller and other people who are interested in making sure they can do mass deportation have been telling him that's the way to characterize it. They're saying it is an invasion.

01:14:02 Speaker_17
What makes you think that John Roberts and Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wouldn't simply reinterpret the law to say that it means exactly whatever Trump says it means?

01:14:11 Speaker_05
Right. So I don't want to predict where the court will go. I mean, I think we all have to be clear eyed that all these legal battles are going to be tricky. But I think there's a difference.

01:14:18 Speaker_05
And I think the courts will recognize the difference between his rhetoric on the campaign trail and what the law actually means. And I think the court is sensitive to how a law has been interpreted over time.

01:14:29 Speaker_05
And it was used in 1812 and the two world wars. Those were declared wars. So I think this is very different. We're going to just remain hopeful that the courts put their foot down on this.

01:14:40 Speaker_17
One of the other things that Donald Trump, you know, theoretically could do would be to prosecute people who he feels speak against him in the government. Whistleblowers, things like that.

01:14:49 Speaker_17
It doesn't feel like there'd be a ton of protection there because they're trying to get rid of the civil service protections that currently protect those who work for the government. What would you do about that?

01:14:58 Speaker_05
Yeah, I think that's, you know, other people at the ACLU are preparing for that, I think. But we are, from my standpoint, we are worried about non-citizens being targeted for their political speech, you know, and for protesting different policies.

01:15:11 Speaker_05
And I think just generally what we're hearing from our clients is now they're going to be worried.

01:15:15 Speaker_17
We're talking about the pro-Palestinian protestors have already been threatened with deportation.

01:15:19 Speaker_05
Right, and so it's the non-citizens, I think, who are entitled to benefits, like the families who were separated under Trump. We have a settlement now that allows them to apply for asylum and get other benefits, reunite with their children.

01:15:31 Speaker_05
We are very worried that they are all going to be attacked for trying to secure those benefits. I think we're looking at things that are going to be really draconian. And I just want to pick up on one thing that you all were talking about.

01:15:43 Speaker_05
The American people, I think, want some reform of immigration. We want some reform of immigration. But I don't think that translates into anything goes. And I think the model for us is family separation.

01:15:55 Speaker_05
I think that Trump, in the first term, thought he had desensitized the American public to immigrants to such an extent that they would go for little children being ripped away from their families. And we saw people take to the streets.

01:16:06 Speaker_05
I think if we see the military in the streets or family separation again or any of these really draconian policies, I think people will push back and say, wait, that's not what we meant by reforming border policy. And that's going to be critical.

01:16:19 Speaker_05
I think any civil rights lawyer will tell you it can't just be done through the courts. There has to be that public pushback. So I hope people will not take this election to be, well, anything goes now on immigration.

01:16:31 Speaker_05
I don't think the American public on both sides of the aisle will stand for something like family separation again.

01:16:37 Speaker_06
But if we're really going to talk about this, there were aspects of the legal efforts against the first Trump administration that worked and there were aspects that didn't work.

01:16:45 Speaker_06
And so I think the ACLU and other groups kind of owe it to everybody to figure that out and not just rerun the same playbook or do a whole blitz where you and other groups are always filing on everything and appealing on everything and fundraising quite

01:16:59 Speaker_06
frankly, on everything. So, the Democrats have to look at what worked and didn't, and the legal groups do. Otherwise, you guys have kind of a race to the bottom.

01:17:07 Speaker_06
I mean, two specific examples is, knowing what you know now, I don't think you'd run the immunity appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, because you ended up getting bad law.

01:17:17 Speaker_06
I don't think you'd run the ballot bans up to the Supreme Court, because you had different groups, Colorado and others, go after Trump in a way that

01:17:24 Speaker_06
didn't achieve their stated goal and created another precedent for them and spent all this public time with more than one fight.

01:17:31 Speaker_06
So I'm curious, this is a hard question, I don't know if you have the answer tonight and you're one group among many, but if people watching agree with some of your goals but are concerned about the past

01:17:42 Speaker_06
playbook, are you aware of, or will there be a discussion about improving that, learning from the things that didn't work, and quite candidly, not filing everything everywhere to bring it up to the Supreme Court, that as Joy, I think, very clearly pointed out, isn't always going to give you the precedent you want in the first place.

01:17:57 Speaker_05
So obviously those two cases that you mentioned came out bad. They weren't ACLU cases. But I think we're hoping to be strategic. We always try and be strategic. And I think you're right. You can't move on every single case.

01:18:08 Speaker_05
But those are difficult considerations because there are clients on the ground. And so you always have to measure that. And I think the other thing that we're going to be looking at is what constitutes a win. So even if we ultimately don't win,

01:18:21 Speaker_05
But we delay a policy for years and that means people are not sent back to danger. Is that a win even if we ultimately lose? Is there anything you'd do different?

01:18:32 Speaker_05
I think we're going to do things different just because this is going to be a different playbook by them. I think they're going to be more prepared and so we're going to have to be much more strategic in how we go about it.

01:18:41 Speaker_05
I think we're going to have to coordinate among groups. That's a very difficult situation when there's a lot of groups with different clients.

01:18:47 Speaker_05
Your point is a fair one and I think we are going to be trying to be strategic and we have to be clear-eyed about what we can win. and what we can't win.

01:18:55 Speaker_05
And I think that's one of the reasons why I wanna stress to people, we need you in the streets because the courts will not always do everything for us.

01:19:04 Speaker_02
But is there more public acceptance or tolerance of severe immigration actions? Look at yesterday's election, right?

01:19:12 Speaker_02
It was two years ago that we all sat here when we watched Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis take migrants and bus them to other cities and said, this is illegal, this shouldn't be done. But politically, it worked for them.

01:19:24 Speaker_02
And it went from being a border crisis to a migrant crisis around the country.

01:19:29 Speaker_02
And Donald Trump has gained more support from not Republicans who aren't saying, I'm down with child separation, but who are saying, I'm not comfortable with this in my city. And so has he gained more support?

01:19:41 Speaker_02
So there's the risk less people could take to the streets this time because they have a more severe view.

01:19:48 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, that's fair, and I don't wanna be Pollyannish about it, but I do think there's gonna be a breaking point.

01:19:53 Speaker_05
I think it's one thing during the election when everyone says we wanna do something about it, we don't wanna, but there hopefully are gonna be really common sense solutions that we can push back on, but I do think there are gonna be lines.

01:20:06 Speaker_05
You're right, has the line moved a little bit? It may very well have, and that's one of the things that keeps us up at night. I mean, the legal arguments we do all the time, but how to break through and remind people

01:20:17 Speaker_05
that these are people fighting for their lives. And this abstract idea that Trump has about everyone's a criminal coming here and everyone's looking to take jobs, that's really the challenge for us is to get through and break through that narrative.

01:20:30 Speaker_05
And that's what keeps us up at night.

01:20:32 Speaker_03
That cruelty and desensitization.

01:20:34 Speaker_17
Yeah, indeed. We're all up with you. If that makes you feel any better, none of us are using either. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

01:20:42 Speaker_03
It's great to have you here. Good luck to you. Yeah. Vice President Kamala Harris in her concession speech today made an impassioned case to continue fighting for democracy even after her defeat in this presidential race.

01:20:54 Speaker_03
We're going to talk about what that fight might look like in very practical terms with one of the first people to organize the first practical opposition to the incoming Trump administration. He joins us next. Stay with us.

01:21:06 Speaker_13
To everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged.

01:21:28 Speaker_16
Do you remember when Donald Trump was elected president the first time around? He promised to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and take health insurance away from millions of people. But he couldn't exactly do that all by himself.

01:21:38 Speaker_16
He needed Congress to go along with it.

01:21:40 Speaker_16
And so, when he was sworn in, the grassroots group Indivisible got to work, absolutely hounding Republican members of Congress, not just in D.C., but at home in their districts, making it incredibly clear that they would immediately vote them out of office if they went along with Donald Trump's plan to kill the ACA.

01:21:58 Speaker_16
And their efforts were a part of a larger pressure campaign that worked. Donald Trump could not persuade enough Republicans to vote for taking health insurance away from millions of Americans.

01:22:07 Speaker_16
Now that Donald Trump has been elected president a second time, Indivisible is gearing up for another fight.

01:22:13 Speaker_16
Tomorrow they are holding a call for progressive organizers, not just from Indivisible, but from hundreds of groups across the country, to start figuring out what their response to the next Trump administration will look like.

01:22:26 Speaker_16
No time like the present. And Ezra Levin joins us now. Ezra, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm very impressed that you're already doing this call tomorrow. So let me start with that, and I want to dig into that.

01:22:36 Speaker_16
But first, I want to ask you, you sent out an email today summarizing where things stand. That included this line, which really stuck out to me so much that I just talked about this language a little bit earlier.

01:22:45 Speaker_16
You said, I believe a loss of this nature requires humility and exploration, not finger pointing. There's a whole lot of finger-pointing going on. There will be more.

01:22:54 Speaker_16
But as you look to the challenges ahead, which is what's most important, what lessons so far are you taking away from the outcome? And how are you applying them as you look to organizing people in opposition to Trump?

01:23:09 Speaker_15
Yeah, Jen, well, thanks for having me. I wish it was under better circumstances. But I do think it's important for us to take this loss, look at it, and figure out how we can do better going forward.

01:23:21 Speaker_15
If you look at what happened around the country, there was about a six-point swing from the last election, a six-point swing away from us.

01:23:27 Speaker_15
And one takeaway that I don't want people to have, if you are watching this and you knocked on doors, or you made calls, or you sent postcards, or you sent texts to get out the vote,

01:23:36 Speaker_15
What we saw in the battleground states, where we were trying to get out the vote most of all, we saw just a three-point swing. We made up about three points through that work.

01:23:44 Speaker_15
Our work mattered, even if it didn't have the outcome that we wanted it to have. And so what that tells me is we just got to roll up our sleeves, like the vice president said.

01:23:52 Speaker_15
We have to roll up our sleeves and do the work, because that's what's going to make this democracy keep on working.

01:23:58 Speaker_16
It's so important to hear. I mean, one of the things Yamiche Alcindor was reporting from talking to Harris folks yesterday is that a number of them were already thinking about how can they start organizing. And you are not delaying.

01:24:10 Speaker_16
You're not waiting any wasting any time at all. You have this call tomorrow with hundreds of progressive organizers. I just mentioned we've been discussing kind of over the last 90 minutes the range of threats that Trump poses from mass deportation to

01:24:24 Speaker_16
from nominating RFK Jr. to siding with Russia in the war with Ukraine. I'm not even listing all the things we've been talking about. But as you approach this call, you want to hear from people I know.

01:24:32 Speaker_16
But what is at the top of your list to discuss tomorrow that you feel is kind of a most immediate threat?

01:24:40 Speaker_15
Look, I think about this in terms of short-term, medium-term, and long-term. In the short-term, folks are going through the stages of grief. I'm going through the stages of grief. I think a lot of folks are.

01:24:49 Speaker_15
And it's important to feel those feelings and work through that. We should be in community with one another first and foremost. There are a lot of folks around this country who are feeling very alone right now. They're feeling very scared.

01:25:01 Speaker_15
They're feeling like their families, their communities, their democracy is under threat. And we need to make sure that they don't feel alone. There are people in your community who feel the same way.

01:25:11 Speaker_15
I'm going to hop off of this and join a call with thousands of indivisible groups who are talking about how they can bring their communities together.

01:25:17 Speaker_15
I was on the phone with folks in Georgia who are stinging from this loss and are bringing people together for a bonfire tonight. That's important. So first of all, we should be bringing people together. But in the medium term, yeah, we need a plan.

01:25:33 Speaker_15
We need a plan. We need goals. We need strategies and tactics. So next week, Indivisible is going to be releasing a new guide with those strategies, tactics, to make sure that we're fighting this anti-democratic movement every step of the way.

01:25:46 Speaker_15
And that's the long term. Look, we have to rebuild a winning coalition. We have to, we have to, and that starts at the local level. If you are in blue states, red states, purple states, it doesn't matter. There is a role for you.

01:26:01 Speaker_15
We need you out there, so take your time. By all means, grieve, but build that community right now. That's the top thing on my list as I look ahead to 2025.

01:26:10 Speaker_16
Ezra, I don't know how you're so energetic right now, but we're all grateful for it. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. Rachel?

01:26:18 Speaker_03
Master of practical politics. Seriously. All right. We'll be right back. Stay with us.

01:26:22 Speaker_17
Donald Trump has vowed to completely upend the immigration system in this country. His plans would include conducting the largest deportation operation in U.S. history through the use of mass raids, as well as detention camps for undocumented migrants.

01:26:36 Speaker_17
We could see a return to the inhumane child separation policies from his first administration, which President Biden is still trying to clean up and reunite those families.

01:26:47 Speaker_17
Trump has also announced that he will not only re-implement his travel ban that focused on Muslim-majority countries, but expand the number of countries that it would cover.

01:26:57 Speaker_17
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed more than 400 legal challenges against Trump's first administration, have been busy this year preparing plans to respond in case Trump was successful in his presidential bid.

01:27:12 Speaker_17
And I'm joined now by Lee Gallant, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. Lee, thank you so much for being here. So, let's start with mass deportation.

01:27:21 Speaker_17
Donald Trump has vowed to use an 18th century law that is on the books still that would allow him to do it. I think it's the Alien Enemies Act. So that's on the books. How would you stop him?

01:27:34 Speaker_05
So we think it would be illegal to use it for immigration. The law is very clear that it has to be a foreign government doing an invasion. That's not what's involved in immigration. So we have been preparing since the wintertime for this challenge.

01:27:48 Speaker_05
If he actually does go ahead and use it. And so we will say that there's no foreign government attacking us. There's no invasion. These are immigrants looking for safety, looking for a better life. This is not what it was intended to do.

01:28:01 Speaker_05
This is a law that was used during Japanese internment and only declared wars. It's really unthinkable to try and use it for immigration. Will the courts uphold it? That's the question. Exactly. But we will be challenging.

01:28:14 Speaker_17
The way that Donald Trump has characterized the immigration system in the country is an invasion. He's been using that term probably pretty deliberately. He's not he's not some genius.

01:28:23 Speaker_17
I'm sure that Stephen Miller and other people who are interested in making sure they can do mass deportation have been telling him that's the way to characterize it. They're saying it is an invasion.

01:28:30 Speaker_17
What makes you think that John Roberts and Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wouldn't simply reinterpret the law to say that it means exactly whatever Trump says it means?

01:28:39 Speaker_05
Right. So I don't want to predict where the court will go. I mean, I think we all have to be clear eyed that all these legal battles are going to be tricky. But I think there's a difference.

01:28:46 Speaker_05
And I think the courts will recognize the difference between his rhetoric on the campaign trail and what the law actually means. And I think the court is sensitive to how a law has been interpreted over time.

01:28:57 Speaker_05
And it was used in 1812 and the two world wars. Those were declared wars. So I think this is very different. We're going to just remain hopeful that the courts put their foot down on this.

01:29:07 Speaker_17
One of the other things that Donald Trump, you know, theoretically could do would be to prosecute people who he feels speak against him in the government. Whistleblowers, things like that.

01:29:16 Speaker_17
It doesn't feel like there'd be a ton of protection there because they're trying to get rid of the civil service protections that currently protect those who work for the government. What would you do about that?

01:29:25 Speaker_05
Yeah, I think that's, you know, other people at the ACLU are preparing for that, I think. But we are, from my standpoint, we are worried about non-citizens being targeted for their political speech, you know, and for protesting different policies.

01:29:38 Speaker_05
And I think just generally what we're hearing from our clients is now they're going to be worried.

01:29:43 Speaker_17
I'm talking about the pro-Palestinian protesters have already been threatened with deportation.

01:29:47 Speaker_05
Right. And so it's the non-citizens, I think, who are entitled to benefits, like the families who were separated under Trump. We have a settlement now that allows them to apply for asylum and get other benefits, reunite with their children.

01:29:59 Speaker_05
We are very worried that they are all going to be attacked for trying to secure those benefits. I think we're looking at things that are going to be really draconian. And I just want to pick up on one thing that you all were talking about.

01:30:11 Speaker_05
The American people, I think, want some reform of immigration. We want some reform of immigration. But I don't think that translates into anything goes. And I think the model for us is family separation.

01:30:22 Speaker_05
I think that Trump, the first term, thought he had desensitized the American public to immigrants to such an extent that they would go for little children being ripped away from their families. And we saw people take to the streets.

01:30:34 Speaker_05
I think if we see the military in the streets or family separation again or any of these really draconian policies, I think people will push back and say, well, wait, that's not what we meant by reforming border policy.

01:30:45 Speaker_05
And that's going to be critical. I think any civil rights lawyer will tell you it can't just be done through the courts. There There has to be that public pushback.

01:30:53 Speaker_05
So I hope people will not take this election to be, well, anything goes now on immigration. I don't think the American public on both sides of the aisle will stand for something like family separation again.

01:31:05 Speaker_06
But if we're really going to talk about this, there were aspects of the legal efforts against the first Trump administration that worked and there were aspects that didn't work.

01:31:13 Speaker_06
And so I think the ACLU and other groups kind of owe it to everybody to figure that out and not just rerun the same playbook or do a whole blitz where you and other groups are always filing on everything and appealing on everything and fundraising, quite frankly, on everything.

01:31:28 Speaker_06
So the Democrats have to look at what worked and didn't. and the legal groups do. Otherwise, you guys have kind of a race to the bottom.

01:31:34 Speaker_06
I mean, two specific examples is, knowing what you know now, I don't think you'd run the immunity appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, because you ended up getting bad law.

01:31:45 Speaker_06
I don't think you'd run the ballot bans up to the Supreme Court, because you had different groups, Colorado and others, go after Trump in a way that

01:31:52 Speaker_06
didn't achieve their stated goal and created another precedent for them and spent all this public time with more than one fight.

01:31:59 Speaker_06
So I'm curious, this is a hard question, I don't know if you have the answer tonight and you're one group among many, but if people watching agree with some of your goals but are concerned about the past

01:32:10 Speaker_06
playbook, are you aware of, or will there be a discussion about improving that, learning from the things that didn't work, and quite candidly not filing everything everywhere to bring it up to the Supreme Court that, as Joy, I think, very clearly pointed out, isn't always going to give you the precedent you want in the first place?

01:32:25 Speaker_05
So obviously those two cases that you mentioned came out bad. They weren't ACLU cases. But I think we're hoping to be strategic. We always try and be strategic, and I think you're right.

01:32:33 Speaker_05
You can't move on every single case, but those are difficult considerations because there are clients on the ground, and so you always have to measure that. And I think the other thing that we're gonna be looking at is what constitutes a win.

01:32:46 Speaker_05
So even if we ultimately don't win, but we delay a policy for years, and that means people are not sent back to danger, Is that a win even if we ultimately lose? Is there anything you'd do different?

01:32:57 Speaker_05
Well, I think that I think we're going to do things different just because this is going to be a different playbook by them. I think they're going to be more prepared. And so we're going to have to be much more strategic in how we go about it.

01:33:09 Speaker_05
I think we're going to have to coordinate among groups. That's a very difficult situation when there's a lot of groups with different clients. Your point is a fair one.

01:33:16 Speaker_05
And I think we are going to be trying to be strategic and we have to be clear eyed about what we can win. and what we can't win.

01:33:23 Speaker_05
And I think that's one of the reasons why I wanna stress to people, we need you in the streets because the courts will not always do everything for us.

01:33:31 Speaker_02
But is there more public acceptance or tolerance of severe immigration actions? Look at yesterday's election, right?

01:33:40 Speaker_02
It was two years ago that we all sat here when we watched Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis take migrants and bust them to other cities and said, this is illegal, this shouldn't be done. But politically, it worked for them.

01:33:52 Speaker_02
And it went from being a border crisis to a migrant crisis around the country.

01:33:56 Speaker_02
And Donald Trump has gained more support from not Republicans who aren't saying, I'm down with child separation, but who are saying, I'm not comfortable with this in my city. And so has he gained more support?

01:34:09 Speaker_02
So there's the risk less people could take to the streets this time because they have a more severe view.

01:34:15 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, that's fair, and I don't wanna be Pollyannish about it, but I do think there's gonna be a breaking point.

01:34:21 Speaker_05
I think it's one thing during the election when everyone says we wanna do something about it, we don't wanna, but there hopefully are gonna be really common sense solutions that we can push back on, but I do think there are gonna be lines.

01:34:34 Speaker_05
You're right, has the line moved a little bit? It may very well have, and that's one of the things that keeps us up at night. I mean, the legal arguments we do all the time, but how to break through and remind people

01:34:45 Speaker_05
that these are people fighting for their lives. And this abstract idea that Trump has about everyone's a criminal coming here and everyone's looking to take jobs. That's really the challenge for us is to get through and break through that narrative.

01:34:58 Speaker_05
And that's what keeps us up at night.

01:35:00 Speaker_03
And that cruelty and desensitization.

01:35:02 Speaker_17
Yeah, indeed. We're all up with you. That makes you feel any better. None of us are illegal. And thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

01:35:09 Speaker_03
Lane, cheers. Great to have you here. Good luck to you. Yeah. Vice President Kamala Harris in her concession speech today made an impassioned case to continue fighting for democracy even after her defeat in this presidential race.

01:35:21 Speaker_03
We're going to talk about what that fight might look like in very practical terms with one of the first people to organize the first practical opposition to the incoming Trump administration. He joins us next. Stay with us.

01:35:34 Speaker_13
To everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged.

01:35:56 Speaker_16
Do you remember when Donald Trump was elected president the first time around? He promised to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and take health insurance away from millions of people. But he couldn't exactly do that all by himself.

01:36:06 Speaker_16
He needed Congress to go along with it. And so, when he was sworn in, the grassroots group Indivisible got to work.

01:36:13 Speaker_16
absolutely hounding Republican members of Congress, not just in D.C., but at home in their districts, making it incredibly clear that they would immediately vote them out of office if they went along with Donald Trump's plan to kill the ACA.

01:36:25 Speaker_16
And their efforts were a part of a larger pressure campaign that worked. Donald Trump could not persuade enough Republicans to vote for taking health insurance away from millions of Americans.

01:36:35 Speaker_16
Now that Donald Trump has been elected president a second time, Indivisible is gearing up for another fight.

01:36:41 Speaker_16
Tomorrow they are holding a call for progressive organizers, not just from Indivisible, but from hundreds of groups across the country, to start figuring out what their response to the next Trump administration will look like.

01:36:53 Speaker_16
No time like the present. And Ezra Levin joins us now. Ezra, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm very impressed that you're already doing this call tomorrow. So let me start with that, and I want to dig into that.

01:37:03 Speaker_16
But first, I want to ask you, you sent out an email today summarizing where things stand. That included this line, which really stuck out to me so much that I just talked about this language a little bit earlier.

01:37:13 Speaker_16
You said, I believe a loss of this nature requires humility and exploration, not finger pointing. There's a whole lot of finger-pointing going on. There will be more.

01:37:22 Speaker_16
But as you look to the challenges ahead, which is what's most important, what lessons so far are you taking away from the outcome? And how are you applying them as you look to organizing people in opposition to Trump?

01:37:37 Speaker_15
Yeah, Jen, well, thanks for having me. I wish it was under better circumstances. But I do think it's important for us to take this loss, look at it, and figure out how we can do better going forward.

01:37:49 Speaker_15
If you look at what happened around the country, there was about a six-point swing from the last election, a six-point swing away from us.

01:37:55 Speaker_15
And one takeaway that I don't want people to have, if you are watching this and you knocked on doors, or you made calls, or you sent postcards, or you sent texts to get out the vote, what we saw in the battleground states, where we were trying to get out the vote most of all, we saw just a three-point swing.

01:38:09 Speaker_15
We made up about three points through that work. Our work mattered, even if it didn't have the outcome that we wanted it to have. And so what that tells me is we just got to roll up our sleeves, like the vice president said.

01:38:20 Speaker_15
We have to roll up our sleeves and do the work, because that's what's going to make this democracy keep on working.

01:38:26 Speaker_16
It's so important to hear. I mean, one of the things Yamiche Alcindor was reporting from talking to Harris folks yesterday is that a number of them were already thinking about how can they start organizing.

01:38:36 Speaker_16
And you are not delaying, you're not wasting any time at all. You have this call tomorrow with hundreds of progressive organizers I just mentioned. We've been discussing kind of over the last 90 minutes

01:38:47 Speaker_16
the range of threats that Trump poses, from mass deportation to nominating RFK Jr. to siding with Russia in the war with Ukraine. I'm not even listing all the things we've been talking about.

01:38:57 Speaker_16
But as you approach this call, you want to hear from people I know. But what is at the top of your list to discuss tomorrow that you feel is kind of a most immediate threat?

01:39:08 Speaker_15
Look, I think about this in terms of short-term, medium-term, and long-term. In the short-term, folks are going through the stages of grief. I'm going through the stages of grief. I think a lot of folks are.

01:39:17 Speaker_15
And it's important to feel those feelings and work through that. We should be in community with one another, first and foremost. There are a lot of folks around this country who are feeling very alone right now. They're feeling very scared.

01:39:29 Speaker_15
They're feeling like

01:39:30 Speaker_15
their families their communities their democracy is under threat and we need to make sure that they don't feel and there are people in your community who feel the same way i'm gonna pop off of this and join a call with thousands of indivisible groups were talking about how they can bring their communities together i was on the phone with that uh... folks in georgia who are stinging from this loss and are bringing people together for a bonfire tonight that's important so first of all we should bring it be bringing people together but in the medium term

01:39:59 Speaker_15
Yeah, we need a plan. We need a plan. We need goals. We need strategies and tactics.

01:40:03 Speaker_15
So next week, Indivisible is going to be releasing a new guide with those strategies, tactics, to make sure that we're fighting this anti-democratic movement every step of the way. And that's the long term. Look, we have to rebuild a winning coalition.

01:40:19 Speaker_15
We have to. We have to. And that starts at the local level. If you are in blue states, red states, purple states, it doesn't matter. There is a role for you. We need you out there, so take your time.

01:40:31 Speaker_15
By all means, grieve, but build that community right now. That's the top thing on my list as I look ahead to 2025.

01:40:37 Speaker_16
Ezra, I don't know how you're so energetic right now, but we're all grateful for it. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. Rachel?

01:40:46 Speaker_03
Master of practical politics, seriously. All right, we'll be right back. Stay with us.