Trump’s Second Term: How He Did It & What to Expect

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It's on! feeling kind of weird since the election, as have many people. I'm not sure what it means for this country, and I don't know what to think about anybody.
As I walk around, if I go to the airport, I don't understand it. There's a lot of postulating about racism and misogyny, which is absolutely there.
There's also the facts. Voters decided they didn't mind any of that and did what they did anyway.
So I'm looking for some clarity, which is why today we're looking back at the election, how Trump won and Harris lost, who supported him and why, and what role social media and mainstream media played in that calculation, and how it will shape campaign politics to come. We're also looking at what the second Trump presidency will mean for his supporters, his detractors, including much of the media, and for Trump himself, and what role the free press will play in all of that.
So my guests today are a really amazing and substantive group, Abby Phillip, anchor of Newsnight with Abby Phillip. She was previously CNN's senior political correspondent, anchor of Inside Politics Sunday, and she covered the first Trump administration for CNN.
The Washington Post national political reporter Isaac Arnsdorf, he's been covering Trump and the MAGA movement for a while. His book, Finish What We Started, The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy, came out in April.
Kristen Soltis Anderson, Republican pollster and CNN political contributor were also on a show on Saturday, The Chris Wallace Show together. And Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and one of the country's authoritative

experts on Latino voters. His book, The Latino Century, How America's Largest Minority is

Transforming Democracy, came out in June. Such an amazing and strong group.

Get ready for an incredibly insightful conversation. Abby, Kristen, Isaac, and Mike, welcome.
Thanks for being on On. Good to be here.
Thanks for having us. So glad to be here.
Thanks for having us. So we're initially scheduled to tape this episode on Sunday because we thought it was going to be tight and it might be a few days before the results came in.
That was clearly not the case. So each of you, I'd love to ask how surprised were you at the results and why or why not? Why don't we start with you, Abby, then Mike and Isaac and Kristen.
I have to say I'm not particularly surprised by the result. Even though I was hearing pretty much universally from people in the Harris campaign.
I was covering the Harris campaign. I was at their headquarters on Tuesday night.
So in the couple of days before, I'm talking to a lot of people, and they're all telling me the same thing, that they think that they can do it, that they think the race is going to be very close, but that she has an edge, that there's been this incredible momentum on the ground, et cetera. But my read of the public information that we had about where the race stood, about some structural advantages that Trump and Republicans have in the country and in the Electoral College always made me believe that Kamala Harris was always a little behind, like maybe a point or two behind pretty much everywhere that she needed to be ahead.
And under those circumstances, there's just not a lot of precedent for Democrats to come into an election that far behind in so many places and actually pull it out. So I'm not surprised.
I thought it was possible that she could win, but I thought it was more probable that Trump would. And I thought we would be done by Thursday.
Mike? I wasn't surprised at the outcome, but there's three reasons why I thought that Harris would win. And the fact that they proved to not be accurate, I think, explains where the coalitions and the parties are changing.
This is really the second time we've had high turnout benefiting Republicans. And this has been a dynamic that we first saw in 2020.
The midterms and the special elections, this changing nature of the coalitions of the party are really going to make us have to reassess the way we weight models and turnout models. The second was the gender gap was as big or bigger as we were looking at in terms of turnout.
To me, most of the polling was suggesting that that was going to benefit the Democrats, especially when the Seltzer poll came out. I didn't believe the Seltzer poll was accurate, but I thought directionally, it was pretty hard to refute that with that big of a break that it was moving in that direction.
And then the Harris campaign was very loudly trumpeting late deciders breaking in their direction. And so if any two of those three broke in her direction, she would have won the race.
In fact, none of them did. But I didn't think it would be a close race.
Like, we would be counting for a very long time. I always thought that it would be decisive one way or the other in the way that it was.
In the way that it was. Kristen? I was not terribly surprised, in part because I had let my mind accept a wide range of possibilities.
So I was not dead set on like, I think I know how this is going to go. But we did have a- What was the phrase you used? The cone of uncertainty that, you know, when you're looking at a hurricane coming toward shore, like, I was predicting a—or I wasn't predicting.
I was allowing myself to accept a wide cone of uncertainty on this one. But the one signal that I did have, and, you know, you need to trust your own data, is my firm did a poll of Pennsylvania that showed Trump up by five.
And I even looked at it and I thought, I don't know about that. And in the end, I don't want to pat us on the back too much.
He's not going to win Pennsylvania by five. But it was a sign that Pennsylvania was going to be to the right of the other battlegrounds, which we showed really close.
And the other two blue wall battlegrounds were close that we polled. But also when that Selser poll came out and everybody started putting her face on prayer candles and saying like, oh my gosh, this is it.
If you looked in the cross tabs, there were just too many things that didn't make sense. Did we really think Kamala Harris was going to win senior citizen men in Iowa? I mean, there were just things like that that were like, I don't know about this.
Right. Isaac? Yeah, I mean, I think the Seltzer poll was a good last-minute reminder of, like, being humble about what you think you know, right? And being open to that range of uncertainty.
I mean, we had a good—my colleague Lenny Bronner had a good story right before the election that the election was more uncertain than it was close, right? And Nate Silver pointed this out also, that the chances that either candidate was going to run the table on the swing states was higher than the chances of getting them to move in different directions. I mean, the thing that really stood out to me in the way that this election broke the pattern that we've been seeing, and this has to do with what Mike was talking about with where less frequent voters were going.
You know, we're used to this story about Republicans gaining in rural areas and Democrats trying to offset it with gains in suburbs and cities and whether which bucket ends up being bigger. And what became clear on election night was everything was moving right.
And that's a really different kind of election than we've seen in a while. In each of the areas.
Go ahead, Abby. And I think that underscores really what the last couple of days, there's just been an insane amount of micro analysis around every little thing about this election.
But I do think that those results that were just a shift to the right pretty much everywhere in a huge swath of the districts in this country, it's more environmental about just the overall political climate that was disadvantageous from the start to any Democratic candidate, but certainly anyone who's closely tied to the incumbent. And I never felt like Kamala Harris was getting that close to really breaking that thought pattern among voters.
If there was one thing that she needed to do, it was to convince voters that they could kind of see a different world from the one that they had been living in with her. Right.
She was meaning affiliated with the Biden administration. Yeah.
But she also like didn't try to break from Biden. Could she? Could she? I think that she probably could not have done it that much, but I think she could have tried harder.
I think everybody knows. See, to me, a woman, especially a woman of color, she would have gotten tarred with the idea of she was a traitor or something like that.
You could have seen that easily. I think that when Democrats made this election about the future of American democracy, I think that it actually raised the bar for them, that they had to be willing to do a lot of things that traditionally in politics you wouldn't be willing to do.
So your unpopular incumbent president, you might need to be willing to jettison him if it means saving democracy. If you're Kamala Harris, you need to have a heart-to-heart with Joe Biden and his aides and say, here's what we've got to do to win.
And that never happened. And I think that it also undermined the argument that the risk to the country was so great when you weren't willing to do a pretty simple thing, which is to say, hey, here's what we got to do in order to reassure the American people and to win.
Let's do it. There was not a willingness to do that.
Let's start. Walk us through who voted for Donald Trump and why.
A whole range of voter groups. They show big movement among Latino voters, particularly Latino men.
They show big movement among men, especially young men. They show groups like white suburban women breaking slightly for Trump.
But even if you discount the exit polls, you can look at just the results themselves. And if you look at the counties, the county returns and how much each county moved left to right or right to left, you see that Donald Trump did better in suburban counties, but he did even more improvement in urban counties.
He improved in places that are very white, but he improved even more in places that are very diverse. He improved among older voters, but he really improved among counties that have lots of young people.
And so I think the challenge with unpacking this election and what did it all mean is, you know, pick your demographic group. They all, with the exception of college-educated women, moved toward Donald Trump this time around, which lends itself to this atmospheric, this is just incumbent parties in every advanced democracy around the world are getting crushed this time.
Inflation is political toxin. No matter the side they're on, by the way, no matter the side they're on, yeah.
No matter the side, and that voters just wanted change. And if you do look at the exit polls or pre-election polling about what voters wanted, They wanted change and they wanted a strong leader.

And it is not as though Kamala Harris didn't try to make the case that she was changed. She used the phrase, I'm going to turn the page a lot.
But I still think that for enough of these voters, they were like, turn the page to what? Donald Trump was the change candidate. There was also a very big believability problem, especially with Latino voters, that really popped out in the New York Times Siena poll,

where Latino voters by a majority said the Democratic Party understands people like me. But when the question came up as to whether or not they would actually do anything to change their personal situation, those numbers fell.
And that was the moment when I realized, oh, the Democrats are in deep trouble with Latinos here. I mean, I wrote a book about it earlier this year.
You know that. I launched it with you at Aspen.
But that was when I realized everything that they've done to make these adjustments are not going to work. It's an incredibly dangerous situation to be walking into an election when a wide swath of what you typically consider your base is saying that they don't believe you anymore.
that we're kind of done buying what you're selling. Even if we understand that you understand us, we want to change and you're not that candidate.
Right. We don't believe you.
We don't believe you. Abby, Harris tried to avoid identity politics through her campaign.
What do you think these results tell you? Did her campaign make the right decision? Did she miss out on an important story? You know, I think that, first of all, avoiding identity politics is actually, believe it or not, that is closer to Kamala Harris's actual personality and political DNA than anything else. And I think that would have been worse for her if she had kind of leaned into that.
But, I mean, look at the results. I don't see a whole lot of evidence that leaning more into identity politics would have helped Democrats in this instance.
If there was anything that may have hurt broadly was this leaning on the idea of Trump's racism, sexism, you know. All the isms.
Maybe he's a demagogue, whatever, all the isms, right? I think people

tuned that out and didn't really care that much. And it really closed some people off to what else Democrats might have had to say.
And to kind of go back to what Kirsten was saying, you know, I think that voters in this cycle, they heard Trump so clearly.

He is not hard to understand, really, in terms of the things that he's driving at. And, well, he's very good at identifying the problem.
He's very good at presenting things that he thinks are a solution but may or may not be. But she was not good at just saying, here's what I'm going to do to make your life better.
Very succinctly. Yeah.
So Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said that all the Democrats have been doing identity politics and that they should have been focusing on the working class. Of course, the bigger divide was income and education.
Trump voters were more likely to earn less than $100,000 and not have a college degree. This is a majority of—that is a majority of Americans, by the way.
He also completely tied up the rural vote. Isaac, you've been following the MAGA movement.
In your book, you write about Republican efforts to engage new voters, which they did. Talk about that and how these demographics factor in.
Yeah. You know, we've been talking about this real change in propensity, right? So when you expand the electorate, who do those voters favor? And the Trump campaign saw that in this election.
And rather than chasing the demos that were moving away from them, like college-educated women, they put a lot of focus into cranking up new voters and also diversifying. You know, the Trump campaign was always arguing, like, when we talk about the economy and immigration, that's a message that appeals to women as much as men and Latinos as much as white voters.
So, Mike, speaking of that, how does the economic divide play in the flip we saw among Latino men? Obviously, people focus on this a lot. According to CNN exit polls, Trump won the cohort by 12 points after losing them by 23 points in 2020.
He also tightened the margin with Latino women. You've been talking about this for a long time, in fact, in quite stark terms.
And you tweeted a while ago, I think Democratic Party is facing a long overdue reckoning with Latino voters. Talk about this slide.
And I know there was a last minute thing around Puerto Rico and getting Latino stars like Bad Bunny or J-Lo in to try to do something. And people felt that would have more resonance.
And it didn't, obviously. Well, in fact, I think maybe it did.
I think it could have been worse without that, to be honest with you. And again, that's, I think, what needs to be recognized is, again, thank you for setting it up that way.
This is more than a decade in the making. And for those of us that have been watching it, and the reason why I wrote the book was to raise the alarm bells and say, this is happening, this is happening.
I've been working with the Republicans and Latinos for three decades. I've never seen what I'm seeing here.
And there are demographic reasons for this. There's an explosion happening in the Latino vote with third and fourth generation Latino voters.
Almost 40% of our voters are under the age of 30, which is crazy. Like, this is such a huge number.
It surpassed the Black vote in 2020. So this extremely young vote is already the largest minority in the country, and it's just starting.
And both parties, both parties are very unprepared for what is happening. But fundamentally, what we are witnessing is the Latino vote moving from an ethnic and racially motivated voting group to an economic populist pocketbook voter.
There's a lot of different nuances to it because of the size of the transformation is huge. The proximity to countries of origin, you know, technology allows for continual cultural reinforcement.
In many ways, I argue the melting pot analogy really doesn't work anymore because the dominant American culture is becoming more like Latin American culture. The Latin American culture is becoming more like dominant American culture.
Bad Bunny He is a perfect example. He's the top artist in the world right now, in the country, and his songs are only in Spanish.
It's not just Latinos buying those songs for those albums. You also hear a lot of pundits saying, this is a racial realignment.
That is not what is happening here. This is the emergence of an entirely new voting group that is ethnically distinct, but has much more populist leanings and much more, we have the weakest partisan ties and are more than comfortable leaving both parties.
And right now, the Republicans are absolutely the beneficiaries of it. Christine, go ahead.
I do want to push back on the idea that it's just the economy stupid. I'm not saying that anybody made that argument here, but I am saying a lot of, well, it was just the economy.
There's nothing else that could be done. I think it's a little bit bigger than that.
I think it's not just about economy, because if you actually look at the exit polls, the percentage of voters who say the economy was their number one issue is only about a third. And I did a really interesting thing in one of my last surveys before the election, is I asked voters an open-ended question.
What is this election about to you? And when you didn't put an issue in front of them or give them the language of, do you think this is inflation? Did inflation matter? You just let it open-ended. The sorts of things people were saying were not just about the economy.
It was a broader sense of dysfunction and brokenness. And so when you would do focus groups, people would talk about the economy, but they would also say, and you know, it doesn't feel right to me that somebody can cross the border illegally and get put up in a Midtown Manhattan hotel.
It feels like criminals aren't being punished. I don't like that when I go down to the store on the corner that everything's locked up behind glass.
Why am I being told that this is normal and I should just accept this? And so even though Harris did try to have a message that tried to say, look, I'm going to be the toughest person on the border you ever saw, I still think there was too much of a sense of chaos and disorder. And Donald Trump, the first time he ran, ran as, I am a chaos agent.
That is a feature, not a bug. And voters wanted a wrecking ball.
But notably, this time around, his message was a little different. He said, I'm going to be strength.
I am going to be Mr. Stability.
If you dislike disorder, vote for me. So I do think that the economy was a big driver.
But the disorder and dysfunction was a little bit broader than that. And I think that also helped favor Republicans.
Interesting. Abby? Yeah.
One of the things I think generationally, just Mike was talking about Latino voters being an extremely young demographic. That's really important because when you look at the split, this cycle with young voters, it isn't so much that Harris lost a lot, but Trump gained a lot.
And he was able to appeal to people who are younger. That's a more diverse demographic driven by Latinos.
And then let's put our minds on what the, if you're under 30 years old right now, what your life has been like for the last, let's call it four to six years. There's a lot of people in that emerging generation who, to Kristen's point, are seeing a world that they think is headed in a trajectory that is not

favorable to them. The age that you have, that for the median age for first-time homebuyers is approaching 40 now because people cannot afford houses.
The interest rates are high. The amount of down payment that you need is high.
The houses are expensive. So there's a whole swath of American life that is changing and not really for the better for younger people.
I think they're reacting against that. I think they're also anecdotally talking to a lot of younger voters who they remember as really young people Obama.
And they remember this feeling of hope. And that hope has turned to kind of just pragmatism about who is really going to change things.
And the candidate of continuity is probably not going to change things. The candidate of disruption is.
And so there are a lot of these kind of factors in how people look at this race that are not, they're not simplified down to Trump bad, Harris good, Trump fascist, you know, Harris is for democracy. That's not a great narrative.
So I want to talk about also how people get their information, the medium, the message, something I talk about a lot. So last week we talked on the podcast about the impact that Elon Musk is having on the election, that his megaphone is falling on X and surrogate in the campaign was having more impact than his money.
According to the Pew survey, nearly half of adults under 30 say they mostly get their political news from social media. And according to another survey, X is more of a platform for news than any other social media site.
Elon, of course, controls X and has shifted the algorithm to favor his posts, spewing conspiracy theories and pro-Trump rhetoric. But it's not the only one.
There's a whole information system out there. Given his involvement in the campaign and potentially in the Trump administration, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the impact of social media and social news.
Isaac, why don't we start with you and then Mike, Abby, and Kristen. Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can look at the growth of non-traditional media without the decline of traditional media also.
I mean, I know that the Harris campaign was very focused on what was on the nightly news. And, you know, historically, that's been a pretty good sense of like what quote unquote real slash normal voters are seeing and thinking.
And obviously, this electorate was a little bit different. I also want to think we should be a little bit careful about, I mean, certainly Trump and a lot of the people around him and his campaign will portray this as a validation of everything that he said and did.
But I think we should be careful about how much America was really following this election closely versus responding to the environment that Abby was describing. And so I just think, like, you know, I'm kind of always skeptical of social media metrics.
And the Tucker Carlson interview was the most viewed interview ever. And I'd like to see some more data to show that those alleged page views actually turn into votes.
That's a very good point. Mike? I guess one observation there, and I think that's all accurate, but one thing that just struck me was for the first time in my political career, I was watching Republicans relying on younger people of color for their political fortunes.
That was clearly where they were heading. And they accomplished something that Democrats haven't been able to do for 30 years, which is kind of get the turnout and a bigger break that they needed.
For decades, the Democrats have sort of relied on the immigration narrative. It has never been a motivating tool, but Republicans have done something completely and entirely different.
And it's not just that message. They are using different tactics.
And in many ways, tactics are more important than the overall strategy here. So in this time when kind of the institutional hierarchies around us are collapsing, whether they're in media or politics or anywhere else, what is evolving, what is building up, is a new way of reaching people that the Trump campaign capitalized on fantastically.
I mean, they've just done a really, really good job of it. Which he's done in both elections, which he did in his first, yeah.
Precisely.

And I think that—I remember talking to a reporter on the eve of the 2016 election saying, I think Donald Trump just may be the perfect person for the digital age. He may be the first president of the digital age.
And in fact, I think that's what we're seeing. It's just the culture of the Republican Party doesn't have the old infrastructure.
Remember that big story about

Trump shutting down his black and brown outreach offices when Laura Trump took over the RNC and, oh my God, this is the end of Republicans caring about black and brown voters. And yet, he gets a high number because he realizes it's not done through storefronts anymore.
It's not done by knocking on doors. They're doing something radically different and it's working.
Abby?

Yeah, I mean, so just on that last point, I was talking to a... They're done by knocking on doors.
They're doing something radically different, and it's working. Abby?

Yeah, I mean, so just on that last point, I was talking to a Democrat donor who was kind of getting these briefings from the campaign in the weeks leading up to the election. And one of the reflections from this person was that there was a sense in the campaign that the ground game was like the solve for like anything that was missing in those last couple of days, that it would just kind of push them over, you know, 100,000 people probably in Pennsylvania knocking on doors.
But I do think that we might be entering an era, to Mike's point, in which that stuff doesn't have as much impact as being able to influence the broader, this broad, diffuse information ecosystem. And I think that, yes, it is true that there's more power now shifting to streamers and to podcasters.
But I think that really the dominant theme of media going forward is that it's not any one place. It's all these little places.
And you have to have much of a broader reach across different types of media in order to be heard by the same amount of people that you used to be able to reach by just talking to the major networks 10 years ago. And Trump does understand that.
But I would also offer that Trump and Vance actually did more. They actually were in more places.
So it wasn't just that they spoke to these podcast bros. They actually just in general did more.
And the Harris campaign got to a place where they felt comfortable engaging with more and varied media toward the end. But that was too little too late.
We'll be back in a minute. Last week, we at Today Explained brought you an episode titled The Joe Rogan of the Left.
The Joe Rogan of the Left was in quotations. It was mostly about a guy named Hassan Piker, who some say is the Joe Rogan of the Left.
But enough about Joe. We made an episode about Hassan because the Democrats are really courting this dude.
So Hassan Piker is really the only major prominent leftist on Twitch, at least the only one who talks about politics all day what's going on everybody i hope everyone's having a fantastic evening afternoon pre-new no matter where they want his co-sign they want his endorsement because he's young and he reaches millions of young people streaming on youtube tiktok and especially twitch but last week he was streaming us yeah i was i was listening on stream and you guys were like, hey, you should come on the show if you're listening. I was like, oops, caught.
You're a listener. Yeah.
Oh yeah, I am. Yeah.
Thank you for listening. Head over to the Today Explained feed to hear Hasan Piker explain himself.
I'm Claire Parker. I'm Ashley Hamilton.
And this is Celebrity Memoir Book Club. And we're thinking like monks this week.
If you've ever thought Kevin O'Leary, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Headspace, those are men that are very, very monk-like. Oh boy, does Jay Shetty have the book for you.
He's written a book that tells you how to use your monk mind to become more like a billionaire monk. Pulling from three highly disputed years at an ashram, he's telling you stories of like when he was in eighth grade and

got a bad grade on a test and how that was scary and how now he knows Will Smith. And if you want

to reach your higher self, the billionaire version of you, think like a monk or listen to this week's episode of Celebrity Memoir Book Club. Out now.
So, Kristen, a lot of people were calling this the podcast election. That would be me.
Podcaster Joe Rogan endorsed Donald Trump the EV election. UFC President Dana White thanked him and others in the speech.
Is it bone out of proportion, like they were just saying, or is it just more places? I do

think that the consumption of news is in so many different places with so many different people. And Harris did very few podcast interviews, mostly on non-political shows.
Should she have done more? Would it have made a difference? I mean, I think that taking your message to places where it is unexpected is so, so, so valuable.

I have been preaching to Republicans for a decade and a half that they were dropping the ball horribly when it came to young voters by just writing them off. And you know what? When I wrote a book about this 10 years ago, Donald Trump was not running for president at that point.
I would not have predicted him as the one to do it, but he did. You know, a year ago, we asked people, you know, talk a little bit about where you get your news and information.
And of our sample of 1,000 people, about 10% said that they followed Elon Musk's post on Twitter. And about 10% of people in our survey said that they have listened at some point to Joe Rogan's podcast.
And we asked them, you know, which presidential candidate you would trust more to handle inflation. This was back when the presumed candidates were Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
But I mean, the numbers for Trump were through the roof with those audiences. And so being able to go into that space, to go into a place like Joe Rogan's podcast and make the case, no, you've actually got it wrong.

You know, again, it's easy to Monday morning quarterback it. But I do think there's something there about the potential impact you could have had by going to this audience that is not inclined to believe what you have to say on this and get a different piece of information into the ecosystem.
One last thing I'll say about the information people were getting. So we asked a question in our last survey before the election about, like, what have you seen, read, or heard about? And we asked about a whole bunch of different news events.
Did you see or hear anything about Kamala Harris's rally in Houston with Beyonce or Kamala Harris's campaign events with Liz Cheney, his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast? I think it is important to note that Joe Rogan's podcast appearance was not actually the thing that had broken through the most in the month before. By a long shot, the thing that had broken through the most was Donald Trump working a shift at McDonald's.
So, well, this is not to say that the podcast election isn't a thing, but I do think that it's not just about the medium. It's about things that are a unique message that are unexpected.
Maybe they're memeable. They're something that amuse, entertain, make your jaw drop, whatever.
Like, that is still the stuff that breaks through. The content still matters, even as the medium is changing.
For the record, Donald Trump did not work a shift at McDonald's. Yeah, but it looked like he did.
For what it's worth. He looked like he did, and people thought that he did.
I also wonder after this, we always talk about the failure of polling, and we talk about why it's not helping us understand what's going on.

maybe we need to just find other ways of understanding how people approach politics because it may not be anymore that when we wait for age and whether they're suburban or urban

or whether they are educated or uneducated, that those may not as cleanly help us understand the election like they used to. And that's maybe the core problem that we're having right now.
Maybe we need to understand how people are getting information. I mean, 10% of people listening to Joe Rogan's podcast seems like a lot, but maybe that is actually what's happening.
And that is a better predictor of the kind of views that align that will help us understand how people might vote. Well, she didn't even get her messages in there.
That was my thing. I mean, we look at a lot of the charts for our podcasts on news, and Scott and my podcast sit in the mid, we're like a number five, but we sit right wing, right wing below us.
It's really, we're like the little blue boat in the Sea of Red. And I'm like, where are the other blue boats? Like, why aren't there, why isn't anybody here? But wasn't Joe Rogan at one point also a big blue boat? I mean, he was, he was a Bernie boat.
That's what I think is so fascinating. It is, I've seen a lot of like, wow, we need to have our own Joe Rogan on the left.
And I think it's important to remember that for a lot of these folks, their appeal is not necessarily ideological or because they are quote unquote right wing. Like, I think that is really important to underscore.
Right. The community is not built around politics at all.
So we talk about the splintering the media and public opinion to separate media ecosystems, and it's been impacting public discourse since Trump came on the scene. Abby, obviously, you got a lot of attention on Newsnight, where you host discussions of panels of opposing voices.
I've been on it. But you had a recent incident when a conservative commentator, Ryan, I think it's Girdusky, made a racist comment directed at former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hassan.
He was banned from CNN as a result. There are only a few Democrats like Pete Buttigieg who are willing to go on Fox nowadays.
How do you see the outcome of the election impacting our ability to have these kind of civil conversations? And how do you feel about them trying to do them every night? It's difficult. That's a really deep question, Cara.
I mean, to be honest, it's almost a little too soon to say. I will say, I mean, you brought up Ryan Gerdesky and what happened there.
Isaac pointed this out. I don't think that because Trump won, it should be an endorsement of all the things that Trump did or represented in our politics.
I still, as a television host, as a human being, I maintain that there will be a line of stability in the conversations that I'm a part of. I don't think it's okay to say, well, or to imply that, well, you're a terrorist, so your beeper might go off.

That's an insane thing to say in the public square, and it's not acceptable. And I think that we are getting to a place where more and more people do think that it's okay.
And that's a real problem. I mean, I just, I don't think that that's helpful to us.
But here's the other thing. I mean, reflecting back on the last several months, on the left, a lot of the conversations at our table sometimes would devolve with panelists on the left basically saying, you're racist, or something akin to that, to people on the other side of the aisle.
That also, I think, contributed to the conversation devolving in a way that I think was not productive. And I don't know that we're getting to a better place on that.
That's the thing that is a little disturbing to me about our ability to talk to one another, is that I don't know that things are really getting better. And I think there are some people who will take a lesson from Trump's victory and say, well, all bets are off.
Like, let's just be as rude and as disrespectful and as, you know, nasty to one another as possible, because that's quote unquote authentic. And I don't think that that's good at all.
I don't think it helps at all. And I'd also think that on the left, there's also a feeling

right now that, okay, if you voted for Trump, you're good with racism and misogyny and sexism and that that is your character. And I also think that that closes off the conversation.
So that's where we are. I don't know where it's going.
Do I look forward to refereeing that.

Sometimes I don't, really.

I wish that we could get to a better place, but this is really actually, it feels like where the country is still right now. I would not look at this election result as an endorsement of ugliness, as an endorsement of, yes, America wants more people saying extreme, insane things.

I think that is one of those interpretations where you have to really go looking for it in the face of all of this other evidence that it was about, so much more about the economy, policy, etc. It is possible, though, that we have become inured to, like, things that would have been considered way outside the mainstream before are now the sorts of things that people shrug at.
Like, I do think that it's possible, not that people are craving the extreme or are craving offensive things or that that is why somebody can win. But I think it is possible that we're becoming desensitized to it.
We'll be back in a minute. So, Isaac, I want to get into specifics of what happens next.
We're going to finish up talking about that. You've reported on promise made to Elon Musk and RFK Jr.
about joining Trump's administration. Based on what you know about his inner circle, you wrote about Steve Bannon in your book.
What do you think the cabinet is going to look like? Susie Wild seems rather normal, chief of staff. And, you know, she was the first campaign manager for Trump who lasted the whole campaign.

Right.

So, you know, clearly she has demonstrated that she has an ability to manage him without making him feel managed, to bring out his better impulses rather than his more self-damaging impulses. And also to the extent that she can exert some influence over who else is getting to him and what information they're bringing to him.
So, you know, it gets harder in the White House and in the administration. Just, you know, there are a lot more people, there are a lot more stakeholders.
but she makes a lot of sense in that role given how she ran the campaign.

RFK and Elon Musk are good examples of that

where they bring assets that really appeal to Trump and interest Trump. You know, I know the campaign really thinks that RFK was helpful to them in the election, but they also bring risks, and she's going to have a big role in trying to balance that.
You know, everyone was like, now it's the freaks and geeks, you know, essentially. Is that what you expect? Or is there probably a more controlled situation happening here? I mean, the first step was for Susie to be the chief of staff.
And I think we're going to learn a lot more this coming week with who's going to end up being in charge of the transition and start to see how the cabinet is shaping up. And that's going to say a lot about which direction that that moves in.
You know, there are camps forming and there's going to be a knife fight for a while. Okay.
So among the two top issues that Trump voters were the economy and immigration. and among the 40 agenda items Trump has promised to launch, two of them are mass deportations and to close the southern border from day one.
He's also promised to increase tariffs, and economists are worried about that. Mike, how do you expect Latinos especially to react if and when he follows through on these particular promises? I think one of the most fascinating dynamics of this election cycle was the dramatic change in the Overton window on immigration and border security issues.
If you look back at earlier this year, like a January-February timeframe when Biden's numbers were really at their lowest, it was largely a function of this dramatic weakness that he had displayed on the border, at least in the perception of the public. And you started to see some very anomalous data coming out from various sources showing dramatic swings in public perception with Latino voters on immigration and border security.
For the first time, there was a separation between the two, a decoupling of border security with immigration reform. They no longer saw those as the same.
And it was at that point, you started to see the administration pivot. And you also start to see DeSantis and Abbott like deporting people to these blue state areas to kind of send a message.
And then the polling was showing like Latinos supported these efforts by over 40 percent, so much so that kind of the D.C. political, you know, intelligentsia was like, these numbers can't be right.
This can't be happening. This sentiment can't be true.
But, you know, from there, you saw, you know, Joe Biden signed the asylum decree, effectively shutting the border down. 69% of Latinos supported that.
So this is how far things have changed on this issue, not just because all of Americans are there, but because Latino voters are there. And so we are going to see a very different discussion and dialogue.
Now, having said that, we also have the history of 2018 when Donald Trump was beefing up ICE and pulling people out of factories and jobs and dragging them out, literally dragging them out and chasing them down in homes in Los Angeles and other Latino communities and deporting them. And then what you saw in the midterms was a historically high turnout amongst Latinos outwardly rejecting this type of activity.
So there is a shift from the abstract to the existential. In concept, there is growing support for this.
When it actually happens, you see a visceral, emotional pushback that can have dramatic, dramatic consequences, certainly at the ballot box.

I would say even beyond that, a president's or a governor's or a mayor's ability to govern. So, Abby, you covered the first Trump administration, a lot of executive orders he passed back then, like the Meslam ban.
Do you remember that caused a lot of consternation? And they were quickly contested in court. The landscape has changed.
There's a lot of Trump appointed judgesointed judges. The Supreme Court gave him immunity.
Republicans will control the Senate. The House is still up for grabs.
Two dozen races still close to call at this point on Friday morning. What is your assessment? Because it's not quite the mandate, but it is.
You know, it's sort of a modified mandate, I guess I'd call it. He thinks it's a mandate.
And he will behave as if it is. I think that it's going to be executed much more smartly than the so-called Muslim ban was.
That was ineptitude at its highest in the early days of the Trump administration. They really did not even know basically how immigration worked, and they just wrote something, and it was not workable from a practical perspective.
And it probably wasn't legal in that form and then it got changed. This time around, you know, I think hearing from the people who are likely to be a part of the implementation of this, I do think that they're going to have to do it in a way that is phased.
And I think the question is not what is their intention. I think maybe the question is more how far in that phased system are they going to get? They are going to have to start with people, for example, who are criminals, who have orders for deportation.
They'll probably start with that because it's low-hanging fruit. It's just much easier to execute that than other things.
And then they're going to try to keep going down the line. And the question is, how far down the line are they going to go? I have no doubt that there are many people in Trump's orbit who want to go as far down the line as possible, right? Do I think they will get there? I'm really not so sure.
Because to Mike's point, we're going to get to a midterm season very quickly here. And then it's going to be a question of trying to kind of calibrate what the administration is doing with what they think is going to pass muster with voters.
But I also, you know, looking at the exit polls from this last election, everybody's talking about this, but it bears repeating. These border districts that are predominantly Latino, they flipped from 2016 to 2024 hugely in Donald Trump's favor.
These are Latino voters who went from voting for Hillary Clinton to voting for Donald Trump. And I think that one of the underappreciated things about what Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis did was that they exposed the hypocrisy among Democrats in non-border states and cities who didn't care about whether these border towns really actually did have the resources to deal with the influx, but they cared when it came to their doorstep.
And I think that really bothered a lot of people. And that should not be ignored.
Like, if Democrats want to address this, they're going to have to deal with that and what went wrong there. I would not foreclose on the possibility that there is a decent stomach among a lot of voters to see deportations happen.
Okay, so don't be surprised when the deportations happen and you don't hear a huge outcry in the country because Trump ran very clearly on that.

They are expecting it.

They know that it's going to happen.

That's going to happen.

So, Kristen, I have just a few more questions.

Kristen, there's been a commentary about Trump's ascension being the death knell for the traditional GOP.

At this point, most Republicans in Congress are Trump loyalists, which is different from the last time around.

What does it mean for the bigger GOP picture? And what kind of, what does that mean? And where do the others go, actually? Where do they go to? The Liz Cheney's and I guess the Mike Madrid's and others. So our political parties are always changing.
The Democratic Party of the Clinton era was different than the Democratic Party of the Obama era. The Republican Party of the Bush era is different than the Republican Party of the Trump era.
These things are always in flux. And I suppose it's always a little bit of a fantasy land to think you're going to go back to the way things were.
Things are always moving. They're always changing.
I still think that in this new administration, one, I don't think there's any quote unquote going back because the argument from a lot of them were never Trump or Trump skeptical Republicans was, you know what, he won in 2016, but it was kind of fluky. He didn't win the popular vote.
And then he lost in 2020. Maybe America doesn't really want Donald Trump.
Maybe in a hypothetical alternate dimension, we run Nikki Haley and we win by 30 points. And I think this election has put that to bed.
Donald Trump outruns, quote-unquote, normal Republicans in a lot of these Senate races. I think we just have to accept the parties have realigned, and you are going to see a lot of quote-unquote normal Republicans who may have not wanted to be involved in a first Trump administration saying, nope, this is where we are now.
This is our new coalition. And so I think for the Liz Cheney's of the world that thought, you know what, if Trump loses again, then we can make the argument that the Republican Party has gone astray.
I think that argument is dead. And I think if they want to be part of a party, it's time to figure out which party do they think they can have most influence in.
They were speaking at the Democratic Convention. They were doing events with Kamala Harris.
I don't know to what extent the internal Democratic infighting is going to say that was a wise or unwise strategic choice. But I think the idea that the Republican Party is going to go back to some previous era is wrong.
So final questions for all of you. The headline of The New York Times the day after the election was Trump's America victory changes nation's sense of self, which you were just referring to,, Kristen.
Peter Baker wrote, for the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the termination of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be dictator on day one, and vowed to extract retribution against his adversaries.
What do you think this election means for America's censor self, or is that overstating it? And how would you describe Trump's America? Mike, you start, then Abby, Isaac, and Kristen, briefly, if you can. Look, I think that's a great question.
And I think fundamentally goes back to what Kristen just said, is you can't go backwards, and yet that's the entire premise of the entire Republican Party is making America great again. It's based off of a regressive fantasy.
Like, that's the whole idea behind it. That's literally the glue.
That says a lot about a nation. It says a lot about a people.
It says a lot about the lack of confidence in itself, is it's much more cosmetic than it is actually substantive. The fact that you have a party that is not based on ideology, but on a populist tendency that wins the popular vote is, I think, it may or may not be problematic, but it's certainly unique going forward.
And it says a lot about the lack of a belief of who we are in the world. Because there is no articulated vision, neither for the party nor for the country, and the practices behind it are basically to retrench, to say isolationism, protectionism, as much as these are isms, they're certainly not an expansive view of American identity.
We've always had those elements in our society, we've always had those elements in our body politic, but rarely have they been so dominant. And fundamentally, it speaks to a people who are frightened about themselves, their sense of security, and their confidence to lead boldly in the world.
That's fundamentally what the Republican Party is, and that is fundamentally what the United States of America is becoming.

Abby?

I think if you think about this in the context of COVID, I think that's very helpful because I think what the pandemic did to people was make them concerned about their survival. And I think this was a survival election where Americans were looking at themselves, their families, their livelihood, maybe their sense of safety, and they're saying, I'm voting for me.
Rugged individualism is what it used to be called, but now it has like a populist veneer over it. But that's really what happened in this election.
People said to themselves, I know you keep telling me to think about the we and the country and the democracy and about what might happen to my neighbors, but I need to worry about whether I'm going to be able to put food on the table and send my kids to college. And there was a meme going around, I think, in liberal circles that said that, that if you voted for Harris, you cared about your community, all of us.
You cared about what happened to someone else and not just yourself. If you voted for Trump, you cared about yourself.
I think that's actually, and it was meant in a good way, to be clear. That is actually a correct view of what happened in this election.
But it was that way because we are humans. We are human beings.
And it is always going to be easier and perhaps more effective to appeal to that part of human nature. Protect yourself and your own family.
And Trump speaks to that so clearly. That broke through.
And COVID, I think, made people feel so vulnerable. They felt like they were going to die.
They felt like the world was closing down around them. And then they emerged from it.
And then all of a sudden, everything is harder to afford. And the prospect of the future seemed more distant.
This is a post-COVID election. And this was a very individualistic American electorate.
And that's why we are where we are. Isaac? Yeah, I mean, I agree with Mike.
These elements have always been in American political culture, but never been this dominant. But I do see it as a pretty clearly articulated ideology and a pretty clearly, very clearly articulated vision of what America stands for.
And it's going to be a question of can Trump actually deliver that? And do people actually like that if that does come to pass? But, you know, it's also still the same country as it was before. It's still very divided.
These elements and views have always been there. There's always been this ebb and flow and these tensions, and there are very serious challenges, and that's going to continue.
Kristen? So, I want to agree in part with what Abby said, which is that I do think that this was an election of people saying this is about survival, but I don't think it was about I want to get mine and I don't care about my neighbor. We did ask a question in our survey.
We asked it back in 2021, right after January 6th. And then we asked it again in our survey just before this election.
And this question is a little bit odd, but we wanted to get at the sense of urgency people felt. We said, what do you think is the goal of politics? Is the goal of politics enacting good public policy, or is the goal of politics ensuring the survival of the country as we know it? And back in 2021, Democrats leaned more towards saying the goal of politics is enacting good public policy.
And Republicans, by a pretty big margin, said no, the goal is ensuring the survival of the country as we know it. Fast forward to just a few weeks ago, and we found that a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans and independents were all saying the purpose of politics is about ensuring the survival of the country as we know it.
So I do think that this is the survival election is right, but I don't necessarily think it's, I don't care about my neighbor. I do think it's why you hear this more isolationist strain.
You hear people, you know, young voters. I think foreign policy is a big piece of why Trump appealed to young voters.
Why are we helping them? Why are we sending money over to Ukraine, over to Israel when it should be at home helping us? And I also think it's part of the immigration conversation. There was a focus group I did of Michigan voters, and it was for the New York Times.
And we asked people to tell us a little bit about why they were voting and what issues mattered. And there was a young man, 25 years old, named Muhammad.
And he said that immigration was an important issue for him. And I said, why? And I'm going to read you the quote from him.
He said, the American dream is becoming less and less of a reality for most people, at least in my generation. We need to do something about illegal immigration, and one side is denying it's a problem.
You need to take care of Americans first rather than paying for the hotel just because they crossed illegally. You know, this idea that, like, I work hard, I play by the rules, and I feel like I'm always coming last is something that a lot of Americans feel.

And I do think that was at, like, the emotional core and animating reason why Donald Trump held appeal in this election.

All right.

On that note, goodbye.

And thank you so much, each of you, for doing this.

You took a lot of time out, and I appreciate it.

Thanks, Carol.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks so much for having us. On with Cara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yocum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch.
Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Andrea Lopez-Cruzado and Kate Gallagher.
Our engineers are Rick Kwan

and Fernando Arruda. And our theme music is by Trackademics.
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