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Episode: Why Trump Won
Author: The Free Press
Duration: 01:18:45
Episode Shownotes
Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. . . again. It was a historic political comeback for a candidate rejected by the people just four years ago. But this time, Trump took almost every coveted state: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. And he leads in Nevada
and Arizona. The entire blue wall. . . turned red. And unlike 2016, this was not just an Electoral College victory. Surprising pollsters and betting markets alike, Trump also won the popular vote. To top it off, Republicans took control of the Senate, gaining four seats, and maybe more by the time this episode airs. Simply put, it was a red landslide. It is extremely rare in our history for a president to come back after losing a reelection bid so badly. In fact, Trump's rebound is bigger than Nixon's—bigger than Napoleon's in 1815. And yet it happened on Tuesday night with the most flawed candidate American politics has ever seen. How did he do it? If you were only watching cable news over the last few years, you would be shocked by the outcome. But if you had been reading The FP, you probably were not surprised. Yes, Kamala had the support of Beyoncé, Oprah, Taylor Swift, and almost every A-lister with a pulse. She outraised Trump by around $600 million. She was endorsed by industry leaders in science and economics. But it’s been clear for some time now that the Democrats do not have the buy-in or trust of the American people. FP senior editor Peter Savodnik said it best: “They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance.” Still, in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, CNN and MSNBC tried to explain away Trump's appeal, and the profound failure of the left, with accusations that the American people are the ones to blame. But those explanations are not right. As exit polls came in, Trump showed strength with black and Latino voters. CNN exit polls showed he won about 13 percent of black voters (up from 8 percent in 2020) and 45 percent of Latino voters (up from 32 percent last election). It shows a massive pickup. He won among voters who make less than $100,000. And compared to 2020, Trump improved in cities, in rural areas, in suburbs. . . . as CNN's John Berman put it: “It’s kind of an everywhere improvement.” Here today to make sense of it all is FP contributor and Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, pundit and political powerhouse Brianna Wu, and FP Senior Editor Peter Savodnik. We reflect on why Democrats lost so dramatically and decisively; how Trump’s comeback happened, despite an impeachment, being found guilty of sexual assault, and 116 indictments; how Trump found success with black and Latino voters; what the next four years might look like with Trump returning to the White House; and if this will be a wake-up call for Democrats. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Summary
In this episode of 'Honestly with Bari Weiss', the discussion centers around Donald Trump's remarkable political comeback, marked by key victories in swing states and surprising gains among Black and Latino voters. The episode explores the Democratic Party's disconnect with the electorate, particularly its failure to focus on pressing issues like inflation and immigration. Despite Trump's controversies, he found traction among diverse groups, leading to a significant realignment in American politics. Contributors reflect on the implications of this electoral shift, urging Democrats to reassess their strategies and reconnect with the working class to regain support.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Why Trump Won) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:01 Speaker_05
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00:00:34 Speaker_08
— Thank you very much. Wow.
00:00:36 Speaker_10
— From the free press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss.
00:00:41 Speaker_08
— Frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There's never been anything like this in this country, and maybe beyond.
00:00:51 Speaker_10
— It would be an understatement to say that the Republicans had a good night on Tuesday.
00:00:56 Speaker_08
— This will truly be the golden age of America. That's what we have to have.
00:01:07 Speaker_10
Donald Trump was elected president of the United States again. He celebrated the election results at 2.30 in the morning in West Palm Beach with 267 electoral votes, just shy of the magic 270. A few hours later, he was declared the winner.
00:01:24 Speaker_08
I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president.
00:01:36 Speaker_10
It was a historic political comeback for a candidate rejected by the people just four years ago.
00:01:43 Speaker_10
This time, Trump took almost every coveted swing state— Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin— and as we record this conversation, he leads in Nevada and Arizona. the entire blue wall turned red.
00:02:00 Speaker_10
And unlike in 2016, this wasn't just an Electoral College victory. Surprising pollsters, and at least in the early hours of the evening betting markets alike, Trump also won the popular vote.
00:02:14 Speaker_10
It is extraordinarily rare in our history for a president to come back after losing a re-election bid so badly. Trump's rebound is bigger than Richard Nixon's, and as Neil Ferguson writes today in the Free Press, bigger even than Napoleon in 1815.
00:02:30 Speaker_10
And yet, it happened on Tuesday night, with the most flawed candidate American politics has ever seen. Here's how my colleague Eli Lake put it in his piece.
00:02:42 Speaker_10
Donald Trump ended his first term in disgrace, hit with a second impeachment after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The 2022 midterm candidates he endorsed—Hershel Walker, Mehmet Oz, and Carrie Lake—all went down in flames.
00:03:01 Speaker_10
In 2023, he was declared guilty of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a civil case. This past May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts for improperly reporting hush money payments.
00:03:15 Speaker_10
Overall, Trump faced 116 indictments. Even now, the New York State Attorney General is trying to punish the Trump Organization with nearly $500 million in fines, claiming that he unlawfully inflated the value of his properties.
00:03:32 Speaker_10
And yet, here he is, America's 47th president. How did he do it? If you were only watching cable news, you would be shocked by this outcome. But I deign to say, if you were reading the free press, you wouldn't have been shocked.
00:03:50 Speaker_10
Yes, Kamala Harris had the support of Beyonce, Oprah, Taylor Swift, and almost every other A-lister with a pulse. She outraged Trump by almost $600 million. She was endorsed by industry leaders in science and economics and most of Silicon Valley.
00:04:08 Speaker_10
But it's been clear to anyone paying attention that the Democrats simply were not speaking to the concerns of the American people. Free press reporter Peter Savodnik said it best. The Democrats didn't lose because they didn't spend enough money.
00:04:25 Speaker_10
They didn't lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance.
00:04:35 Speaker_10
They should have spent the past eight years learning from the Republicans' honest-if-flawed conversation about the plight of America, but they insisted on talking to themselves about the things that made them feel morally superior.
00:04:50 Speaker_10
In other words, they talked more about gender fluidity and defunding the police than they did about inflation, immigration, and the forever wars. But I'm not sure the party, or the legacy media for that matter, has yet absorbed this lesson.
00:05:07 Speaker_10
In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I watched as CNN and MSNBC tried to explain away Trump's appeal and the profound failings of the left with accusations not that Kamala Harris failed, but that the American people are the ones to blame.
00:05:22 Speaker_04
By the way, for women candidates, the economy and national security are always two very hard issues where you have to shore up your credentials. And yes, pointing back to 2016, sexism, I'm going to say also racism and bias had to have played a role.
00:05:41 Speaker_09
I think it's important to say that, you know, anyone who has experienced or been in the United States for any period of time and experienced this country's history and knows it cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.
00:05:56 Speaker_09
Let's just be clear. And nothing that was true yesterday about how flawlessly this campaign was run is not true now. I mean, this really was an historic, flawlessly run campaign she had Queen Latifah never endorses anyone.
00:06:14 Speaker_10
Those explanations simply are out of touch with reality. As the exit polls came in, Trump showed strength not just among white men, but with Black and Latino voters.
00:06:25 Speaker_10
CNN exit polls showed that he won about 13% of Black voters, up from 8% in 2020, and 45% of Latino voters, up from 32% in the last election. He won among voters who make less than $100,000.
00:06:40 Speaker_10
And compared to 2020, Trump improved in cities, in rural areas, in suburbs, everywhere. As CNN's John Berman put it, it's kind of an everywhere improvement. And it's indicative of a massive, countrywide political realignment.
00:06:59 Speaker_01
It is a realignment. It's a race realignment. It's an education realignment. It's an income realignment. It's even an age realignment as well, with Donald Trump doing historically well at least over the last 20 years among voters under the age of 30.
00:07:10 Speaker_10
To top it off, Republicans took control of the Senate last night. Simply put, it was a Republican landslide. By the time you hear this, I know that millions of Americans are cheering, and millions of other Americans are heartbroken.
00:07:25 Speaker_10
We at the Free Press understand both reactions. We have both of those voters here in-house, and we're here to talk about it, how it really happened, and about what comes next.
00:07:36 Speaker_10
Here with me today, after about 20 minutes of sleep, collectively, is Free Press contributor and Newsweek Opinion Editor Batya Angr-Sargon, pundit and political powerhouse Brianna Wu, and Free Press Senior Editor Peter Savodnik.
00:07:53 Speaker_10
Today, I ask how Trump's comeback happened despite an impeachment, two of them, despite being found guilty of sexual assault and 116 indictments.
00:08:02 Speaker_10
We talk about how Trump found success with Black and Latino voters, what the next four years will look like with Trump returning to the White House, and if this will be, at long last, a wake-up call for Democrats. We'll be right back. Stay with us.
00:08:25 Speaker_10
Today's episode was made possible by Ground News. America's trust in the media has been on a long and steady decline, especially over the last few years. If you listen to this show, you know that's something that we care about and talk about a lot.
00:08:40 Speaker_10
Mainstream media often have their own agenda, which leads, and we've seen this many times, to bias coverage, public polarization, and ideological bubbles that reinforce readers' opinions rather than challenging them.
00:08:54 Speaker_10
That's why ground news is so important. Their app and website allow us to access the world's news in one place to compare coverage with context behind each source.
00:09:05 Speaker_10
Take the story of major news outlets like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times opting out of endorsing a presidential candidate. Ground News found more than 300 headlines covering it, and there was backlash from both sides.
00:09:19 Speaker_10
They analyzed stories from Business Insider, Slate, the Center for the National Interest, and many others for their biases and blind spots.
00:09:27 Speaker_10
Reading the news this way helps you see discrepancies on how certain topics are covered or not covered at all, so you can think critically about what you read and make up your own mind. Check it out at groundnews.com slash honestly.
00:09:42 Speaker_10
to get 50% off the Ground News Vantage Plan for unlimited access. Ground News is female-founded and subscriber-funded. By subscribing, you're supporting transparency in media and our work in the meantime.
00:09:56 Speaker_00
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00:10:03 Speaker_03
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00:10:15 Speaker_03
That's because the credit card companies fix prices. It goes against the free market that made our economy great. The Credit Card Competition Act would ensure we have basic competition. It's one of the few things in Washington that both sides agree on.
00:10:32 Speaker_03
Please ask your member of Congress to pass the Credit Card Competition Act. Small businesses and my customers need it now.
00:10:39 Speaker_00
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00:10:50 Speaker_00
Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. merchantspaymentscoalition.com
00:10:59 Speaker_10
Well, Bhatia Angersargon, Peter Savodnik, Brianna Wu, welcome to Honestly. It's 12.30 on Wednesday, November 6th. Most of us were up until 4.30 or 5 in the morning, and we're back now to try and make sense of what just happened.
00:11:17 Speaker_10
And I guess I want to start by understanding how each of you are feeling, because I think each of you genuinely represents a different segment of the American electorate.
00:11:27 Speaker_10
And I'm curious how each of you are absorbing the reality, not just of a second Trump term, but really of a Republican blowout. Brianna, let's start with you.
00:11:37 Speaker_07
It's always, uh, scariest to go first. I mean, look, obviously, I'm terrified, you know, as a trans woman, you know, the Republicans spent $250 million on ads specifically targeting me.
00:11:49 Speaker_07
They've been taught a lesson that this is a strategy that works, and I have no reason not to believe that they are gonna follow through with the things in, you know, Project 2025 and, you know, continue this pursuit.
00:12:01 Speaker_07
It seems to be a winning, uh, strategy for them, so... But even beyond what happens to me personally, I'm really concerned about the U.S. economy and I'm really worried about NATO.
00:12:12 Speaker_07
I don't want to live in a world where China and Russia are free to do whatever they want. I think last time around, Trump did not have a good relationship with Rex Tillerson, his Secretary of State, and it's very clear he wants to reshape the U.S.
00:12:26 Speaker_07
's relationship with NATO and scale that back. You know, just on every single front, I'm afraid for my country. But I've also been through this before. And, you know, I feel like I'm more prepared for it this time.
00:12:40 Speaker_10
Brianna, I want to come back to you. Obviously, we're very involved in this election, sort of from the Democratic side, but also critical, I think, in an important way of the Democrats.
00:12:49 Speaker_10
And I want to talk to you in a bit about why you think they lost in the way that they did. How are you feeling?
00:12:57 Speaker_10
I mean, last night when we began the live stream, you were sort of girding yourself for a Kamala Harris victory and you said something hilarious to me. I don't know if you remember it. Do you remember it?
00:13:08 Speaker_02
I think so.
00:13:09 Speaker_10
What did you say to me?
00:13:11 Speaker_02
Well, when it became clear that Trump was going to win or was winning, I said to you, I created a whole new personality for myself around the idea that Harris was going to win and I was going to have to accept this defeat gracefully.
00:13:25 Speaker_02
And now that it looks like Trump is going to win, I have to go back to my old self and remember how to win gracefully. Um, and I am working on that actually. Um, I think to me, obviously I, you know, wanted Trump to win.
00:13:40 Speaker_02
I think he's going to be an amazing president. I think he was a very good president, although at the time I don't think I was very good at acknowledging that. But to me, what's really important here, Barry, is that he won a mandate.
00:13:53 Speaker_02
He won the popular vote as well as the electoral college.
00:13:59 Speaker_02
And that was the thing I was praying for the most was not so much that he would win, but that whoever won would win in a big and indisputable way so that as a country we can start to heal and come together again.
00:14:14 Speaker_02
And the fact that the people who made him win was voters of color and women. You know, it was everybody that we had been told to expect, you know, to go for Harris.
00:14:27 Speaker_02
These narratives of who is a Democrat and who is a Republican have been totally shuffled. And I'm just hoping and I feel hopeful and optimistic that this can be a moment
00:14:37 Speaker_02
for us as Americans to come together again and recognize Trump for who he is, or at least the platform and the agenda for what it is, which is something that has broad support with the majority of Americans.
00:14:50 Speaker_10
And Batia, just one quick thing. When you hear Brianna talking about her fears, I mean, specifically her fears of trans health care, I think would be the fair way to put it, and also of Trump's like the people around Trump.
00:15:05 Speaker_10
You know, there's been a lot of commentary in the run up to the election that Trump has sort of burned through the A-list, the B-list, the C-list. And now we're left with like, you know, Mike Lindell. Do either of those things concern you?
00:15:17 Speaker_02
I'm very honored and I feel very blessed to be able to have conversations with Brianna about this because it's a perspective that I think is incredibly important.
00:15:29 Speaker_02
I think that Trump sees the trans issue much in the same way that you do, Breonna, that the view that I encounter most often from certainly Republican voters, normies, is a fear of the same excesses that you are afraid of.
00:15:45 Speaker_02
the same kind of coercive practices that you are afraid of. So from that point of view, I'm really hoping that we can make Brianna feel safer in this country and more comfortable and more at ease.
00:15:59 Speaker_02
I sort of see things the other way in terms of the personnel question around Trump. To me, it seems like, you know, in his first term, he hired a lot of people who really did not believe in his agenda.
00:16:11 Speaker_02
They were social conservatives, and he is not a conservative. So he sidelined that whole Project 2025. He humiliated Project 2025 in a really big way throughout the campaign.
00:16:21 Speaker_02
And they were also free marketeers and people who believed in foreign interventions, which are things he really doesn't support.
00:16:26 Speaker_02
So to me, it's sort of like the A-list is on the ascendancy and he got rid of sort of the old GOP that I think was much more socially conservative.
00:16:35 Speaker_02
And I so I think that from that point of view, again, I'm hoping that soon or throughout the term, we will be able to show people will be able to show people in the administration, people who defend the administration will be able to do so in good faith in a way that is compelling.
00:16:50 Speaker_02
Peter.
00:16:52 Speaker_10
Savadek, how are you feeling? You took a red eye. You went all night. You brought your nine-year-old, who was the star of the show last night. She had some hilarious commentary throughout the night. I think she actually had some bets that she won.
00:17:03 Speaker_10
I think she might be using her $10 to buy a gerbil.
00:17:06 Speaker_06
Yeah, she bit my money.
00:17:07 Speaker_10
How are you doing this morning?
00:17:08 Speaker_06
I mean, I feel good in the sense that there was a clear outcome. I think like most people, I was most concerned about the possibility of this being hotly, highly disputed, that this is going to be protracted, and that we wouldn't know.
00:17:25 Speaker_06
And I think there was this kind of consensus that it was going to be weeks or months, and there was an uncertainty and a wondering, is there going to be a sort of another January 6 like event?
00:17:35 Speaker_06
I think the likelihood of anything like all that happening now is exceedingly low, because It's not just that Trump won, it's that Republicans won across the board.
00:17:46 Speaker_06
And the correct move now for Democrats from Kamala Harris to the county commissioner is to say, we lost fair and square, and we move forward, and to take a very long, hard look in the mirror and ask how they arrived at this sad juncture.
00:18:04 Speaker_10
Well, there are two ways broadly, I think, to look at last night. On the one hand, it's a story of Democratic failure. And on the other, it's a story of how Donald Trump pulled this off.
00:18:15 Speaker_10
And obviously, these two explanations sort of speak to each other. And I'm sure we could write a counterfactual history in which Trump would have actually lost if only there had been a stronger Democratic candidate.
00:18:25 Speaker_10
But I want us to sort of take each in turn, starting with a simple sort of autopsy. Why did Kamala Harris, Breonna, lose this election?
00:18:35 Speaker_07
Oh, boy, where do you want me to start? You choose. OK, OK. So, look, I know we're all tired. I'm just going to bring the energy up here and just lay it on. OK, we're all having mimosas. We're out to lunch and just can give it to you straight.
00:18:50 Speaker_07
The Democratic Party, if you work with it up close, is gross and fake and weird and not real at all. It's just not. You will sit there and you'll work with the top politicians and you'll find out they are just utterly messaged.
00:19:04 Speaker_07
There's nothing true behind what they're saying. And we carry that kind of arrogance through. You know, the fundamental nature of a Democratic politician is a people pleaser.
00:19:14 Speaker_07
You know, that friend you've got that never wants to say anything that's going to piss anyone off. So they just kind of say whatever and they're sitting there and smiling at you. It's kind of charming.
00:19:24 Speaker_07
But you're also kind of like, there's nothing real here. That's a Democratic politician. Some of the ones that went on last night with you, Barry, I'm saying they're watching them. I like their work, and they're saying nothing that's real.
00:19:35 Speaker_07
So the problem is, when you've got a party that doesn't truly stand for anything, the American people pick up on that. They know that it's a fake party.
00:19:45 Speaker_07
It knows that it can say it's standing for working-class people, but it doesn't feel that that's true culturally.
00:19:51 Speaker_07
So even though Trump is over here and he's not saying stuff that, like, he's a jerk, he's just a loud jerk, but you know what you're dealing with.
00:19:59 Speaker_07
And, you know, it is this culture in the Democratic Party of coding us for the most elite nonsense possible. I'll give you a very specific example. Land acknowledgements.
00:20:11 Speaker_07
I cannot tell you how many Democratic events I've been to where it opens up and someone stands up there and they go, we just want to acknowledge
00:20:18 Speaker_07
here in Massachusetts that this land belonged to this Indian and you're just sitting there looking around and it's a bunch of white people like me is the most, I hope I can say this word, but masturbatory, self-indulgent, like moralistic nonsense I've ever seen.
00:20:35 Speaker_07
So until we retreat away from this window dressing and get back to being something real, where people know what we're actually standing for, the Republicans are going to clean our clock.
00:20:47 Speaker_07
And just one last thing, the simple truth is the American people don't like Donald Trump.
00:20:52 Speaker_07
They vetted him out in 2020 for a reason, but they are looking at our culture of this woke progressive nonsense, which honestly, I played a huge part of shepherding into the party in 2014. and they hate it even more.
00:21:06 Speaker_07
So until that changes, until the Democrats grow a spine and are willing to say, you know what, we're actually gonna piss off the communists. We're actually not gonna stand with the Hamas sympathizers.
00:21:19 Speaker_07
We actually are going to tailor a message for working people and not the perpetually upset green haired, you know, like college student. Until we have the backbone to do that, we're going to continue to lose.
00:21:32 Speaker_10
So much of what Brianna just said is captured in a brilliant Peter Savodnik column written in the wee hours of last night, headlined memorably, We Blew It, Joe. And I want to read just the beginning of that here.
00:21:45 Speaker_10
The question is how the Ivy League technocrats, with oodles of cash and all their allies in legacy media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, managed to bungle this so royally.
00:21:55 Speaker_10
How did Kamala Harris lose to a crook in his campaign of, quote, relentless lying, as CNN recently characterized it? The answer is it wasn't a campaign of relentless lying. Relentless bullshit, yes, as my colleague Eli Lake has noted.
00:22:07 Speaker_10
Relentless hyperbole, absolutely. But lying, that's just not how voters saw it. For the past eight years, Peter writes, the Republican Party has been having an honest conversation about the real things that ail us all.
00:22:18 Speaker_10
Inflation, the hollowing out of rural America, the rise of China, the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, the chaos at our southern border, free speech, and the decline of American power.
00:22:29 Speaker_10
Has the conversation been frenetic and at times weird and wrongheaded, he writes? Yes. But more to the point, it is what we cared about. It was what the average voter wanted to talk about. And the Democrats? Well, Peter, now I want to hand it to you.
00:22:41 Speaker_10
What have the Democrats been talking about for these four years?
00:22:44 Speaker_06
Yeah, the Democrats have been talking about all the wrong things. I mean, I agree largely with what Breonna said.
00:22:49 Speaker_06
What's amazing is that the Democratic Party, for the most part, is still where all of Trump's Republican primary rivals were back in the fall of 2015.
00:23:00 Speaker_06
If you see him on stage with all these professional politicians, the Marco Rubios and Christie's and all those people, look utterly flabbergasted and kind of bemused and obviously not really taking Trump seriously. They don't get it.
00:23:18 Speaker_06
Over the course of the next year, they all got it because they had to. And they quickly came around to figuring out that this is where their base was. The Democratic Party is still there.
00:23:29 Speaker_06
They're still in the fall of 2015 and they haven't figured out that Trump is not tapping into or not simply tapping into kind of deep racist xenophobic feelings coursing through the American ethos or sort of like consciousness.
00:23:45 Speaker_06
He's talking about things in his own frenetic crazy amorphous kind of way that matter a lot to millions of Americans. He's asking kind of the question at the heart of it all, which is why are we declining and how do we reverse that?
00:24:00 Speaker_06
And anyone who spent just a few minutes at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, you back in July would have known that.
00:24:06 Speaker_06
Had Democrats actually bothered to dispatch like, you know, like a secret agent to the convention hall and really spent time listening and talking to delegates, they would have heard the same thing over and over, which is, why is it that we keep declining and no one's doing anything about it?
00:24:22 Speaker_06
No one's reversing it. And Democrats They seem to think that, well, if you don't want to talk about gender fluidity or BLM, that that makes you somehow a transphobic racist.
00:24:34 Speaker_06
No, I think at the heart of it, what Republican voters are saying and what voters across the board are saying is we don't actually have a problem with that per se.
00:24:42 Speaker_06
We want to know why that's more important than, say, what's going on in East Palestine or Flint or all the countless towns across the country that have seen their economic base disappear over the past 10, 15, 30 years.
00:24:57 Speaker_06
That's the question that animates the whole kind of America First movement. And I think increasingly, you know, voters want answers, too.
00:25:04 Speaker_06
So when the Democratic Party starts responding to this sort of like right-wing populism with a really substantive left-wing populist program, then they're going to see real success at the polls. Until then, they have a lot of thinking and work to do.
00:25:18 Speaker_10
Bhatia, as the Trump supporter in this conversation, I want to put the question to you just briefly.
00:25:22 Speaker_10
I think the consensus among a lot of people that I know is a vote for Trump wasn't a vote for Trump per se, so much as it was a vote against all of these things, the double standards, the hypocrisy, the elitism, the out-of-touchness that people were just absolutely fed up with.
00:25:40 Speaker_10
Do you buy that or do you view Trump's win today as more affirmative and more a like embrace of Trump as a persona, Trump as a politician?
00:25:50 Speaker_02
I think it's neither. I think it's an embrace of Trump, the policymaker. Obviously, he did get the support of some educated people, some rich people. And I think those people really wanted to cast a vote against Kamala Harris.
00:26:02 Speaker_02
But for the average everyday working class American, they're voting on their economic interests, which Trump 100% represents. And so I, you know, the thing that the Democrats did to lose and the thing that Donald Trump did to win were the same thing.
00:26:18 Speaker_02
Okay. Because Donald Trump picked up the Democrats' long-abandoned pro-labor policy agenda around the economy. So these are not two distinct things that happened, right?
00:26:31 Speaker_02
Trump got the Democrats' old base, the multiracial working class, because he picked up the Democrats' old agenda. Strong border, let's limit the supply of labor and protect wages. tariffs, trade war with China.
00:26:46 Speaker_02
Let's put American workers first, American labor first. Let's reshore manufacturing or have a strong manufacturing base. No more wars. The Republicans cast themselves as the anti-war party. And what did Kamala Harris do in order to challenge that?
00:27:02 Speaker_02
She brought Liz Cheney on board to campaign with her, right? These are one and the same thing. The Democrats used to be the party of abortions should be safe, legal, and rare. That's now Donald Trump's position, right?
00:27:15 Speaker_02
He's pro-choice for 15 weeks, 12 weeks. He promised that he would veto a national abortion ban. It's back to the states where many, many people, including many, many Democrats, think it belongs, or at least used to think it belonged.
00:27:29 Speaker_02
So I would say that those are the same. What Donald Trump did to beat the Democrats is he literally beat them at their own game. Became one. Basically, he literally became, or never stopped being one. He picked up their agenda, their pro-worker agenda,
00:27:43 Speaker_02
that was anti-war, anti-free trade, pro-worker, and strong immigrations, and socially moderate. And you see that even in, he won 44% of union households.
00:27:54 Speaker_02
I mean, this is, we're talking about just a complete, complete vindication of the realignment narrative.
00:28:02 Speaker_07
Bhatia, can I jump in and just really agree with you? And I want to talk structurally about why that happened in the Democratic Party. So I live in Boston. So when I go to Boston events, it's Massachusetts politicians, right? What's here? It's Harvard.
00:28:16 Speaker_07
It's MIT. I cannot tell you how many times I've had a meeting with an elected official in Boston or gone to some event late at night and who's there.
00:28:26 Speaker_07
There's a pipeline of people that go to Harvard and the Ivy League schools, hyper-educated, that read about this stuff, like the working class stuff you're talking about, and they learn about it at Harvard, right?
00:28:39 Speaker_07
And then they get a straight path to working with high-level Democrats, and then they work their way up the party. I'm not going to embarrass anyone, but You know who are politicians here in Massachusetts? You can probably guess, right?
00:28:54 Speaker_07
And we're supposed to be the pro-worker people. I cannot tell you how many times I've sat down and had a conversation with these people. And look, I grew up in Mississippi, the poorest state in the country. I myself am a college dropout, right?
00:29:07 Speaker_07
Like I dropped out to go do a startup, right? I went to public school and then I went to a public college. I'm the furthest thing on earth from Harvard.
00:29:17 Speaker_07
And you sit there and you talk to these democratic operatives and they talk about working class people like they are a dumb animal to be manipulated. This is the fundamental problem. It's not just the ideas, Bhatia, it is the people.
00:29:34 Speaker_07
that the Democratic Party selects, which are fundamentally as elite as you could possibly be, they are self-selected to not neurocognitively understand this stuff. And I think the thing that has fundamentally changed about the Democratic Party
00:29:50 Speaker_07
is a generation ago. You know, when you look at the expansion of unions, who was in charge of the Democratic Party was real union guys, right? The nature of our party is so fundamentally changed.
00:30:02 Speaker_07
And what I worry about more than the next four years, it's not that we're not going to get through this and survive as a country. We will.
00:30:10 Speaker_07
It's yet again, I know this party well enough to know we are not going to learn any lessons because we didn't learn any in 2016.
00:30:19 Speaker_10
Well, that's what I find kind of amazing this morning, to turn on cable, is like I expected Trump to win last night, but I did not expect the kind of Republican blowout or mandate, as Batya put it, that we saw.
00:30:33 Speaker_10
And I guess I'm still astonished that even the results of last night would not be enough to kind of shatter the narrative that you still hear issuing forth from the mouths of people on MSNBC this morning.
00:30:49 Speaker_10
Like, if last night is not enough to wake people up, I'm not sure what will be. Let's just stay on Kamala Harris for a minute, and then I want to talk more about the Trump campaign and how they achieved what they did.
00:31:03 Speaker_10
If I had to headline for you the issues that Donald Trump ran on, it's easy. It's inflation, immigration, and what are called the forever wars or foreign policy. Very simple.
00:31:13 Speaker_10
I guess if I had to choose a Kamala Harris issue, it would be abortion, but that's about it. To me, when I look back on the campaign, it was like a campaign of avoidance. Right? Donald Trump and J.D.
00:31:27 Speaker_10
Vance, love them or hate them, they made themselves massively available to podcasters for long-form conversations. There was kind of no one they didn't talk to.
00:31:38 Speaker_10
And Kamala Harris had seen the strategy up until the end when the campaign realized this was not going to be tenable, was kind of to avoid everything and to win by basically being not the other guy.
00:31:49 Speaker_10
Brianna, talk to us a little bit about that strategy, because I'm curious, from your sort of more insider position, how you perceived it. There was obviously a shift at a certain point, maybe around when she decided to go and call her daddy.
00:32:02 Speaker_10
But like, you know, was there any other issue other than abortion that Kamala Harris was running on? And why did they embrace sort of a campaign of avoidance?
00:32:13 Speaker_07
Why are you asking questions you know the answer to? Of course there was no other message. There was nothing. All we ever talked about is how bad Trump was and how scary it was.
00:32:22 Speaker_07
And then you would define Kamala Harris by like certain economic strategies. Like this is, it's just a problem across the board, right? With the entire party. And, you know, I think we've, we're so used
00:32:37 Speaker_07
to telling the American people how terrible the Republicans are, the Democratic Party has never developed a message of what we stand for. So, no, you're just dead on there. And again, it's not just the candidates, it's the culture within the party.
00:32:53 Speaker_10
It's very hard to make an argument that the country is going to end if this person wins when you've lived through four years of the person being president and the country didn't end.
00:33:03 Speaker_10
And, like, the amount of brain power, IQ points, sophistication in the Democratic Party, like, these are meant to be the geniuses. Help me understand it. Like, how could there not have been a better strategy than what they offered?
00:33:22 Speaker_07
Well, the thing you've got to understand about the Democratic Party you need to understand right now is everyone that rose to a senior level right now came from the Obama 2008 campaign. So they're really frozen in that world.
00:33:34 Speaker_07
So when they're thinking about how to target voters, it really, television is still a really major impact.
00:33:43 Speaker_07
I'm not gonna tell you television, you know, will not sway the polls certain ways, but there's an entire, like, within the Democratic Party, a consultant class that gets rich every single four years by, like, giving a bunch of charts.
00:33:57 Speaker_07
They come from McKinsey, they show it to the candidate, and then they go buy out mass amounts of ad time on all these television stations. And they make their money from giving the exact same recommendation, election after election after election.
00:34:10 Speaker_07
You've got super specialists in the party that will work on field and event. But the problem is, the party is structured around these ideas that have worked in the past, and that's how people got to where they are.
00:34:25 Speaker_07
So it's very, very difficult to get the party to agree to shift anything. And let me give you a really specific example. I come from Twitch world and YouTube.
00:34:35 Speaker_07
I have spent so many hundreds of hours talking to elected Democrats at the highest levels and trying to get them to go more on Twitch this cycle to get the vote out. Yet Trump, he had no issue with that. He went on Aiden Ross.
00:34:49 Speaker_07
You know, did Kamala Harris go on Destiny's Show? Of course she didn't. Right? So the problem is there's this Democratic consultant class is so conservative with everything they recommend, which is exactly why she did not go on Joe Rogan.
00:35:04 Speaker_07
We are tremendously risk averse and we are tremendously unincentivized to try anything new.
00:35:11 Speaker_10
Let's just try counterfactual. Yes.
00:35:13 Speaker_10
If Donald Trump had been running against a stronger candidate, if after Joe Biden dropped out, there had been the kind of mini primary that a lot of people were talking about, and let's say she was running against Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, even a Dean Phillips, would the result, Peter, have been different?
00:35:33 Speaker_06
So it's a little bit like asking if Donald Trump had run against a different Democratic Party, would the results have been different? Yes. The compressed primary could never have happened because it's simply too uncorporate, disorganized.
00:35:46 Speaker_06
It's too unpredictable for the kind of.
00:35:50 Speaker_10
You might even say Democratic.
00:35:52 Speaker_06
Yeah, Democratic, exactly. There's no controlling that result. I think, look, the really important thing to take away from from what happened last night, this pertains to everything that Brianna was just talking about.
00:36:03 Speaker_06
I guess there's a big potential mistake the Republicans may make here over the next few years. And that is, of course, to go back to something that I'm I mean, we hate you in a kind of visceral way. And we hate, it's not just the Democratic Party.
00:36:31 Speaker_06
And I think, you know, I've seen this morning a lot of strategists and consultants talking about, you know, pinning the blame on Biden. You know, we're just talking about Twitch.
00:36:39 Speaker_06
I think if we reduce it to like something tactical, we're missing the point. This is about the whole sort of like progressive firmament and the whole ecosystem, the institutions, the culture, the anthropology behind all this. It's rotten.
00:36:54 Speaker_06
And it's illiberal and it has, there's a fundamental disconnect with the American people. And I think what happened last night is millions of voters said we are done with that.
00:37:04 Speaker_06
And it reminded me a lot of, there's a wonderful book that came out 60 years ago by Digby Boutsell, this University of Pennsylvania sociologist called the Protestant Establishment. And it's basically about sort of the role of the American elite.
00:37:16 Speaker_06
And Baltel talks about there being an aristocracy versus an establishment. And the establishment is the guiding elite that is connected to the body politic, that cares about America, that feels a real affinity and fondness and closeness with it.
00:37:32 Speaker_06
And the aristocracy is cordoned off and hostile to it. And we've been in this moment of a protracted aristocracy. And I think we want to be careful. We don't want to abolish the elite, an elite, the idea of an elite altogether. We just hate this elite.
00:37:48 Speaker_06
We hate the people who are in charge of these institutions.
00:37:51 Speaker_10
That's so elegantly put, Peter, and I think the way that I've been thinking about it, and Martin Goury kind of prophesized the whole past 15 years or so.
00:38:03 Speaker_10
For people who haven't read, and we'll put in the show notes, his book, The Revolt of the Public, it really captures so much of what we saw come into full
00:38:12 Speaker_10
bloom last night, which is this sort of struggle between, you could call them the elites and the counter elites, right? The New York Times, MSNBC, Industrial Complex, and then the Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Renegade, Justice League types.
00:38:30 Speaker_10
It's not that those people are not also highly educated, pedigreed elites. It's just their dissidence from inside the elite class. And I think that's one crucial way that you can understand what happened last night.
00:38:44 Speaker_06
Well, and if the Republicans don't figure out very fast that this is not a wholesale rejection of elitism or an elite, the idea of an elite, this is simply a rejection of the people who are in charge, this elite.
00:38:58 Speaker_06
If they don't get that clear in their head, we do want guardrails, right? We don't actually want conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites at national conventions. We don't want people close to the president who are peddling all kinds of crazy ideas about
00:39:12 Speaker_06
whatever Pizzagate kind of notions. We want a kind of like sobriety and even stodginess in our leaders. But we want also to believe that those leaders have a real kind of heartfelt connection with the American people.
00:39:25 Speaker_06
We want to feel like we're something closer to where we were during World War II when, you know, many, many members of Congress had their own children serving in the wars that they were voting, you know, in the war they were voting to support.
00:39:37 Speaker_06
That is, there's a heartfelt connection. Right now, we feel like there is this cordoned off insular... Right now, it's like the Hunger Games.
00:39:44 Speaker_10
That's right. And it's like the people from the Capitol versus whatever the other people are called.
00:39:49 Speaker_06
That's exactly it.
00:39:49 Speaker_10
Just before we get to Trump, taking sort of like the big, big picture, if I'm a historian in, you know, decades to come, do you think that I would look back and say that the biggest character of this election wasn't actually Kamala Harris or Donald Trump,
00:40:08 Speaker_10
But Joe Biden, in other words, if Joe Biden stepped away sooner, the Democrats might have had an open primary and run a candidate chosen by voters who actually had a chance of beating Trump.
00:40:25 Speaker_10
How much of the Democrats lost last night was because of Biden's or rather the Biden White House's refusal to get him out earlier in the game? Bhatia, let's start with you.
00:40:38 Speaker_02
Well, every time somebody says, this is a vindication of a book, I keep expecting them to say, this is a vindication of a great book called Second Class, How the Army Betrayed America's Working Men and Women. Sorry about you. Who wrote that book?
00:40:50 Speaker_02
Whose author was interviewed on Honestly, this very podcast by the brilliant Barry Weiss. Said author gets stopped in the street and told how much that interview on Honestly meant to them. Very frequently, actually. Yeah, I mean, so I would say,
00:41:05 Speaker_10
For listeners at home that are not picking up on the subtlety here, the author of that book is one Bachangar Sargon, but yes, go on.
00:41:11 Speaker_02
Indeed, indeed. My book came out about six months ago and was completely vindicated because if you look at exactly who flipped the election for Trump, it's the working class, the multiracial working class.
00:41:23 Speaker_02
I've been saying that the MAGA movement is a multiracial working class coalition made up of former Democrats. you know, for ages. And amazingly, there are some people on the MAGA movement who don't like hearing that either.
00:41:33 Speaker_02
But so I feel I feel like I actually don't think that Joe Biden staying in, leaving when he did had much of an impact.
00:41:43 Speaker_02
If you look at who flipped for Trump and what issues they said they flipped for him on, it was immigration and the economy, and it was the working class.
00:41:53 Speaker_02
Now, the Democrats, we've all agreed here, have abandoned those voters to cater to the very poor and the very rich. And so it really would.
00:42:01 Speaker_02
You know, the question really is if if Joe Biden had not immediately undone Donald Trump's very effective border executive actions on day one in office, would that have made a difference for the Democrats?
00:42:15 Speaker_02
But that's effectively to say if the Democrats were no longer the Democrats, would that have made a difference for the Democrats? And it certainly would. Right. This was the this was the immigration election. This was an election that pitted the fake
00:42:28 Speaker_02
the fake needs, the fake story that there's going to be an abortion ban that that allowed rich women to feel like an oppressed class against the real problems and real needs of downwardly mobile working class men.
00:42:45 Speaker_02
And so, you know, there's very little I think the Democrats could have done short of totally revolutionizing who they are to stop this tsunami of support for, look who flipped for Trump. He got the majority of Latino men unheard of for Republican.
00:43:01 Speaker_02
He got the majority of young people. I mean, it's like just beyond you look at who flipped for him. These are not people who would, I think actually Josh Shapiro would appeal to, to to the working class and to young men.
00:43:13 Speaker_02
He only lost the white working class by two points in Pennsylvania, which is insane for a Democrat.
00:43:18 Speaker_02
But short of that, it's very hard to imagine how anybody else at the front of the line coming out of the Obama coalition could even understand what I'm saying here, which is so obvious to everybody else. And there's such an irony here
00:43:34 Speaker_02
Because, you know, what Obama achieved was to have all of these millions and millions and millions of Americans say, we're not racist. We want to cast our vote for a black man. We are thrilled to do that.
00:43:48 Speaker_02
And having done that, they were like, well, surely now no one can accuse us of being racist. We can go back to voting on our economic interests.
00:43:55 Speaker_02
So they voted on their economic interests for Donald Trump and immediately were of course called racist, which of course just made more people feel emboldened to give the finger to the people who would dare smear people for voting on what's best for their children.
00:44:12 Speaker_10
After the break, how Republicans exploited the trans issue. And was that a bigger issue actually for women than abortion? Stay with us. Today's episode was made possible by Ground News.
00:44:31 Speaker_10
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00:44:43 Speaker_10
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00:45:07 Speaker_10
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00:45:21 Speaker_10
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00:45:33 Speaker_10
Hey, Honestly listeners, I want to let you know about an amazing podcast called Unpacking Israeli History. If you read the headlines about what's going on in Israel, you're only getting a very tiny slice of a very long story.
00:45:46 Speaker_10
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00:45:53 Speaker_10
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00:46:50 Speaker_10
It looks like Trump is going to sweep every battleground state, right, which is kind of I mean, I'm never paying attention to a pollster ever again after last night. I mean, they all told me it was going to be a squeaker.
00:47:02 Speaker_10
We weren't going to know for weeks, maybe even months, like, you know, strap in for the long haul. There was you know, it was but it was so overwhelming. The picture, North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.
00:47:18 Speaker_10
They've already been called for Trump, and he's very likely going to take Arizona and Nevada. The map is almost identical to 2016, but an utter reversal of 2020. What changed between then and now?
00:47:32 Speaker_10
How did Trump turn around, and four years later, win the very states he lost in the last election. Any of you, please jump in.
00:47:41 Speaker_07
So Bhatia, I agree somewhat with what you just said, but I think it's a little more than that. I think the issues with Biden really depend on where you kind of pick up the storyline.
00:47:53 Speaker_07
For whatever you think of Trump, he has set the tone of the Republican Party very consistently since 2015 and 2016. If you're a Republican today, you know who you are and what you're standing for.
00:48:07 Speaker_07
It is Trumpism and that kind of, you know, poke in the eye to the elites. You're voting for a party that's gonna smash the machinery that is making your life unappealing because the elites aren't running it well.
00:48:20 Speaker_07
I don't agree with that vision, but you know what you're voting for. One of the consequences, and since I don't work for free press, I can say this.
00:48:27 Speaker_07
One of the things the free press wrote about better than literally anyone else was this sham that the Democratic Party put on for four years, hiding President Biden from the public, never making him answer questions or do interviews or go out and give messages.
00:48:45 Speaker_07
We have been leaderless. for four years.
00:48:48 Speaker_07
So it's not so much the moment that we switched the candidate that was the problem, is that the Democrats have just been like the ship at sea, just floating wherever the tide takes us for the last four years, because we don't have a leader.
00:49:01 Speaker_07
Biden has not done that. He's done an excellent job on policy from behind the scenes, but that's not what people vote on. You know, coming back to your question, Barry, why did we all get this so wrong?
00:49:12 Speaker_07
I don't know if y'all have ever paid for polling or worked with these pollsters, but I swear to God, I beg you, like hire a pollster and sit down.
00:49:21 Speaker_07
I have a functional grasp of statistics from programming some graphics drivers one time and looking at your reports for it. Like it is one-on-one level stuff. If you sit down and really start asking a pollster, how are you correcting this data?
00:49:36 Speaker_07
How are you getting this? How are you sampling this? There are not enough people in this class here. How are you correcting your data? How do you measure voter turnout? It's just, for lack of a better word, it's horse duty.
00:49:47 Speaker_07
Like, they're just completely full of it. So, like, we are past the days where we are going to be able to get really accurate data.
00:49:56 Speaker_07
You can use polls to pick up signals and say things like, the American people are going to respond to anti-trans ads, but really coming down and measuring an election, those days are just gone in America.
00:50:08 Speaker_10
But this is like the greatest political comeback story in American history to go from where he was in 2020. And then, of course, the impeachments, the convicted felon, all of the different lawsuits to now. Like, how did he flip these states?
00:50:23 Speaker_10
Is the answer simply immigration, inflation and foreign policy? Or is there some deeper vibe shift that occurred over the past four years?
00:50:33 Speaker_10
perhaps COVID lockdowns, the media narrative and the explosion of it, the feeling that people were lied to about Biden's mental state, the summer of 2020. Like, do you guys feel like any of that played a role in the shift here?
00:50:48 Speaker_10
Or was Donald Trump genuinely just surrounded by the most brilliant strategists that helped him sail to victory last night? Peter?
00:50:57 Speaker_06
Yeah, I think it's a mistake to view what happened last night as a refutation of or a kind of reversal of 2020 and more as a continuation of 2016.
00:51:06 Speaker_06
Democrats don't appreciate that the paradigm shifted in the fall of 2015 and in the spring and summer of 2016. That's when the kind of fulcrum around which our politics moved.
00:51:17 Speaker_06
And you either moved with it and saw where the country was headed or you didn't. The reason that the Democrats captured the White House in 2020 is simple. It was COVID.
00:51:25 Speaker_06
And they nominated the one guy, Scranton Joe, who seemed like he could be the antidote to the kind of populist right. And they played him up, right?
00:51:35 Speaker_06
I mean, there's a reason they nominated the oldest Democrat in the pack who seemed like he was closer to that kind of traditional Democratic working class base.
00:51:44 Speaker_06
And had they actually embraced a program over the past four years that mapped that branding, then I think, yes, last night's results have been very different. But that's not what they did, right?
00:51:55 Speaker_06
They had the packaging right, but the substance was all wrong. And so what happened last night is simply voters saying, no, no, no, we're not finished with what we started in 2016.
00:52:04 Speaker_06
There was an interruption in 2020 because there was a lot of commotion, there was upheaval, but we want to continue with what we were doing. And the Democrats don't seem to have gotten that. They don't appreciate that there's been this seismic shift.
00:52:17 Speaker_10
Right. They're still kind of seeing Trump as the anomaly rather than Biden's victory in 2020 as the anomaly.
00:52:24 Speaker_06
Exactly. And I think what happened is that this is a reckoning that is being imposed on the Democrats akin to sort of 1968. The party is is going to have to ask itself deep, existential questions. Why are we here? Who are we?
00:52:39 Speaker_06
What is our role in the world, in America? Why do we exist? And by extension, why do all kind of democratic-dominated institutions exist, right? We're having questions like that right now. Why does the legacy media exist?
00:52:51 Speaker_06
Does it exist to hold the powerful to account? Why do universities exist? Do they exist to educate young people or to indoctrinate them and so on and so forth? I think we're at this reckoning moment where
00:53:01 Speaker_06
the whole left, it's not just the Democratic Party, it's not just a handful of insiders, it's not just the Democratic consultant class, all of whom should be fired, it's not just them, it's the whole kind of left-wing world that has to ask itself, and until you stop seeing yourself as furthering some kind of progressive agenda and you start seeing yourselves as sort of members of a kind of robust and three-dimensional society or polity,
00:53:28 Speaker_06
then you are going to continue kind of hemorrhaging support and losing. And I think there's a broader kind of like reckoning or kind of come to Jesus moment that we've arrived at.
00:53:37 Speaker_10
As we've already sort of touched on in this conversation, Trump massively overperformed with minorities in the working class. And he also didn't have as much of a deficit as we would have expected with educated suburban and women voters.
00:53:51 Speaker_10
What do you think those women saw in him that they didn't see in the last election, because the assumption, of course, and like the conventional wisdom going into this election was Donald Trump needed to get out the men.
00:54:04 Speaker_10
He needed to get out the Joe Rogan voter. And Kamala Harris needed women to show up because they were scared of Donald Trump and passionate about abortion. And that just didn't come to pass. Batia, why did these women go for Trump?
00:54:18 Speaker_02
The question really, I think, is why 2020 was different, right, which is something we've been talking about. I think because of the pandemic, the question of voting on economic policy was a little bit suspended because the economy was suspended.
00:54:33 Speaker_02
that sort of as a pressing issue, people had stimmy checks, right? We were not in normal, like, worker, making money, supporting family mode. And so I think there was a suspension of that.
00:54:46 Speaker_02
But what happened in the meantime was Donald Trump went from being, like, brutish and lame and, you know, somebody, maybe your racist uncle, that's the trope, right, would vote for,
00:54:59 Speaker_02
to being like this gangster who they keep trying to destroy and put in prison and shoot. And he just keeps popping back up and refusing to be put down. And I think the stigma was shifted.
00:55:13 Speaker_02
So Trump became this kind of badass and this kind of countercultural symbol for young men, and the Democrats became the kind of cringe, lame, like posers, like brat, like as if, right? Like, you know, there was this real shift.
00:55:33 Speaker_02
It was a vibe shift in terms of like which party was cool, you know? the cool that Obama had brought to the Democratic Party evaporated. And there was this old man, Joe Biden, right, who was supposed to be representing young voters.
00:55:47 Speaker_02
And meanwhile, Trump, he's not young, but he got this kind of aura around him. And I think that that maybe influenced younger people to show up, younger men especially.
00:55:56 Speaker_02
But your question was about women and why women didn't buy this narrative about women's bodies and freedom and so forth. And I think that there was just a
00:56:05 Speaker_02
competing narrative about the threat to women, to their bodies, and to their selves, posed in a way by the excesses of the trans movement and the ways that they have been so fully embraced by the Democratic Party.
00:56:19 Speaker_02
What happened since 2020 is we have seen images of young women being beaten, you know, harmed in sports settings.
00:56:27 Speaker_02
We have been exposed to this idea that this should be normalized and that it's somehow transphobic to oppose that, which, of course, Brianna can tell you that it's not. There was a competing sense of what it would mean to protect girls and women.
00:56:42 Speaker_02
And it was so amazing to see the loudest voices demanding abortion rights were coming from women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. We're talking about women who will never need an abortion.
00:56:55 Speaker_02
And I think there was something about that that just kept really bothering me about this.
00:56:59 Speaker_02
Like, why are all of these billionaire and millionaire women in their 70s out there lecturing both men and women that this should be the number one issue for them?
00:57:10 Speaker_10
Well, just to steel man it, I agree with you that there were competing arguments about which party cared more about women's bodies and the flourishing of girls and women.
00:57:21 Speaker_10
But I think the reason that that generation is so outspoken about it is that they remember a time in American history where people died of back alley abortions and sepsis.
00:57:32 Speaker_02
Do they really, it's not, I feel like that the idea that that is where we're headed, like they don't, you can't act, nobody can actually believe that that is true.
00:57:39 Speaker_02
Like nobody really believes that you have to really like really purposely misconstrue the stories that were coming out of Georgia to believe that that is where the Republican party is trying to take us. I mean, I think a lot, maybe they do.
00:57:53 Speaker_02
I shouldn't say they don't believe it. Maybe they do really believe it. But what we've learned from this election is that to the majority of women, that seems incredibly far-fetched.
00:58:02 Speaker_02
And I think also there is a feeling that to reduce women's interests to this one thing, there's something very insulting about that.
00:58:12 Speaker_10
Brianna, I'd love for you to weigh in here because I think one of the stickiest issues of this election, strangely, just given the importance of so many other things to most Americans, was the issue of biological men in girls' sports and the fundamental unfairness of that.
00:58:29 Speaker_10
Talk to us about that, which is an issue I think that you resonate with, and where that begins to bleed into the kinds of things you've been tweeting about for the past 24 hours, which is a genuine and profound fear about
00:58:42 Speaker_10
health care of trans adults that you feel is under threat in a Trump administration?
00:58:47 Speaker_07
So, I mean, and I want to really set the stage here. Bhatia, I agree with everything you just said. You know, I think it's really insulting to tell women that the only thing they need to care about is abortion rights.
00:58:58 Speaker_07
As best as I can tell from the friendships I have, it's very important. You know, these stories of women dying of sepsis even recently are very scary to people. But a lot of my friends have children.
00:59:10 Speaker_07
And, you know, when they go to here in Massachusetts, you know, if they're taking their children to kindergarten for the very first time and there's a box that they need to fill out saying, tell us your child's preferred pronouns, or if they're in elementary school and there's a coming out day elementary school and a ton of the class is raising their hands and saying they think they're non-binary,
00:59:32 Speaker_07
that is going to put the fear of God into most parents. Because, ironically, the way the trans community has messaged this to people is if you have any kind of gender nonconformity, that apparently can drive your child to suicide, right?
00:59:46 Speaker_07
So we're scaring the hell out of parents, ironically, with the way we ourselves have framed these issues. So I think it is so clearly off-base, the way that the trans community has run this. And I want to be really clear about this.
01:00:01 Speaker_07
It's not transsexuals like me. I medically transitioned. I have to take HRT. I will literally die without it. I transitioned to move on with life. It is people that have shown up that are honestly, in my opinion, straight.
01:00:15 Speaker_07
They are not medically transitioning, they are just typically gender non-conforming, and they have radically redefined, they've colonized, to put it in leftist terms, they've colonized my healthcare movement that I need or I will die without for this other completely crazy mission objective.
01:00:33 Speaker_07
Of course you're seeing a pushback on this. What is so frustrating, Barry? What just makes me want to scream out of my window is when I look at every single, quote, trans leader on this, they were saying this yesterday.
01:00:47 Speaker_07
Oh, the Republicans ran $250 million on ads. It's not going to have any effect. We know this has no salience. Really? You know, I run a super PAC. I know what happens before you invest. $100,000 in an ad, much less a couple, like a few million.
01:01:03 Speaker_07
You market test it, you see who it's going to land with, you figure out who's in the district, you micro-target it, and you really get that message very granular.
01:01:12 Speaker_07
Someone clearly has done some research that's showing these kinds of voters that Bhatia's talking about are responding to these anti-trans messages. And who is responsible for this?
01:01:24 Speaker_07
It is so convenient for trans activists to say, the Republicans are all transphobic. They're just evil. No, that's not it. We've changed our messaging on this to something radical and crazy that the rest of the country just can't get on board with.
01:01:39 Speaker_07
And it has literally handed the Republican Party everything they need to destroy us.
01:01:43 Speaker_06
What's sad and very telling about what Brianna was saying now is that
01:01:47 Speaker_06
Like having been to many, many Republican campaign events over the past two, three years, you never hear Republican partisans, people with their MAGA caps on in deep red states bashing the trans cause per se, trans adults. I've never heard that.
01:02:06 Speaker_06
It's always the same thing, which is get your laws and your policies and your regulations off my kids or my grandchildren. What that leads me to think is, There is much, much more overlap here.
01:02:17 Speaker_06
There's much more consensus about this kind of liberal consensus about sort of Americans in the very best sense saying, you know what, Americans, adults are free to live their lives as they see fit.
01:02:28 Speaker_06
That's, that is part of the American promise, the American compact, but you do not have the right to impose your politics on kids who are still figuring out who the hell they are and certainly not behind their parents' backs.
01:02:42 Speaker_10
Yeah. I want to talk for a minute about character, both about Trump's and also the character of the American people, which is the conversation that a lot of people, especially a lot of people on the left, are having this morning.
01:02:54 Speaker_10
Trump will be the first convicted felon and twice impeached candidate to become president. He was found liable for sexual abuse. He mocked a disabled reporter. He said John McCain wasn't a hero. He called veterans suckers and losers.
01:03:07 Speaker_10
He faced 116 indictments. Those things didn't seem to matter to voters. I bring all of this up not to kind of relitigate those issues, but because I'm seeing a lot of the same 2016 takes recirculating on social media and on legacy media.
01:03:27 Speaker_10
In other words, that Americans voted for Trump for the worst possible reasons. They voted for Trump because America is, in fact, a sexist, racist, bigoted, fascist-loving place. I'm choosing one example, but I might write about this.
01:03:42 Speaker_10
There are hundreds that I'm compiling since late last night. Here's Jill Filipovic, a writer that I often read. Here's what she wrote on Twitter. In the coming days, there's going to be a lot of opining about what the Harris campaign did wrong.
01:03:55 Speaker_10
But this election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris, she says. It was an indictment of America.
01:04:02 Speaker_02
Wow.
01:04:04 Speaker_10
Let's talk about that.
01:04:05 Speaker_07
I like I like Jill a lot. I don't think I agree.
01:04:09 Speaker_10
I'm not trying to pick on her. I'm choosing an example of many that are basically saying that America just chose to elect a fascist, that America is sort of choosing to usher in a dark age. Contend with that.
01:04:23 Speaker_07
This is not what's going on. So I'm probably the only person here that will cut to this. Who ought to watch Jersey Shore? Am I the only one? Oh, my God. Of course I watch Jersey Shore. Ronnie and, uh, Ronnie, what was his name?
01:04:38 Speaker_07
Nut J. Well, the girl he kept hooking up with. You know, Ronnie and his girlfriend are fighting, and then it's terrifying. Like, Ronnie's throwing the mattress out the window, and it's like, oh, my God, I can't believe this.
01:04:49 Speaker_07
And then season two, Ronnie's fighting with his girlfriend, throwing it out the window, and you're like, eh. All right, let's watch this again. Season three rolls around, the same storyline every single time.
01:05:04 Speaker_07
It's like, so this is a story about mainstream media and the complete breakdown of being able to pay attention. Look, I am, I suppose, an elite.
01:05:14 Speaker_07
I understand why all this stuff is bad, but the fact that the press in this country has not found a way to connect these events and these things that Trump is doing and make them stick, it just has come off as a Jersey Shore fight at this point that they are just tuned out to.
01:05:34 Speaker_07
They're bored, they have short memories, and they just don't care anymore. Like it or not, this rise of hyper-wokeness and the way that trans culture is affecting children in this country, this is a new story.
01:05:49 Speaker_07
This is a new threat and people are just more tuned into it. This is a really terrifying shift in the power of the fourth estate to get the American people to pay attention to things.
01:06:01 Speaker_07
And I think it speaks to an inability of them to move from this really old paradigm and to move into something that looks a lot more like Joe Rogan. People trust personalities more than they trust institutions in 2024.
01:06:16 Speaker_06
Barry, if I may, I think this is more characterological. It says something about the to the left more broadly and psychologically. The impulse is to blame the people who don't think like us.
01:06:27 Speaker_06
If only these people, these dumb, unwashed masses would just be more like us, then everything would just fix itself. But they're not. And so the problem is them. It is never us. It's never Maybe we've made mistakes.
01:06:41 Speaker_06
Maybe we don't understand the people we claim to care about. Maybe we are actually the wrong people to be furthering the politics we claim to care about so much. It's never introspective.
01:06:51 Speaker_06
The best you get from Democrats, I recall the debates around Obamacare, and there was lots of sort of like hand-wringing in the administration about, why aren't more Americans excited about this kind of, you know, like upending of healthcare as we've known it?
01:07:05 Speaker_06
And the best that the administration could come up with was, Well, our messaging hasn't been that good. It's never the program itself. It's never we are doing anything wrong.
01:07:14 Speaker_06
It's either the masses are too dumb or evil, or the message that we are communicating to them just needs to be tweaked somewhat.
01:07:23 Speaker_06
They need to think hard about the fact that they have jettisoned utterly the economic determinist prism that used to inform democratic politics. That is this idea that class and economics, money matter fundamentally.
01:07:37 Speaker_06
And they have embraced this idea of racial essentialism, identitarianism, and it has not occurred to them yet.
01:07:44 Speaker_06
that that's actually not where the great mass of Americans are, including many, many Americans who are very smart and educated, who also happen to think that they're crazy.
01:07:55 Speaker_02
I also really liked Jill, but I think what's so amazing about that tweet is Donald Trump showed up and said, they don't hate me. They hate you, the American people.
01:08:07 Speaker_02
And this morning the left and the Democrats went on Twitter and went on cable news and literally said, it's not an indictment of Trump. It's an indictment of the American people.
01:08:18 Speaker_02
they have the same interpretation of the Trump phenomenon, which is that he is, you know, the candidate of the masses and represents to a certain degree where the American people are at.
01:08:31 Speaker_02
And you either love the American people and thus love him for representing them, or you hate the American people because they chose him. And I think that that is really what we're seeing here.
01:08:42 Speaker_02
And I think that that was really what was exposed with all of this Hitler talk. When you call somebody Hitler or a fascist, who now we know has won the popular vote, that is not a smear on him.
01:08:55 Speaker_02
That is a smear on the American people, and we should not tolerate it from anybody.
01:09:01 Speaker_10
I just want to read an amazing tweet from Brianna that I think well sums that up. She writes, Democratic path forward, jettison the commies, Hamas fans, and designer gender crowd. No more land acknowledgments. No more trying to please everyone.
01:09:16 Speaker_10
We have a point of view. Fight for normal people. Whatever gets in the way of that, we stop doing. That's it.
01:09:23 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's it. That's exactly it.
01:09:25 Speaker_10
I think that's the strategy. OK, well, the control of the Senate flipped. It's not just that the Republicans won the White House. They've also flipped the Senate. And it looks like they might even win the House.
01:09:39 Speaker_10
So the possibility of a red White House, a red Senate, and a red Congress, and, of course, the Supreme Court. Peter, put this in historical perspective for us. I mean, does this just mean that we're a center right country? And how do you explain this?
01:10:00 Speaker_10
I mean, this is this was the we were told there was going to be a red wave in 2022. It never happened. It looks like this is it. And and what does it mean for for policy and for governing?
01:10:09 Speaker_06
I think it's a demand that, like, it's a reflection of a certain maturity on the part of the American electorate. People want the parties to govern and to lead.
01:10:18 Speaker_06
So for the Democrats, the message should be enough with all of your, like, criticizing the likes of Joe Manchin for being a conservative Democrat in an ultra-conservative state.
01:10:27 Speaker_06
You lost West Virginia because you don't make room for people like that anymore. And if you were truly a pluralistic and inclusive party, a diverse party, you would have held on to West Virginia and you would have held on to Montana.
01:10:40 Speaker_06
And there wouldn't be these vast swatches of the country that are basically verboten or off limits to Democrats. You know, what's going to happen? You know, I don't know.
01:10:51 Speaker_06
I derive some comfort from the fact that the Republican majority in the House is probably going to be narrower than I think we expected. I don't think that's going to be a check exactly on the White House power, on the president's power.
01:11:04 Speaker_06
But it will encourage some people on the Hill to push for, I think, a little bit more cooperation or kind of bipartisan coming together. Probably, you know, it'll be a very eventful two years.
01:11:18 Speaker_06
I think, you know, happily, we'll all be here in two years and in four years. I'm sure this is not the last election. And I look forward to covering the next one.
01:11:26 Speaker_10
Well, I found it kind of unbelievable. We had an editorial on it very late last night. The rhetoric going into this election from both sides was was just so irresponsible. Like Oprah spoke at this Kamala Harris rally in Philadelphia.
01:11:41 Speaker_10
on Monday saying that this might be the last vote you ever cast if she doesn't win. But equally, you had Elon Musk and Joe Rogan saying that if Trump didn't win, this was going to be the last American election.
01:11:52 Speaker_10
Bhatia, what do you make of that rhetoric?
01:11:57 Speaker_02
When you brought up Oprah, I remembered something that I had said right after she did. She went out, she did the DNC, and then she had Kamala Harris on her show. And every time she would introduce her, she would go, Kamala Harris.
01:12:13 Speaker_02
I joked, but it seems that I was right. Every time Oprah says Kamala Harris in that way, a swing voter dies and a Trump voter is born. It does seem like the numbers at least are bearing that out.
01:12:29 Speaker_02
I hate to break it to you guys, but you're going to be very happy with the next two years. There's going to be, you know, great policy put in place on tariffs and on border controls. Working class wages are going to go up.
01:12:43 Speaker_02
Your children are going to be able to play with working class kids whose parents are living a middle class life. And if that doesn't happen in two years, there will be another election and they'll flip the house back.
01:12:55 Speaker_02
I mean, this is the greatest country on earth. Our checks and balances are incredible and they are much better at standing up to Republicans than Democrats.
01:13:07 Speaker_02
I mean, this is the crucial thing to remember is that it is in the nature of power to abuse itself and to expand itself and to wrest more of itself from the people. Right. And the truth is that in America, the checks and balances in our institutions
01:13:23 Speaker_02
come from people who have all been indoctrinated in universities.
01:13:27 Speaker_02
So they're all on the side of the left, which means they are incredibly adept at standing up to Donald Trump's alleged abuses of power or attempts to control more power than he has legal access to.
01:13:39 Speaker_02
And they have proven themselves the handmaidens of democratic abuses of power. And so I just think it's great. We're going to see what can happen when government is working. If they overreach, they'll be checked.
01:13:51 Speaker_02
If they go in a bad direction, they'll be overturned. Brianna, I'm going to fight for your rights and for the rights that I think most people now in the Republican coalition agree with Peter. They want every person to have
01:14:04 Speaker_02
physical autonomy to be protected from discrimination in housing and in the economy and so forth. But they also want to protect children. I think that most Americans, 90% of Americans, American voters are on board with the same things.
01:14:16 Speaker_02
And I think we're going to see what that can look like. And if, God forbid, it goes awry, this great nation will correct for that.
01:14:24 Speaker_10
I want to read the end of Peter's excellent column that I referenced earlier in this conversation, maybe as a way of bringing us to a close and reflecting on the way forward. Here's what Peter writes.
01:14:36 Speaker_10
I've spent much of the past year on the road in towns and cities like Flint and East Palestine and the suburbs of Phoenix and the backwaters of Pennsylvania and the California desert, and there was everywhere a deep and pervasive desire for an honest, wide-ranging conversation about what's to be done, how we move forward.
01:14:53 Speaker_10
The only way out of this cul-de-sac, the only way for Democrats to win once again, will be for the party to tune out MSNBC and the campus and the progressive identitarians and to return once again to the same Americans it has made a habit of disparaging.
01:15:07 Speaker_10
Breonna, let's kick it to you.
01:15:11 Speaker_07
What's the way forward? Yeah, I'm so happy you asked that, Mary, because, you know, this whole conversation, Batia, I've been thinking, like, you know, I don't agree with what you just said, but I can appreciate the spirit that is behind it.
01:15:25 Speaker_07
And, you know, I think if we're looking back to 2014 and 2016, kind of where were we as a country? You had Gamergate, you had Trump kind of rising, and you had this organized movement to unite the left as strongly as possible.
01:15:40 Speaker_07
and decide that every single American that voted for Trump was evil, everything Trump wanted to do was wrong, and that we were gonna fight him every step of the way.
01:15:51 Speaker_07
It was really the step, and I think both sides did this, where we decided the other half of the country was completely evil. And it's hard for me to name accomplishments from Trump, but like prison reform, he deserves credit for that.
01:16:04 Speaker_07
He never has gotten it fully to the degree I think it's warranted. So Bhatia, As we're kind of gearing up to do 2016 part two, this is my challenge to you, and this is what I want to do.
01:16:16 Speaker_07
It is so deeply unrewarding to take on your own side and to try to steer it towards normality. You know, just last week I started a show with a bunch of moderate trans women that have the views on trans stuff that we've been talking about right here.
01:16:32 Speaker_07
I've spent the last week getting screened out by trans extremists and TERFs, which is not exactly fun, but is necessary work to getting our public policy back to where it needs to be. So this is my challenge for you.
01:16:46 Speaker_07
I am going to use my power as a public figure to set the conversation instead of just digging my heels in and deciding that you're the enemy and I'm going to moralize everything.
01:16:57 Speaker_07
I'm going to commit to trying to have conversations as much as I can and to steer the public policy to something that is going to work for all Americans. and to try to find a way to work with the Republican Party.
01:17:10 Speaker_07
Because if I've learned anything since kind of leaving the progressive fringe, it's that Republicans are thirsty for actual conversations with liberals and Democrats and progressives. They are so eager for a conversation.
01:17:24 Speaker_07
We just slap them at every single turn. So I am willing, I will try my best to do that for you. And my challenge for you, is please, you know, when it comes to these bills I'm sure are going to target me, really look into it.
01:17:39 Speaker_07
You know, if I'm telling you I think this is really a threat to my life, listen to that. Take it seriously. Talk to your friends about this. Because the only way we can go forward as a nation is by talking to each other and working with each other.
01:17:53 Speaker_07
Like, this 2016 playbook, it's just going to leave America this big, stupid, fat target for Vladimir Putin and, you know, the world's dictators. It fundamentally, objectively does not work.
01:18:06 Speaker_02
Challenge accepted with a full heart. This is the kind of thing I live for. Thank you, Brianna. Yes.
01:18:15 Speaker_10
I don't think there's a better note to end on there, so I'm going to call it. Peter Savodnik, Batya Angarsargon, Brianna Wu, here on Very Few Hours of Sleep, and as articulate and insightful as ever.
01:18:26 Speaker_10
I'm eager to have this group back together again, possibly with the addition of Jonah Serra, who was not feeling well. Guys, thank you so much for making the time. I really appreciate it.
01:18:35 Speaker_02
Thank you, Barry.
01:18:36 Speaker_10
Thank you. Thanks for listening, and wow, what a 48 hours.
01:18:44 Speaker_10
If you liked this episode, if it made you think differently about the next four years, if it comforted you maybe a little, if you're someone that woke up brokenhearted, then share this episode with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own.
01:18:57 Speaker_10
Last but not least, if you want to support Honestly, there's just one way to do it. It's by going to the Free Press' website at vfp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time.