Clip: How Trump won and what he'll do with the power he has been given

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, here we are, the sequel, Trump 2, The Revenge of MAGA. This election marked, among other things, the birth of a new Republican-led multiracial working class coalition and the beginning of an upheaval in the Democratic Party. There's a lot to unpack here, so I want to jump right in with our panel.

Tim Alberta is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory. Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author, with Peter Baker, of The Divider, Trump and the White House, 2017-2021. Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and Asma Khalid is the White House correspondent for NPR and a political contributor to ABC News.

Well, hello, everyone. We're here. We're on the other side of, of the election and there's a lot to talk about. I want to play, Susan, for you and for everyone a brief clip from the campaign that I think exemplifies the challenge ahead for the country.

Donald Trump (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no, other than day one. We're closing the border, and we're drilling, drilling, drilling.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan, what do you think he's actually going to do on day one and day two and three and four?

Susan Glasser, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Well, I think that Donald Trump's critics possibly haven't really fully reckoned with how quickly some of these changes are going to occur. I think that you're going to see Trump determined to move very fast on some of the things that are core to what he promised his followers in this campaign, Jeff. And I think that especially on immigration, on the border, he's promised mass deportations now.

And I recall, you know, really a level of hysteria that created Trump's first inauguration when there was just a, quote/unquote, Muslim ban on seven million countries. And this is going to be of a scale and a scope and a speed that I think many Americans simply haven't reckoned with, the extent to which Trump is going to be, according to him, rounding up people and sending them out of the country, even possibly separating families between those who are legal here and those who are not. And I think it's going to be a radical and disruptive start to the administration that perhaps Democrats are not fully prepared for.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Will it look dictatorial?

Susan Glasser: You know, one of the things that, that I think we have to question is just how organized and how planned out is this? And, in a way, the first term of Donald Trump, there were many radical plans, many of which didn't come to fruition in part from advisers who constrained him from doing so, but in part also because there weren't the plans. And the question is, are they more prepared this time than they were eight years ago?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Tim, how did Trump win?

Tim Alberta, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I think the long and short of it is that it's interesting, Jeff, if you look at the seven battleground states, in most of them, Kamala Harris won more raw votes than Joe Biden did four years earlier. So, she actually did her part, to a large degree, at least in those seven states.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Although we were looking at that map just a few seconds ago, and the blue wall is pretty red.

Tim Alberta: The blue wall has gone red, and, and you ask yourself, well, how could that have happened? Because actually, Donald Trump was able to turn out significantly more votes than he had turned out in either 2016 or in 2020 in those states.

And if you think about what his campaign had been talking about all summer and all fall, this idea of mobilizing low propensity voters, specifically looking at men under 40, white men, Latino men, black men, all of whom are not regular voters, not regular parts of any party's coalition, turning them out in numbers that we had never seen before.

And I think for a lot of us, especially those of us who had had the opportunity to look under the hood of the campaign and see sort of their lack of field organization, their lack of ground game in these states, I think there was a real question, a lot of suspicion, and not just among reporters, but even Republicans on the ground in these states saying, this sounds great, but is it going to work?

And, in fact, it did work. They turned out millions of voters who -- we're not just talking about persuading erstwhile Democrats to flip and go Republican, we're talking about turning out voters who had never been registered to vote before, bringing them out in these states specifically, and whether or not they will remain a durable piece of the Republican coalition remains to be seen.

But in this election, that proved to be the difference.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Asma, any thoughts on the success of Trump, what do you attribute the success of Trump to this time?

Asma Khalid, White House Correspondent, NPR: I mean, that's a good question. I, I think that, you know, there's been a lot of soul searching on the Democrat side, I think, about what went wrong. And I've been wrestling, right?

Jeffrey Goldberg: It probably hasn't even really begun.

Asma Khalid: Yes. I mean, I think already there's been a lot of finger pointing about what could be the fault at this point. But I think what I've been struggling with understanding is how much of this is due to the Democrats' fault, how much of this is due to like an affirmative vision of what Trump was offering, and how much of this is also due to just a broad anti-incumbency feeling in the fact that if you look at where majority of the country was, if you ask them, is the country on the right track, wrong track, a vast majority of people felt this country was not on the right track. They were frustrated with high prices and they blamed President Biden. And Harris really routinely struggled to offer any clear distinction of how she would be different than President Biden.

And I think that was ultimately -- I mean, these are broader trends. And to me, I don't know, I didn't cover the Trump campaign, I covered largely the Harris campaign.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.

Asma Khalid: I don't know that any Democrat would have been able to really fight against that. I mean, she was swimming up current. Sure, she could have potentially done different things, right? But would that have ultimately changed the conclusion of this election? I'm not sure it would.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Stay on the infighting and the Democrats right now. How do you assess the sides in this? There's a Biden camp, there's a Harris camp. There's a pox on both your houses camp. How do you -- give me the taxonomy?

Asma Khalid: Yes. I mean, look, there are some Democrats who feel that Joe Biden should have been a one term president and should have said he was not running around the time of the midterms and allowed Democrats to have a proper primary and maybe it would have resulted in a Kamala Harris ticket, nonetheless, but they feel that he stayed in this race too late. She was only able to really run a campaign for 107 days. So, there are folks who blame Joe Biden for that.

Then there are folks who feel like Harris, in some ways, they feel should have run a better campaign and should have been able to sort of distinguish herself more clearly as an independent figure separate from the Biden administration.

And then, look, there were a lot of folks, and I did some reporting on this before the election, within the sort of progressive wing of the party who felt like they wanted to hear more of a message about the economy and about fighting for lower costs. I think Democrats tried to present that message particularly towards the end. It didn't really get through. But I think there's been a lot of questioning about it.

I mean, there are folks within the Democratic Party who felt like there wasn't enough clear messaging on a range of issues though. I don't think it was just about the economy. I heard about, you know, people wanted different messages, some, right, on the war in Gaza. Some wanted different messages on costs. Some wanted different messages on immigration. There's been and will continue to be, I think, a lot of debate in the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party is a really, really broad tent, that I would argue in 2020 was stitched together by being a party in opposition to Trump. And that wasn't enough this time.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Helen, so you've been traveling this country for a while. You're trying to understand our voters and our desires. When you go home to London tomorrow, how are you going to explain all of what has just occurred?

Helen Lewis, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I think there's a genuine fear in London and across Europe about what dealing with a very chaotic and unstable and unpredictable Trump presidency looks like. You know, what his supporters love about him is the fact that he fully embraces that kind of madman theory of politics. You never quite know what I'm going to do next.

As a foreign leader, trying to deal with that is very difficult. Britain, my country, is in a particularly difficult position, having left the European Union and that kind of trade and security bloc, wondering whether or not it should throw its lot in with, you know, Donald Trump's tariff plans, or whether or not to cleave more closely to Europe.

But the thing about it, I would say, I agree with you on that, because this is my second election this year, right? Britain had an election in July, in which, again, the incumbent party was whomped and we brought in a centre left government party. Now, that isn't because we're wild socialists who have now embraced collective farming, right? It was due to lots of the same factors that were happening in this election, which was just, fundamentally, people felt the country was not in a great state and stuff cost too much.

And, you know, when I was in traveling in Pennsylvania, I would talk to people and you'd ask some very like basic questions about how they felt they interacted with the economy. And people would say things like eggs are too expensive. I go to the shop and I can't buy meat anymore, right? That's the like very, very, very fundamental ways in which you felt like here was some stuff I used to be able to do, here were little treats I could have in my life, I can't have them. It's harder to -- every time I go grocery shopping, I have to put things back that I brought to the till.

And I just think, we might over read the results of this election. I think this has been a grizzly time for incumbents across the world.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Stay on this, this question of the Democrats. I mean, give us your analysis from a little bit of a distance from what the Democrats could have done differently, or was it all baked into inflation in a kind of way?

Helen Lewis: I mean, I think, yes, first start with the time machine. It's probably the way the Democrats needed to do on this. So, yes, I think if there had been a full Democratic primary, it would have been a bloodbath but you'd have felt a leader emerge from that who had the entire party's backing rather than this kind of coronation of Kamala Harris.

But then the second thing is what really damaged, I mean, you mentioned this, what really damaged Harris was her 29 2020 positions at the height of whatever you want to call it, peak progressive, peak woke. The things that she got hammered with were things that were very fashionable in the Democratic Party then, and which the party has crept away from, but without anyone really having the cojones to turn around and say, we're not doing this anymore. I'm actually against that stuff now. I'm talking about gender, and I'm also talking about the border, right? That they had sort of tiptoed away from all this very 2020 stuff, defund the police you haven't heard for years, without anyone turning around and going, I'm actually a clean break with that era. I'm not of that party at all.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Susan, come back to this. You know, one of the things that people are talking about is a key mistake of Kamala Harris not to say, when asked, what would you do differently than Joe Biden? Or what do you disagree with Joe Biden? Is that post-facto wishful thinking, that if she had just broken with him, in some meaningful way, that she would have convinced people to -- that she wasn't, in fact, the incumbent?

Susan Glasser: Yes. I mean, I think, Jeff, there's a reason that there's only one incumbent vice president, George H.W. Bush, who was elected directly into the presidency since Martin Van Buren in the 19th century. It's very, very hard for vice presidents to run and to claim credit for the good things of the president and to disavow the bad things that the president did. This is a very unusual role in American politics to be successful in, first of all, then to come at a time when there's essentially a global anti-incumbent sentiment. I believe that there's no major incumbent party in any of the world's major democracies that's won an election this year. And I think that tells you about a sort of a sweeping trend.

But I also -- I think the third thing is we have to -- I understand Democrats are Democrats, so they're going to spend a lot of time beating up on each other and, you know, sort of arguing about, you know, this broad tank (ph) coalition.

Let's talk about Donald Trump, though. Let's talk about the fact that this is his third consecutive election as the Republican nominee. This is the only time in the Republican Party's history that they have nominated someone three consecutive elections in a row. He is not an unknown commodity, and yet what's remarkable is the extent to which so many Republicans overcame their own qualms and decided in this highly partisan environment to get behind him, even as they viewed him as too old or a flawed leader, you know, that there's the core MAGA. But then there are millions and millions of other Republicans who voted --

Jeffrey Goldberg: There was Mitch McConnell.

Susan Glasser: Well, exactly, and all those that he represents. But, I mean, you know, those voters and especially the Republican Party, they have some agency here, too. And I think it's important to talk about what does it say about this country that so many Republicans were able to say that Donald Trump was a threat to this country in 2020 and 2021 and nonetheless support him anyways?

Tim Alberta: You see, I would view that slightly differently, which is just to say that I'm less interested in what it says about the country for the context of this conversation. I think what it says about the Democratic Party, why is it that millions and millions of voters who will tell pollsters, and we see this in the post-election analyses, in the exit polling, in the vote casting surveys, we see that millions of Americans do not like Donald Trump, do not trust Donald Trump, do not think of Donald Trump as a moral man, do not want Donald Trump to be their neighbor, and yet they're willing to vote for him.

That is a rejection of the Democratic Party in a fundamental way that I think that we have to come to terms with sensing now how a party that has really been sort of living off of the fumes of the Obama era for the past decade-plus now has failed to kind of reimagine itself and really to bring back into the fold the working people of this country, who were a backbone, not just of the Obama era Democratic Party, but of the Democratic Party for generations. And that has --