Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 11/8/24

Jeffrey Goldberg: Donald Trump, the 45th and soon to be 47th president, is almost certainly the most important American political figure of the 21st century. Trump has told voters that he would be a dictator on his first day back in office, and now he has an open field run to remake American government and society.

Tonight, we'll talk about how he won, and what he'll do with the power he's been handed, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

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 --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Tim, I want to read something to you. First of all, I want to thank Susan for introducing Martin Van Buren into the conversation. It makes us feel very knowledgeable and erudite. And I don't think he's been mentioned at this table the entire --

Susan Glasser: You know, context, Jeff.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Context.

Susan Glasser: To keep understanding who we are.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to read something that turned out to be a very prophetic piece you wrote in 2022. It's about the Latino vote. And you said in part, quote, the very thing that breathed life into the Democratic Party 20 years ago, the focus on identity and inclusion is making it more popular with white voters and less popular with Hispanic voters.

This was in 2022 that you said this. A lot of people in the party understood this then. You were reflecting a view as well as advancing a view. How do you explain -- and maybe this is a question also about gender. How do you explain the incredible attraction that many Latino men felt toward a person who has been, objectively speaking, racist at many different kinds of Latinos? I mean, he's talking about Mexican rapists. That was -- the first introduction to Trump as a serious candidate was a disquisition about Mexican rapists. How do you explain this?

Tim Alberta: You know, Jeff, in that piece, it's really interesting. I characterize a few different conversations I'm having with Latino men who -- in the Rio Grande Valley, in the southwest, in South Florida, and they're all telling me some variation of the same thing, which is that, yes, I'm pretty sure that Donald Trump is a racist. I'm pretty sure that Donald Trump doesn't like people like me. But at least he's sort of open and transparent about it, and, in a way, I can almost trust him, whereas Democrats, use us as pawns in their political game. They act like they're our friend. They sort of -- you know, they tell us how important we are to their coalition, but then they never give us a seat at the table.

And furthermore, Democrats seem preoccupied with all of these sort of cultural, social issues and the sort of virtue signaling that can accompany them rather than on the concerns of people like me in our community, namely, the economy, and, yes, illegal immigration. If you go spend time in the Rio Grande Valley, and I've done a lot of it over the past five, six years, it is remarkable to see these counties that Hillary Clinton won by 70, 80 points, that Donald Trump has now, eight years later, flipped to red.

And what is the common theme through all of those areas when you spend time talking to people there, including Democratic mayors and Democratic sheriffs? They will say the same two things. Democrats stopped focusing on working people and Democrats stopped caring about illegal immigration.

And if you think back to even the Obama era, Barack Obama deported millions of illegal immigrants, more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton had. On a lot of these sort of core cultural and social touchstones, Obama, even though he was in his heart of hearts a progressive, was willing to at least sort of accommodate the center right in this country in ways that the Democratic Party, since his departure from office, has not been done.

Asma Khalid: Can I just say --

Helen Lewis: - the amount of ways that Donald Trump and his campaign spoke to men as men. Like if you spend any time in the kind of spaces online that young men hang out in, I'm thinking of the podcast of people like Logan Paul, who started off as a YouTube prankster, then he moved into fighting, and then he was one of the many, many male influencers that Barron Trump, Trump's 18-year-old son, suggested that he do an interview with. So, they have just barraged these very male spaces in which are deliberately kind of punky, anti-authoritarian.

And I think you're exactly right. The kind of overt rudeness and shading into overt racism and sexism is a kind of badge of honor in those communities that we can take it, right? We're not these people who sit around in corporate offices and all know exactly the right language to use and the right cutlery to use. No, this is -- like this is raw. This is dudes hanging out together. And I think they very much rode what is a kind of zeitgeisty way? Like it is not a coincidence that Dana White, who is the head of, you know, the mixed martial -- like, the United Fighting Championship was there on stage for Donald Trump at his victory speech in Mar-a-Lago. They barraged sports fans with those transgender ads, you know. The campaign had a very, very strong strategy for talking to men as men. It did rely on --

Susan Glasser: But they also had a strategy of telling monumental amounts of untruths and lies. And I do think it's very important if we're going to talk about immigration to talk about the Trump campaign's -- campaign of lies around immigration. Do you believe that we are under an invasion? Do you believe that they're eating the dogs in Springfield? You know, this is also, I think, a story about propaganda and its enormous effectiveness.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, what lesson do you derive from that, about the media or about --

Susan Glasser: Propaganda is very effective, Jeff, unfortunately. That's one of the important lessons for I think all Americans of the last eight years and watching Trump's persistent hold over millions of people. Donald Trump lied, as we all know, about the results of the last election in 2020.

And he wasn't just isolated and made a pariah for doing that. In fact, millions of people chose to believe his untruth over --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me ask Asma a question, if you don't mind, and then jump in with whatever else you wanted to say. And I don't want to appoint you the spokesperson for the media, God forbid. But is Susan right that we were overwhelmed by propaganda? And obviously in your organization, and a lot of organizations, people are questioning the effectiveness of our truth telling, or what we believe in good faith is truth telling.

Asma Khalid: I mean, it's hard. I mean, look, I agree with Susan that it's very important to cover like the policy and the consequences of his administration and his words. At the same time, and maybe I feel this way a lot because I've spent most of my career, up until now, I was actually a campaign reporter, demographics reporter, I was out in the country, I grew up in Indiana, feeling that much of political coverage could be improved by spending time outside of Washington.

I think there is nuance, and I agree with you, Tim, to how different demographic groups feel, different racial groups feel about Trump's candidacy. I mean, I give an example, like just as, you know, Trump came down that golden escalator talking about Mexican rapists, Trump also, during the first few days of his administration, issued a ban on Muslim majority countries.

But you look at a number of Muslim Arab-American voters, they moved away from Kamala Harris this election cycle. You look at a city like Dearborn, Michigan, and Trump, according to the results, it looks like won Dearborn, Michigan. I mean, that is astounding, but he showed up, and I heard this from voters this cycle. He would take pictures. He promised to end the war in the Middle East. And there'd be like, you know, little images of him circulating on WhatsApp chats kissing a little kid at a restaurant in Dearborn. And that went viral in communities, where people wanted to hear that someone was showing up and someone was listening.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Was he just a better candidate as a candidate than Kamala Harris?

Asma Khalid: I think he showed up in a lot of different communities.

Susan Glasser: But what are you saying? I mean, I'm, I'm a little confused though. Like what are you saying? So, because people like Donald Trump kissing babies, that it makes sense for them to vote for the guy who handed American policy toward Israel over to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who refused, who cut off all U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority.

Asma Khalid: I'm not going to defend whether or not it makes sense or not. But I guess I'm saying from an emotional perspective, though, I think if people feel, and there's a very large, like Lebanese community, right, in Michigan, and I remember asking the Harris campaign, like what are you guys doing? Where are you in this area? Are you talking to people? I had people in the community asking me, like where is the Harris campaign? What are they doing, right?

But Trump was going there. His Tiffany Trump, his daughter's father-in-law is out there meeting with people and they're promising to end the war.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Helen, I want to jump on something. You use the expression, it doesn't make sense.

Asma Khalid: It doesn't matter --

Jeffrey Goldberg: And, again, I'm not -- you know, and I don't mean to put a pith helmet on you and you know, you're hacking your way through the American jungle or something, but does this make sense? How does this make sense now? I mean, is this the triumph of propaganda and populism and the manosphere? How -- I'm not asking you to bring coherence in the next 1 minute and 27 seconds, but bring a little coherence to this.

Helen Lewis: Propaganda is a really interesting word because if you think about the media that people consume online, they are listening to podcasters who, for example, in the middle of that Logan Paul interview with Trump, he breaks off to sell his energy drink, right? They listen to him.

Jeffrey Goldberg: While Trump is sitting there.

Helen Lewis: Yes. And Aden Ross, the streamer, gave him a custom Cybertruck before doing the interview, right? This is not stuff that happens in classic journalism, but it references the fact that for those younger people who are used to listening to TikTok, Instagram, other things, they're used to people talking to them face to face and being very open about their political views and trying to sell them things.

And so I don't think I don't think that necessarily those news consumers have the same idea about propaganda that we do. They think that we're all sitting here with a secret agenda, but what's more honest is people who just go --

Susan Glasser: So, like Elon Musk, who is the world's richest man, who purchased a social media platform, decided to endorse Donald Trump and Amplified his lies and conspiracy theories and misinformation as part of it in addition to giving more than a hundred million dollars to the --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Tim, last 30 seconds.

Tim Alberta: As someone who has stowed (ph) a lot of ink on Donald Trump's lies over the past decade --

Jeffrey Goldberg: A couple of books worth.

Tim Alberta: A couple of books worth. I just want to say this when we talk about propaganda. Arguably, the three most determinative things in this election were propaganda from the Democratic Party. Number one, Joe Biden is fine and totally fit to be president for another four years. He wasn't. Number two, the border is closed. It's under control. There's nobody coming in. That was not true. And number three, hey, don't worry about inflation, prices are fine, Bidenomics. Everything's great. You guys don't know what you're talking about. Actually, the economy is in great shape. This is propaganda to millions of Americans who said, none of that is true, and therefore, I don't trust you. They might not trust Trump, but they don't trust Democrats either.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now. It's a great conversation. It's not the end of this conversation. But I want to thank our panelists for joining us. And I want to thank you at home for watching.

On PBS News Weekend, how the war in Gaza affected this year's election.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.