Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
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It's Thursday, November 7th, right now on CNN This Morning. We're going to make it the best it's ever been. We can do that. Swept into power, Donald Trump vowing to move quickly as he sets up his return to Washington. Plus... While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign. Kamala Harris concedes the race but says she's not giving up hope as her party faces a reckoning. And...

You can see a new big tent Republican Party. Republicans crashing a red wave into Washington on the verge of unified Republican government. And playing the blame game, the Democratic Party now searching for answers as President Biden prepares to address the nation. All right, just a few moments before 6 a.m. here on the East Coast.

A live look at the White House where the lights are still off. You may remember when we were here on Tuesday, the dawn of Election Day or pre-dawn Election Day, they'd lit it up. Now that's going to be Donald Trump's new home. We are two and a half months from Inauguration Day. Good morning, everyone. I'm Casey Hunt. It's wonderful to have you with us.

Donald Trump is returning to Washington nearly a decade after he rose to political dominance for four more years at the pinnacle of American power. A stunning comeback after he left the White House four years ago, impeached for January 6th, and isolated after losing to Joe Biden. No longer. We just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America. America has given us an unprecedented opportunity

and powerful mandate. Democrats now reeling. President Biden has already invited Trump back to the White House. And Vice President Harris addressed a tearful crowd yesterday. While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign. To the young people who are watching, it is okay to feel sad and disappointed. But please know it's going to be okay.

On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win. But here's the thing, here's the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn't mean we won't win. Doesn't mean we won't win. I do not concede the fight, she says. But others in her party are acknowledging there's something that Democrats are getting wrong about what the country needs and wants from its leaders.

I'm going to be very blunt. As Democrats, we've got to do some soul-searching. We're getting a message from a lot of people that we're not hearing them. And I hope we take the time to do the soul-searching we have to do. Donald Trump didn't win just with MAGA. He won with the centrists, the common sense, the independents in the middle. He was able to have a program that basically more people bought in than what Kamala did.

That's the middle, the power of the middle is unbelievable. I just hope when they get to Washington, they remember how they got there. We have to be honest as Democrats. We do have a problem connecting with working class voters. This started to emerge about a decade ago and it was focused on white working class areas. That is now spread. It's not just white working class voters, it's black working class voters and it's Latino working class voters.

All right, joining us now to discuss Elliott Williams, CNN legal analyst, Isaac DeVere, CNN senior reporter, Megan Hayes, former director of message planning at the Biden White House, and Brad Todd, Republican strategist. Welcome to all of you. This morning, we finally, we get all the newspaper headlines, Trump storms back, Trump triumphs again, dawn of a new Trump era. They didn't quite make their

deadlines yesterday because the call didn't come until 5:30 in the morning. But Isaac, you were at Kamala Harris's event yesterday. So I'll start with you. You also cover Democrats extraordinarily closely. The recriminations are already coming in over what happened here. What is the lesson, do you think, at this point that Democrats are going to take away from this?

There is, you know, this argument, I mean, Joe Manchin is going to say, you've got to stick with the middle of the country. There are going to be people who are going to argue that she didn't do enough to turn out her progressive base, that they weren't excited, all of these things. Which lesson are they going to learn, and what's the right lesson of that?

I don't know that anybody knows what the right lesson is and what lesson they'll take from it. This is a situation where this is a big loss, but it was bigger than they expected it to be in so many different ways that it has just pulled the guts out of Democrats across leadership and across the country, it seems. When you look at the size of this loss, though,

You can make the argument it was about the working class, black working class, white working class, Latinos. You can make the argument it was about losing faith among suburban voters or Jewish voters or Arab voters. The truth is Kamala Harris won New Jersey by five points. That is a tiny margin. She was 30 points behind Hillary Clinton in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is a heavily Latino area of Massachusetts.

The scale of this loss is something that the party is going to have to really grapple with in a way that doesn't get solved, I wouldn't think, by saying, OK, we need to tack more to the center. We need to tack more to progressives. They really need to try to figure out how to make more of this going forward. And they don't have a clear leader right now.

They don't have really any clear leaders of who the national person would be. And it also may be that we are seeing Donald Trump ride, in addition to his own strength, what has been going on all over the world of people who have been kicking out the parties that were in power in the post-COVID age. I'm not sure that Donald Trump has a huge amount in common with Keir Starmer, but what

happened to the way that the Labour Party triumphed a couple months ago in the UK is similar to what happened on Tuesday for the Republicans

So it's all of that going on at once. Yeah, well, you ever hear the expression Occam's razor? That sometimes the most obvious explanation is the one that wins out over all of the different things that people can think about. I'm actually a big fan of Occam's razor. It's a great expression and a great concept, right? And we can talk about should it have been Josh Shapiro or was it Latino men or was it black men? When in reality, the facts on the ground were you had an unpopular president, in effect,

A vice president running for the second term of an unpopular president at a time when the economy wasn't doing well, people were feeling it, and that was it. She didn't say she would do anything differently, that she had a window to break from Joe Biden and the mistakes. She just had to say, we messed up.

I think. We messed up. We messed up the border. Instead of inflation reduction, we gave you a Green New Deal. We said inflation was transitory. We lied to you. Like, she just needed to say, we messed up and we'll start over. She was not running against Jesus. She was running against Donald Trump. And the most important word in there is the we. And by merely saying we messed up, she was the face of

the last, or the current administration. And I just think that headwind would have been incredibly hard no matter what circumstances. - So Megan, you were part of this administration. What do you think happened? - I think that we have been not in line with where the electorate is. The party is not in line with where the electorate is. I think we're moving too far to the left as a party. And I think the electorate was telling us,

No, you're not listening to us. We can't pay for gas. We can't pay for groceries. We don't care that we're sending money to Ukraine for all the right reasons, that for democracy and all the right reasons, we're sending money to Israel. We can't afford eggs and we can't afford gas. Why are you sending money to fight foreign wars? We were not like, that's one example of the money that we can go through. But I just don't think we are listening to people on the ground. And I think it came down to the economy. And Donald Trump saying, were you better off four years ago? Clearly, the answer was yes for all of these people.

What's the answer for Democrats going forward? I think that we need to take a good look at who we are and who we represent and where we want to move forward. And I think that we, a lot of times, cater just like people do in the primaries. You get the most extreme of candidates when you have a primary, and I don't. So I think that's where the electorate is, and I think that that's the trouble. How much of this do you think is cultural? Like, one of the things that...

It especially stood out to me, and Brad, I know, obviously, you were doing all this work in Pennsylvania, but when we started to see the margins for Trump in kind of the rural areas of Pennsylvania, kind of the red middle of the state that were better for him in 2024 than they were in 20, I was looking at Montgomery, Chester, Delaware County, suburban women, right, often relatively well off.

compared to other areas, often moderate, perhaps used to vote Republican, don't tolerate Trump. Her margins in those areas were not coming in ahead of where Joe Biden was. They weren't giving...

her enough and i think the question i had about that was how much of it of that because again a lot of those people are not feeling the effects of inflation in the economy the same way working class people are but they still weren't coming out for her enough how much of that is about some of the cultural divides um in that the democratic party has has played into and the cultural ways they have moved to the left i think it's massive i think that joe biden had a unique

It was a different time with COVID. It was a very different time. But I think that Joe Biden had a unique way of connecting with people because he came across more as a working class person. He was from, the people thought he was from Pennsylvania. He just connected differently, but also it was a different time. So I don't want to like go too much into like he was the, you know, Uncle Joe stereotype there or trope there. But I do think we, the Democratic Party needs to really evaluate like how far left are we going to go? Are we going to stay in the center? Because the country is telling us they are in the center.

I think you're really onto something. And I think it would be a mistake for Democrats to have this decided. Is this Kamala's fault or Joe Biden's fault? No, it's the faculty at universities' fault. It is the education curriculum's fault. You had moms voting for a guy they did not like in Donald Trump because they don't like what's in the school books that come home. They don't like the fact that there's an entire left-wing worldview that has invaded so much of the language coming from the left.

It doesn't square with them. And they want to be able to educate their kids the way they were educated. And I think the cultural revolution that Democrats have just allowed to happen in their institutions, that you finally just saw middle class people, even who weren't thrilled with Republicans. I mean, Republicans could overread this too.

But they just rebelled. That's what it was. That's why you saw Donald Trump win with moms. You saw him win with married women. That's why you saw him increase his margins with suburban women. It was just across the board, and it's deeper than Kamala or Joe. I just think when you are doing well and your paycheck is...

and you can afford groceries and you can afford all these things, those things become second nature to you. But then when you can't afford those things, everything becomes much more extreme and much more magnified. Among undecided voters, one of the things that was coming up in focus groups is that they were hearing from people to say, what do you think of Republicans or Donald Trump? What do you think of Democrats, Kamala Harris? And it was basically coming down to...

again, undecided voters, people who had voted for Trump or Biden both, saying they thought Donald Trump was a little crazy, Republicans were a little crazy, but they thought Democrats and Harris were preachy and they felt better about going with the crazy that they knew in their construction of it than with going with Democrats who made them feel bad about how

Well, Kamala Harris also sounds like she's running for the faculty Senate. She doesn't sound like she's running for working class America. I don't think she had much experience sort of pursuing that voter. Joe Biden did, for instance. In Pennsylvania, I can tell you, during the Senate race, we were really relieved when Biden left the ticket because Biden didn't know how to speak to those voters. He was unpopular. The administration was unpopular, but he could connect with them. She couldn't.

- Yeah, Brad, you said that Republicans shouldn't make the mistake of over-reading. - For sure. - Expand. - Well, this was a huge victory for Republicans and it's a huge opportunity for us to build out this coalition of what I call a party of work, right? We have new people who haven't voted for Republicans before, but we shouldn't then take that they agree with us on everything, right? We're gonna have to pay very close attention to this

It's going to require a lot of discipline from us in Congress, which discipline is not our forte in Congress. You don't say. And so we're going to have to really lock in and try to pass some meaningful things and actually function. We succeed a lot of times by stopping things. We're going to have to do a couple of things here. I don't think we need to think like Democrats do and say we're using government to solve everybody's problem. But we do need to prove we can run the railroad a little bit.

And I think we'll have to try to find a way to reach out to people who didn't

do this enthusiastically. Right? There are people who voted for Republicans because they felt like they had to. That's going to be a pretty key audience for us. Really fascinating point. Governing is hard is going to become the mantra of things we cover here day in and day out. All right, straight ahead here on CNN This Morning. Trump's legal battles or lack thereof. The president-elect facing sentencing in New York in less than three weeks. Plus, a geopolitics specter. Why Republicans growing more confident by the hour that they will win control of the House too.

And Howard Dean is here, the former DNC chairman and presidential candidate, will tell us why he thinks election night went so terribly wrong for Democrats. We're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan and then we're going to Washington DC to take back the White House. Building a portfolio with Fidelity Basket Portfolios is kind of like making a sandwich.

It's as simple as picking your stocks and ETFs, sort of like your meats and other topics, and managing it as one big juicy investment. Now that's pretty good. Learn more at fidelity.com slash baskets. Investing involves risks, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokers Services, LLC. Member NYSC SIPC.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. People think about conflict resolution is that it's a compromise, and in some situations might be the optimal solution. Dr. Peter T. Coleman is a social psychologist and he's author of the book, The Way Out, How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.

You're going to hear some simple steps we can all take to get better at conflict resolution, whether it's with a co-worker, a neighbor, or even a spouse. Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts. The real verdict is going to be November 5th by the people. November 5th by the people.

The president-elect of the United States, who you saw there, does have a sentencing hearing scheduled for later this month in New York because he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the hush money payment during the 2016 campaign to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump's legal team already moving to have the sentencing canceled. New York Attorney General Letitia James says she's ready to fight back. If possible, we will work with his administration

but we will not compromise our values or our integrity or our principles. We did not expect this result, but to respond to this result. Trump also facing federal charges in cases in DC and Florida. And of course he threatened to fire special counsel Jack Smith quote in two seconds if he won. Smith is now in discussions with the DOJ exploring ways to wind down the two criminal cases. So what happens next?

Listen to our Ellie Honig to sum it up. So we're going to hear a lot of fascinating scholarly constitutional arguments over the next few weeks about how this goes. Let me just cut to the bottom line. All four of these cases are done effectively.

All four of these cases are done effectively. Elliott Williams, do you agree? I agree. And it's important to think of them as four different cases, sort of in two buckets, right? You have the state cases and federal cases. And frankly, the former soon-to-be president was quite good at lumping them all in together into one big sort of oppressive state coming after him. Now, the federal cases, there are two being brought by Jack Smith, one in Florida, one in Washington, D.C., one for documents, one for interfering with the 2020 election. Those are gone.

because once the president comes in, as he said, he's going to quote unquote fire Jack Smith, remove Jack Smith, the prosecutor, at the top of them. Those, in effect, go away. And that's why you're hearing about Jack Smith right now trying to figure out how to wind down those cases.

The state cases are a little bit trickier simply because they exist outside of the operation of the federal government. And state prosecutors can still bring charges and try to lock up a president of the United States. I just don't think any court is going to allow a sitting president of the United States to be certainly prosecuted and certainly sentenced while he's president. It just, as a practical matter, no court, federal or state, is going to allow that.

is really going to allow that. - Well, and Megan, I mean, when I was listening to Letitia James just there, she's clearly angry. It seems like she's angry about the election result. Is she taking away, I mean, kind of the way you've started to understand what the lesson was here? I mean, do you think people would tolerate

her moving forward with this? No, and I also think that he's the president-elect, and he has duties to do as the president, and I'm not sure that it's good for all of us to sit here and talk about his sentencing and all the other things that are going to be happening. And I just... Is it fair? No. But is it what probably needs to move on for the country? Yes. Yeah, I would...

differ a little bit only insofar as it's still a pending prosecution that a prosecutor has brought that a grand jury has blessed and so on and simply saying well and we don't really feel like going forward with it I don't know if that's the best approach I know but what I think in practice happens is just keep trying to bring it and a court will eventually say that it can't proceed and I think that's the right way rather than just throw your hands up I think Tish James and and

- Well, Marshawn and Alvin Breyer have to also think about the fact that they serve and they prosecute other people based on the trust they get from the public in their authority they've been invested with. And I don't know how you can look at New York's election results-- - I was gonna say, we were talking about New York's election results. - And conclude, you know, Donald Trump gets 38% in Queens. You know, well, guess what?

These people running Queens, too. Megan, you were making a very interesting point in the break. The one thing that I do have trouble with is he was found guilty by 12 people on a jury, and those are of your peers. And I don't understand how you don't have consequences for that. That is not a prosecutor. That was a jury found him guilty. So that's where I have a little bit of trouble just in general of

of our justice system, but I don't know how you sentence a sitting president-elect. They chose to bring these charges in an election environment. Sure. Totally. That's a whole other issue as to they took years to bring them to trial and drag their feet on them and so on. I just don't buy the argument that, well, because...

He did well in the electorate, therefore people aren't going to bless prosecutions. We cannot be in a situation where we are grafting political polling onto whether prosecutions ought to move forward or not. I mean, I just think Republicans get prosecuted in Republican jurisdictions all the time, and that's okay. I just don't think that simply because he did well in Queens, he should prosecute. The choice was made to involve the electorate in these prosecutions,

by the prosecutors when they waited as long as they waited when they pushed it as far as they pushed it they ask for this to be influenced the election will not be an election will influence the process by 12 people and that that's where I have it like that future prosecutions fine but he what about the one that he was actually found guilty for by a jury of his peers seventy-something percent American people think it was a political

But that doesn't matter. 12 people found him guilty. That's the problem. People might support Ted Bundy. People might support serial killers. It doesn't matter. At the end of the day, the judge has enormous power here, right? And how does the judge consider all of these questions? Is it in the public interest to proceed with this matter? Now, there is a standing conviction right now and a scheduled sentencing. He ought

to go through with it. Now he has to decide on the day of and say, well, I'm going to postpone this until after inauguration day. It would be odd for him now after a verdict to throw the whole thing out. I really do think you just let it play out, recognizing that he will not end up in jail as president of the United States. He won't. The courts won't allow it.

All right. Coming up here on CNN this morning, Howard Dean, the former Democratic governor of Vermont, joins us to discuss what comes next for his party after sweeping Democratic losses Tuesday night. Plus, progress is never linear. Mark McKinnon on how he's speaking to his daughters after he says their dreams of the first female president were dashed. John Kerry and John Edwards both voted for the war.

Then Dick Eppardt voted to spend another $87 billion on Iraq. Howard Dean has a different view. I oppose the war in Iraq, and I'm against spending another $87 billion there. I'm Howard Dean, and I approve this message because our party and our country need new leadership.

That was vintage Howard Dean, the former Democratic presidential candidate, back in 2004, calling for a change in party leadership as he mounted one of politics' first true online grassroots campaigns. Now, 20 years later, Democrats are left seeking the same fresh leadership as they enter a second Trump presidency. They don't have a clear leader or a plan. Now, Democratic lawmakers are trying to figure out what this means for the party going forward.

I'm gonna be very blunt, as Democrats we gotta do some soul searching. We have to be honest as Democrats, we do have a problem connecting with working class voters. This started to emerge about a decade ago and it was focused on white working class areas. That is now spread.

All right, joining us now, former presidential candidate, the former governor of Vermont and former DNC chairman, Howard Dean. Governor, very good to see you. Thank you so much for being here. I'm chuckling at the old vintage footage. It's great, right? I know. I remember attending...

I was in college, naturally. I'm letting my age show a little bit, but I remember attending some of your events as well as some of your competitors at the time. This moment, I mean, you also went on to run the 50-state strategy at the DNC, and you kind of took what Democrats were doing then and tried to make it something that you could argue with across the country.

And obviously, it came down to seven swing states, but we're now in a situation where the Democratic message clearly failed in a broad and deep way. I mean, we were here talking about Queens and New Jersey and the margins that Republicans ran up in those very traditionally blue places. How do you diagnose the problem that was clearly revealed on Election Day, and what should Democrats do about it? -The problem is we haven't done a damn thing since 2008 about getting out into the grassroots.

I always call Washington middle school on steroids because they work hard, they're very smart, and it's all about them all the time. This goes to the 50-state strategy, which has never been implemented. This goes to being on the ground. The Democratic Party ought to be putting a lot of money

into school board races and into city council races and into local representative races, including in very red states. And they're not doing that. Every four years we have this orgasm of raising enormously billions of dollars. And I thought Harris had a great infrastructure. I thought she ran a great campaign. But there's nothing underneath

And if you there are a lot of now there are a lot of kids who grew up in my campaign are now 30 and 40 who are running things like run for something and stuff like that. But the Democratic Party needs to be doing that. And it's not. And until we learn, we're not going to win.

Sir, you mentioned the grassroots and that word sometimes gets conflated with, say, activists. Some now would probably say the progressives like AOC and others might fit that criteria. But there does seem to be a...

divide there between, you know, we were talking about the cultural aspects, the way that, you know, you see colleges and universities and other institutions that certainly Republicans believe are run and influenced by Democrats talk about things versus the working class. I mean, you have Bernie Sanders out, you know, saying it should come as no great surprise the Democratic Party, which has abandoned working class people, would find that the working class has

has abandoned them. So, I mean, when you say the grassroots, who are you talking about? And do you think that there is an issue with how progressives talk about this stuff? - No, I don't think there's an issue with how progressives talk about this stuff. And you brought up the example of AOC who ran relatively far to the left on the democratic spectrum. The reason she won had nothing to do with where she was running from and her views. It had to do that she got her, I was shocked and very impressed by her campaign.

because it was a grassroots campaign. She got out there and knocked on doors and organized people. This is not about where you are on the political spectrum. There'll be some districts where you have to be a little more conservative, and some districts you have to be a little more liberal. AOC replaced a guy who had been there for years and years, and

represented his district very well. The reason she replaced him was not because he was doing a bad job. It was because he wasn't out in the community. He'd been in Washington too long and thought that's where the world revolved. The world revolves in the districts. It does not revolve in Washington. And once you get sucked into Washington, you start to believe your own BS. And the Republicans have done this much better for almost a generation.

That's interesting. I mean, I guess my pushback would be there is a kind of a national question, right, about where is the country when you're running for president. I'm curious where you think the party should be on kind of the spectrum from left to right if you're trying to make a national argument. And also, do you think running and putting yourself where people are is different in this age than it used to be? Obviously, AOC is a very small district. You can't really advertise on TV. But a lot of what she did

was on the phone and a lot of what Trump did, you know, Republicans took some criticism heading into election day saying, well, you don't have a traditional field campaign. You know, you're not knocking on doors the way we normally do. They had made a concerted strategy to go on, you know, put Donald Trump on every podcast that they could find to kind of run a national social media based campaign. What lessons do you think there are to pull out there?

Well, that was a lesson that was learned in my campaign, which I take no credit for. My campaign was inspirational to young people. And this was a time where all these kinds of things, these innovations were invented. Podcasts. And I remember having a podcast and outracing Dick Cheney, who was running a $25,000 podcast.

lunch in California while I was having a ham sandwich in front of my computer because these kids figured we didn't even have computers that had cameras in them. We had to put a Logitech on top of the frame. And I didn't know what I was doing. I just did what they told me to do. But they were right. That's how you organize. And we did not do that. And Trump did. I will give Trump some credit.

his field was very, very good. And I thought Harris's field was pretty good, too. The problem was Trump was building on a generation of efforts that had already been previously made in all those states to move them to the right with school board elections, with city council elections, with state legislative elections. Do you know how many state legislatures they took over the last time we had a presidential election? Until you start taking over state legislatures, we're not going to win presidential races. It's just too hard.

Sir, how much blame does President Biden deserve for Trump's victory? And is the second Trump term part of President Biden's legacy?

I don't think so. Look, the honest truth about Biden is, whether you like him or not, he has been the most active and the most successful president since Lyndon Johnson on the domestic front. He remade America. And Trump is not going to be able to undo all that stuff. Ironically, I knew this was going to happen, and I said so before the election. Trump, I mean, Biden invested millions, billions of dollars in places, states that he knew he wasn't going to win. Ohio, chip plants, battery plants, Kansas, all these places.

And then, of course, all the Republicans who voted against his program ran out and took credit for them anyway, which is what you do in politics. Biden has transformed the country in a very good way, and he won't get credit for that for a long time, particularly because of the way he went out. But I think he deserves a lot more credit than he's going to get historically. All right. Howard Dean, very interesting conversation. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you.

All right, still coming up here on CNN this morning, while Democrats grapple with their losses, Joe Biden preparing to address the nation in just a few hours. Plus, now that Trump is set to return to Washington, his allies already vying for roles in his new administration. All right, welcome back. Now that Donald Trump's return to the White House is official, sources tell CNN his allies are quickly scrambling for new roles in his administration. Sources adding that Trump could announce his decisions on some key positions within days.

Trump will also have to decide what to do with two familiar but controversial figures from the campaign trail, Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A source familiar with conversations around Musk telling CNN, quote, it seemed unlikely that he would even want a full-time government position, given what that would mean for his role in the various companies he helms. As for RFK Jr., CNN reports this, quote, inside Trump's camp, questions have been raised about whether Kennedy could get confirmed or not.

or obtain a security clearance necessary for a cabinet-level position. And even if he could, they doubt Kennedy would want to go through those processes. A former Trump official briefed on the discussion says this, quote, If you dump a bear in Central Park and think you're above the law, you don't want to have to go through the gauntlet, that gauntlet of political correctness. I spoke with Senator Marco Rubio yesterday about whether he thought Kennedy could get confirmed by the Senate.

Well, I think the Senate's going to give great deference to a president that just won a stunning, what I think is an electoral college landslide when all is said and done, and a mandate. And he's being given a mandate to govern. And I think presidents who are given a mandate to govern deserve from the Senate the opportunity to surround themselves with people that are going to help them execute their policies.

All right, our panel has returned. Brad Todd, will the Senate confirm RFK Jr. to a cabinet-level position? No. No? Rubio seems to think maybe so. Marco Rubio is being given the discretion is the better part of valor, and he's being discreet by trying to point the right direction privately, I'm sure.

President Trump is gonna elect Trump is gonna give RFK a voice but that does not necessarily means the word secretaries in front of it You know, it's interesting this word mandate that he used it means different things to different people And yes, the president won a clear victory and comes in on the strength of that victory But what does that actually translate to and a lot of people might actually think that a mandate means whether it's RFK as secretary of whatever

or six-week abortion bans or whatever else it might be. And I think the next several weeks will be telling as to how the Trump folks talk about what exactly are they empowered to do and what have the people blessed their ability to do right out of the gate. Axios is reporting this morning that Tom Cotton won't join the Trump cabinet. Senator Tom Cotton has told President-elect Trump's team he will not be accepting administration roles despite being a top contender for presidency.

positions, including CIA director and secretary of defense. Two sources familiar told Axios, Cotton, relatively young conservative defense hawk, much speculated future presidential contender. You guys surprised by this?

I think Tom Cotton's a former client of mine, and I think he has unlimited potential, and he will have a great deal of influence in this administration because he has a great deal of influence in the United States Senate, and the president-elect trusts him. So I would watch for his imprint on defense and national security policy. Why do you think he's doing this, though? Because he wants to distance himself from Trump to preserve his future? I'll let him speak for himself, but he's running for conference chair in the U.S. Senate. He has a great chance of winning that post.

conference chairs worth having right republicans have fifty three point members in a state senate and being leadership matters have a whole new leadership team coming in uh... i i i think you can do whatever you want to uh...

Interesting. Let's talk for a second about Chief of Staff, the New York Times reporting Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who are, of course, two bylines we're going to be reading a lot about. Even more so, we read them during the first Trump administration, the second Trump administration. I think they're going to be all the more critical. They report that the likely choice for Chief of Staff is Susie Wiles, who, very interestingly, I thought Isaac

when Trump on Tuesday night told her to take the microphone, basically refused and gave it to Chris LaCivita instead, her fellow campaign manager. - Yeah, that's the kind of role that she's had through this campaign is being in the background, helping run things, helping manage things. I think most people who looked at the Trump campaign, whether they had a real inside view of it or even those who were informed from the outside of it, saw her as a really important part of the campaign functioning in the way that it did.

But we can over index any staffer all the time, right? I think what is true here is that Donald Trump won because of the way that he is, because of the way that the country is and how he tapped into it. So the question now is going to be taking that and figuring out what this looks like, what a mandate looks like, what a governing approach looks like for Donald Trump

and how he will respond to it. All through the campaign, we heard, well, if he comes back into power, he's not gonna want any of the guardrails around him. He doesn't like it, even less so than when he first came into the White House eight years ago. So Susie Wiles has figured out so far how to navigate that role around Donald Trump if she's in as chief of staff.

then she will be having to figure out that role in a much different capacity and with a lot more intensity around every decision. Can I say something about Suzy? Sure. I've known Suzy for 25 years, and it...

America should hope she takes this job. She is a thermostat. She is capable of turning the temperature down of any heated situation. She's a really impeccable manager who's very organized. People trust her. She learns your strengths. She marries your strengths to your job. She would be a quintessential White House Chief of Staff who could succeed. She would also be the first woman to be Chief of Staff of the White House. Really?

Interesting. All right. Straight ahead here on CNN This Morning, Mark McKinnon joins us with an open letter to his two daughters after the defeat of Kamala Harris. Plus, President Biden preparing to speak to the nation in just a few hours. There's also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices. Yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.

We put our pocketbooks above people's lives, above women's rights. And I'm scared for what that means for us as women and also as a country. Kamala Harris supporters now facing a reality that many of them feared. Their hopes of seeing the country's first female president will have to wait.

In an open letter to his two daughters, our next guest offers this to them. Quote, Mark McKinnon writes...

And sometimes it just takes an incredibly long time. Progress is never linear, forward, or constant. But damn, it shouldn't be this hard either. Joining us now is Mark McKinnon. He's a former advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain and one of the creator of Paramount's The Circus. Mark, good morning to you. I know you had thought that Kamala Harris was going to win here.

Obviously, her defeat was pretty sweeping. How do you understand it? And of course, you were speaking to your daughters there. What's the impact?

Well, you know, I've been through a bunch of these, Casey, in my time. Obviously, it wasn't the outcome that I expected or wanted. But, you know, like I said, I've been around the block a lot of times. I've learned a lot from my losses more than I won campaigns. But the pain that I really feel is for my daughters and daughters everywhere who, you know, I remember in 16, you know, my youngest daughter, I couldn't get her out of bed for three days.

And she was just now starting to, you know, to grasp again this notion that, you know, that a woman could have a seat to the presidency. And so what I don't want to see happen is for that light to be extinguished. Hope is a fragile, essential, and precious thing. And I just want that light to be kept alive. And so I've been around long enough to know that it comes back around. So my message to young women is, you know, it just takes a while to stay in the fight.

I'm also an Occam's Razor fan, Casey, and I think you and your panel got right to it, which is, I mean, in a win that's this sweeping and resounding, you can point to a thousand things or one thing. And the one thing that I think is quite true is that it goes back to the sort of fundamental campaigns, which they are essentially in presidential elections about change or the status quo, change or more of the same.

And exit polls from this race showed that seven out of 10 voters were very unhappy with the direction of the country. And when you have a 70% wrong direction and you are the incumbent as a vice president of this administration, that's just a huge hill to climb, which is not to say that lots of mistakes weren't made. But again, you can't point to like one thing or she should have done this or should have picked Shapiro or

whatever. I think she could have done all those things right and ultimately would come up short because people just want to change. So at the end of the day, if you're voting for change, even if you're a woman of color, that you're a vice president of the administration that's been at the wheel for the last four years, it's a tough road to hoe. Mark, what do you

What do you think Democrats are missing for working class voters of all races and ethnicities? I mean, we've talked a couple times already this morning about the number of people who voted for Donald Trump in Queens, the number of people who voted for Donald Trump in New Jersey. I mean, we didn't call New Jersey for Kamala Harris until I was on the air after four in the morning on Wednesday.

It's incredible the kind of coalition that Trump has put together and taken it away from Democrats, particularly working class Americans. And that's what Democrats have to figure out over the next four years. But I'll tell you, the one thing in politics I've learned is that if you spend enough time in the desert, you figure out where the water is, right? And the Democrats are now in the desert.

And, you know, you asked me what's going to happen. They tack left, tack in the middle. They just got to tack and tack hard. They got to tack somewhere. And the way to do that is a process over the next four years of putting candidates through the primary process, which is not what Harris got to do. She didn't get those reps. She didn't earn the, you know, earn it through, you know, a lot of spring training. And that's what Democrats will do this time. And you asked me, you know, how are they going to get out of the desert? How are they going to find water? It's going to be leadership.

And it's going to be somebody who fights their way through the next four years, emerges through a tough primary.

process, battled and bruised, but tougher and smarter to lead the way for Democrats out of the wilderness. Mark, do you remember that scene? I think it's Michael J. Fox with Martin Sheen. They'll drink the sand in the desert trying to convince him that leadership is all you need in the White House. That's just what's playing in my head as I'm listening to you today. Mark McKinnon, thank you. I really appreciate it. All right. See you soon. Take it, Casey. Thanks.

All right. After congratulating Donald Trump yesterday on his electoral victory, President Biden will address the nation from the Rose Garden later this morning to speak further on his vice president's loss to the man that he once warned was an existential threat to our democracy. But within his own party, some Democrats are blaming Biden, angrily accusing him of starving Harris of valuable months on the campaign trail.

by refusing to drop out of the race earlier, even when it was obvious that his stamina and mental acuity would be a significant obstacle in his campaign against Trump. - Is it worth the risk? - I don't think anybody's more qualified to be president or win this race than me. - You know, the heart of your case against Donald Trump is that he's only out for himself, putting his personal interests ahead of the national interest. How do you respond to critics who say that by staying in the race, you're doing the same thing? - Oh, come on.

Well, I don't think those critics know what they're talking about. They're just wrong. It's wrong. The critics are just wrong, he said then. Megan Hayes, was the original sin for Democrats this cycle that President Biden decided to run for reelection?

I mean, I think a lot of people are going to say that, but the fact of the matter is he did run for reelection. We're in the spot we're in, and I think we need to start to look forward because you can do the woulda, shoulda, couldas until we're blue in the face, but that doesn't change the fact that we have a president-elect Trump and we have a Democratic Party that's in shambles and in pieces, and so I think that we need to take a hard look at ourselves and move forward. Joe Biden may have... He was going to go down, it seems, as the only Democrat to defeat Donald Trump. If he had dropped out earlier...

there would have been a messy primary. I think you can look at the Harris folks who say that she didn't have enough time to run, but there are others who say this was actually the best scenario for her. I was going to say, I think a lot of people probably thought she would have lost a primary. Well, not just that, but even if it had been two months earlier, more time would not necessarily have benefited Kamala Harris. And this is, look, Joe Biden's legacy is going to be defined by the fact that Donald Trump won here.

We'll see what it looks like in the full scope of time. But this is, as I was saying earlier, given what this loss looks like for Democrats, it does seem to me that you can place blame in a lot of ways. You can say it's all these different things going on. It's all of them at the same time, and it's bigger things than any of it.

And it doesn't, you'll find some Biden supporters say, oh, he ran ahead of Kamala Harris in a lot of counties. Everywhere, basically. But it's a different election. It's a different election. It functioned in different ways. And Joe Biden is the easiest person to blame here. That's not to say he's not deserving of a lot of the blame, but it's just a lot of it at once. That primary point, Kavanaugh,

cannot be made enough. And it's easy to say, well, there would have been a primary and the heavens would have opened and it would have been fine. No one in modern history, no sitting president has faced a primary from within his party and gone on to win. And Lord knows if a president stepped down and his vice president had faced a primary, that that vice president would go on to win. Look, it happened to Jimmy Carter. It happened to...

There's another one. But it just, she would not, I just don't buy that she would have co-signed a victory. She got the best campaign she could get. She was able to hide for six weeks from interviews. There was a completely scripted campaign. She had a compliant media that helped project exactly what she wanted. It wasn't the messenger. It was the product. Democratic governance lost. The challenge for Republicans is to make sure that our governance can win next time. LBJ and George H.W. Bush. There you go.

All right, we want to leave you on a little bit of a lighter note. The magic wall, of course, you may have seen it. It was shining again in the election night spotlight. Remember, you can always change some of the colors. You've got blue, blue again, a little bit of a red right over there, a little bit of blue. And of course, if you want to make something out of green, we've got a little face here, some whiskers. We can make a cat.

Now let's take a little bit of Oregon. Let's move it out to the ocean. It's going to be surrounded by water. That's very, very dangerous. Check out Michigan. I can make it bounce.

You got to love it. That old Saturday Night Live sketch got new life on election night because it went viral again online as the real magic wall pros got to work. And we just want to take a minute to salute our actual magic wall magicians, Phil Mattingly, John Berman, and of course, the legendary John King, who manned the wall throughout our election night and day coverage, breaking down the race like only CNN can.

So you asked, are there any places that the vice president is overperforming Joe Biden in 2020? So we can show you that as well. We just bring that out here. Harris overperforming 2020. Holy smokes. There you go. So let this go away and see if there's anything on the east side there. Literally nothing? Literally nothing. John, you're a youthful individual, but you know the game in Nevada. The game in Nevada is right here. For me, it's craps, but that's a different story.

Gotta love them. Thanks to our panel for being here this morning. Thanks to all of you for joining us. I'm Casey Hunt. Don't go anywhere. CNN News Central starts right now.