The 2024 Elections: What Happened and What’s Next?
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to our Dealbook Summit Task Force on the 2024 elections, what happened and what is next. The 2024 election cycle is among the most consequential elections of our generation with starkly different views for the nation having been offered by the Trump and Harris campaigns. And the aftermath leaves us with some critical questions that we are going to talk about today. I want to start by introducing this panel of

esteemed experts and people who have worked on the recent election, Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, Major Garrett, the chief Washington correspondent at CBS News, Jason Miller, who was a senior advisor to Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Anita Dunn, former senior advisor to President Biden, Alexis McGill-Johnson, the CEO of Planned Parenthood,

Van Jones, CEO of Dream Machine and a CNN host and author. Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News. And Margaret Hoover, the host of Firing Line with Margaret Hoover on PBS. This is an exceptionally large group of people. And we have 90 minutes for people to get in their expertise. And I would like this to actually be a conversation. So...

If any of you want to jump in and add a thought at any time as we talk or jump off of something someone else said, please do. Just give me a minute to introduce you so that people listening know who you are when they're not watching. And I'll just take a moment to reintroduce at that point. And let's get started with the person to my left, Anita Dunn.

Given the breaking news of the last few days, my first question is to you. President Biden for months said he was not going to pardon his son, Hunter. He did so on Sunday and did so with a sweeping pardon whose language tracked in modern times only with President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. Why did it cover such an expansive time period and how long has President Biden actually been considering it?

Oh, Maggie, thank you for such an easy question to start the morning. And I can only say that I don't speak for President Biden any longer and was not party to the conversations that were held about this. But let me just start by saying that I do not believe and I don't think most people believe that Hunter Biden should go to jail and that, you know, he had a serious addiction.

that he broke the law, that he has pled guilty to that, that he has been held accountable and has actually been publicly pilloried in a way that very few people who commit these crimes have ever been pilloried. So he has paid a certain price. He's also someone who has turned his life around, who has been sober now since 2019, who has a young child and is actually going to be a grandfather sometime next year. And had this pardon been done at the end of the term,

in the context of compassion, the way many pardons will be done, I am sure, and many commutations will be done, I think would have been a different story. So I will say I absolutely agree with the president's decision here. I do not agree with the way it was done. I don't agree with the timing. And I don't agree, frankly, with the attack on our judicial system. Can you say a little bit more about that in terms of the attack on the judicial system? Because that was what was most striking to people who...

criticize this pardon, not just the point you just made about the timing, but the specific attack after months of saying that he would respect the judicial process? So I think the president's statement has to be taken at its face value. And clearly, like everybody else in the world, he has the prerogative of changing his mind. And that is indeed what he kind of said he did there.

I think that, you know, as a, you know, from a Democratic Party perspective, from a Democratic perspective, as we were in the midst of the president-elect rolling out his nominees, and in particular, in the middle of a Kash Patel weekend, kind of throwing this into the middle of it was exceptionally poor timing. And that the argument is one that I think many observers are concerned about a president who ran for

to restore the rule of law, who has upheld the rule of law, who has really defended the rule of law, kind of saying, well, maybe not right now. So, you know, Maggie, as I say, I agree with the decision to pardon. I absolutely think that Hunter deserves a pardon here. But I disagreed on the timing, the argument, and sort of the rationale. Was this pardon discussed while you were still in the White House, or was this all new information for people after the fact?

I was never part of any pardon discussion when I was at the White House beyond the question of what do we tell the press if they ask about this? And there was a one-word response, right, which was no. And I think if you read the news reports and the reporting around this, it's very clear that the White House was really not part of this process. It was a process that was done very much internally with the family and with the defense lawyers. So that's a different issue.

To Jason Miller, do you expect now that President Trump, President-elect Trump will go ahead and pardon January 6th arrestees and detainees as he has suggested he would? And is he going to point to this pardon as why?

Well, good morning, everybody. Good morning. Thank you for being here. Starting right in. Yeah. Thank you for being here to join me in celebrating President Trump's victory. So it's good to see all of you again. But going right at that, I think what you heard with that answer is a big part of the reason why President Trump won. I think people are sick and tired of the way the justice system has been politicized under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. When you go back and look at the polling in this race, I think this is a big deal.

when you talk about who's the bigger threat to democracy, a lot of people said that was Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, because they saw what happened, the way that everything from the DOJ, the FBI was turned on its head and used to attack a political opponent. So obviously you think that the Hunter pardon is pretty ridiculous.

But I don't think anyone's actually surprised by it. Now, to your direct question, Maggie, regarding the J6 prisoners, the president has said over and over, and he's even said this since the election, those will be looked at on a case-by-case basis. And I think also when we talk about who's going to be doing that, I think Pam Bondi is a very serious player coming in to take over the DOJ. I think it's going to be definitely a change in tone and focus than we saw from Merrick Garland.

where the entire thing was politicized. So I'm glad to get the politics out of it. Let's go through and make sure that everybody is treated equally. And that's where we go. I just want to stay on that for a second. Two things that you just said. President Biden's Justice Department was

politically weaponized against his own son. That's been an argument that has been confusing, and I'm just hoping you can explain what that means, number one. But number two, just one sec. President Trump has talked about retribution, and he's talked pretty openly about investigations into people who investigated him. So how is that different? And I'm genuinely asking, and hopefully you can answer this. Yeah, well, taking those in reverse order, the president said very clearly his only retribution or revenge will be success.

And that's what it's going to be. On day one, he's going to secure the border, going to drill, baby, drill. He's laid out a bunch of those. The Green New Deal, it's on its way out. But to the DOJ, the very clear weaponization of the DOJ against President Trump, against a political opponent, we've never seen anything like this in history. We saw the first four years with President Trump. There were no attacks. There was no going after Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton or any of his other political opponents. But we did see that under Joe Biden. It's going to be –

in the second Trump term, be just like it was in the first where justice will apply equally to everyone. I'm sorry, Maggie, can I just jump in for one second? Please jump in. I need it done. You know, I think many things have been said about Merrick Garland and people have been criticizing him from both sides.

Judge Garland, he was a judge before. But I think the one thing that people really would not say about Merrick Garland is that he has been a political attorney general. The only person who's been convicted by this Justice Department who had a special counsel was the president's son, the president of the United States. And Jason, I just have to say that I think that when you look at this attorney general, this Department of Justice,

That of all the things you can say about it, the one thing you really cannot say is that it operated as a political arm of the White House. I can attest to that. Jason Miller responding. Anita, did you miss the last four years? Did you miss the illegal raid on Mar-a-Lago? No, I know. That's what I'm saying.

I mean, the illegal raid on Mar-a-Lago? That's not what the American people think. Even if you go to the poll, they're not Republican or Democrat. I think it was maybe three months ago. Independents believe the greatest threat to democracy was Joe Biden getting reelected. And that was independents, not Republican or Democrat. So what you say, you can believe, but that's not what the American public believes. There's a difference between what the American people think and what's true. So the idea, I don't know why...

I don't know what we are, why the defense of Merrick Garland. Sure. Donald Trump lied about an election being stolen and then sick to mob on the Capitol. And it's funny that you roll your eyes at this, Kevin, because you're the one who went down and resurrected him. You want to know what happened just now in the 2024 election is we elected the most dangerous criminal human being, corrupt human being that America has ever elected. And Kevin, you helped him. You're the

who went and got him after. You're welcome. You're welcome. Yeah, sure. Thank you. And in doing so, and in doing so, you enabled this. And so Joe Biden, the idea that Joe Biden's Justice Department is the problem here, as opposed to Donald Trump

And the fact that he tried to overturn an election and sick people on the Capitol is – I don't know if people let you get away with that in rooms all the time, but you should never be allowed to get away with it. Stop, stop, stop, stop, Jason. You realize President Trump won the popular vote. I do. And the American public –

weighed everything in consideration, looked at his first term. They looked at the disaster of Biden-Harris over the past four years, and they reelected President Trump with historic numbers. That's because they want the economy back. They want the secure border. I think the question really was about the Justice Department being politicized. That was your assertion, Jason. I think the real issue here is that it's hard to make the argument that the Justice Department is politicized against for one particular party when the party in power's

president's son was the one who was also prosecuted. So one could make the argument, maybe both sides make the argument that there has been some politicization or maybe over politicization in the prosecution of Biden's son. I understand the argument that you're going to make, but it's very difficult to say that the Justice Department is politicized in one direction when the son of the president... Why didn't they prosecute him? Wait, wait, wait, wait, Jason. Stop, stop, stop. You also made the point, I just want to put a pin in this.

You said the only—it's very convenient to be able to pluck one thing that Donald Trump says and say that that is the thing that he said. You said he said retribution will be his success. He also had talked about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad. He talked about hanging Mark Milley. I mean, so it's convenient to pick the definition of retribution. But he has said so many things, Jason. You can't just pick one of them. And then the issue—the final thing is—

President Biden's attack against the judicial system undermines the confidence that all of us have.

in the non-partisan nature of justice. So in the pardon of his son, he should never have undermined the justice system in the same way that, frankly, those of us who look in appallment at the Trump administration were looking to Democrats to uphold a standard of a partisan and non-partisan nature in Justice Department. And so that undermines the entire system, the integrity of the entire system for all Americans.

I want to move on to a related but different topic. And again, back to Anita. Was President Biden right to run again in the first place after suggesting that he would be a transitional figure to a new generation? And did he drop out too late?

So he said that once. I'm going to go back to what Margaret just said about you can take one statement, somebody says one time. He said that one time in 2020. And like any president, once he got in there, he discovered there was a lot to do. Let us not forget, Maggie, we had an extremely successful first two years in terms of extraordinary legislative accomplishments, including the infrastructure bill that nobody had been able to do for years.

including the Inflation Reduction Act, poorly named but monumental in terms of what it's going to accomplish for the American people and a number of other things. And then a midterm election that was far more successful than anybody believed was possible given the overall economic status of the country. So given that, his decision to run, which was his decision, because people make that most personal decision themselves,

was not one that was really controversial within the party at the time. And it was a pretty logical one for him to make. There were things that he felt he still needed to do. And he thought he was the right person for the job. That's why people decide they want to run for the presidency. So...

You know, the way it unfolded, I think people will spend the rest of their lives kind of looking at this election. But I'll say that the decision that he made was not a decision that was really a tough call for him, I don't think, given the fact that he felt he was a successful president with a vision of where he wanted to lead the country. And he had just led his party through midterms that no one predicted would be as successful as they were. Van Jones.

Look, I think winning the midterms cost us because it gave a false sense of confidence to Joe Biden and to a lot of D.C. Democrats.

Most people in the party didn't feel that way. People were shocked that Biden wanted to run again and disappointed. And the polls showed it immediately. It wasn't like there was some big mystery about that. Look, this is a party that loves Joe Biden, loves Joe Biden. You never hear people talk about a politician with as much love as they do. But people were disappointed that he decided to run again. And, you know, the red wave didn't show up in the midterms, but it sure showed up later.

I also just want to say, you know, stuff we talked about before. Look, man, people are scared, Jason. I mean, you're very confident in President Trump and I appreciate your confidence. I got people who are literally terrified because people take the things that he says seriously when he says he's coming after folks.

folks. Every one of the people that were just mentioned are people who are hiring lawyers, people who are thinking about leaving the country. And so if he didn't mean it, then I wish he would come out and say that. And I hope you tell him to do that. And there's also been reporting, yeah, he didn't go after Hillary Clinton, but there's been reporting that he did go after John Kerry and others, and he was being restrained. So just understand there is a level of concern on this side. The last thing I just want to say is that, you know, there's a reckoning inside the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris promised us freedom.

Well, she delivered it to us because now we're free from having to run anything in Washington, D.C. That's not what we were signing up for. It's what we got. And I hope the party takes a chance to look at the fact that we pushed all our rebels out of this party. We had a rebellion in our party in 2016. It was called Bernie Sanders. You had a rebellion in your party in 2016. It was called Donald Trump. Your rebel won. Our rebel lost.

And then since then, the rebels in our party have been pushed out. RFK was a rebel inside of our party. He wanted to run against Joe Biden fair and square. The DNC wouldn't let him. Pushed him out. You can walk down the list. Don't forget, Elon Musk was a Andrew Yang Democrat four years ago. He's out. You can walk down the list. Joe Rogan.

Was very favorable toward Michelle Obama. He was a Bernie guy. He's out. So there's something that's happened this party

where the rebels in this party no longer feel like they have a place. And we've got to be able to talk about that stuff. Honestly, I love Joe Biden. Joe Biden picked me out of the puppy pile and gave me a chance to work with you guys. I love him. He should have walked away and let other people in this party step up to the bat. He didn't and paid the price. Van and Alexis, Miguel Johnson, just answer a question of how Democrats could have won. What could they have done differently?

I mean, Vance sort of answered this by saying not have Joe Biden. But given the race that was over the three months, what could have been done differently, if anything? You know, look, I mean, I definitely hear how the midterms gave us a false sense of hope. I do think that the fact that

the midterms coming on the heels of Dobbs, right? The power and the anger and the outrage that people had really was underestimated. And I think we continue to see that through 24. I think abortion made...

not only the midterms competitive, clearly, but it also kept Kamala Harris competitive because she stepped into that role and for two years has been an incredible surrogate and messenger meeting with folks across the country

You know, the country to really understand the impact and really frame the conversation around freedom. I do think that the economic messaging as it relates to it, abortion was not the only issue. It was a central issue. But connecting, even using abortion as a way to talk about the economic challenges.

constraints that families were experiencing and understanding the decisions, the daily decisions that they were making from, you know, buying a box of cereal to, you know, making decisions about if, when, and how their families would, you know, would survive, I think is, was critical. So I would have liked to have seen a little bit more on the economic messaging that would have helped ground folks in, and connecting more, obviously, to men and men's concerns, which I think came a little late.

On that note, Anita Dunn, if President Biden had stayed in the race, do you think he would have won? You know, I don't think anyone has any way of knowing. OK, and I think that for everyone who can say if this person had been the nominee, if this had happened, if that had happened, those of us who've done presidential politics know a lot of things happen in presidential politics you can't predict.

I think that the contours of the race didn't change as much as people thought when you had President Biden step down and the vice president become the nominee. And I do want to say something about the vice president. She did a terrific job. OK, she just did a terrific job.

I thought that she was a leader. I was I mean, I obviously hoped she would win for a number of reasons. But one reason I truly hope she would win was because I thought a great legacy for Joe Biden would be having put a woman in the pipeline so that when the opening occurred, a woman was the natural choice for people, which is, of course, something that I think is helpful to everybody.

Having said that, I'm going to actually your core question. What could have been done when you have a race as close as this one was? And it was not a landslide. I mean, the president elect has less than 50 percent of the vote now is going to win by one point five million elect popular vote, which is a victory. He won and more decisively than either of the previous two elections.

for either winner. That's not, Joe Biden won by 7 million votes. Yeah. Not in the electoral college. Yeah, but I'm just saying he won. Okay, but when you have a race this close, right, when there's 250,000 votes across seven states, right,

Then you can spend a huge amount of time saying this tactic, that tactic. But I think that going to something Van said, that it's an opportunity for the Democratic Party to take a step back and to, you know, in a way that we have not for a while, and it's a healthy thing, to actually ask ourselves not just how did we communicate our message? Should we have been on Joe Rogan? But what are we saying to people? Mm-hmm.

And are we listening to them? Are we expecting them to listen to us? Because I do think that the party itself needs to look at these results, look at what happened in terms of voting groups. And I know you're going to get to that, but I think that this is, you know, it was not a wipe out the way 1980 was or 1994 was or 2010 or some of the, you know, I'm old enough to have been around for, you know, Ronald Reagan carrying 49 states. It wasn't that. Right.

But and we even probably picked up a little in the House or the House will be super close. The Senate is what it is. It was not that big of a victory. However, it is a message to this party. Right. And you want to say, no, we got wiped out. We did not get wiped out. I did say I just laughing. I did. I did. I said you got what you want to say. We got 312 electoral votes. It's a wipeout. So there are ways to evaluate this.

President Trump increased his vote total in nine out of 10 counties in this country. All right.

In the places where the race was most closely fought, the battleground states, things were relatively close, but not all that close. The margins were bigger than they were in 2016 and 2020 on the Trump side. In places where the race was not thoroughly joined, Illinois, New Jersey, California, where people had just a general sense of direction and attitude, they voted for President Trump. That's an important thing for Democrats to ponder.

and to look at. When you're collapsing in New Jersey, when you're collapsing in Illinois, you're coming to a near collapse in California, there is something that you need to address and take seriously. One thing I would like to say about this question of justice being politicized, I've never covered a member of Congress or a governor or a senator who thinks any investigation from any US attorney wasn't politicized, straight up. Matt Gaetz thought that the Trump Justice Department investigation into him was politicized and said so, okay?

Politicians always run to politicize justice when they're in the dock. All right? What President Trump said to the country is, political popularity should immunize me from these charges. That was the question he laid before the country. The country gave an answer. You have to respect that answer, whether you agree with it or not. He said, I will put this in the forum of politics. I will delay everything judicially, as is my right under due process.

Delay is a tactic. It is a long-running tactic of Donald Trump. Everyone who brought these cases should have known that delay and then a political appeal would be the playbook. That's exactly what happened, and he got the verdict politically that has immunized him now legally. Kevin McCarthy, we're going to say something. 55 counties flipped to Trump. Some have not ever voted for a Republican.

Lake County, California hasn't voted for a Republican since 1984, if you want to remember that. So no, it wasn't close. This was an amazing vote where it took place. When you look two years ago, Democrats should have looked four years ago. When Joe Biden won, he only won by 48,918 votes. And you know, for the first time since 1994, not one Republican incumbent lost in the House.

Everybody thought 15, they beat 15 Republicans. We beat 15 Democrats. So it was four years ago you knew you had this problem. In the last election, you had abortion, the Supreme Court, nothing to do with Joe Biden. And you had a redistricting, which made fewer competitive seats. So it wasn't something that Joe Biden did to make some election. And you lost the House. So I don't know when you lose a House as somehow you were successful in an election. To Marla Garland,

You're saying he did something he didn't go after. No, he let he let had the whistleblowers from the IRS not come forward to the Ways and Means Committee. Hunter Biden would not have gone forward to be prosecuted because he was getting a plea deal.

He was getting waved away the last five years they didn't go forward. So Marlon Garland got pushed because whistleblowers came forward, not because he was some holy man of his attorney general. And the last thing I would say, when you look at this election going forward, she was always going to lose. If you look at the pardon, the way he wrote it, if you look at running for reelection, I was on the other stage a year ago.

And I talked about why Joe Biden should not run by mental capacity of personal experiences I had. The vice president came on a few people after me and criticized what I said and said his age had no determination of going forward. These decisions of the pardon and running again were all decisions made with this president, with his family. And every time he's sitting with his family, he's made the wrong decision.

And nobody on this table would have thought that he wasn't going to pardon him. So we thought he was lying to us the entire time. And I knew they were lying to us about his mental capacity every time I met with him.

Look, it's extraordinary that you had a situation where 70% of the country was saying they didn't want a Trump-Biden rematch, where the majority of Democrats were saying they didn't want Joe Biden to run again. And nobody really stepped forward. Now, in terms of the promise to turn over to the next generation, be a bridge to the next generation, which he said once in Michigan after the primary in 2020 with Kamala Harris on the stage.

with Gretchen Whitmer on the stage and with other potential people seeing as the bridge to me. I know, and I'm sure other reporters here have heard that some of those

took it as a promise. They thought Biden was really going to do one term and out, regardless of whether he's... And he did, to be fair. He was asked in the election whether or not he would commit to serving only one term, and he said no. But look, Biden took specific steps to ensure that it was going to be extremely difficult for anybody to challenge him. He changed the primary calendar. He took some of his...

you know, potential rivals and put them on his campaign committee. Uh, you know, this is the stuff that any incumbent president Donald Trump did the same thing. Absolutely. Um, but, um, and then made it clear that there were going to be no debates and, you know, there were going to be no debates. So they were shut off, but ultimately it's on those future leaders of the democratic party. And the bench was deeper than it had been for a long time. Uh,

not to ultimately step in and say, I'm going to take him on. Nobody stepped forward to take him on. And that's the question that Democrats have to ask. But it's not whether or not Biden should have dropped out first, but whether why nobody other than Bobby Kennedy, Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, Dean Phillips, none of these major figures, the governors came forward and said, I'm going to take on Joe Biden. But there was something else going on at the time. There were articles

where Democrats were saying, please dump Kamala Harris from the ticket, change your vice president. That's a parlor game that's played every time there's an incumbent president who's eligible to run for a second term. But let's all be honest. And Van Jones and I talked about this at Milken Institute in early May. Let's be honest. Part of the reason that President Biden could not step aside is people didn't have confidence in the competence of Kamala Harris.

And then all of a sudden, we're supposed to believe that she has worked hard. She does speak well. The American people saw it differently. And I'm glad—I'm relieved to hear that very few lessons, it sounds like, have been learned by my Democratic colleagues. Oh, wait. I was talking about you. Oh, wait. I hear yours. I hear yours. But let me just say this. Maggie, I think that this election was also about moments that Donald Trump has this sense of the culture. He just—

gloms onto a cultural zeitgeist and leads it. So I think him, rather than banning TikTok like Joe Biden did and Kamala Harris did, by extension, he got on it. And Forbes magazine wrote an article maybe two weeks ago, Topps, saying of the 10 top TikToks of 2024, eight came from the Trump campaign, five in the last week alone. So he's in the garbage truck. He's at McDonald's. You're watching Joe Rogan live, but then other people are watching it through TikTok.

He goes to East Palestine before any official in the Biden-Harris administration, before the Secretary of Transportation, before the sitting senior senator, now the ex-senator of Ohio, Sherrod Brown. And he's honoring the police officer who's slain in Massapequa, New York on Long Island, while Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden are all at Radio City Music Hall at a fundraiser.

He beats Kamala Harris to Georgia and North Carolina where people are in pain, where everything that they've had and loved ones have been washed away literally, and Kamala Harris in San Francisco at a fundraiser. So people see this.

They know what they see. They know what they hear. And I think the big distinction in this last election, two I'll say quickly, one was the Democrats would have won if they got away with convincing Americans to believe what the Democrats told them was real and true and authentic rather than what they saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears, what was real and true and authentic. Everything from a sitting president's

obvious mental and physical lack of acuity, agility, ability. But even the vice president, whose official schedule that they stopped publishing a while ago had little to nothing on it most weekends and then most days. So you can't create a candidate out of somebody who is going to eat and own all of these things. Second thing I want to say is very quickly, this is, I listened for 26 minutes, very quickly is that putting Harris on the ticket

I think also sealed Biden's fate. And him thinking that he was FDR, hanging out with John Meacham. And instead of realizing you're here to be the post-COVID caretaker, you're here after George Floyd's murder. The idea that he was going to govern as Bernie Sanders, who had already been pushed out of the party as somebody who beat Hillary Clinton, folks, in 23 contests. That's a real primary opponent. And this is the election where Americans are saying, no more.

You are not going to pigeonhole and narrowcast me and tell me what to think, for whom to vote, and how to feel based on my age, my gender, my race, my sexual orientation, my religion, my political party registration, my past voting behavior. And whether it's Ann Seltzer's phony poll or phony focus groups,

of junk saying that Kamala Harris is going to win, attacking people like Kevin McCarthy. Thank you so much for having the courage in 2022, you and President Trump and the RNC, to have run these candidates in California and New York, because without that, we would not have had

the majority in the House of Representatives. You had the courage to go into blue states and go into purple districts and do that. I think they misread the mandate, Maggie, in 2022 of the midterm. A lot of those terrible candidates fell short. They should have. They weren't great candidates. But the Republicans won 3 million more of the popular vote than the Democrats.

They misread a mandate for Joe Biden who wasn't even invited on the campaign trail. They sent out Barack Obama, not Joe Biden, to campaign for candidates. So you've got to – we have to level set with the public and stop pretending that these counties didn't flip. And last point, every – How many last points are you going to do? This is my last point.

Well, they're all good ones. I'm not here spinning. They're really great points. And I'm not here spinning and pretending that this election, a lot of this conversation respectfully sounds like the election didn't happen yet. We've talked about the same stuff over and over again. The fact is this. I said it a year ago. I'll say it again because it was just raised. The Democratic Party right now, every day they wake up, it's still January 6, 2021 on the calendar. They get an electric vehicle. They get an abortion. You're out of touch with the public.

This election was a rejection of wokeness and people, every state went more red except Nebraska and Washington state. That is a sweep. That is a mandate. That is President Trump coming into office and the American people saying, please make my life safer, more secure, more affordable. Please get us out of these foreign engagements. And I think the always wrong, never Trumpers who had unlimited money

Costs the party, costs the Democratic Party, which they say they're not even a member, another presidential election. Van, hang on one second. I'm going to let Sarah Longwell respond. Yeah. So first of all, thank you for pointing out that I do a lot of focus groups. I do. And they didn't say— We all do. We just don't publicize them. They didn't say Kamala Harris was going to win. What did they say? Trump, Trump, Trump. Okay.

You have stage five Trump derangement syndrome. We're on a podcast. There's no cure. There's no vaccination. No one is figuring out who is talking. I think you guys are. Who is you guys? The country? People who are bad. Yes. Are bad for the country. Yes. That's right. You guys. Who attacked the Constitution. Stop. Stop. Donald Trump. Stop. Stop. No, this is what they do. So here's the thing. If she's going to be invited here, she's going to sound like her. Just let Kellyanne let her talk. Let her talk. Because the thing is, is I actually agree with a number of the things Kellyanne said about the actual voters, which is that...

And here's the thing. Most of the independent voters, they were double haters, right? They don't love Donald Trump. Most of them hate Donald Trump, actually. But they also, and this is an indictment of the Democrats, okay? Joe Biden should not have run. He was too old and every voter said it. It was an

all of the data that Joe Biden should not be the nominee. He should have been a one-term president who was a bridge and let the party have a primary. That is the only thing that you can retcon at this moment and go back and say, what would have been different? Kamala Harris coming in with 100 days left.

wasn't going to do the trick. And I think that she did. She so exceeded expectations, though, in terms of where the low expectations for her were. She increased her favorables. And that allowed Democrats to sort of go back to something Kevin McCarthy was saying, you

You know, they were able to make it extremely close in the House. The Republicans are still losing House seats right now. It's going to be like a three seat majority. They held on to a lot of places in the Senate where Democratic senators overperformed Kamala Harris. And so Donald Trump didn't have the same coattails. But what was happening?

Is it because there's some great, you know, thing about Donald Trump? Or were people so angry about inflation, so angry about a lot of COVID? There's still a lot of COVID anger. They were so angry about immigration. Democrats have no answer.

no plan on immigration, and voters really care about it. And so, you know, I think that, and when I say, you know, there's sort of, there's a lot about what voters think that comes from the fact that people lie to them.

They were lied to about the 2020 election being stolen. It's interesting to hear Kevin talk about 2020 right now and essentially in the frame that Joe Biden won because that is not a given in the Republican Party. They lie to people all the time. Donald Trump is a professional liar. And as a result, but they are better at working the media channels. So the people are stupid. You're sitting here saying the American people are stupid. No, I'm saying you guys are better at talking. I don't think you guys is. Is this a football team? The Trump campaign? Yeah.

Uh, the Trump, Trump went everywhere. JD Vance went everywhere, right? They went on every podcast. They talked to every person and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did it. But isn't that, isn't that a different point, Sarah? I mean, the point that there is a, there is a point. I do want to call them on 15 minutes ago. I'm just saying, hang on, hang on just one second. I just want to address that though. Cause I do want John Carl to speak to this and major and Margaret after Dan talks, but we're getting a little behind here. Um, the, I, I,

The issue of the media approach is actually a really important one. The issue of the issues, immigration and coronavirus, which we haven't even discussed yet and I want to get to. But Van, please make your point. Okay. Look, guys, a lot of the stuff we're doing is the same stuff we do all the time. We got a chance to talk real here. I want to talk real. You guys shouldn't be as happy as you are because 2016 people voted for change because they were fed up and sick of it and gave Trump a chance. 2020 people voted for change because they were sick of Trump.

2024, they voted for change. They're probably going to vote for change a bunch more times because something is off, man. There's something really going wrong for real everyday working folks in this country. And I'm not sure either party has an answer yet. We don't have to beat each other up when the other one's in power. But can we solve any of these problems?

My perspective doesn't come from the focus groups. It doesn't come from sitting on CNN next to my beloved Anderson Cooper. I was on the ground supporting folks in Philadelphia trying to get folks to vote. I was trying to help Jewish voters get to the polls in the Philly suburbs. And I'm telling you, we are way off. The entire political class is way off. First of all, digital is a new door knocker.

You've got to understand that. We were laughing our butts off at Donald Trump for suspending his door-knocking campaign and letting Charlie Kirk and Elon do a bunch of stuff online. We said, these guys are idiots. These guys are stupid. Then you start knocking on these doors. You know what people come to the door with? Their phone in their hand.

They're in a 24-hour digital surround sound that has nothing to do with CNN, has nothing to do with any stuff that we do. I asked myself, I got a teenage son, I asked him, who are the most influential people in the world today? I'm thinking to myself, he's going to say Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z. He says, Kai Scent, Aiden Ross, Jinxie, and Sketch are

I don't know who he's talking about. I said, what platforms are you on? He goes, I'm on Twitch, Kick, and Rumble. I said, that sounds like you need to go to the hospital. What are these platforms? I'm telling you guys, the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream. There are platforms, there are people out there that are getting 14 million streams, and we're on cable news getting one or two million.

And so there is a whole world out there. Kellyanne Conway, I hate to agree with her, but I do a lot of times. Donald Trump understood that and we didn't. And it's not just Democrats that don't. The entire political class is way off, way off, way off. And I'm going to tell you something else. Men are hurting, man. Men are hurting. And the feminist culture tells you don't cry because you're the problem anyway. And the masculinist culture tells you don't cry because boys don't cry.

So you just aren't able to talk about how scared you are you can't provide for anybody. You can't talk about how scared you are that you don't understand your kids and what's going to happen to them. You can't talk about anything. So at least Donald Trump lets you have an emotion besides shame. And so, guys, we can sit up here all day long and do this talking point gumbo stuff that we do. But I'm telling you right now, you guys are going to be in trouble next.

Because until somebody fixes these problems for real people, there is a rebellion in this country. And anybody who comes out and sounds like they aren't pulling their talking points out of a crackerjack box will get a hearing, whether they're right, wrong, or otherwise. All right. Hang on one sec. Margaret Hoover, to Van's point about...

the media, mainstream media becoming fringe, which I'm not sure I quite agree with. You can't. Actually, given our surroundings, that's actually why. It is certainly true that the mainstream media does not have the impact it once was. What do you, John Major, see as the future for what reporting looks like as we go forward into the next Trump administration? And what is the approach that the mainstream media should take considering controversies of the last term?

The underpinning and the foundation of a representative democracy, it relies on a free press. It relies on transparency. It relies on people observing what is happening amongst those who hold power,

and then reporting it. And not just reporting it. I mean, reporting, we don't have to think of in the traditional sense. But look, video cameras are everywhere now. We don't have to wonder whether somebody was held down for however many seconds. We have a video of it. I think being able to see transparently on camera what is happening is part of a story. So I do think

digital isn't not just the new door knocking. Digital is the new media. I mean, digital is how we hold those in power to account. And people who are in the digital space, who are capturing the moments where people who hold power, which is the trust of the public, that is how we hold people account. And then, you know, so this is, and the New York, by the way, we're all doing this because this is not being broadcast on cable news. This is not being broadcast on television. This is being broadcast online.

by digital. And so we're all moving there, even if we're a beat behind. But transparency is, I mean, reporting and telling the truth and transparency is how we hold those in a power to account. Alexis, Michael Johnson. Yeah, I mean, look, as an organization that reaches millions of people every single day to have conversations around bodily autonomy, we are all on digital, right? So the idea that the Harris campaign was not on digital, that the IEs like Future Forward were not on digital and spending money

millions of dollars to reach those folks, to hire influencers, to bring them to the DNC, right? And have a totally different kind of reach, outreach to young folks and people of color much differently than we have seen in the past.

It doesn't mean that we need to know who tank and please and, you know, all the folks are. But they are out there and they are having those conversations. You know, I think that the difference is, and I, you know, I listen to Kellyanne talk about, you know, the rejection of wokeness. You know, we also saw that.

A closing argument that was grounded in white nationalism and supremacy and patriarchy and the Madison Square Garden fiasco. Like, you know, the idea that that is what people are accepting, that young men are accepting that because of shame, of racism.

of their masculinity and how they are engaging. That's the emotion they're leaning into, I think, is way more problematic in terms of what we need to be thinking about and bringing the next generation into this. So I don't think it's just a critique of mainstream media not giving the information. I think we are living in a very digital society, but one that is so polarized, right, that is corrupting

created, like wherever you're getting your media, it's not like your media, the people who are listening to Tang are not the same people who are listening to Joe Rogan, right? And so how do you actually bring them together and create the structures? That's what the parties need to be thinking about. That's certainly what the Democratic Party needs to be thinking about. How are you bringing people and fighting the polarization that seems to be locked into a different structure and one that is reinforcing, you know, some very problematic, uh,

Identity politics and othering politics that are very focused on hate and division. And that's what I'm deeply concerned about. We'll be right back. What can you learn from Built for Change? We could actually turn software into buildings and represent it in a virtual space. So we did exactly this. What will the next breakthrough mean for your enterprise? Reducing that level of complexity and you can focus on where your real value is.

How can your business thrive in a world that's constantly evolving? That is the difference. It's about breaking the silos of data, bringing all of this together. Check out Built for Change, a podcast from Accenture, wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. She sent me a year-long subscription so I have access to all the games. We'll do Wordle, Mini, Spelling Bee. It has given us a personal connection. We exchange articles. And so having read the same article, we can discuss it. The coverage, the options, it's not just news. Such a diversified desk. I was really excited.

really excited to give him a New York Times cooking subscription so that we could share recipes. And we even just shared a recipe the other day. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff. We're making the same food. We're on the same page.

Connect even more with someone you care about. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nytimes.com slash gift. Get a special rate if you act before December 26th.

I want to, speaking of polarization, turn to Kevin McCarthy. Oh, do you have something you want to say about polarization? Jonathan, do you have something to add? I was just going to make a point on the media coverage. And there's been so much tension, Donald Trump's vilification of the media, enemy of the people, opposition party, fake news, all of that.

But it was interesting to see the way Kamala Harris engaged with what the so-called mainstream media, which was for much of the campaign, not at all. She came out of a very successful convention and then almost went into hiding to prepare for her first major media engagement, which was a 20-minute interview with her running mate on CNN that came and went like that. And then

you know, went in to prepare for a, a debate and, and, and, and, you know, she didn't, she didn't, not only did she not gauge with Joe Rogan or all these alternative media you talking about, she didn't engage with, with the major broadcast media, with the New York Times. She, and the complaints coming out of the Democrats were almost as strident as the ones coming out of, out of, out of the Trump campaign about the coverage. And yet there were so little engages. Tim Walz

was chosen in large part, got on Kamala Harris' radar screen because of his effectiveness on cable television. And then he went into hiding. Did anybody hear from Tim Walz after he became the Democratic nominee for vice president? Yes, we saw his disastrous debate. And I'd like to think... Well, you saw the debate, but my point is, Kellyanne, my point is he didn't go...

He didn't go anywhere. Even he went and he did his speeches. Even the little traveling press corps that follows the vice president or the running mate had almost no access to him, didn't engage, didn't take questions. I interviewed J.D. Vance time and time again myself during the campaign. He was everywhere. Tim Walz was in hiding. Transparent and truthful. But I'd like to thank ABC News for giving a platform to Vice President Harris because The View definitely did her in just by asking her a simple question.

Go ahead, Jason. Go ahead, Jason.

But it's also – it's not just the fact that on their wage growth. They're also looking and seeing those clips on TikTok and on other places of the border being wide open. They're seeing the horrific –

the horrific and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some very serious things that people take as personal offenses that are impacting them while they're struggling to even, I mean, cashing out 401ks, even paid the rent just to get by. And they see illegal migrants being put up at hotels and being given their own communities. That makes people mad. And I think one other thing too on the media point, going to what John said,

When you talk about President Trump and essentially his flood the zone approach with media being everywhere, we're talking about a lot of critical issues, but the thing that hasn't really brought up is the authenticity issue. And as a candidate...

People wanted to have a beer with and talk about their economic future with somebody who doesn't drink and somebody who himself is a billionaire because he was authentic, because he could speak to them in direct and plain spoken and without a filter. And when you look at the way that Biden and Harris tried to hide, then President Trump cut through and it was –

It was very clear. Major Garrett and then Anita. So, Maggie, you asked a moment ago about press coverage on the incoming Trump administration. Kellyanne knows this. John knows this. When we covered the first Trump administration, I told a lot of reporters, do not get emotional about this. Do not fall into this trap of critics saying you're normalizing Trump. The presidency is an institution. The country confers the normality of the presidency. Full stop. The occupant of the presidency is the president. And you cover the president.

And you do it with curiosity and clarity and accuracy, and that's it. And if you get emotionally involved in it, not only is that journalistically erroneous, Trump will manipulate you. Trump understands your emotions much better than you do. Figure that out, people. Trump is someone who possesses within the political context supreme emotional intelligence, especially where reporters are involved.

So that's one thing the level set. Kellyanne made a mention of culture. I just want to refer to something that Tony Blair used to say. Tony Blair said when economic times are convulsive and people feel dislodged, they don't move left economically, they move right culturally. It was true 20, 30 years ago when Tony Blair said it. It's true now. And I've done a little bit of reading about Grover Cleveland because...

They are now matched. You beat me to the punch on one of the questions I was going to ask you, so thank you. It is not historically coincidental that the two times we have had non-consecutive re-elected presidents were times of tremendous economic dislocation. All right? The digital age is what we live in now. The gilded age was occurring during Grover Cleveland's time in office and others. Massive dislocation, massive convulsions, people feeling as if the world they knew was

It's not only changing, but may never be there again. And they are uncertain about things. One thing I'll say about Grover Cleveland, when he was nominated in 1884, the second day speech in Chicago said the people love him, quote, because of his iron will, but they love him most for the enemies he has made. And I was in a completely different context. That was about Tammany Hall and Grover Cleveland's New York political life.

But you could say that about Donald Trump, and you could say that about Donald Trump from 2015 onward. The enemies he has made, and the American people keep looking at the people that are enemies of Trump and say, you know what, there's something about that that makes me side with him despite all of the misgivings you, Sarah, have given voice to. And that's just a fact.

I need it done.

after COVID and after we came out of the pandemic, tended to suffer because there is economic dislocation and people are unhappy. But one of the disturbing things for the Democratic Party and something that we as a party have to face up to is that we have absolutely lost our credibility with people who

who are at the lower end of the economic scale. And that is since the New Deal, right? What our party's identity has been. So right now we're a party that thinks that we are representing them and thinks we're talking to them, but we actually are not doing a very effective job. And I want to go to the role inflation played, okay? Because we haven't touched on it a little, but if you were to say to me, why'd you lose? The easiest answer out there is inflation and prices, right?

And the cost of rent. And, you know, Jason touched on this a little bit. It's absolutely true. You know, people in this country remember 2019. Okay. And they remember it was a time when grocery prices were a lot lower, when they felt like they could go buy a house because interest rates were low. You know, we heard this over and over again from voters, 2019. It was, you know, and Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, losing the economy to,

to Donald Trump, they still thought Trump was better on the economy, even as Joe Biden was elected. But it was a huge issue. And inflation is something that I think you can't message your way out of. And so if you were to say to me, what is the Democratic Party's biggest problem right now, is that the people we think we're representing, don't think we are representing them when it comes to the core issue for them, which is the economy, and how am I going to make it?

And I used to pay this much and now I'm paying that much and I can't afford it. And Van talked about this, but I think it is such a real thing for the Democratic Party that as we, you know, over the last 10 years or so, really the last four election cycles –

The acceleration of this has just become serious. Very quick, Ben. I don't want to go quick. I want to go as long as Kellyanne. I got a lot to say. So look, I think that you're talking about something that's important for this party. Both these parties are hypocritical.

You have the Republican Party that's the party of Lincoln. It's a party of, in its own mind, it's a radical anti-slavery party. It's a party of individual rights and individual dignity. And they have a bunch of white nationalists running around in there. That's a problem. Our party is supposed to be the party of FDR and working folks. But if you don't eat kale and go to yoga classes, you can't go to most of these meetings.

And so that's a problem. So you have two parties that have fundamental hypocrisies built into them. We thought that their hypocrisy was going to blow them up. We thought that playing 50 with all these crazy people was going to blow them up. But it's our hypocrisy that blew us up. And so rather than sitting up here and trying to defend everything, I think there's an opportunity because most people listening to this, the New York Times is going to be our people. So look, there's a bunch of stuff we did wrong. You touched one of them.

People are hurting economically, and we kept trying to tell them that, you know, we're building cathedrals for them in 20 years with this Inflation Reduction Act. It didn't work. We also ran people out of our party on crypto. 50 million people bought some crypto.

That's a bet on a future. They are trying to get to a better future. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, beating the hell out of crypto, beating the hell out of Silicon Valley people was not smart. Not inviting Elon Musk to the White House when you're doing an EV day because he doesn't have union workers was not smart. You're pushing people out of the party. That's a mistake. People are concerned about the health of their children.

We used to own that. Michelle Obama owned that. We gave that up. RFK starts talking about it. He's a nut. There's a lot of people after COVID, a lot of our folks, suburban housewives and other folks who are very concerned. We could have talked about the issue. We didn't. We're pushing people out of this party. And the last thing I'll say is I hate all these people, the anti-woke, the anti-this, the anti-that, but you got to look in the mirror at a certain point. We've had five movements in a row in our party.

They rely on dehumanizing binaries where you're putting down some people to lift somebody else up. I love all our movements, but there's a moral flaw when every movement's got to put somebody down. Black Lives Matter. All white people are racist.

That is not gonna work. No, hold on a second. Hold on a second. That is in fact a part of the ideology that subconsciously there's unconscious bias and the way that lands though for people is you're calling them names. There's got to be a better way to say it. You walk through all of our movements. You look at Bernie. I love Bernie. All billionaires are evil. Everybody 99% is a victim. Oh,

Oprah Winfrey's a billionaire. She's not evil. You look at the climate movement. All traditional energy is evil, including poor, sick coal miners. Environmentalists can throw ketchup on the Mona Lisa and they're heroes. That doesn't work. Look at me, too. Look at now, if you're Jewish. If you're Jewish, you're a colonizer. If you're for the Palestinians, you can do whatever you want to. These things are landing very poorly because it's not Dr. King.

It's not Nelson Mandela. It's not Ella Jo Baker. It's not Van Luhamer. Progressives are at our best when we're saying we want dignity for everybody. We want to free the jailed and the jailers. We want to free the people who have been oppressors and the people who have been oppressed. We want to free everybody. When you stand for everyone's dignity, everybody's humanity, the whole world stands with you. When you do these dehumanizing binaries, even though we're well-intentioned, it lands poorly. So there's a lot of stuff for us to look at. I think we can take these same movements,

Love everybody bring everybody to the table tell white guys. We need them tell white guys We're mad at them because we need them. We're mad at them because we love them. We want them on our side There's a different way to talk about this stuff. We've got to take these sub movements seriously. We've got it Look you guys gonna beat me up and I don't care. I'm telling you right now. There's a progressive movement That's available that if we take people's economic pain seriously, like you said take women's fear seriously like you said but also

Draw this circle a little bit bigger then when the thing comes back to us now, can we win? We can govern and get something done I want to key off something you just said about Elon Musk and the lack of an invitation to him and turn to somebody who knows him well What is your sense of how much influence Elon Musk actually has over Donald Trump right now? And how long do you expect this love fest is going to last Kevin McCarthy? Um, how long does it last?

I think it lasts quite a bit. One thing I know about the two of them, they got together in the first... Elon will not equate himself to be a Republican or Democrat. There's something that drives Elon. It's the First Amendment. And you're right. You pushed him out. The Democrats pushed him out, offended him. He's the biggest maker of EVs, and you pushed him out. Elon didn't set up to think that, I'm going to support Donald Trump. He thought he would lose the country...

if these policies with the Democrats stayed in. And he had to leave California. He watched what happened to him in California. And he says, I have no other place to go. They'll make every state that way. So he called it upon himself to engage to try to save the country. He endorsed him when he watched the assassination attack because of the reaction that he gave. It wasn't in his mindset to go then. I think it'll last a while, but there's going to only be one president. So it...

People get tired of one another, and I think it could be wearing. But I think Elon has done better in the process now, in my conversations with him. All these decisions are not decisions that Elon would make, but I think he feels very fair about giving advice. I think Trump is really good about embracing because there's a lot of things. What's unique about Trump, Trump is probably our last presidential, our television president.

I mean, if you think about it, we've known Donald Trump from TV long before he ever ran. That's what helped him. But he's also the president that moved us to the digital. There's a lot of things that are happening from space, from everything else.

The president doesn't know about it, but he trusts certain people. And I think that will be an education that would move on. Talk a bit about, just staying with you for a second, Mike Johnson is entering this new Congress with a razor-thin majority. There is almost no room for error. Two things I want you to talk about. One is how exactly is this going to work and how much more important does it make the Senate and specifically John Thune? And also, why does Donald Trump...

run ahead of the Republican brand the way he has consistently? And can any other Republican presidential nominee put together the coalition that Trump did? Okay, to be fair, Van Jones, Republicans have problems too. We didn't win. Donald Trump won. Hence the question. And I would say before this election, whoever lost the election was the first party to correct themselves. I disagree with the election about Hillary Clinton. People were voting against Hillary Clinton in that election. Um,

And both parties have problems. Why you think the Bernie Sanders and the Trump rise up, they haven't solved the problems for all this time. You're 100% with both parties. So people are free to go to either way and who's going to capture them. Republicans used to win when we had low turnouts. We now win when we have big turnouts because what did President Trump do for us?

He brought his people, lower educated. He brought his mass people. If you look at Hispanic population, we do best in those areas. So what's going to happen in Congress itself was the question. I think the power is going to rest with Thune because how the next goes is how you finish this year. You are doing the president a disadvantage that he's going to have to worry about last year's funding.

When you think about the debt ceiling, I made the debt ceiling now. Why? So you could take care of it before the next president.

I advise this to Johnson. What I would do is I would finish all the funding and I would do the debt ceiling before the next president takes in. He never got a honeymoon last time because he started attacking him. He's better prepared in transition. Why are you making him deal with last year funding when he wasn't even around? The top lines are already set. The appropriators know how to do it.

Johnson's worried about a speaker's vote that will never happen to him what happened to me because President Trump is there, you got adult supervision. Nobody else can win either. So you can't get to that point. But you're doing the president a disservice if he has to go deal with all last year's funding. The Senate is going to become the power. Thune is also central casting. He's the person that's going to confirm him. I think he's going to find that he's going to work well with President Trump.

You've got reconciliation, so the biggest fear you have of tax, that's going to get taken care of. But you want to bring salt back, you're going to have to pay for that. How are you going to make the system work again? Again, if you end this year without funding the funding, the next year doesn't start so well. Jason and Kellyanne, I want you both to address something. We've talked a little bit about what President-elect Trump has said about retribution. Jason, I know you said he said retribution.

You know, his only retribution or revenge will be a successful presidency, but he's also actually just said revenge. And he has announced that he is going to make the FBI director if he can get him confirmed, and it would require either forcing Chris Wray, his other appointee for the FBI, to resign or firing him.

He is going to name Kash Patel, who told Steve Bannon last year that it was imperative to, quote, go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Do you, to both of you, expect that that is something that Donald Trump will follow through with? Jason or Kellyanne? Jason, dive in. I think, well, first of all, I think Kash stepping in is going to

bring reform to the FBI, that's much needed. And I think too many Americans have lost confidence in the FBI, in the DOJ, American justice system, about where it stands. They feel that justice is being applied unequally. With President Trump, I think the only people who need to be worrying are people who leak classified information.

People who have sought to undermine our justice system. People who have violated very serious laws themselves. Now, I know that many folks here in the media, and obviously we're doing this with the New York Times, take this very seriously. President Trump being a strong supporter of the First Amendment is always going to protect that. And I'm not concerned about that at all with this next Trump term.

But I do think that there has to be a reckoning with the way that we've seen the leaks and the classified information, all the nonsense that's gone on behind the scenes. That has to be fixed because Americans need to have confidence in this legal system and with the justice system. It would be so bad if people were keeping classified information like in a bathroom.

That wouldn't be good, right? I feel like it's 2022. Kellyanne Conway, same question to you about Kash Patel. Do you anticipate that he will follow through with what he had said he would do last year, or do you see it as Jason sees it, which is that this is just going to be—

Going back to household names, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, people don't have confidence in the seventh floor of the Justice Department. They saw how politicized our FBI became. That is nothing against the 30,000, 35,000 rank and file men and women who work at the FBI and show up every day doing their jobs.

I think that our relationship with law enforcement has taken a beating over the last however many years. Saying defund the police, three of the dumber words coming out of the Democratic Party, it makes people nervous to see that our military, our border patrol, our FBI, certainly our local law enforcement feel threatened.

They feel under-resourced and under-respected in doing their jobs. And that is a big part of the Trump mandate and the Trump coalition. I want to say something else about the media. I keep open as a window on my laptop, Jeff Bezos' Washington Post op-ed. I think that beyond we're not going to endorse in the presidential race and people had to hissy fit and quit and cancel their subscriptions because they have this expectation that the media are emotional about Donald Trump.

major that they will, everybody will be Jim Rutenberg, one of your colleagues at the New York Times who in August of 2016 wrote a piece basically saying, Maggie, listen, I'm supposed to be objective and fair and unbiased, but the prospect that we can even have Donald Trump as president

means I have to stop this. I feel this time... I'm sorry, you're saying Jim Rutenberg wrote a piece saying that? Yes, in August of 2016. In other words... That doesn't sound like Jim Rutenberg, I know, and I can't say... I'd have to go back and look at what you're saying, but Jim Rutenberg's an excellent colleague and an excellent reporter. No, no, he is. I'm not criticizing him. I'm saying that this time, I think everybody, a lot of people in the media...

took that mantle. And they said to themselves, I have to stop Trump. It's my moral obligation to stop this person and call him names and so forth. Even as, you know, Jonathan knows, I think he's written three books with Trump in the title. Like there's this love-hate relationship. There's this symbiosis of a relationship. But I think what Jeff Bezos says is important for all of us to digest where he says, look, he says, we in the media,

He was talking about the Washington Post. He said, we in the media have a low approval rating. We don't have this wanted position we once did. We need to win back the trust. I think many of our institutions do, including the FBI. And if anybody who is covering Kash Patel or any other nominee

and did not do it with the same enthusiasm and accuracy when Alejandro Mayorkas told this country, told Congress under oath in 2021, three and a half years ago. The border is closed. The border is secure. And since then, 10 million people have come here, government statistic. And since then, people open up their phones, turn on the TV, and they see people here in New York City getting debit cards, cash, cell phones, clothing, hotel rooms, your kid's seat in a New York City classroom. And they say that's not fair.

fair. And they don't think of themselves as xenophobes and racists. They just say, this isn't fair. When did this happen? And so I feel that every president has grace and latitude to put the nominees up that they want to serve them well. I think President Trump is choosing people he think will do an excellent job in those individual posts. And one more thing, Maggie, he's chosen people who he knows are communicators.

He wants his democratization of information back for America. Here's a man who, whether you liked it or not, by 6.02 every morning, you knew what he thought about for the day because he had tweeted it. People miss that transparency from their commander in chief from a White House telling us behind the scenes, Joe Biden's actually a triathlete trapeze artist. We just can't see it. They want somebody to have democratization of information so that

in this country, in this world, whether you're the stay-at-home mom, the plumber on the job looking at his phone, or a billionaire CEO. You like those tweets a lot more than I do, I'll tell you that. Everybody, well, you know what, good. At least we know what he's thinking. And he's choosing people in the cabinet who are going to do the same. Kellyanne, you mentioned some important policy points, but there was a question that Maggie said about prosecuting the media. And I think specifically with Kash Patel, if Jason and Kellyanne could reaffirm

respond to the promises that Cash has made, not just to prosecute the media, but also to go after specific people who have been part of the Justice Department in the previous administration, including Bill Barr, John Bolton, Mark Esper, Joe Biden, forget HRC, Pat Cipollone, Alyssa Farah Griffin. Yes, to be clear, he has a lengthy target list that he has put out. It's in his book. He published it in the appendix, all the people that he plans to prosecute if he's in charge. So, I mean, can you all speak to that? Are you saying lawfare is a bad idea, Mark?

Margaret? I'm sorry? Are you saying welfare is a bad idea? No, no, no. I'm actually wondering. You guys are previous colleagues. No, you and Jason. No, this is a question to both of you. And this is somebody who, as you say, Donald Trump is only going to nominate people who are going to prosecute his vision for government. Is prosecuting people who held those positions of power in the previous administration, his own administration, the proper way to go? Are you guessing that people have committed crimes? Yes.

And Kash Patel has said that he will prosecute Bill Barr, Mark Esper, Mark Milley, John Bolton, Cassidy Hutchinson, Pat Cipollone, Alyssa Farrah Griffin. You can say that's a bad idea. Is that appropriate? So I think what's going to happen is he'll be asked about all of that in his confirmation hearings. And we should welcome those questions.

He's a big boy. He can answer those questions. I assume he'll have pre-confirmation hearing meetings where he could be asked those questions as well. I am very happy to see – Kellyanne, you think that's a bad idea though. I mean I'm being – here's the thing. I'm being honest with my stuff and you guys aren't. You think that's a bad idea. No, no. I don't think it's a great idea to prosecute people without just cause.

I don't know all the facts. I do know some of the people you're mentioning were very difficult for me to deal in the White House as senior counsel to the president because— But not criminal. No, because they weren't very effective. They were obsequious. They always had their pom-poms out. And it was hard to give them any position of responsibility. He loses, and all of a sudden they found anti-Trump religion. And they write their books, and they go on TV, and they do what they do. But I think everybody here is getting a little nervous about—

Because maybe there's some regret, maybe not here at large, there's some regret of the way Donald Trump's been covered. And by the way, had people who are obsessed with Donald Trump spent an iota, I mean a scintilla of that time, not focused on Trump, Trump, Trump, focused on the Trump voter, the growing Trump coalition, Trump country that we have now, where these, you look at the map, it looks red.

almost everywhere. Had you spent time focused on the Trump vote instead of looking down on them and telling who they should be and whom they should vote for and how they should worship their God and raise their kid and what they should eat? I'm sorry, are we not going to just take a moment to be chilled by what...

Kelly Ann just said. But I said don't prosecute people without just cause. Is that what you just said? Yeah, I did just say it. Because what I saw you say, actually. You're just always off on some tangent. We don't know each other. Insulting Kevin McCarthy, insulting me by name. Let Sarah talk. She's just insulting people by name. Everyone is insulting everybody by name. You guys have been insulting each other since you guys sat down next to each other. So don't say Sarah's doing it. That's just not fair. Margaret.

Yeah. And also, I don't know that it's an insult to say that Kevin McCarthy said that the election was stolen, that that was a lie to the American people, that they now believe. Can we can we keep this focused on Trump? I don't know. You just talk. You brought up stop or.

and everybody else. Sarah, if you want to respond to what Kellyanne said, please. So the reason that I do focus groups all the time is because after Trump was elected the first time, I wanted to understand why. Because I was a Republican, right? I'd been a Republican my entire life. And I wanted to know why voters liked this person that I thought was repellent and who was saying things like, go grab women by their genitalia, was doing all of this crazy stuff, who's now an adjudicated rapist. You know, there's a lot of things. And

I just, um, there's a couple of things that, that were in some of the answers that I think are really important going forward. So one is it's not just that people are being pushed out of the democratic party. There's actually a political realignment going on. And so the democratic party is now populated by a lot more of these college educated voters and there aren't enough of them. The Republican party has built a multi-racial, multi-ethnic working class coalition, uh,

for a variety of reasons, much of which is part of like negative polarization, right? A rejection of something else as opposed to an affirmative like. I don't think that Americans wanted tariffs. I don't think that Americans want a lot of the things that Trump wants, but they are rejecting. And just like in 2020, right, when you say never Trump, you know, always wrong or whatever your thing is, right? We beat Donald Trump in 2020 because people thought he mismanaged COVID. They were tired of him. They were sick of him being in their face all the time. And they wanted the stability.

But then what they got still was a bunch of things that they also didn't want, mainly higher prices and an open border. But I actually also want to go back to something Jason said, because I think it's important for Democrats to understand that the entire world has changed. And Van was saying this, too.

I had written down authenticity and had squared it, and then you brought it up. And I think it's deeply important. When I listened to voters in the focus groups, I knew DeSantis was cooked against Trump when they said he seems like a regular politician. And the thing about Kamala Harris is technically she could be quite good, actually, I think surprisingly good compared to where Republicans had set the bar.

But she did not feel authentic. She felt like a regular politician. Joe Biden feels like a regular politician. Voters don't want that anymore. And people are going to have to adjust to that terrain. When you give a good speech or even a good debate, like, and you win on points, that's not enough anymore. You've got to be able to walk in to all kinds of places, hostile places, and sit down and have a conversation. And if you can't do that, you can't win. I agree with that.

Van, go ahead. Look, I think Kamala's campaign went from brat to flat, and it was obvious. There was a moment when she first got in there, she was loose, and she seemed to be saying, F it, and people could relate to that. And then it seemed it got super professional, super slicked up.

It became kind of talking point bingo, and people didn't stick with her. I think, I mean, what I found, the message that worked for Kamala Harris on the doors in the barbershops was a message she never used. It was Kamala Harris wants to lift you up. Donald Trump wants to lock you up.

We never prosecuted Donald Trump on all the stuff he wanted to do on stop and frisk. We gave him a free pass. Donald Trump said he wanted to bring back stop and frisk, a lot of stuff that scared the crap out of young black men. We told him. But the other thing that we were able to do with Kamala on the doors was Donald Trump's a little baby billionaire. He's a little billionaire. You want to be rich? You're a young black man. You want to be an owner? You want to be an entrepreneur? You want to be a provider? Why are you following this little baby billionaire? Kamala Harris represents real billionaires.

She represents California. She represents the biggest, hold on a second, the biggest bunch of billionaires in the world vote for her and donate to her. And so then you begin to link into the aspirations of these young men who don't like what Donald Trump says, but they like what he's been able to do with his life. And so there was a huge disconnect there.

from what the campaign thought was going to work and what was actually resonating with young men. I'm going to tell you, young men of color are up for grabs. They don't like Republicans. They don't like Democrats. And they don't like their circumstances. Kevin McCarthy. One thing I will say, at times we overthink this. If I just look at a city council race or any race, I start on election day and work backwards. What is in the voters' mind on election day? Kamala Harris didn't flip one county.

Not one county. She did worse on the gender vote than Joe Biden did. And I would say this one question to any race. What's in the voters mind on Election Day? She had more than a billion dollars. And I'm being frank. I could not tell you the three things she was going to accomplish if she got elected. The only thing that comes to mind is she was going to give first time homebuyers twenty five thousand dollars. So that's a putiation on the campaign itself.

What was the campaign about? We could say all these other things, but to a voter out there, what are you going to do? Hang on one sec. I want to switch for a second to ask Anita a question here in terms of just talking about what's on voters' minds and the point Jason made about immigration.

We're in a sanctuary city. We're in a city where the mayor, who has also been indicted, has been praising President-elect Trump a lot. He also angered the Biden administration by being very critical about the border policies. Did he have a point given where things were and where the electorate has shown it was? I mean, do you think that the Biden White House...

was slow to react to what was clearly a crisis in the minds of voters or anything should have been dealt with differently in the first two years? That's a huge question. It is. I think that immigration was an issue that was seen as something to be managed as opposed to really addressed. And don't forget, every administration, and this one will be no different, comes in in reaction to what has gone before.

And what the 2020 campaign and what the Biden administration was reacting to were the policies of President Trump and his first administration, family separation, children being locked in cages, things like that, that were very powerful images for the American people.

And, you know, obviously came into office COVID. We had Title 42. So we had a shut border at that time. We had unaccompanied minors, which was our first immigration problem, solved it. But there's no question that the administration should have moved more quickly once Title 42 was no longer in effect to get control of what was happening there. And there's no question, quite frankly, that had we done that earlier,

New York, Chicago, cities where you saw a dramatic drop off in democratic vote probably would have looked a little different. So... This is another reason why you lost Elon Musk, was what was happening on the border. This is another reason why you have two counties in Texas who have never in the history of America voted for a Republican vote. It's another reason why we're winning Hispanic vote. Well, yeah, you know, look, one of the central arguments against Trump was he's chaos. He's going to bring chaos back.

And if you look at Joe Biden's approval rating, it actually went down well into his first year. It was with the withdrawal from Afghanistan and those images, which were more chaotic than any images, frankly, that we saw during the four years of the Trump presidency. So you combine that with the images coming from the border, which were, again, not only, you know, so many people coming, it's just the whole chaos around it.

And Kamala Harris had an answer on the border, which was the immigration bill, which was an immigration bill that wasn't brought up until almost three years into the Biden presidency. And she also said – and we put an – we had an immigration bill on the first day of

of our presidency. Well, that bill, which they never really pushed for, it wasn't going to go anywhere, was not a border security bill. It was the opposite. It was rolling back everything that Trump had done. So she really didn't have an answer on that or, frankly, on Afghanistan. Anita, did you have something you wanted to say? Well, I think the one thing I would say is that the answer for Kamala Harris was we do need to be tougher.

And I think that that was an obvious one. Everyone would have accepted it. Yes, we need to be tougher. Yes. And we should have done it. And we should have been tougher. But was she the immigration czar? I mean, did she argue? I really wasn't that, but we all watched at the State of the Union for him to say it. Look, the minute those governors, those red state governors started putting buses full of folks in front of Commerce House and every place else, we were in deep trouble.

And if I had, you know, to retcon, as you said, call those governors of the White House. Sit down and let's figure this thing out. There was an opportunity to be bipartisan Joe on the issue. And he didn't do it. And we paid a price. Look, I think the freedom that we have now is not the freedom we wanted, right?

But Democrats, I do think, because most of our people listening to this are Democrats who are miserable, who are depressed, who cut off the news, who are talking to three therapists a day. Guys, guess what? For the first time in a long time, we don't have to run institutions that most people hate or protect them.

There is an opportunity now. These guys own it all. Donald Trump is the most powerful person in human history. He has the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House, the popular vote, a massive movement behind him, a massive media system that's tailor-made for him. He owns it all.

And thank goodness, because people are going to figure out if his ideas are good or bad. Now, for the first time, we don't have to run these things. Let our rebels have a chance. Let people who've got new ideas have a chance. Let people who are coming out of these neighborhoods have a chance.

And let's let love have a chance. We can lift up poor black and brown folks without putting anybody down. We can lift up women without putting anybody down. We can stick up for the earth without putting anybody down. There is a condescension. There is a I'm right and you're wrong. There's a I'm better than you that we can just let go of because there's going to be enough pain and suffering out there and people looking for real answers that if we let some of these new ideas come forward, new people come forward, we're going to be able to lift up poor black and brown folks without putting anybody down.

I think we can actually inherit in two years a real movement, and that's what's needed. Alexis, hang on one second, Alexis Mikkel-Johnson. Van, I love you. I love you dearly. I have known you for years, and...

I don't disagree that there should be love and hope and freedom to let the other folks fail, right, in some ways. But that pain and that suffering and that harm is real. Those are the people who come through our doors every single day, the undocumented folks, the women, the low-income folks who don't have any other place to get their care, right? And they may come for birth control, but they are leaving and they are worried that they are going to be locked

up, that their kids are going to be grabbed from school, that they're going to be grabbed from the front job. Like the fear and the terror. And I think the challenge that I have is the idea that somehow the movement made this binary, right? It is the fight for humanity, right? The dehumanization was already, it already existed. It already was happening and it was being codified into policies just as it has with Dobbs.

And so, you know, I see this as a, you know, a rollback on, you know, 50, you know, to 100 years of progress that we have been making among communities of color, among gender, among, you know, people who just want to live their lives. And I think we are overstating the multiracial coalition that Trump brought in, right? Right.

I really do because I think there are enough people who stayed home who weren't inspired to come out because the Democrats didn't offer something. But they were still very consistent in their numbers, just a little bit of reach, which we would expect. But it's not some overwhelming, you know, majority. And I think, you know, when you start to take away rights from folks, right? Yeah.

You're not saying that they're equal, right? You're saying that they're not your peers because you don't take away rights from people that are your peers. And you're allowing the dehumanization to flourish. And the reason we're all in therapy and worried is because of the pain and the harm. So we cannot just let a tyrant kind of be in an institution like the presidency without that, you know, that fear and reckoning of what we need to be doing. Let me ask Sarah Longwell a related question. What happens to the future of the Never Trump movement?

from here? I mean, I don't think never Trump is a relevant thing to talk about anymore. Like never Trump Republicans were something from 2016. We were all Republicans. We were never going to vote for Donald Trump because he didn't represent our values. And then we set out to beat him. And then we beat him in 20. We beat him and all the little Trump wannabes like him in 22 because we were able to move a bunch of McCain Romney voters to

uh, into the democratic party. They were unwilling to vote for not just Donald Trump, but Carrie Lake this time, you know, Mark Robinson, like you've got a bunch of insane people that the Republican party has brought in because of Donald Trump. However, like I said, there aren't enough of those voters, right? The vast majority, like there are just more sort of non-college working class voters and Donald Trump, uh,

though much less non-Donald Trump Republicans, but Donald Trump himself can pull those people out in a general election. If I were Republicans, I would be deeply worried about a non-Trump future because Donald Trump uniquely, because he was on TV, I'll never forget when I was trying to understand why Donald Trump appealed to voters in the first place,

How many people had watched The Apprentice? Now, I never watched The Apprentice. That wasn't it. But they all had. And so this idea of Donald Trump as a television carefully curated businessman is just an idea that is locked in the public consciousness that gives him a superpower that other people don't have. They also forgive him.

many of his trashiest, most despicable qualities because he's on TV, because he was on page six. It's like a celebrity thing that they forgive, so they don't treat him. That's the reason there's a big asymmetry in how voters hold politicians accountable versus Donald Trump. And so for never-Trumpers...

I think right now, like there's no more unless I mean, I don't know. I don't think that Donald Trump, because he in those tweets that he puts out, he said he would suspend the Constitution. He's obviously already flirting with the idea that he could run again in 2028. He's too old, I think, to actually do that. But.

I don't think there's another time to sort of resist Donald Trump. I think for a lot of us now, we became very focused on democracy, right? We became very focused on how do you preserve the things that are the best about America that Donald Trump wants to tear down? You know, it's funny when I listen to these guys say, oh, well, they don't have faith in the FBI. It's like, oh, well, maybe you guys called them the deep state for a really long time or they don't have any faith in the media. Well, maybe you guys have been calling them the enemy of the people. And I'm not saying some of that didn't exist before.

and Donald Trump was able to tap into it, but he has exacerbated, he has torn down people's faith. The trap that we now fall into, though, is because of that, and I don't want to take away from any of it, the pain that was just spoken to, we should have started with, honestly. But the only blessing in this massive curse is,

is that we can now dream beyond just defense. I would like an answer, actually, though, to what the movement ends up looking like. Yeah, and so I think now we have to be in a position when Kellyanne says things like, I don't know, maybe he's going to prosecute... I didn't say that, Sarah. Stop. That's... It's not what I said. What is... And you just want to sound like to get more sugar daddy money for your focus groups. Okay, stop. They don't have money in the resistance. Stop, stop, stop. I'm going to cut this off. I'm going to cut this off for now. Jason Miller, does...

President-elect Trump still have faith in Pete Hegseth as his secretary of defense? Yes. And Pete's going to have to go through the process, meeting with the senators individually, and then going in for his confirmation hearing. As we know, we've seen one presidency already. We have a second one. Then only one person is going to make these decisions.

And that's President Trump. But I would say when you look at where he is now in 2024 versus 2016, this is an entire different level of organization and preparedness for a new administration. I would make the case that we've never seen an administration ever come into day one with

ready to go like President Trump is. Quite frankly, because he's done it before. So when you talk about the personnel having named people for each cabinet spot by Thanksgiving, that's way ahead of the pace from where it was in 2016. He has a chief of staff that's in place. They have executive orders. They're ready to go on day one.

President Trump is ready to hit the ground running. But also, I make a critical point. Also got a playbook, a Project 2025 playbook, 900 pages. I'd also make the important point. He's already the president, effectively. You have foreign leaders coming to visit him. He's issuing threats to terrorists. Don't we still have one president at one time or is this? I'm saying in the eyes of world leaders. They're already looking past Joe Biden because the Democrats have put him out to pasture. But

People are now recognizing that America has to be respected again. And that's why they're coming to Mar-a-Lago. That's why they're calling him. So President Trump's going to bring in this whole new era of reform when he goes to Washington in January. And I think that's going to be good for the country as the economy goes up and we secure the border. Two follow-ups. He's also had two nominees, and depending on what happens with Hegseth, and they're not nominees yet, but announced nominees, right?

I think when you look at the body of the cabinet that he's named so far, these are some very solid folks.

And Scott Besson going into Treasury, Lutnick at Commerce. I have a lot of confidence what these people are going to be able to do. These are some very stellar people. Matt Gaetz lasted eight days. Kevin McCarthy, do you have thoughts on that? I'm surprised he lasted eight days.

No, Gates wasn't vetted. Gates needed to get out of Congress and Trump gave him an advantage because he had to resign before the report came out. So I don't equate that. No one thought he would ever get in. But I would exactly say what Jason said. He is better prepared. And the one thing you have to remember too is Trump has 10,000 hours. He knows what to do with a job. He knows he only has four years and he doesn't want to waste one moment. The only thing I would take from all this discussion, and Van, tell me if I'm right or wrong. When Republicans lose jobs,

We never say we have to have therapy. You just say you didn't lost. You just say you didn't lose. I never knew who she was until today, and I don't know if I'd ever listen. But what's interesting to me is I don't think that's the right advice for the Democrats. And I know what you said, let them own everything. The only thing I would say is the election's over.

The one thing I will tell you, America has some very big problems. One thing I tried to do as speaker, the Select Committee on China, reconstitute the others, but I tried to bring everybody together. On our big issues, we can't do it by one party. Our debt...

We've got to reform our education system. When you also look at defense, whoever captures AI and quantum is going to have an advantage, but whoever has energy is going to have those. We cannot say one party you have it all because our whole government is designed that you have to have compromise. There's power in the minority. So what I would say, engage in the process. They may have power right now, but you can engage.

The minority has power. Van Jones, get the van, have the final word. Look, I agree with you and I'll work with anybody to help the people at the bottom. You've proven that before too. I've proven it. I'll work with anybody. The least of these, the addicted, the afflicted, the convicted and the evicted, the people that Jesus called, the least of this, I'll work with anybody. But the future of this party is going to be people whose names we don't know yet.

It's going to be people like John Fetterman. It's going to be people like Ro Khanna who are thinking outside of the box. This party has a future. Last time we got trapped and we have to oppose everything all the time. Every tweet is the end of the republic. This time I think you're going to see a much more judicious Democratic Party. And we have the opportunity to come up with brand new ideas that while you guys are trying to run everything, we can actually start building a real movement. And that's the opportunity we've got.

With that, thank you all for being here today and mostly holding your fire and see you next time. Dealbook Summit is a production of the New York Times. This episode was produced by Evan Roberts and edited by Sarah Kessler. Mixing by Kelly Piclo. Original music by Daniel Powell.

The rest of the Dealbook events team includes Julie Zahn, Hillary Kuhn, Angela Austin, Haley Hess, Dana Prakowski, Matt Kaiser, and Yanwei Liu. Special thanks to Sam Dolnik, Nita Lassam, Ravi Mattu, Beth Weinstein, Kate Carrington, and Melissa Tripoli. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.