- Donald Trump has been elected president, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris and making a political comeback unlike any.

- This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again.

(crowd cheering) - While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - Hello, and welcome to GZERO World.

I am Ian Bremmer, and it's official, this is Donald Trump's America, and we'll all be living in it for the next four years.

President-elect Trump will be the first commander-in-chief to serve non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, and after months of us hearing that this election would come down to just tens of thousands of votes in a few key swing states, it most certainly did not.

Take Pennsylvania, the state that decided the election.

Nearly every county there shifted towards Trump, winning him a state he lost back in 2020.

Philadelphia, giving Trump one of his biggest bumps, moving by more than five points, even though Kamala Harris still won the city.

And now, Trump is poised to move back into the White House, with clear victories in the electoral college and the popular vote.

He'll also enjoy the support of Republican Senate, and probably a Republican House too, this for a man who came within millimeters of death in Butler, Pennsylvania, just months ago.

That's not too shabby.

The way I see it, this was fundamentally a change election, with over 70% of Americans saying they believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, much like other countries around the world.

Harris represented the status quo.

Regardless of how often she urged supporters to turn the page, it was the core challenge for the vice president, who had no choice but to own the inflation albatross of the past few years, which was as politically toxic for her as it was for Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

She didn't help herself by saying in an interview that there's not a thing she'd have done differently than Biden over the past four years, the worst possible answer to the most important question of the campaign.

So, how did changing demographic support for Trump among minority groups tilt the race in his favor?

What does this mean for America's democracy and its place in the world, and how will a second Trump term shape the fate of Ukraine and Gaza?

Today, I am talking to two women who understand the GOP and American media better than most, Nicole Hemmer, a historian of modern conservatism at Vanderbilt University, and Molly Ball, senior political correspondent at the Wall Street Journal.

You'll hear from both of them in a moment.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

- Do you recognize me?

- Oh, Putin.

- Ah, hey, I love it.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

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Learn more at prologis.com.

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- [Announcer 1] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... (upbeat music) (moves to bubbly electronic music) - Nicole Hemmer, Molly Ball, thanks so much for joining us on GZERO World.

- Happy to be here.

- Thanks for having us.

- Everyone said the polls were going to be so close, razor-close election.

It was not.

In fact, the popular vote actually went for Donald Trump.

What did everyone get wrong here?

Nicole, you start.

- Well, part of it is that those polls have such a wide range of margin of error that, actually, a Donald Trump popular vote win was within the range of many of the polls because they were so tight, but I think that nobody looking at those polls thought that it was going to end up like this, that Trump would so easily sweep all of these states, that there would be such a rightward move, even in states that we knew were going to go red, or states like New York and New Jersey.

So, I think that what was missed was what's been missed in 2016 and 2020.

These pollsters have not yet figured out how to really integrate and poll the pro-Trump vote, and this is the third presidential election in a row where they've missed it.

- So, the Republicans, of course, now don't just hold the executive.

They have the Supreme Court.

They have the Senate.

They are very likely, at the time of this recording, to win the House.

What do you think that means for governance in the United States going forward?

What should the US be doing differently on the back of that?

Molly, you can go first if you want.

- Well, Donald Trump was elected on the strength of his promises to solve what people viewed as the most important problems facing America, particularly inflation and immigration.

In fact, both candidates campaigned on tightening the border, although I think most voters thought that Trump had more credibility in that regard.

So, you know, and he now, as you say, he has a governing majority if, as we believe right now, he does win the House of Representatives in addition to the Senate.

So, that means he will be able to implement his agenda and voters will be able to evaluate whether he kept those promises.

You know, many of the things he has promised he won't need Congress to do, particularly, you know, erasing the traditional independence of the Justice Department.

He has promised to fire the FBI Director, the Special Counsel.

He, of course, gets to appoint his own new cabinet, including a new Attorney General.

We expect the legal cases against him to disappear, and if he keeps his promises, he will go after many of his political enemies and opponents in the Democratic Party.

- Inflation, immigration, certainly two of the biggest issues out there, Nicole, and while both are coming down, they're coming down from high levels.

Is this something that, in part, Trump is just gonna be the beneficiary of cyclical change, or do you think that leaning in is gonna make a huge difference?

- Oh, I think he's going to be the beneficiary of cyclical change.

In fact, I think his election, in many ways, is part of that larger global cycle that we're in right now, right, that we've seen incumbents across democracies get turfed because there's so much discontent over those precise issues, particularly inflation, but there has also been pretty strong anti-immigration sentiment across most of Europe, and here in the United States as well.

So, I think that he's the beneficiary of these big global changes that are happening.

You know, a lot of the policies that Molly just outlined could make those things worse.

I mean, tariffs would likely spike inflation, and so that would be a big problem, I think, for Donald Trump economically, but again, like, voters weren't necessarily voting for tariffs.

They were voting in frustration against inflation, and they wanted something different, and they wanted some sort of change, and most voters don't really have a strong sense of what tariffs might do.

They were sort of, like, voting on this big, broad range of issues.

So, there is kind of a, potentially a disconnect between the problems that are motivating voters to throw out the Democratic Party and the policies that a Trump Administration would put into place.

But when you only have two choices, really, functionally, two choices when you go into the voting booths, you get the policies that you get when you vote for Trump.

- Now, Trump has been a very strong opponent of globalization, and also, more hard to define, globalism, in the sense that he's been saying, "I'm gonna end these wars," wants to end the wars in the Middle East and Russia, Ukraine, wants to bring, you know, a capital back to the United States, doesn't want free trade, wants tariffs in part because he wants more jobs in America, wants more money in America.

He's just not interested in a lot of the values that the United States has said it has stood for over the course of the past several generations.

What does that tell you about this moment in time?

What do you think we should learn from that, Molly?

- Yeah, we are in a global anti-establishment moment, and that is certainly true in the United States.

I mean, Donald Trump has been very consistent on this point over the course of his three presidential campaigns.

He has continued to insist that the system is rigged and that the establishment is corrupt, and Democrats have largely campaigned on protecting our institutions and holding them up as sacred and invaluable, and it turns out many people don't believe that.

Many people don't agree with that.

They like the idea that Trump, in his sort of wrecking ball, bull in a China shop sort of way, promises to disrupt the establishment and promises to break up those corrupt institutions that aren't serving people's needs.

So, that has always been a big component of his platform.

I think he bolstered that appeal by bringing figures like RFK Jr. into the tent this time around, sort of fringe, conspiracy theorist political actors who amplified this idea that the establishment is lying to you, that our institutions are corrupt, and that the whole thing needs to be smashed up and remade from the bottom up.

- So, Molly, you're not responsible for the editorial side at the Wall Street Journal, but certainly their coverage in discussing the candidates implied that there's not much to worry about here, that, yeah, people complain that Trump is gonna be, you know, undermine rule of law, and he has all of these extreme advisors, but in reality, that's not his focus.

He's not really that, he's not gonna follow through.

He's not gonna execute on that.

He's not really competent on that.

We don't really have that much to worry about.

Do you think that's accurate?

- I will say, it is certainly the case that many Conservatives, including the Conservatives who sit on the Wall Street Journal editorial board, do think that a lot of the sort of liberal hyperventilating about the supposed danger that Trump poses to democracy is a bit overblown, and we will see.

He has already tried to overturn an election through violence once.

That, to me, was a pretty significant sort of blow to the Constitutional Order, but he also has stocked his political operation, and the transition that he is assembling now is focused on making sure that he is surrounded by loyalists, not to say yes-men, who will make sure that he can do the things that he wants.

So, if there are not those barriers before him, what is he willing to do?

What norms and traditions, not to say laws, is he willing to violate in order to pursue his goals?

- Nicole?

- When it comes to Donald Trump, I mean, the thing is you never quite know which of the policies that he has stated, or that are in Project 2025 because I do think that a lot of that is a kind of guide for how to fill in some of the blanks in Donald Trump's agenda, but you don't know which of those are going to be put into place.

Any of them could be put into place, and when they are, they could be real dangers for a lot of people, and that can take the form of real bodily and material danger, but it could also be these challenges to rule of law, which has been a big through line of the first Trump Administration and these four years that he's been out of office.

I mean, it already is doing a kind of irreparable damage to a particular vision of a democracy bounded by rule of law to have re-elected someone who tried to overturn an election violently, and so there's not going to be any real sort of constraint in terms of accountability on Donald Trump.

And so, those restraints, as Molly were saying, really just kind of work out to, does he feel like doing it and is there enough, I mean, resistance in the Republican Party to stop him from pursuing some agenda items?

And I think that's about it as far as guardrails.

- I mean, Trump does believe that acts of a sitting president cannot be criminal.

So, in other words, from his perspective, as soon as he takes that office, he can act with impunity.

Now, that is certainly not aligned with checks and balances and rule of law.

I don't believe, and I think most of us don't believe, that we're about to experience a dictatorship in the United States, and yet there is a question of what kind of constraints, what kind of checks, beyond the way that the president-elect happens to feel on a given day, we should most be relying on, we should most be focused on as he takes office.

- I had a version of this conversation with the now Vice President-elect, JD Vance, and one of the things that he said was, "Of course, the president is reigned in by the Constitution," although I feel like one of the things we learned in Trump's first term is that there aren't any enforcement mechanisms in the Constitution, but beyond that, he said, "You know, a president should get to do the things that he wants to do and has promised to do."

And I do think that voters broadly feel that a president ought to be able to enact the things and to do the things he has promised to do, of course, you know, within the structure of the system, which requires you to go to Congress for some things and not others, but I think a lot of people are frustrated with Washington gridlock, with the feeling that our institutions are so sort of calcified and bottle-necked that they don't allow anything to get done.

We can't build things, we can't create change.

We can't really get anything moving in this system, because there are so many veto points that have sort of grown or are encrusted on the basic checks and balances guaranteed by the Constitution that even a sitting president can't really make things happen.

So, I think there is a mandate for Trump to actually execute on his agenda.

- Nicole?

- There is really no difference, I think, in Donald Trump's mind between policy and self-enrichment, and so this idea that the president is pursuing his agenda and should have free range to pursue his agenda, I think that does have more popular support than, I think, many liberals and proponents of rule of law would hope.

That's not unusual in the United States.

I think there has been a kind of broad support for impunity for some parts of the government, and I think that Donald Trump is the beneficiary of a decades-long effort to try to prevent there from being effective tools of accountability.

You see this in the 1980s with Iran-Contra, which, you know, ends in pardons and no impeachment, even though it involves a number of laws being broken by people throughout the government.

You see it in the 1990s with the use of impeachment against Bill Clinton for something that Americans just didn't feel, like, was a crime, a high crime, and a misdemeanor in any way, something that weakened the tool of impeachment to the point when it was used against Donald Trump on two different occasions, it proved to be completely useless as a tool of accountability.

And I think that those tools of accountability have been so degraded and were so degraded by the time that Donald Trump entered office the first time that he was already able to act with a kind of level of impunity that will only have accelerated when he comes back into office, in no small part because he's not just of the belief that he has impunity for official acts, but the Supreme Court has said just a few months ago that he does in Trump versus the United States.

So, you know, the idea that there are levers that can be pulled that will suddenly snap into place an accountability regime, those levers don't exist.

- Is it fair in that environment to say that the existence of the US as a representative democracy is less functional, less effective, has significantly eroded today compared to, say, 10 years ago, also compared to its peers in the G7 around the world, for example?

Would you go that far, Nicole?

- Yes, I would say that the erosion of representative democracy rooted in rule of order has not just eroded over the past 10 years, I think the erosion has accelerated over the past 10 years, but I think it has been in decline for a lot of reasons, and for a lot of good reasons in some cases, right?

People lost faith in institutions in part because those institutions didn't earn their faith, that those institutions weren't serving them, and then people who weren't interested in fixing those institutions got ahold of them and are now using them in ways that aren't particularly supportive of a rule of law-bound representative democracy.

You know, it's not going to look like an authoritarian dictator on January 20th, but that doesn't mean that we have a healthy, thriving, inclusive, multi-racial democracy in the United States, and, in fact, we're likely moving away from that.

- It certainly feels like a good thing for democracy that everyone can agree on who actually won the presidential race, even if it wouldn't have happened the other way around.

Do you think that's a fair thing to say, Molly?

- We can't know, obviously, but I think, yes, that the true test of Republicans' faith in elections is going to be, will they accept an election that they lose?

It's easy for both sides to accept elections that they win.

- Before we close, let me turn to the Democratic Party since we haven't talked about them much.

It certainly seems that at least on some of their policies, they have been out of step with the population at large.

What lessons, I should say, to become more effective do you think the Democrats should be listening to?

What signals are most important?

- Yeah, you know, this debate is already starting to take shape within the Democratic Party, particularly since Donald Trump has broadened his appeal with working class voters, that is to say, voters who don't have a four-year college degree, across the map, white working class, but also Black and Brown voters without college degrees, and those are the voters that Democrats have always claimed to be representing and working to help.

So, I think there's a lot of soul-searching in the Democratic Party about how to reach those people and how to offer them policies that appeal to them.

One part of this discussion is that Harris really did not do anything to distance herself from the far-left.

She took more centrist positions than she'd taken in her 2020 presidential campaign, but she never explained why those positions had changed or explicitly repudiated left-wing policies, such as the provision of taxpayer-funded, gender-affirming surgery to prison inmates, which was the subject of the single most well-funded ad after Donald Trump's campaign aired.

- Absolutely, yep.

- So, you know, I think that was an ad that was less about transgender rights than about a policy that many people simply saw as going too far, and again, her campaign never responded to that ad, never indicated whether or not she still supported that policy, and didn't try to repudiate any of the left-wing voices.

But then, of course, you have the left wing of the Democratic Party arguing that, in fact, her problem was the opposite, that, you know, when she was taking these centrist positions, campaigning with Liz Cheney and so forth, that what she actually should have been offering was a far more progressive platform that would've indicated far more of this sort of anti-establishment change agenda than the one that she ended up offering.

So, this is going to be a very lively, not to say contentious, debate within the Democratic Party in the weeks and months, and potentially years, to come.

- I think the Democratic Party's major problem has been that even though we've had charismatic leaders, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one of the things that they haven't really been able to formulate, that the party as a whole hasn't been able to formulate, is a vision of the future of how government works, of how society works, of how the economy works that is broadly appealing and that makes sense for people in the 21st century.

I think there is too much of a reversion to kind of the economic policies and visions of the New Deal era or the 20th century.

I think it's important for the Democratic Party to support unions, but unions aren't the center of the economy anymore, and so there has to be a way of not just pursuing incrementalism, not just nibbling at the edges of the problems that people see with the economy and the global order, but really offering a new, positive, popular vision of how the economy might work for people and showing how that would work.

I don't actually think that the Democratic Party needs to sacrifice the rights of other people.

I know that's not what's being suggested here, but I think that that is how the conversation can often go, is that, well, you know, you need to wait because we need to appeal to more moderate, and even conservative, voters, and while I do think that the Democratic Party needs to grow its base, I think that there are appeals that you can make economically and politically that don't necessarily center on or don't necessarily require giving up rights for other groups of people.

- Nicole Hemmer, Molly Ball, thanks for joining me on GZERO World today.

- Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

(bubbly electronic music) - Now, for Puppet Regime, our chief democracy correspondent, making his way to New York City to understand why it was that all those millions didn't turn out for Kamala Harris.

- What's the best thing about American democracy?

- Oh, you get the right to vote.

- Oh, welcome to New York.

- Okay, these guys look like very turned up in street of New York.

Did you vote in election?

- No.

- You did not vote?

- I didn't vote.

- I don't really care.

- You don't really care?

- Nah.

- Yeah, I'm not registered to vote.

- Do you recognize me?

- Oh, Putin.

- Ah, hey, I love it.

Did you vote in election today?

- Not today, not today.

- Not today.

- When I get off work.

- Did you participate in this little election?

- Nah.

I didn't vote.

I don't really get into politics anymore, you know?

- Right.

You voted, like, nine times.

- No.

- So, you don't vote at all?

- Nope.

- A great day for democracy.

No?

- We don't need them.

We don't need phony elections, thank you.

- We don't need phony elections.

- We don't need phony elections.

- Could I tell you who to vote for?

- Yes.

- Yes, vote, no, don't vote.

- Yes, vote, no, don't vote, this is exactly the kind of confusion I like.

- These elections are a sham.

- So, I assume you voted.

- I stood in line for a long time.

Then we were gonna miss our flight if I didn't get out of line.

So, unfortunately, I wasn't able to.

- I have to say that, overall, I am quite pleased with the level of disillusionment and distrust in the system.

Of course, not everybody was quite so apathetic about election.

- Now it's election time again, my friends.

♪ Donald's ship is coming in ♪ ♪ America First it has to be ♪ ♪ To maximize our liberty ♪ ♪ Taking back America ♪ ♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week, come back next week if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, you can't quite get to acceptance, it's okay.

We've got your seven steps covered.

Why don't you take a moment to check us out at gzeromedia.com.

(bells tinkling) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (rhythmic piano piece) (upbeat music ends) (bright outro music) - [Announcer 1] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Announcer 2] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - And by... - Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, cleantech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

- [Announcer 1] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... (upbeat music) (moves to bright outro music)