Thank you very much. Wow.

From the Free Press. This is honestly and I'm Bari Weiss.

Frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There's ever been anything like this in this country and maybe beyond.

It would be an understatement to say that the Republicans had a good night on Tuesday.

This will truly be the golden age of America. That's what we have to know.

Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Again, he celebrated the election results at 2:30 in the morning in West Palm beach with 267 electoral votes, just shy of the magic 270. A few hours later, he was declared the winner.

I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president.

It was a historic political comeback for a candidate rejected by the people just four years ago. This time, Trump took almost every coveted swing state. Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. And as we record this conversation he leads in Nevada and Arizona, the entire blue wall turned red. And unlike in 2016, this wasn't just an Electoral College victory. Surprising pollsters and at least in the early hours of the evening, betting markets alike. Trump also won the popular vote. It is extraordinarily rare in our history for a president to come back after losing a reelection bid so badly. Trump's rebound is bigger than Richard Nixon's and as Neil Ferguson writes today in the Free Press, bigger even than Napoleon in 1815. And yet it happened on Tuesday night with the most flawed candidate American politics has ever seen. Here's how my colleague Eli Lake put it in his piece. Donald Trump ended his first term in disgrace, hit with a second impeachment after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The 2022 midterm candidates he endorsed, Herschel Walker, Met Oz and Kerry Lake, all went down in flames. In 2023, he was declared guilty of sexually assaulting the writer E.

Jean Carroll. In a civil case this past May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts for improperly reporting hush money payments. Overall, Trump faced 116 indictments. Even now, the New York State attorney General is trying to punish the Trump organization with nearly $500 million in fines, claiming that he unlawfully inflated the value of his properties. And yet here he is, America's 47th president. How did he do it? If you were only watching cable news, you would be shocked by this outcome. But I deign to say, if you were reading the Free Press, you wouldn't have been shocked. Yes, Kamala Harris had the support of Beyonce, Oprah, Taylor Swift, and almost every other a lister with a pulse. She outraged Trump by almost $600 million. She was endorsed by industry leaders in science and economics and most of Silicon Valley. But it's been clear to anyone paying attention that the Democrats simply were not speaking to the concerns of the American people. Free Press reporter Peter Savodnik said it best. The Democrats didn't lose because they didn't spend enough money. They didn't lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers.

They lost because they were consumed by their own self flattery, their own sense of self importance. They should have spent the past eight years learning from the Republicans honest, if flawed conversation about the plight of America. But they insisted on talking to themselves about the things that made them feel morally superior. In other words, they talked more about gender fluidity and defunding the police than they did about inflation, immigration and the forever wars. But I'm not sure the party, or the legacy media for that matter, has yet absorbed this lesson. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I watched as CNN and MSNBC tried to explain away Trump's appeal and the profound failings of the left with accusations not that Kamala Harris failed, but that the American people are the ones to blame.

Which, by the way, for women candidates, the economy and national security are always two very hard issues where you have to, you know, shore up your credentials. And I guess pointing back to 2016, sexism, I'm gonna say also racism and bias had to have played a role.

And I think it's important to say.

That, you know, anyone who has experienced.

Or been in the United States for.

Any period of time and experienced this country's history and knows it cannot have.

Believed that it would be easy to.

Elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color. Let's just be clear. And nothing that was true yesterday about.

How flawlessly this campaign was run is not true now.

I mean, this really was an historic, flawlessly run campaign.

She had.

Queen Latifah never endorses anyone she came out and endorsed. Those explanations simply are out of touch with reality. As the exit polls came in, Trump showed strength not just among white men, but with black and Latino voters. CNN exit polls showed that he won about 13% of Black voters, up from 8% in 2020, and 45% of Latino voters, up from 32% in the last election. He won among voters who make less than $100,000. And compared to 2020, Trump improved in cities, in rural areas, in suburbs, everywhere. As CNN'S John Berman put it. It's kind of an everywhere improvement and it's indicative of a massive countrywide political realignment.

It is a realignment.

It's a race realignment.

It's an education realignment. It's an income realignment. It's even an age realignment as well, with Donald Trump doing historically well, at least over the last 20 years among voters under the age of 30.

To top it off, Republicans took control of the Senate last night. Simply put, it was a Republican landslide. By the time you hear this, I know that millions of Americans are cheering and millions of other Americans are heartbroken. We at the Free Press understand both reactions. We have both of those voters here in House, and we're here to talk about it, how it really happened and about what comes next. Here with me Today, after about 20 minutes of sleep, collectively is Free Press contributor and Newsweek opinion editor Bhatia Unger, Sargon, pundit and political powerhouse Brianna Wu, and Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik. Today I ask how Trump's comeback happened despite an impeachment, two of them, despite being found guilty of sexual assault in 116 indictments. We talk about how Trump found success with black and Latino voters, what the next four years will look like with Trump returning to the White House, and if this will be at long last a wake up call for Democrats. We'll be right back. Stay with us. Today's episode was made possible by Ground News. America's trust in the media has been on a long and steady decline, especially over the last few years.

If you listen to this show, you know that's something that we care about and talk about a lot. Mainstream media often have their own agenda which leads, and we've seen this many times, to biased coverage, public polarization and ideological bubbles that reinforce readers opinions rather than challenging them. That's why Ground News is so important. Their app and website allow us to access the world's news in one place to compare coverage with context behind each source. Take the story of major news outlets like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Opting out of endorsing a presidential candidate, Ground News found more than 300 headlines covering it, and there was backlash from both sides. They analyzed stories from Business Insider, Slate, the Center for the National Interest, and many others for their biases and blind spots. Reading the news this way helps you see discrepancies on how certain topics are covered or not covered at all so you can think critically about what you read and make up your own mind. Check it out@groundnews.com honestly to get 50% off the ground News video for unlimited access. Ground News is female, founded and subscriber, funded by subscribing.

You're supporting transparency in media and our work.

In the meantime, the Credit Card Competition.

Act would help small business owners like Raymond.

We asked Raymond why the Credit Card Competition act matters to him. I'm Raymond Huff. I run Russell's convenience in Denver, Colorado. I've ran this business for more than 30 years. But keeping it going is a challenge. One of the biggest reasons I found.

Is the credit card swipe fees we're forced to pay. That's because the credit card companies fix prices.

It goes against the free market that made our economy great. The Credit Card Competition act would ensure we have basic competition. It's one of the few things in.

Washington that both sides agree on.

Please ask your member of Congress to.

Pass the Credit Card Competition Act.

Small businesses and my customers need it now. For more information on how the Credit Card Competition act will help American consumers save money, Visit merchants payments coalition.com and contact your member of Congress today.

Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition.

Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Merchants payments coalition.com.

Well Batya Angur Sargon Peter Savodnik Brianna Wu welcome To honestly, it's 12:30 on Wednesday, November 6th. Most of us were up until 4:30 or 5 in the morning. And we're back now to try and make sense of what just happened. And I guess I want to start by understanding how each of you are feeling because I think each of you genuinely represents a different segment of the American electorate. And I'm curious how each of you are absorbing the reality not just of a second Trump term, but really of a Republican blowout. Brianna, let's start with you.

It's always scariest to go first. I mean, look, obviously I'm terrified, you know, as a trans woman, you know, The Republicans spent $250 million on ads specifically targeting me. They've been taught a lesson that this is a strategy that works. And I have no reason not to believe that they are going to follow through with the things in Project 2025. And you continue this pursuit. It seems to be a winning strategy for them. So. But even beyond what happens to me personally, I'm really about the US Economy and I'm really worried about NATO. I don't want to live in a world where China and Russia are free to do whatever they want. I think last time around, Trump did not have a good relationship with Rex Tillerson as Secretary of state. And it's very clear he wants to reshape the US's relationship with NATO and scale that back. So just on every single front, I'm afraid for my country. But I've also been through this before, and I feel like I'm more prepared for it. This.

Brianna, I want to come back to you. Sure. Obviously, we're very involved in this election, sort of from the Democratic side, but also critical, I think, in an important way, of the Democrats. And want to talk to you in a bit about why you think they lost in the way that they did. But, Batya, how are you feeling? I mean, last night when we began the live stream, you were sort of girding yourself for a Kamala Harris victory, and you said something hilarious to me. I don't know if you remember it. Do you remember it?

I think so.

Okay, what did you say to me?

Well, when it became clear that Trump was gonna win or was winning, I said to you, I created a whole new personality for myself around the idea that Harris was gonna win, and I was gonna have to accept this defeat gracefully. And now that it looks like Trump is gonna win, I have to go back to my old self and remember how to win gracefully. And I am working on that, actually. I think, to me, obviously, I wanted Trump to win. I think he's gon be an amazing president. I think he was a very good president. Although at the time, I don't think I was very good at acknowledging that. But to me, what's really important here, Barry, is that he won a mandate. He won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College. And that was the thing I was praying for the most, was not so much that he would win, but that whoever won would win in a big and indisputable way, so that as a country, we can start to heal and come together again. And the fact that the people who made him win was voters of color and women, you know, it was everybody that we had been told to expect, you know, to go for Harris.

These narratives of who is a Democrat and who is a Republican have been totally shuffled. And I'm just hoping, and I feel hopeful and optimistic that this can be a moment for us as a Americans to come together again and recognize Trump for who he is, or at least the platform and the agenda for what it is, which is something that has broad support with the majority of Americans.

And Batya, just one quick thing. When you hear Brianna talking about her fears, I mean, specifically her fears of trans healthcare, I think would be the fair way to put it, and also of Trump's, the people around Trump. You know, there's been a lot of commentary in the run up to the election that Trump has sort of burned through the A list, the B list, the C list, and now we're left with, like, you know, Mike Lindell. Do either of those things concern you?

I'm very honored and I feel very blessed to be able to have conversations with Brianna about this because it's a perspective that I think is incredibly important. I think that Trump sees the trans issue much in the same way that you do, Briana, that, you know, the view that I encounter most often from certainly Republican voters, normies, is a fear of the same excesses that you are afraid of, the same kind of coercive practices that you are afraid of. So from that point of view, I'm really hoping that we can make Brianna feel safer in this country and more comfortable and more at ease. I sort of see things the other way in terms of the personnel question around Trump. To me, it seems like in his first term, he hired a lot of people who really did not believe in his agenda. They were social conservatives, and he is not a conservative. So he sidelined that whole Project 2025. He humiliated Project 2025 in a really big way throughout the campaign. And they were also free marketeers and people who believed in foreign interventions, which are things he really doesn't support. So to me, it's sort of like the A list is on the ascendancy and he got rid of sort of the old GOP that I think was much more socially conservative.

And I. So I think that from that point of view, again, I'm hoping that soon or throughout the term, we will be able to show people, will be able to show people in the administration, people who defend the administration will be able to do so in good faith in a way that is compelling.

Peter to vodka. How are you feeling? You took a red eye, you went all night. You brought your 9 year old who was the star of the show last night. She had some hilarious commentary throughout the night. I think she actually had some bets that she won. I think she might be using her $10 to buy a gerbil.

Yeah, she bet my money.

How are you doing this morning?

I mean, I feel good in the sense that there was a clear outcome. I think, like most people, I was most concerned about the possibility of this being hotly, highly disputed, that this is going to be protracted and that we wouldn't know. And I think there was this kind of consensus that it was going to be weeks or months, and there was an uncertainty and a wondering, is there going to be a sort of like a. Another January 6th event? I think the likelihood of anything like all that happening now is exceedingly low, because it's not just that Trump won, it's that Republicans won across the board. And the correct move now for Democrats from Kamala Harris to the county commissioner, is to say we lost fair and square and we move forward. And to take a very long, hard look in the mirror and ask how they arrived at this. This sad juncture.

Well, there are two ways, broadly, I think, to look at last night. On the one hand, it's a story of Democratic failure, and on the other, it's a story of how Donald Trump pulled this off. And obviously, these two explanations sort of speak to each other. And I'm sure we could write a counterfactual history in which Trump would have actually lost if only there had been a stronger Democratic candidate. But I want us to sort of take each in turn, starting with a simple sort of autopsy. Why did Kamala Harris, Brianna, lose this election?

Oh, boy. Where do you want me to start? You choose. Okay. Okay. So look, I know we're all tired. I'm just gonna bring the energy up here and just lay it on you, okay? We're all having mimosas, we're out to lunch, and just gonna give it to you straight. The Democratic Party, if you work with it up close, is gross and fake and weird and not real at all. It's just not. You will sit there and you'll work with the top politicians, and you'll find out they are just utterly messaged. There's nothing true behind what they're saying. And we carry that kind of arrogance through. The fundamental nature of a Democratic politician is a people pleaser. You know, that friend you've got that never wants to say anything that's going to piss anyone off, so they just kind of say whatever, and they're sitting there and smiling at you, and it's kind of charming, but you're also kind of like, there's nothing real here that's a Democratic politician. Some of the ones that went on last night with you, Barry, I'm sitting there watching them. I like their work, and they're saying nothing that's real.

So the problem is when you've got a party that doesn't truly stand for anything, the American people pick up on that. They know that it's a fake party. It knows that it can say it's standing for working Class people. But it doesn't feel that that's true culturally. So even though Trump is over here and he's not saying stuff that like he's a jerk, he's just a loud jerk. But you know what you're dealing with and you know it, is this culture in the Democratic Party of coding us for the most elite nonsense possible. I'll give you a very specific example. Land acknowledgments. I cannot tell you how many Democratic events I've been to where it opens up and someone stands up there and they go, we just want to acknowledge here in Massachusetts that this land belonged to this Indian. And you're just sitting there looking around and it's a bunch of white people like me. It's the most, I hope I could say this word, but masturbatory, self indulgent, like moralistic nonsense I've ever seen. So until we retreat away from this window dressing and get back to being something real where people know what we're actually standing for, the Republicans are going to clean our clock.

And just one last thing, the simple truth is the American people don't like Donald Trump. They voted him out in 2020 for a reason. But they are looking at our culture of this woke progressive nonsense, which honestly I played a huge part of shepherding into the party in 2014, and they hate it even more. So until that changes, until the Democrats grow a spine and are willing to say, you know what, we're actually going to piss off the communists. We're actually not going to stand with the Hamas sympathizers. We actually are going to tailor a message for working and not the perpetually upset, green haired, you know, like college student. Until we have the backbone to do that, we're going to continue to lose.

So much of what Brianna just said is captured in a brilliant Peter Savodnik column written in the wee hours of last night, headlined memorably, we blew it, Joe and I want to read just the beginning of that here. The question is how the Ivy League technocrats with oodles of cash and all their allies in legacy media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley managed to bungle this so royally. How did Kamala Harris lose to a crook in his campaign of quote, relentless lying, as CNN recently characterized it? The answer is it wasn't a campaign of relentless lying. Relentless bullshit, yes, as my colleague Eli Lake has noted, relentless hyperbole, absolutely. But lying? That's just not how voters saw it. For the past eight years, Peter writes, the Republican Party has been having an honest conversation about the real things that ail us all, inflation, the hollowing out of rural America, the rise of China, the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, the chaos at our southern border, free speech and the decline of American power. Has the conversation been frenetic and at times weird and wrongheaded? He writes. Yes, but more to the point, it is what we cared about.

It was what the average voter wanted to talk about. And the Democrats. Well, Peter, now I want to hand it to you. What have the Democrats been talking about for these four years?

Yeah, the Democrats have been talking about all the wrong things. I mean, I agree largely with what Brianna said. What's amazing is that the Democratic Party for the most part, is still where all of Trump's Republican primary rivals were back in the fall of 2015. If you see him on stage with all these professional politicians, the Marco Rubios and Christie's and all those people look utterly flabbergasted and kind of bemused and obviously not really taking Trump seriously. They don't get it. Over the course of the next year, they all got it because they had to. And they quickly came around to figuring out that this is where their base was. The Democratic Party is still there. They're still in the fall of 2015, and they haven't figured out that Trump is not tapping into or not simply tapping into deep racist, xenophobic feelings coursing through the American ethos or consciousness. He's talking about things in his own frenetic, crazy, amorphous kind of way that matter a lot to millions of Americans. He's asking kind of the question at the heart of it all, which is, why are we declining and how do we reverse that?

And anyone who spent just a few minutes at the Republican convention in Milwaukee back in July would have known that had Democrats actually bothered to dispatch a secret agent to the convention hall and really spent time listening and talking to delegates, they would have heard the same thing over and over. Which is why is it that we keep declining and no one's doing anything about it, no one's reversing it. And Democrats, they seem to think that, well, if you don't want to talk about gender fluidity or blm, that that makes you somehow a transphobe or racist. No, I think at the heart of it, what Republican voters are saying and what voters across the border saying is we don't actually have a problem with that per se. We want to know why that's more important than, say, what's going on in East Palestine or Flint or all the Countless towns across the country that have seen their economic base disappear over the past 10, 15, 30 years. That's the question that animates the whole kind of America first movement. And I think increasingly voters want answers to. So when the Democratic Party starts responding to this sort of like right wing populism with a really substantive left wing populist program, then they're going to see real success at the polls.

Until then, they have a lot of thinking and work to do.

Batya, as the Trump supporter in this conversation, I want to put the question to you just briefly. I think the consensus among a lot of people that I know is a vote for Trump wasn't a vote for Trump per se so much as it was a vote against all of these things. The double standards, the hypocrisy, the elitism, the out of touchness that people were just absolutely fed up with. Do you buy that or do you view Trump's win today as more affirmative and more a like embrace of Trump as a Persona, Trump as a politician?

I think it's neither. I think it's an embrace of Trump the policymaker. Obviously he did get the support of some educated people, some rich people, and I think those people really wanted to cast a vote against Kamala Harris. But for the average everyday working class American, they're voting on their economic interests, which Trump 100% represents. And so the thing that the Democrats did to lose and the thing that Donald Trump did to win were the same thing because Donald Trump picked up the Democrats long abandoned pro labor policy agenda around the economy. So these are not two distinct things that happened. Right? Trump got the Democrats old base, the multiracial working class, because he picked up the Democrats old agenda. Strong border, let's limit the supply of labor and protect wages, tariffs, trade, war with China. Let's put American workers first, American labor first. Let's reshore manufacturing or you know, have a strong manufacturing base. No more wars. The Republicans cast themselves as the anti war party. And what did Kamala Harris do in order to challenge that? She brought Liz Cheney on board to campaign with her. Right. These are one in the same thing.

The Democrats used to be the party of abortions should be safe, legal and rare. That's now Donald Trump's position, right? He's pro choice for 15 weeks, 12 weeks, he promised that he would veto a national abortion ban. It's back to the states where many, many people, including many, many Democrats think it belongs or at least used to think it belong. So I would say that those are the same what Donald Trump did to beat the Democrats is he literally beat them at their own game, became one, basically. He literally became or never stopped being one. He picked up their agenda, their pro worker agenda that was anti war, anti free trade, pro worker and strong immigrations and socially moderate. And you see that even in he won 44% of union households. I mean, this is, we're talking about just a complete, complete vindication of the realignment narrative.

Batya, can I jump in and just really agree with you? I want to talk structurally about why that happened in the Democratic Party. So I live in Boston, so when I go to Boston events, it's Massachusetts politicians, right? What's here? It's Harvard, it's mit. I cannot tell you how many times I've had a meeting with an elected official in Boston or gone to some event late at night and who's there. There is a pipeline of people that go to Harvard and the Ivy League schools, hyper educated, that read about this stuff, like the working class stuff you're talking about, and they learn about it at Harvard, right? And then they get a straight path to working with high level Democrats and then they work their way up the party. I'm not going to embarrass anyone, but you know who are politicians here in Massachusetts? You can probably guess, right? And we're supposed to be the pro worker people. I cannot tell you how many times I've sat down and had a conversation with these people. And look, I grew up in Mississippi, the poorest state in the country. I myself am a college dropout, right?

Like I dropped out to go do a startup, right? I went to public school and then I went to a public college. I'm the furthest thing on earth from Harvard. And you sit there and you talk to these Democratic operatives and there's just a fun. They talk about working class people like they are a dumb animal to be manipulated. And this is the fundamental problem. It's not just the ideas, Batya, it is the people that the Democratic Party selects which are fundamentally as elite as you could possibly be. They are self selected to not neurocognitively understand this stuff. And I think the thing that has fundamentally changed about the Democratic Party is a generation ago, when you look at the expansion of unions, who was in charge of the Democratic Party was real union guys. The nature of our party is so fundamentally changed. What I worry about more than the next four years, it's not that we're not going to get through this and survive as a country, we will. It's yet again, I know this party well enough to know we are not going to learn any lessons because we didn't learn any in 2016.

Well, that's what I find kind of amazing this morning. To turn on cable is like, I expected Trump to win last night, but I did not expect the kind of Republican blowout or mandate, as Batya put it, that we saw. And I guess I'm still astonished that even the results of last night would not be enough to kind of shatter the narrative that you still hear issuing forth from the mouths of people on MSNBC this morning. Like what? Like if last night is not enough to wake people up, I'm not sure what will be. Let's just stay on Kamala Harris for a minute and then I want to talk more about the Trump campaign and how they achieved what they did. If I had to headline for you the issues that Donald Trump ran on, it's easy. It's inflation, immigration, and what are called the forever wars or foreign policy. Very simple. I guess if I had to choose a Kamala Harris issue, it would be abortion. But that's about it. To me. When I look back on the campaign, it was like a campaign of avoidance. Donald Trump and J.D. vance, love them or hate them, they made themselves massively available to podcasters for long form conversations.

There was kind of no one they didn't talk to. And Kamala Harris, it seemed the strategy up until the end, when the campaign realized this was not gonna be tenable, was kind of to avoid everything and to win by basically being not the other guy. Brianna, talk to us a little bit about that strategy because I'm curious from your sort of more insider position, how you perceived it. There was obviously a shift at a certain point, maybe around when she decided to go on call her daddy. But like, you know, was. Was there any other issue other than abortion that Kamala Harris was running on? And why did they embrace sort of a campaign of. Of avoidance?

Why are you asking questions you know the answer to? Of course there was no other message. There was nothing. All we ever talked us how bad Trump was and how scary it was, and then you would define Kamala Harris by certain economic strategies. It's just a problem across the board with the entire party. And I think we are so used to telling the American people how terrible the Republicans are. The Democratic Party has never developed a message of what we stand for. So, no, you're just dead on there. And again, it's not just the candidates, it's the culture within the party.

It's very hard to make an Argument that the country is going to end if this person wins. When you've lived through four years of the person being president and the country didn't end and the amount of brain power, IQ points, sophistication in the Democratic Party, these are meant to be the geniuses.

Yeah, yeah.

Help me understand it. Like, how could there not have been a better strategy than what they offered?

Well, the thing you've got to understand about the Democratic Party, you need to understand right now is everyone that rose to a senior level right now came from the Obama 2008 campaign. So they're really frozen in that world. So when they're thinking about how to target voters, it really, television is still a really major impact. I'm not going to tell you television will not sway the polls certain ways, but there's an entire like within the Democratic Party, a consultant class that gets rich every single four years by like giving a bunch of charts. They come from McKinsey, they show it to the candidate and then they go buy out mass amounts of ad time on all these television stations and they make their money from giving the exact same recommendations election after election after election. You've got super specialists in the party that will work on field and event. But the problem is the party is structured around these ideas that have worked in the past and that's how people got to where they are. So it's very, very difficult to get the party to agree to shift anything. And let me give you a really specific example.

I come from twitch world in YouTube. I have spent so many hundreds of hours talking to elected Democrats at the highest levels and trying to get them to go more on Twitch this cycle to get the vote out. You had Trump, he had no issue with that. He went on Adin Ross, you know, did Kamala Harris go on Destiny's Show? Of course she didn't. Right. So the problem is there's this Democratic consultant class is so conservative with everything they recommend, which is exactly, exactly why she did not go on Joe Rogan. We are tremendously risk averse and we are tremendously unincentivized to try anything new.

Let's just try counterfactual.

Yes.

If Donald Trump had been running against a stronger candidate, if after Joe Biden dropped out there had been the kind of mini primary that a lot of people were talking about and let's say she was running against Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, even a Dean Phillips, would the result, Peter, have been different?

So it's a little bit like asking if Donald Trump had run against a different Democratic Party, would the results have been different? And the answer is yes. The compressed primary could never have happened because it's simply too uncorporate, disorganized, it's too unpredictable for the kind of, you might even say.

Democratic.

Yeah, Democratic, Exactly. There's no controlling that result, I think. Look, the really important thing to take away from what happened last night, this pertains to everything that Brianna was just talking about. I guess there's a big potential mistake that the Republicans may make here over the next few years, and that is, of course, to go back to something that was said earlier about this mandate, is that there is no mandate, as I see it right now, for any particular Republican agenda. What happened last night was a lot of voters saying to Democratic Party, we hate you. I mean, we hate you in a kind of visceral way. And we hate. It's not just the Democratic Party. And I think I've seen this morning a lot of strategists and consultants talking about pinning the blame on Biden. We're just talking about Twitch. I think if we reduce it to something tactical, we're missing the point. This is about the whole progressive firmament and the whole ecosystem, the institutions, the culture, the anthropology behind all this. It's rotten and it's illiberal, and there's a fundamental disconnect with the American people. And I think what happened last night is millions of voters said, we are done with that.

And it reminds me a lot of. There's a wonderful book that came out 60 years ago by Diggy Bautzel, this University of Pennsylvania sociologist called the Protestant Establishment. And it's basically about the role of the American elite. And Baltal talks about there being an aristocracy versus an establishment. And the establishment is the guiding elite that is connected to the body politic that cares about America, that feels a real affinity and fondness and closeness with it. And the aristocracy is cordoned off and hostile to it. We've been in this moment of a protracted aristocracy, and I think we want to be careful. We don't want to abolish the elite and elite, the idea of an elite altogether. We just hate this elite. We hate the people who are in charge of these institutions.

That's so elegantly put, Peter. And I think the way that we were, the way that I've been thinking about it, and Martin Guri kind of prophesized the whole past 15 years or so for people who haven't read and we'll put it in the show notes, his book the Revolt of the Public it really captures so much of what we saw come into full bloom last night, which is this sort of struggle between, you could call them the elites and the counter elites, right? The New York Times, MSNBC industrial complex, and then the Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Renegade Justice League types. It's not that those people are not also highly educated, pedigreed elites. It's just their dissidents from inside the elite class. And I think that's one crucial way that you can understand what happened last night.

Well, and if the Republicans don't figure out very fast that this is not a wholesale rejection of elitism or an elite, the idea of an elite, this is simply a rejection of the people who are in charge. Right? This elite, if they don't get that clear in their head, we do want guardrails, right? We don't actually want conspiracy theorists and antisemites at national conventions. We don't want people close to the president who are peddling all kinds of crazy ideas about whatever Pizzagate kind of notions. We want a kind of, like, sobriety and even stodginess in our leaders. But we want also to believe that those leaders have a real kind of heartfelt connection with the American people. We want to feel like we're something closer to where we were during World War II, when many, many members of Congress had their own children serving in the wars that they were voting in, the war they were voting to support. That is, there's a heartfelt connection. Right now. We feel like there is this cordoned off, insular right now.

It's like the Hunger Games, and it's like the people from the Capitol versus whatever the other people are called.

That's exactly it.

Just before we get to Trump taking sort of like the big, big picture, if I'm a historian in decades to come, do you think that I would look back and say that the biggest character of this election wasn't actually Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, but Joe Biden? In other words, if Joe Biden stepped away sooner, the Democrats might have had an open primary and run a candidate chosen by voters who actually had a chance of beating Trump. How much of the Democrats lost last night was because of Biden's, or rather the Biden White House's refusal to get him out earlier in the game? Batya, let's start with you.

Well, every time somebody says, this is a vindication of a book, I keep expecting them to say, this is a vindication of a great book called Second how these Betrayed America's working men and women, who wrote.

Sorry, Bacha, who wrote that book, whose.

Author was interviewed on Honestly, this very podcast by the brilliant Bari Weiss, said author gets stopped in the street and told how much that interview on Honestly meant to them. Very frequently, actually. Yeah. I mean, so I would say for.

Listeners at home that are not picking up on the subtlety here, the author of that book is one Batyangar Sargon. But yes, go on.

Indeed, indeed. My book came out about six months ago and was completely vindicated because if you look at exactly who flipped the election for Trump, it's the working class, the multiracial working class. I've been saying that the MAGA movement is a multiracial working class coalition made up of former Democrats, you know, for ages. And amazingly, there are some people on the MAGA movement who don't like hearing that either. But so I feel like, I actually don't think that Joe Biden staying in, leaving when he did, had much of an impact. If you look at who flipped for Trump and what issues they said they flipped for him on, it was immigration and the economy, and it was the working class. Now, the Democrats, we've all agreed here, have abandoned those voters to cater to the very poor and the very rich. And so it really, the question really is, if Joe Biden had not immediately undone Donald Trump's very effective border executive actions on day one in office, would that have made a difference for the Democrats? But that's effectively to say, if the Democrats were no longer the Democrats, would that have made a difference for the Democrats?

And it certainly would. Right. This was the immigration election. This was an election that pitted the fake needs, a fake story that there's going to be an abortion ban that allowed rich women to feel like an oppressed class against the real problems and real needs of downwardly mobile working class men. And so there's very little, I think, the Democrats could have done short of totally revolutionizing who they are to stop this tsunami of support for, look who flipped for Trump. He got the majority of Latino men, unheard of for Republican. He got the majority of young people. I mean, it's like just beyond you look at who flipped for him. These are not people who I think actually Josh Shapiro would appeal to the working class and to young men. He only lost the white working class by two points in Pennsylvania, which is insane for a Democrat. But short of that, it's very hard to imagine how anybody else at the front of the line coming out of the Obama coalition could even understand what I'm saying here, which is so obvious to everybody else. And there's such an irony here, because what Obama achieved was to have all of these millions and millions and millions of Americans say, we're not racist.

We want to cast our vote for a black man. We are thrilled to do that. And having done that, they were like, well, surely now no one can accuse us of being racist. We can go back to voting on our economic interests. So they voted on their economic interests for Donald Trump and immediately were of course called racist, which of course just made more people feel emboldened to give the finger to the people who would dare smear people for voting on what's best for their children.

After the break, how Republicans exploited the trans issue. And was that a bigger issue actually for women than abortion? Stay with us. I don't know about you, but I'm always searching, searching for better hypoallergenic detergents. Okay, that last one might just be me. I search everywhere. Google, Instagram, Twitter, Resi. But when you're hiring for your business, the best way to search is not to search at all. Don't search, match and match with Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform. Ditch the busywork and the endless scrolling and use Indeed for scheduling, screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. And Indeed doesn't just help you hire faster. A recent survey showed that 93% of employers agreed that Indeed delivers the highest quality matches compared to other job sites. Indeed's matching engine constantly learns from your preferences, so the more you use Indeed the better it gets. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@innodd.com honestly. Just go to indeed.com honestly right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com honestly. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you.

Need Indeed. Winter in Dublin. Where else can you get three whole months of unmissable crack culture and events, iconic sites and hidden gems and the.

City coming to life in a whole.

New light daytime buzz and proper nights out and something different around every corner. Your new favorite band and your next favorite band. The pubs, the clubs, the gigs, the music, top class theater, comedy and more. If it's winter in Dublin, where else? Plan your winter break now@visitdublin.com brought to you by Folger Ireland. It looks like Trump is going to sweep every battleground state, right? Which is kind of. I mean, I'm never paying attention to a pollster ever again after last night. I mean, they all told Me, it was gonna be a squeaker. We weren't gonna know for weeks, maybe even months. Like, you know, strap in for the long haul. There was, you know, it was. But it was so overwhelming. The picture. North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, they've already been called for Trump, and he's very likely going to take Arizona and Nevada. The map is almost identical to 2016, but an utter reversal of 2020. What changed between then and now? How did Trump turn around and four years later win the very states he lost in the last election? Any of you, please jump in.

So, Bhatia, I agree somewhat with what you just said, but I think it's a little more than that. I think the issues with Biden really depend on where you kind of pick up this storyline. For whatever you think of Trump. He has set the tone of the Republican Party very consistently since 2015 and 2016. If you're a Republican today, you know who you are and what you're standing for. It is Trumpism, and that kind of, you know, poke in the eye to the elites. You're voting for a party that's going to smash the machinery that is making your life unappealing because the elites aren't running it. Well, I don't agree with that vision, but you know what? You're voting for one of the consequences. And since I don't work for Free Press, I can say this. One of the things the Free Press wrote about better than literally anyone else was this sham that the Democratic Party put on for four years, hiding President Biden from the public, never making him answer questions or do interviews or go out and give messages. We have been leaderless for four years. So it's not so much the moment that we switched the candidate that was.

The problem is that the Democrats have just been like the ship itself, see, just floating wherever the tide takes us for the last four years because we don't have a leader. Biden has not done that. He's done an excellent job on policy from behind the scenes, but that's not what people vote on. Coming back to your question, Barry, why did we all get this so wrong? I don't know if y'all have ever paid for polling or worked with these pollsters, but I swear to God, I beg you, like, hire a pollster and sit down. I have a functional grasp of statistics from programming some graphics drivers one time and looking at your reports for it like it is 101 level stuff. If you sit down and really start asking a pollster, how are you correcting this data? How are you getting this? How are you sampling this? There are not enough people in this class here. How are you correcting your data? How do you measure voter turnout? It's just, for lack of a better word, it's horse duty. They're just completely full of it. We are past the days where we are going to be able to get really accurate data.

You can use polls to pick up signals and say things like the American people are going to respond to anti trans ads. But really coming down and measuring an election, those days are just gone in America.

But this is like the greatest political comeback story in American history to go from where he was in 2020. And then of course, the impeachments, the he's a convicted felon, all of the different lawsuits to now. Like, how did he flip these states? Is the answer simply immigration, inflation and foreign policy? Or is there some deeper vibe shift that occurred over the past four years? Perhaps COVID lockdowns, the media narrative and the explosion of it, the feeling that people were lied to about Biden's mental state, the summer of 2020. Like, do you guys feel like any of that played a role in the shift here? Or was Donald Trump genuinely just surrounded by the most brilliant strategist that helped him sail to victory last night?

Peter yeah, I think it's a mistake to view what happened last night as a refutation or a kind of reversal of 2020 and more as a continuation of 2016. Democrats don't appreciate that the paradigm shifted in the fall of 2015 and then the spring and summer of 2016. That's when the kind of fulcrum around which our politics moved and you either moved with it and saw where the country was headed or you didn't. The reason that the Democrats captured the White House in 2020 is simple. It was Covid and they nominated the one guy, Scranton Joe, who seemed like he could be the antidote to the kind of populist. Right. And they played him up. Right. I mean, there's a reason they nominated the oldest Democrat in the pack who seemed like he was closer to that kind of traditional Democratic working class base. And had they actually embraced a program over the past four years that mapped that branding, then I think, yes, last night's results have been very different. But that's not what they did. They had the packaging right, but the substance was all wrong. And so what happened last night is simply voters saying, no, no, no, we're not finished with what we started in 2016.

There was an interruption in 2020 because there was A lot of commotion, there was upheaval. But we want to continue with what we were doing. And the Democrats don't seem to have gotten that. They don't appreciate that there's been this seismic shift.

Right. They're still kind of seeing Trump as the anomaly, rather than Biden's victory in 2020 as the anomaly.

Exactly. And I think what happened is that this is a reckoning that is being imposed on the Democrats akin to sort of 1968. The party is going to have to ask itself deep existential questions. Why are we here? Who are we? What is our role in the world, in America? Why do we exist? And by extension, why do all kind of democratic dominated institutions exist? We're having questions like that right now. Why does the legacy media exist? Does it exist to hold the powerful to account? Why do universities exist? Do they exist to educate young people or to indoctrinate them and so on and so forth. I think we're at this reckoning moment where the whole left, it's not just the Democratic Party, it's not just a handful of insiders, it's not just the Democratic consultant class, all of whom should be fired, it's not just them. It's the whole kind of left wing world that has to ask itself. And until you stop seeing yourself as furthering some kind of progressive agenda and you start seeing yourselves as sort of members of a kind of robust and three dimensional society or polity, then you're going to continue kind of hemorrhaging support and losing.

And I think there's a broader kind of like, reckoning or kind of come to Jesus moment that we've arrived at.

As we've already sort of touched on in this conversation. Trump massively overperformed with minorities in the working class, and he also didn't have as much of a deficit as we would have expected with educated suburban and women voters. What do you think those women saw in him that they didn't see in the last election? Because the assumption, of course, and like the conventional wisdom going into this election was Donald Trump needed to get out the men. He needed to get out the Joe Rogan voter. And Kamala Harris needed women to show up because they were scared of Donald Trump and passionate about abortion. And that just didn't come to pass. Batya, why did these women go for Trump?

The question really, I think, is why 2020 was different. Right. Which is something we've been talking about. I think because of the pandemic, the question of voting on economic policy was a little bit Sustainable. Suspended because the economy was suspended. That sort of, as a pressing issue. People had stimmy checks, right? We were not in normal, like, worker making money supporting family mode. And so I think there was a suspension of that. But what happened in the meantime was Donald Trump went from being, like, brutish and lame and, you know, somebody, maybe your racist uncle, that's the trope, right, would vote for, to being, like, this gangster who they keep trying to destroy and put in prison and shoot, and he just keeps popping back up and refusing to be put down. And I think the stigma was shifted. So Trump became this kind of badass and this kind of countercultural symbol for young men. And the Democrats became the kind of cringe, lame, like, posers, like, brat, like, as if, right? Like, you know, there was real shift. It was a vibe shift in terms of, like, which party was cool. You know, like the cool that Obama had brought to the Democratic Party evaporated.

And there was this old man, Joe Biden, right, who was supposed to be representing young voters. And meanwhile, Trump, he's not young, but he got this kind of aura around him. And I think that that maybe influenced younger people to show up. Younger men especially. But your question was about women and why women didn't buy this narrative about women's bodies and freedom and so forth. And I think that there was just a competing narrative about the threat to women to their bodies and to themselves, posed in a way by the excesses of the trans movement and the ways that they have been so fully embraced by the Democratic Party. What happened since 2020 is we have seen images of young women being beaten, you know, harmed in sports settings. We have been exposed to this idea that this should be normalized and that it's somehow transphobic to oppose that, which, of course, Brianna can tell you that it's not. There was a competing sense of what it would mean to protect girls and women. And it was so amazing to see the loudest voices demanding abortion rights were coming from women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.

We're talking about women who will never need an abortion. And I think there was something about that that just kept really bothering me about this. Like, why are all of these billionaire and millionaire women in their 70s out there lecturing both men and women that this should be the number one issue for them?

Well, just to steel, man, it, I agree with you that they were competing arguments about which party cared more about women's bodies and the flourishing of girls and women. But I think the reason that that generation is so outspoken about it is that they remember a time in American history where people died of back alley abortions and sepsis.

Do they really? It's not, I feel like that the idea that that is where we're headed, like they don't, you can't, nobody can actually believe that that is true. Like, nobody really believes that. You have to really, like, really purposely misconstrue the stories that were coming out of Georgia to believe that that is where the Republican Party is trying to take us. I mean, I think a lot. Maybe they do. I shouldn't say they don't believe it. Maybe they do really believe it. But what we've learned from this election is that to the majority of women, that seems incredibly far fetched. And I think also there is a feeling that to reduce women's interests to this one thing, there's something very insulting about that.

Brianna, I'd love for you to weigh in here because I think one of the stickiest issues of this election, strangely, just given the importance of so many other things to most Americans, was the issue of biological men in girls sports and the fundamental unfairness of that. Talk to us about that, which is an issue, I think, that you resonate with and where that begins to bleed into the kinds of things you've been tweeting about for the past 24 hours, which is a genuine and profound fear about healthcare of trans adults that you feel is under threat in a Trump administration.

So, I mean, and I want to really set the stage here, Batya, I agree with everything you just said. You know, I think it's really insulting to tell women that the only thing they need to care about is abortion rights. As best as I can tell from the friendships I have, it's very important. You know, these stories of women dying of sepsis even recently are very scary to people. But a lot of my friends have children and you know, when they go to here in Massachusetts, you know, if they're taking their children to kindergarten for the very first time and there's a box that they need to fill out saying, tell us your child's preferred pronouns. Or if they're in elementary school and there's a coming out date elementary school, and a ton of the class is raising their hands and saying they think they're non binary, that is going to put the fear of God into most parents. Because ironically, the way the trans community has messaged this to people is if you have any kind of gender nonconformity that apparently can drive your child to suicide. Right? So we're scaring the hell out of parents, ironically, with the way we ourselves have framed these issues.

So I think it is so clearly off base the way that the trans community has run this. And I want to be really clear about this. It's not transsexuals like me. I medically transitioned. I have to take hrt. I will literally die without it. I transition to move on with life. It is people that have shown up. They're honestly, in my opinion, straight. They are not medically transitioning. They are just typically gender non conforming and they have radically redefined. They've colonized, to put it in leftist terms, they've colonized my healthcare movement that I need or I will die without for this other completely crazy mission objective. And of course you're seeing a pushback on this. What is so frustrating, Barry, what just makes me want to scream out of my window is when I look at every single quote trans leader on this. They were saying this yesterday. Oh, The Republicans ran $250 million on ads. It's not going to have any effect. We know this has no salience really. You know, I run a super PAC. I know what happens before you invest $100,000 in an ad, much less a couple like a few million.

You market test it, you see who it's going to land with, you figure out who's in the district, you micro target it and you really get that message. Very granular. Someone clearly has done some research that's showing these kinds of voters that Batya is talking about are responding to these anti trans messages. And who is responsible for this? It is so convenient for trans activists to say the Republicans are all transphobic, they're just evil. No, that's not it. We've changed our messaging on this to something radical and crazy that the rest of the country just can't get on board with. And it has literally handed the Republican party everything they need to destroy us.

What's sad and very telling about what Brianna was saying now is that like having been to many, many Republican campaign events over the past two, three years, you never hear Republican partisans, people with their MAGA caps on in deep red states bashing the trans cause per se, trans adults. I've never heard that. It's always the same thing, which is get your laws and your policies and your regulations off my kids or my grandchildren would that that leads me to think is there is much, much more overlap here. There's much more consensus about this kind of liberal consensus about sort of Americans in the very best sense saying, you know what Americans Adults are free to live their lives as they see fit. That is part of the American promise, the American compact. But you do not have the right to impose your politics on kids who are still figuring out who the hell they are and certainly not behind their parents backs.

Yeah, I want to talk for a minute about character, both about Trump's and also the character of the American people, which is the conversation that a lot of people, especially a lot of people on the left, are having this morning. Trump will be the first convicted felon and twice impeached candidate to become president. He was found liable for sexual abuse. He mocked a disabled reporter. He said John McCain wasn't a hero. He called veterans suckers and losers. He faced 116 indictments. Those things didn't seem to matter to voters. And I bring all of this up not to kind of relitigate those issues, but because I'm seeing a lot of the same 2016 takes recirculating on social media and on legacy media. In other words, that Americans voted for Trump for the worst possible reasons. They voted for Trump because America is, in fact, a sexist, racist, bigoted, fascist loving place. I'm choosing one example, but I might write about this. There are hundreds that I'm compiling since late last night. Here's Jill Filipovic, a writer that I often read. Here's what she wrote on Twitter. In the coming days, there's going to be a lot of opining about what the Harris campaign did wrong.

But this election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. She says it was an indictment of America.

Wow.

Let's talk about that.

I like. I like Jill a lot. I don't think I agree with that.

I'm not trying to pick on her. I'm choosing an example of many that are basically saying that America just chose to elect a fascist, that America is sort of choosing to usher in a dark age, contend with that.

This is not what's going on. So I'm probably the only person here that will cop to this. Who else watch Jersey Shore? Am I the only one?

Oh, my God, of course I watch Jersey Shore.

So first season, Ronnie and Ronnie. What was his name? Not JWoww, the girl he kept hooking up with. Ronnie and his girlfriend are fighting, and then it's terrifying. Like, Ronnie's throwing the mattress out the window, and it's like, oh, my God, I can't believe this. And then season two, Ronnie's fighting with his girlfriend, throwing out the window, and you're like, all right, let's watch this again. Season three of the Bull around sustained storyline every single time. It's like, so this is a story about mainstream media and the complete breakdown of being able to pay attention. Look, I am, I suppose, an elite. I understand why all this stuff is bad. But the fact that the press in this country has not found a way to connect these events and these things that Trump is doing and make them stick, it just has come off as a Jersey Shore fight at this point that they are just tuned out to. They're bored, they have short memories and they just don't care anymore. Like it or not, this rise of hyper wokeness and this like the way that trans culture is affecting children in this country, this is a new story, this is a new threat and people are just more tuned into it.

This is a really terrifying shift in the power of the fourth estate to get the American people to pay attention to things. And I think it speaks to an inability of them to move from this really old paradigm and to move into something that looks a lot more like Joe Rogan. People trust personalities more than they trust institutions in 2024.

Barry, if I may, I think this is more characterological. It says something about the sort of the left more broadly and psychologically. The impulse is to blame the people who don't think like us. If only these people, these dumb unwashed masses would just be more like us, then everything would just fix itself. But they're not. And so the problem is them. It is never us. It's never, maybe we've made mistakes. Maybe we don't understand the people we claim to care about. Maybe we are actually the wrong people to be furthering the politics we claim to care about so much. It's never introspective. The best you get from Democrats. I recall the debates around Obamacare and there was lots of sort of like hand wringing in the administration about why aren't more Americans excited about this kind of upending of healthcare as we've known it? And the best that the administration could come up with was, well, our messaging hasn't been that good. It's never the program itself. It's never we are doing anything wrong. It's either the masses are too dumb or evil or the message that we are communicating to them just needs to be tweaked somewhat.

They need to think hard about the fact that they have jettisoned utterly the economic determinist prism that used to inform Democratic politics. That is this idea that class and economics money matter fundamentally. And they have embraced this idea of racial essentialism. IDENTITARIANISM and it has not occurred to them yet that that's actually not where the great mass of Americans are, including many, many Americans who are very smart and educated, who also happen to think that they're crazy.

I also really like Jill, but I think what's so amazing about that tweet is Donald Trump showed up and said, they don't hate me, they hate you, the American people. And this morning, the left and the Democrats went on Twitter and went on cable news and literally said, it's not an indictment of Trump, it's an indictment of the American people. They have the same interpretation of the Trump phenomenon, which is that he is, you know, the candidate of the masses and represents, to a certain degree, where the American people are at. And you either love the American people and thus love him, him for representing them, or you hate the American people because they chose him. And I think that that is really what we're seeing here. And I think that that was really what was exposed with all of this Hitler talk. When you call somebody Hitler or a fascist, who now we know has won the popular vote, that is not a smear on him. That is a smear on the American people, and we should not tolerate it from anybody.

I just want to read an amazing tweet from Brianna that I think well sums that up. She writes, democratic path forward. Jettison the commies, Hamas fans and designer gender crowd. No more land acknowledgments. No more trying to please everyone. We have a point of view. Fight for normal people. Whatever gets in the way of that, we stop doing.

That's it.

Yeah, that's it. That's exactly it.

I think that's the strategy. Okay, well, the control of the Senate flipped. It's not just that the Republicans won the White House, they've also flipped the Senate. And it looks like they might even win the House. So the possibility of a red White House, a red Senate and a red Congress, and of course, the Supreme Court. Peter, put this in historical perspective for us. I mean, does this just mean that we're a center right country and, like, how do, how do you explain this? I mean, this is. This was the. We were told there was going to be a red wave in 2022. It never happened. It looks like this is it. And what does it mean for policy and for governing?

I think it's demand that, like, it's a reflection of a certain maturity on the part of the American electorate. People want the parties to govern and to lead. So for the Democrats, the message should be enough with all of your criticizing the likes of Joe Manchin for being a conservative Democrat in an ultra conservative state. You lost West Virginia because you don't make room for people like that anymore. And if you were truly a pluralistic and inclusive party, a diverse party, you would have held on to West Virginia and you would have held onto Montana and there wouldn't be these vast swatches of the country that are basically verboten or off limits to Democrats. What's going to happen? I don't know. I derive some comfort from the fact that the Republican majority in the House is probably going to be narrower than I think we expected. I don't think that's being a check exactly on the White House power, on the president's power, but it will encourage some people on the Hill to push for, I think, a little bit more cooperation or bipartisan coming together. Probably it'll be a very eventful two years and I think happily we'll all be here in two years and in four years.

I'm sure this is not the last election and I look forward to covering the next one.

Well, I found it kind of unbelievable. We had an editorial on it very late last night. The rhetoric going into this election from both sides was just so irresponsible. Oprah spoke at this Kamala Harris rally in Philadelphia on Monday, saying that this might be the last vote you ever cast if she doesn't win. But equally you had Elon Musk and Joe Rogan saying that if Trump didn't win, this was gonna be the last American election. Batia, what do you make of like that rhetoric when you brought up Oprah?

I remembered something that I had said right after she did, she went on, she did the DNC and then she had Kamala Harris on her show. And every time she would introduce her, she would go, Kamala Harris. And I joked, but it seems that I was right, that every time Oprah says Kamala Harris in that way, a swing voter dies and a Trump voter is born. And it does seem like the numbers at least are bearing that out. I hate to break it to you guys, but you're gonna be very happy with the next two years. There's going to be great policy put in place on tariffs and on border controls. Working class wages are going to go up. Your children are going to be able to play with working class kids whose parents are living a middle class life. And if that doesn't happen in two years, there will be another election and they'll flip the House back. I mean, this is the greatest country on earth, our checks and balances are incredible. And they are much better at standing up to Republicans than Democrats. I mean, this is the crucial thing to remember is that it is in the nature of power to abuse itself and to expand itself and to wrest more of itself from the people.

Right? And the truth is that in America, the checks and balances in our institutions come from people who have all been indoctrinated in universities. So they're all on the side of the left, which means they are incredibly adept at standing up to Donald Trump's alleged abuses of power or attempts to control more power than he has legal access to. And they have proven themselves the handmaidens of Democratic abuses of power. And so I just think it's great we're going to see what can happen. When government is working, if they overreach, they'll be checked. If they go in a bad direction, they'll be overturned. Brianna, I'm going to fight for your rights and for the rights that I think most people now in the Republican coalition agree with, Peter. They want every person to have physical autonomy, to be protected from discrimination in housing and in the economy and so forth, but they also want to protect children. I think that most Americans, 90% of Americans, American voters, are on board with the same things. And I think we're going to see what that can look like. And if, God forbid, it goes awry, this great nation, well, correct.

For that, I want to read the end of Peter's excellent column that I referenced earlier in this conversation, maybe as a way of bringing us to a close and reflecting on the way forward. Here's what Peter writes. I've spent much of the past year on the road in towns and cities like Flint and East Palestine and the suburbs of Phoenix and the backwaters of Pennsylvania and the California desert. And there was everywhere a deep and pervasive desire for an honest, wide ranging conversation about what's to be done, how we move forward. The only way out of this cul de sac, the only way for Democrats to win once again, will be for the party to tune out MSNBC and the campus and the progressive identitarians and to return once again to the same Americans it has made a habit of disparaging. Brianna, let's kick it to you. What's the way forward?

Yeah, I'm so happy you asked that, Barry, because this whole conversation, Batya, I've been thinking like, yeah, I don't agree with what you just said, but I can appreciate the spirit that is behind it. I think if we're looking back to 2014 and 2016. Where were we as a country? You had gamer game, you had Trump rising, and you had this organized movement to unite the left as strongly as possible and decide that every single American that voted for Trump was evil. Everything Trump wanted to do was wrong, and that we were going to fight him every step of the way. It was really the step. And I think both sides did this where we decided the other half of the country was completely evil. And it's hard for me to name accomplishments from Trump, but like prison reform, he deserves credit for that. He never has gotten it fully to the degree I think it's warranted. So, Bhatia, as we're kind of gearing up to do 2016 Part 2, this is my challenge to you, and this is what I want want to do. It is so deeply unrewarding to take on your own side and to try to steer it towards normality.

You know, this just last week, I started a show with a bunch of moderate trans women that have the views on trans stuff that we've been talking about right here. I've spent the last week getting screamed at by trans extremists and terfs, which is not exactly fun, but is necessary work to getting our public policy back to where it needs to be. So this is my challenge for you. I am going to use my power as a public figure to set the conversation. Instead of just digging my heels in and deciding that you're the enemy, and I'm going to moralize everything. I'm going to commit to trying to have conversations as much as I can and to steer the public policy to something that is going to work for all Americans and to try to find a way to work with the Republican Party. Because if I've learned anything since kind of leaving the progressive fringe, it's that Republicans are thirsty for actual conversations with liberals and Democrats and progressives. They are so eager for a conversation and we just slap them at every single turn. So I am willing, I will try my best to do that for you.

And my challenge for you is, please, when it comes to these bills, I'm sure are going to target me. Really look into it. If I'm telling you I think this is really a threat to my life. Listen to that. Take it seriously. Talk to your friends about this. Because the only way we can go forward as a nation is by talking to each other and working with each other. Like this 2016 playbook. It's just going to leave America this big, stupid, fat target for Vladimir Putin and the world's dictators. It fundamentally, objectively does not work.

Challenge accepted with a full heart. This is the kind of thing I live for. Thank you. Brianna Yes, I don't think there's a.

Better note to end on there, so I'm going to call it. Peter Savodnik, Batya Angar Sargon, Brianna Wu here on Very few hours of sleep and as articulate and insightful as ever. I'm eager to have this group back together again, possibly with the addition of Jonah Sara who was not feeling well. Guys, thank you so much for making the time. I really appreciate it.

Thank you Barry.

Thank you. Thanks for listening and wow, what a 48 hours. If you like this episode, if it made you think differently about the next four years, if it comforted you maybe a little, if you're someone that woke up broken hearted, then share this episode with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own. Last but not least, if you want to support honestly, there's just one way to do it. It's by going to the free presses website@vfp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next. Looking for a great way to reward and thank your hard working team this Christmas? Choose a gift that gives back with the Dumpstores Gift card. The more you gift, the more you save with a tax free allowance of up to 1000 Euro. Think instant gifting Instant delivery with an E gift card your employees can use across all our departments in store and online. The Dumpster Store's Gift Card. Perfect for everyone. Terms and conditions apply.