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| Good evening. | |
| It's Monday, November 11th. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. | |
| Last week we were off a couple of days, as any of you who watched our program on Wednesday, the day after the election, probably observed I was quite ill throughout the week. | |
| I'm feeling close to 100% better and very happy to be back. | |
| We have a lot to talk about, beginning with the fact that it has now been five full days since Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election and as such became the president-elect of the United States. | |
| To say that Democratic Party officials and corporate media personalities have not handled this news very well is to dramatically understate the case. | |
| At least since the September 11th attacks, I have really seen such a frantic and unhinged reaction to any event as we're seeing toward this election outcome. | |
| And the spasms are, I'm afraid, nowhere near the end, but rather in their incipient stages. | |
| To begin with, Democrats and their media allies need to explain to their partisan faithful hordes how this happened. | |
| Why would people as honorable and decent and noble and patriotic as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz possibly lose a national election? | |
| Voted on by American citizens to a ticket led by a convicted felon and twice impeached monster and an insurrectionist who is literally the new Hitler, along with his vice president who may proclaim to be, depending on the week, weird, fascistic, and a Silicon Valley puppet. | |
| Obviously people want an explanation. | |
| They were led to believe that Kamala and Tim Walz would win and that the American people would never re-elect Trump. | |
| Now, there are two rules that Democrats and their media must follow in trying to concoct an explanation. | |
| First, they have to identify who the villains are who caused this terrible traumatic event. | |
| And secondly, they have to ensure that the villains are anyone other than the Democratic Party, its leaders, its establishment ideology, and its media. | |
| The one thing they all agree on is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Democratic Party. | |
| The same thing happened after 2016. | |
| The vote was not an indictment of them, but of you. | |
| People who voted for Trump are racist and misogynist, some of them argued. | |
| Trump voters are deceived and confused by a steady stream of disinformation fed to them by right-wing oligarchical media barons who somehow control the independent podcast and independent news shows that have become far more influential than CNN or The New York Times. | |
| Or it's Joe Biden's fault for not dropping out soon enough. | |
| It's just a problem with messaging. | |
| People were never really told why the Democratic Party deserved their eternal gratitude. | |
| Or it was all the left wing of the Democratic Party's fault for their excesses on culture war issues such as trans rights. | |
| All of this is anything to avoid having to confront and grapple with the real rot at the heart of the Democratic Party, namely its corporatism and its militarism, which produce major benefits for a small clique of American liberal elites, the people who occupy the D.C. swamp, while which produce major benefits for a small clique of American liberal elites, the people who occupy the D.C. swamp, | |
| Now, I've often said the two most accountability free professions on the planet are politics and punditry. | |
| No matter how much people in those professions fail, they never acknowledge their failures, they find someone else to pin the blame on, and then they just merely continue in their positions of what is now, thankfully, rapidly diminishing influence and power. | |
| And that is exactly what we're seeing right now, an attempt to shift the blame onto anybody other than the actual culprits, which are themselves. | |
| Then, there are many things that one could say about the first Donald Trump presidential term. | |
| That it was driven by rigid ideological coherence is not one of them. | |
| For all sorts of reasons, constant contrived scandals from the U.S. security states disseminated by the corporate media, Trump's lack of familiarity with how the swamp really functioned, all the conflicting fashions he allowed to barrel deep into his government. | |
| It was hard to discern a clear political worldview from those first four years. | |
| Official Trump policies often conflicted with the president's rhetoric. | |
| Often his orders were simply thwarted or ignored by generals or unseen bureaucrats. | |
| Trump himself has acknowledged many of these problems. | |
| And is explicitly vowing to avoid the repetition. | |
| We've had people very close to the Trump transition team and Trump himself on our show and they have sworn that they are aware of those problems and are determined not to let them repeat themselves. | |
| But there are, of course, all sorts of ideological factions vying to influence Trump. | |
| None more dangerous than the neocons and warmongers who sometimes populated his first administration and are eager to drive him into the very wars he insists he wants to avoid. | |
| Those tensions were quite evident over the last several weeks as Trump's CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, arguably the worst person in the first Trump administration, was included in Trump's inner camp on some of his last campaign stops. | |
| Pompeo was clearly attempting to worm his way into a position of influence. | |
| But Trump, responding to the concerns of the anti-interventionist wing of the Republican base, preemptively announced that he would bar both Mike Pompeo and, for good measure, through a Nikki Haley, from any position in his administration and wish them best of luck in the future. | |
| That announcement, combined with Trump's prior selection of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate earlier this year, created hope that Trump would freeze out the standard D.C. warmongers and interventionists from shaping his top national security spots. | |
| Donald Trump Jr. | |
| this week vowed that freezing such people out was his top priority, and by all reports, Donald Trump Jr. | |
| is wielding more influence in the Trump camp than ever before. | |
| Today, however, Trump announced that he was appointing New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Nikki Haley clone, to Haley's old position as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. He also just announced moments before we went on the air that Congressman Mike Waltz of Florida, a Republican of Florida, a former Green Beret, somebody who has been quite hawkish in the war in Ukraine. | |
| He actually opposed Trump's attempt to withdraw from Afghanistan, is quite hawkish on China, though he is a NATO skeptic, will be his national security advisor. | |
| Now, none of these individual appointments standing alone will definitively signal what differences, if any, The second Trump administration will have from the first, but we do have some revealing clues thus far that at least are worth examining, especially because there's clearly an ongoing fight among those closest to Trump to shape how these differences might emerge. | |
| It's definitely worth looking at since we have enough data points at this point to try and map out how we think that will Before we get to all that, a few programming notes. | |
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| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. | |
| By far the most traumatic event to Western liberalism in the past, let's say, 20 years was the 2016 defeat by Donald Trump of Hillary Clinton, in part because our leading institutions, almost all of them, who opine on such matters told us that it was virtually a certainty that Hillary Clinton would win, that someone like Donald Trump could never be president. | |
| And our newspapers and polling authorities gave a Hillary Clinton victory a 95% chance, a 98% chance. | |
| Maybe the lowest you could find was something like 75%, and it was a great shock to the system. | |
| And that's why the system reacted in the way that it did with so much hysteria, instantly creating false scandals that drowned our politics and our country for more than two years, all kinds of bizarre conspiracy theories about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, ones that Robert Mueller all kinds of bizarre conspiracy theories about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, ones that Robert Mueller ultimately concluded after being unleashed for 18 months, he | |
| But that was the nature of our political order in the first Trump president. | |
| It was just this constant hysterical attempt to sabotage and undermine the Trump administration and everything it was doing. | |
| They impeached him two times. | |
| Twice they impeached him. | |
| They, as we know, once those didn't end up banning him from office, the minute that he left office, they attempted to imprison him. | |
| They brought four different cases against him, hoping to imprison him before the election. | |
| That didn't work. | |
| He was the target of two assassination attempts in about two months, one of which came very close to killing him and the other one not that far away either, events about which we still know very little. | |
| And so you really can't overstate the amount of hysteria that drove the establishment's reaction to Donald Trump's first victory in part because it came out of nowhere. | |
| They were so certain they had done enough to manipulate the electorate in order to win. | |
| And Trump had that sweeping victory over Hillary Clinton, and they had to accept not only that someone they despised and found very threatening was about to be president, but their confidence in their whole world and in their institutions were so shook at their core because these institutions have proven to be so unreliable, so ineffective, so wrong. | |
| And part of what they did, as we know, is immediately set out to figure out a way to curb online free speech based on their conclusion, not just with Trump but also Brexit, that they simply can't allow a free internet any longer because when that happens, they can't control the outcomes. | |
| They can't control what people think and what they do. | |
| That all came from that 2016 shock. | |
| The 2024 victory by Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, though maybe not quite as shocking, since this time the institutions weren't assuring us of Kamala's victory, but instead saying it was a toss-up, it was a 50-50 election, that nobody could possibly guess what the outcome would be, though it was a 50-50 election, that nobody could possibly guess what the outcome would be, though not a shock, | |
| Because they really believed that having talked themselves into this in their little closed information bubble in which they reside, that it was just a known fact, definitively proven, inarguably true, that Donald Trump was a traitor, an insurrectionist, a criminal, a rapist. | |
| They had turned him into this demon And anyone who resides in liberal media or liberal sectors of American political life, especially on the East Coast and the West Coast, didn't understand that only they thought that. | |
| Only people who feed on their media diet believed that. | |
| And that's why, even though it wasn't as rationally shocking, it was still emotionally even more traumatic to see that even after everything they believe has been shown about Donald Trump, People saw January 6th. | |
| People saw the documents case that Jack Smith brought. | |
| They saw the Stormy Daniels case where Trump was convicted after a Manhattan prosecutor and a Manhattan jury did their part in ensuring that he was found guilty on charges that would never have been brought against anybody else. | |
| And all the other things that have been said about Trump over the last year and over the last eight years, they're so drowning in that. | |
| That they just, even though rationally they understood that the polls were showing a close race and therefore rationally Trump had to have a chance to win, emotionally they just didn't believe that the American people, these good, upstanding, kind, compassionate patriots would ever deviate from their worldview and elect somebody that everybody now knows and their worldview is as evil and destructive and malicious as Donald Trump did. | |
| And so to watch Donald Trump not just compile a very fast victory, we kept being told, oh, it's going to be so close, we're never going to know the election results. | |
| On the first night, it might take days to know them. | |
| And it was very evident about three hours after the polls closed, when Trump was ahead in Georgia and North Carolina and then Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan and the ways in which he was ahead, the shift of the electorate to Donald Trump, that not only made it devastating, but so did the fact that not only made it devastating, but so did the fact that he didn't just win the electoral college in 2016, but is very, very likely to win the popular | |
| He's still several million votes ahead of Kamala Harris and all of this combined to really devastate the worldview and the sense of security, even more so than 2016, of American liberals, American liberal elites, Democratic Party operatives, corporate media, American liberal elites, Democratic Party operatives, corporate media, and all the other centers of power that were just convinced that there was no way a decent, good country could elect somebody like Donald Trump. | |
| And obviously after building all of this up for so many years, after going on air night after night with the backing of these huge corporate media conglomerates calling Trump a Fascists and a new Hitler and lying about him and saying that he threatened to put Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad and execute her. | |
| He was going to put his political enemies in camps. | |
| He was going to come after AOC and Rachel Maddow and Joy Behar and Keith Olbermann and they were all going to concentration camps. | |
| They had worked themselves into such a frenzy that they could not conceive of any world that existed in which people thought differently than they did about Donald Trump. | |
| They just don't understand that there's a world, a gigantic world, the vast majority of the world, that is completely detached from and indifferent to and even contemptuous of the tiny little bubble in which they live. | |
| And so needless to say, they did have to explain to the people who trust them how could this have happened. | |
| We've talked a long time about when 9-11 happened, American citizens rightly wanted to understand, wait, how could something like this happen? | |
| Why would people hate us so much that they would try and kill as many of us as possible? | |
| And they had to quickly come up with an excuse about why they hate us. | |
| They hate us for our freedom, all of that. | |
| That's what the liberal establishment is currently faced with, having to concoct some explanation about how it is that Americans, in large numbers, and not just white people, they don't even get to blame white people, or men But women in large numbers, | |
| Latinos in large numbers, black people, especially black men in large numbers, and essentially every other demographic group abandoned the Democratic Party over the last four years to move even more closely to Donald Trump as the rhetoric about his evil escalated from these institutions. | |
| And not only have they not settled on any kind of an explanation, they're throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks, but they're now at each other's throats. | |
| And have really dropped their mask about what they really think about American voters, what they really think about ordinary people, what they really think about the working class, what they really think about anybody, especially people in so-called minority groups, marginalized groups who they believe they own, who didn't do what they were told. | |
| I mean, the mask is really off when it comes to American liberal elites in terms of how they really feel and how they really think. | |
| Let's begin with the New York Times, which the day after the election published this article, quote, devastated Democrats play the blame game and stare at a dark future. | |
| Quote, the nationwide repudiation of the party stunned many Democrats who had expressed a, quote, nauseous confidence about their chances in the final weeks of the race. | |
| As they shifted through the wreckage of their defeats, they found no easy answers as to why voters so decisively rejected their candidates. | |
| In more than two dozen interviews, lawmakers, strategists, and officials offered a litany of explanations for Vice President Kamala Harris' failure. | |
| And just about all of them fit neatly into their preconceived notions of how to win in politics. | |
| Now, most of the attacks ended up being either on the voters themselves... | |
| Or parts of the Democratic Party that these people dislike. | |
| But one of the main targets were white leftists, who they say somehow controlled the party, even though Kamala Harris's entire campaign was based on emphasizing her experience as a transnational prosecutor and cop. | |
| She went around the country, not with Bernie Sanders, but with Liz Cheney and Bush Cheney Republicans to emphasize what a centrist she was, what an establishment figure she was. | |
| They blame black people for being misogynist, Latinos for being misogynist, white people for being racist. | |
| It's everybody's fault except the liberal establishments. | |
| It's the fault primarily of voters. | |
| Here is a segment from Morning Joe where they cite an article in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd where she headlined the article | |
| Democrats and the case of mistaken identity politics and basically blamed wokeism and identity politics and these culture war issues as the reason Democrats lost and blamed the left wing of the party for saddling the Democratic Party with that instead of confronting what voters actually said was their principal issues of concern when they voted. | |
| namely the economy, safety from immigration, wages, inflation. | |
| Those are the things voters said were the things that We're of highest priority for them and they believe that Donald Trump and the Republican Party he leads would be better than the Democratic Party. | |
| Having to confront that is a lot more difficult Than just feeling around for villains and demons that you can blame. | |
| So here's Morning Joe's explanation for why this happened. | |
| Send your kids to campus safely, defunding the police. | |
| Back in 2020, we were talking here, Reverend Al, let me bring you in here, on defunding the police. | |
| You and I were talking about how representatives in the toughest parts of New York City, in real time, We're saying, defund the police! | |
| No! | |
| No! | |
| We need more police on the street protecting our children as we walk to school. | |
| We need more children in the classroom. | |
| You know, in the classrooms, more police officers, safety officers, so our children can go to and from class, so our businesses can be safe, so we can live a safe life. | |
| And it's something, again, you have a great line about wokeness and limousine liberals and everything, but I just wanted to say this is... | |
| This is what we've known since 2017 and what you and I have talked about. | |
| That white elitists that run the Democratic Party are far to the left of many black and Hispanic voters in the Democratic Party. | |
| I mean just let's take a second to appreciate how funny it is that Joe Scarborough Who makes many millions of dollars a year hosting a morning program on MSNBC, basically ground zero for white DC elites, is ranting and raving about white elites and the way they control the Democratic Party. | |
| It is true that phrases like defund the police were extremely politically obtuse. | |
| We're, of course, designed to alienate people. | |
| All that happened way back in 2019 and 2020, especially 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protest movement after the killing of George Floyd. | |
| And it took place in the fall of 2020 when Donald Trump was president. | |
| Democrats don't go around saying, defund the police. | |
| Anymore. | |
| Kamala Harris, in fact, ran on purpose as a police officer, as a law enforcement figure, as a prosecutor who put people in prison, calling Donald Trump the criminal and the like. | |
| She ran as conservative a campaign as you could possibly run. | |
| Conservative with a small C. People would have thought that Liz Cheney, not Tim Walz, was her running mate. | |
| And that she was as free of any kind of wokeism. | |
| She never talked about identity politics. | |
| They completely avoided all of these culture war issues on purpose. | |
| That, while alienating, again, was not what people said they went and voted on. | |
| But what they're trying to do is find villains. | |
| No, it's not our fault. | |
| It's not my fault. | |
| Joe Scarborough, the ideology I support, the establishment, militarism and corporatism of the Democratic Party that I've been cheering and all the people who I bring on my show have been cheering, the endless wars. | |
| The dependence on billionaires, the complete contempt for working class people. | |
| No, it's not our fault. | |
| It's these far leftist, woke people who are in charge of the Democratic Party or in charge of the Kamala Harris campaign. | |
| Again, I don't doubt that that was alienating, that kind of woke excess. | |
| But that is not what determined this election. | |
| What determined this election was that people hate the brand of the Democratic Party, especially people who are concerned about their economic future and their safety. | |
| Here's the rest of this. | |
| Here's where Al Sharpton, and if you know the history of Al Sharpton, it's just so funny, where he comes in and says how important it is that we respect police officers. | |
| We want police officers in our neighborhoods. | |
| It's terrible when there's disorder on our streets because of protests. | |
| But this is what they're trying to claim is why Kamala Harris lost. | |
| And I remember a pollster for Barack Obama, I think David, I think his name is David Sachs, forgive me, came out and had that poll in 2017 and he got absolutely hammered on Twitter. | |
| Absolutely hammered by the far left. | |
| How dare you say this? | |
| How dare you? | |
| But he was right. | |
| And it was true in 17. | |
| And it was doubly true in 2024 that these white progressives on the far, far left said, we're going to save you, black and Hispanic people of America. | |
| A lot of black and Hispanic people in America say, no thanks. | |
| You're kind of wild. | |
| You're like, you're too far left. | |
| We believe in the American dream. | |
| We want to be part of the American dream. | |
| Thanks, but no thanks. | |
| Keep that in your college classes. | |
| I mean, listening to this, you would think, you would have thought. | |
| And this is a common narrative now that a lot of these inside the Beltway D.C. Democratic operatives are embracing. | |
| You would have thought that Angela Davis or some communist professor at UC Davis or Berkeley or something was the chief strategist for the Kamala Harris campaign, and they ran this very woke leftist campaign. | |
| The incident that Joe Scarborough was referring to there is a political researcher named David Shore. | |
| And what happened was he, while the George Floyd protests were happening, put online studies that showed, in his view, that nonviolent protests work much better than the use of violence. | |
| He was condemning the protesters who were burning down buildings and burning down stores. | |
| And it is true he got vilified for that by the left. | |
| He ended up doing quite fine, but at the time he was considered he was canceled ended up being the best thing that could have happened to him. | |
| This David Shore, who Joe Scarborough is holding up as this kind of symbol, this emblem of the right way to do politics, fighting the far left, fighting wokeism, condemning violent protests, David Shore probably was more influential in Kamala Harris' campaign than any other single person. | |
| Maybe with the exception of her campaign manager. | |
| And maybe not even her. | |
| Because David Shore became the chief strategist of the future forward pack that all the Democratic billionaires like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg put hundreds of millions of dollars into. | |
| And he shaped the strategy of that pack. | |
| This person who Joe Scarborough correctly is saying hates the far left, has been vilified by the far left. | |
| This was not a far left campaign. | |
| This was a campaign by the Democratic establishment to hold hands as much as they could with the Republican establishment and sell this rotted bipartisan consensus that had nothing to do with left-wing politics. | |
| It had everything to do with neoliberalism, corporatism, and militarism. | |
| Here's Al Sharpton giving his little lecture. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| The whole goal of the civil rights movement and the movement now is to correct the system, not to overthrow the system. | |
| And to make things work equally for everyone, not to just upturn everything and change everything to some undefined utopia. | |
| And these latte liberals that speak for people that they don't speak to, that want to lead people that they don't even like, are running around trying to represent things that was never part of what we were saying. | |
| I mean, I don't even disagree with that critique about these pro-DNC leftists and their woke ideology being completely detached from the world or the people on whose behalf they are speaking. | |
| But that was not what was running the Kamala Harris campaign. | |
| That was not defining Kamala Harris' candidacy nor the Joe Biden administration. | |
| All of that was in the hands of the same sort of establishment Democrats who have been running Democratic Party politics going back to the Clinton era. | |
| When they were crusading for NAFTA and free trade and the gunning of the middle of America. | |
| That's who has been in charge of the Democratic Party. | |
| Here is the view, this was right after the election on November 7th, where they were trying to figure out why Kamala Harris lost. | |
| You'll never guess what their explanation was. | |
| And finally, we talk a lot about these different demographics and these assumptions of where they're going to go. | |
| Latinos in Texas, a district that's 97% Latino, went 75 percentage points for Donald Trump. | |
| Why? | |
| Misogyny. | |
| No, it's on the border! | |
| It's misogyny. | |
| The border crisis is on their doorstep. | |
| And they were begging people to care about it for years. | |
| Misogyny and sexism, that's what that was. | |
| The lessons are not misogyny. | |
| Who's there? | |
| Oh my gosh, it's whooping! | |
| You see just the casual ease with which they slander malign people? | |
| She's like, this woman who hates Donald Trump but has been in Republican Party politics, used to work for the Trump administration. | |
| She was one of those people who left and turned against Trump and got rewarded with a hosting contract on The View. | |
| She was saying, look, there's this county in the south of Texas that's 95 percent Latino. | |
| And they overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump. | |
| And the explanation of that other host was, yeah, misogyny and sexism. | |
| That's what explains that. | |
| And she was saying, no, it's actually because they're right on the border. | |
| Their community is being overrun with an uncontrolled border. | |
| And that's why they voted for Trump. | |
| No, it's because they hate women. | |
| What's so amazing about that is that same county, that county filled with Latinos just eight years ago when Hillary Clinton ran, overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. | |
| Somehow they just were perfectly happy to vote for a woman eight years ago, Hillary Clinton, that same county, and then they just transformed into misogynist and sexist overnight. | |
| And that's the only thing that, in her view, can explain why they would abandon the Democratic Party for Donald Trump. | |
| Here is David Axelrod on CNN, who is Obama's former political guru, now a CNN contributor, making very similar assessments of the people who voted for Donald Trump. | |
| It wasn't a mandate to wantonly use the power of the presidency to punish his political enemies. | |
| It wasn't a mandate to help enrich himself and his friends. | |
| It wasn't a mandate to single out groups in our society for scorn or worse. | |
| You know, I'd love to hear from Van on this, but let's be honest about this. | |
| OK, let's be absolutely blunt about it. | |
| There were appeals to racism in this campaign and there is racial bias in this country and there is sexism in this country. | |
| And anybody who thinks that that did not in any way impact on the outcome of this race I'm not saying that was the main reason that Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won. | |
| And I think they ran, honestly, strategically, his campaign. | |
| And I've said it many times. | |
| They ran a very smart campaign. | |
| It was an ultimately rational, well-conceived and well-executed campaign for an irrational, often irrational candidate. | |
| And they overcame him to sell his message or the message that they thought he should be selling to the country. | |
| So, David Axelrod... | |
| Worked for Barack Obama. | |
| Barack Obama was elected to the American presidency twice. | |
| David Axelrod worked for the Obama campaign. | |
| Where was all this systemic racism that prevented Kamala Harris from being president back then? | |
| So many of the white working class voters who are the most maligned in these media sectors, who are constantly spoken of as stupid and racist and misogynistic, troglodytes, so many of them actually voted for Barack Obama. | |
| That was a major reason why he was able to turn so many previously red states Blue. | |
| And in fact, even when Obama was running for the Senate for the first time back in 2002, he won a lot of those more rural counties in Illinois that were filled with white working class people. | |
| He's always had an appeal to them. | |
| And then the minute those people decide they want to vote for a Republican, it must be because the white working class is still so primitive that they're too racist to consider. | |
| A black woman are too misogynistic to consider a female president. | |
| This has been an overwhelming storyline from Politico, but just right when the election was concluding. | |
| There's the title, Democratic Women See a Country That, quote, Is Not Ready for a Woman President. | |
| Quote, in interviews with Politico, nearly a dozen Democratic elected officials and strategists argued that Kamala Harris faced headwinds, including an ornery electorate and her connection to an unpopular incumbent. | |
| But to them, it was also about more than that. | |
| Quote, I do think the country is still sexist and is not ready for a woman president, said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. | |
| Quote, I was hoping we'd get closer at the very least this time around, but we got farther. | |
| Sexism and racism, inextricably woven into our political culture and politics, played a central role in the 2024 campaign, these Democratic women said. | |
| Democratic pollster Angie Kufler, who worked on several abortion rights initiatives in recent years, said Trump, quote, explicitly weaponized gender and purposely tried to activate men in a traditional masculinity-focused way. | |
| Quote, we don't want to say it publicly. | |
| A woman can't get elected, Kufler said. | |
| But what else are we supposed to take away from this moment? | |
| Imagine that. | |
| But what else are we supposed to take away from this moment? | |
| Why don't you look at what the voters are saying who didn't vote for you? | |
| Including one out of every four black men in the United States who voted, who voted for Donald Trump, depending on the exit poll, one out of every four, one out of every five, 20 to 25 percent. | |
| Half of all Latino men who had long been very loyal Democratic constituencies, including when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ran for president. | |
| A majority of white women, commonly like 45 percent of all women, What else are we supposed to take away from this moment besides the conclusion that Americans are misogynistic? | |
| How about a self-reflection of what the Democratic Party is and why it has alienated so many Of its prior, previously loyal constituencies. | |
| She concludes, I hope this is unique to women running against Trump. | |
| Quote, we've made so many strides with executive female leadership, but what presidents deal with, but governors don't, generally speaking, is national security in the military, said one Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. | |
| Quote, there was something in the language of what Trump said about Harris being a, quote, play toy, To world leaders, I think that might be a sticking point for us, that internalized misogyny of women not being strong enough in a foreign policy context. | |
| I need white women to dig deep and figure out why they, to this day, given all of Donald Trump's sexism, all of his racism, is still the person they voted for over Harris, said North Carolina State Senator Sidney Batch. | |
| It's dumbfounding. | |
| It's dumbfounding only if your sole source of news are these tiny little liberal outlets that constantly validate what you think. | |
| And you can't conceive of why people would possibly favor Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, would possibly reject the Democratic Party, other than because they're all pigs. | |
| Sex is pigs. | |
| Women have internalized misogyny. | |
| They're all racist. | |
| That's the only conceivable reason they can come up with as to why People might vote for Donald Trump instead of the Democratic Party. | |
| Now, even when you present them the evidence of why people abandoned the Democratic Party, namely that they are struggling economically, it's gotten worse during the Biden-Harris administration, they remember it being better under Trump, Even when you show them that data, even when you confront them with what people are saying to pollsters and exit polls and interviews, they will still insist that the only reason this happened is because America is still a fundamentally racist and misogynistic country. they will still insist that the only reason this happened | |
| Here is Eddie Glau Jr., who's a professor at Princeton. | |
| So needless to say, he is very much in touch with working class people of all races. | |
| He's quite whelpy. | |
| He has had media platforms for a long time. | |
| And here is his very melodramatic insistence on why Americans just did something inconceivable, which is not vote for Kamala Harris. | |
| There's this sense, right, that whiteness, right, is under threat, the demographic shifts, the country isn't, all of these racially ambiguous children on Cheerios commercials are confusing the hell out of me. | |
| I mean, a lot of people voted because their life's too damn expensive, and it was here, and it was the world. | |
| They voted for, you're telling me, Stephanie. | |
| That all of these people who believe that bread is too high and eggs are too high, that they voted for a convicted felon, a guy who said we can grab the pee, they voted for this guy. | |
| I'm not defending it, but I think there are tons of people that don't pay attention to, and I'm not defending it, don't pay attention to politics at all. | |
| But while we live in the most prosperous country in the world, people are saying, life's not fair. | |
| I'm not doing well. | |
| My son's still living in the basement. | |
| I can't seem to get a job. | |
| I don't like the status quo. | |
| I'm voting for something else. | |
| I love you to life, but I do not believe that. | |
| I cannot believe that. | |
| And the reason I think you believe it is because you don't want to believe that that's what's really motivating them. | |
| It's always the case. | |
| People don't want to believe what the country actually is. | |
| Because if they believe it, they're going to have to confront what's in them. | |
| I don't believe that. | |
| They voted for a crook, a person who they know is stealing from just doing everything to undermine the so-called country that they love. | |
| And then they're telling us the BS that it's economics. | |
| We know that's not true. | |
| He knows that's not true. | |
| He knows what's in the heart of American voters. | |
| You can present him, as she did, surprisingly, with the truth about what all the data shows, that they were primarily driven by economic insecurity, inflationary concerns, a sense that they can't afford their life. | |
| It's absolutely true that we are the richest country in the world, and yet everybody watches as we're the only country that doesn't have guaranteed health care. | |
| Millions of people without health insurance, we send billions and billions and billions of dollars to other countries, to Ukraine and to Israel, right in front of their face when they're saying they can't afford to buy groceries for their children. | |
| Nobody ever cares about their circumstances. | |
| Their communities are devastated. | |
| They say over and over that they feel abandoned, that nobody in Washington cares about them and they're absolutely right. | |
| And so they're looking for something to destroy the system that has caused them so much deprivation. | |
| And increasingly, it's not just white working class voters. | |
| It is Latinos and black working class voters. | |
| It's the multiracial working class. | |
| It has always been the dream of the Democratic Party to have a multiracial working class coalition. | |
| And for a long time, a long time ago, they did. | |
| That is now the Republican Party that is driven by a multiracial working class coalition. | |
| And it is increasingly Republican and decreasingly Democrat. | |
| And once that spell was broken on these marginalized groups that Democrats long believed they owned forever, no matter what they did, the terror now that they have is that now black people and Latinos are going to think when there's an election... | |
| They will vote for the party and the candidate they believe is doing the best for them. | |
| They're not going to just automatically give Democrats their vote. | |
| And that is completely frightening to Democrats. | |
| Here from NBC News, a Democratic congresswoman implies that racism is what fueled Trump's victory. | |
| Quote, it still rings true. | |
| The Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett took two acts to share her stance on the presidential election by citing the words of the late Republican Shirley Chisholm, the Democrat of New York, whose, quote, wisdom still rings true. | |
| Congresswoman Chisholm, in 1969, So 55 years ago was the country's first black woman elected to Congress. | |
| A photo included in the post attributes the quote, quote, of the two handicaps, being black is much less of a drawback than being female to Representative Chisholm. | |
| Quote, I am proud of Vice President Kamala Harris, Representative Crockett said, but as I said many times on the trail, this election was more about us and what it is that we wanted for our future and while Project 2025 is loading. | |
| Now, let me just say this, too. | |
| Let's recall that the premise of American liberalism, the Democratic Party, and the corporate media that supports them has been that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our country and to our democracy, that this very well may be the last election that we ever get to vote in if he takes over, that he's going to plan to put the Republican Party in power for all of eternity and dismantle all of our constitutional rights. | |
| He's going to send people who disagree with him to camps. | |
| Anybody who actually believed that, if you really believed that, as they insisted for so long they did, and who at the same time believes that America is a fundamentally racist and sexist country who's simply not ready to elect a black woman, if you also believe that, why would you ever put Kamala Harris as your nominee? | |
| Wouldn't that be the Least likely moment that you would take the risk of trying to elect the first black woman as president if you really believe that Americans are just so steadfastly misogynistic that they won't vote for a woman. | |
| Why, at the moment that you're claiming a new Hitler is coming, would you choose that moment to elect somebody who you believe the American people are too fundamentally bigoted to possibly accept? | |
| None of these premises are reconcilable because none of what they say is what they believe. | |
| And, of course, if you're a Democrat and you've been in power in the United States for 12 of the last 16 years, as they have been when it comes to the executive branch, and people are telling you we think the country is radically off track, of course they want to blame the voters. | |
| They don't want to say, wait, what have we done that have made people's lives so miserable that they hate us so much? | |
| No, it's not a reflection on us at all. | |
| It's a reflection on them. | |
| These ordinary people, these voters who didn't do what they're told. | |
| And they'll just not even reconcile any of that with the fact that millions and millions of black people and Latinos and women and other marginalized groups voted for Donald Trump and not for the Democratic Party. | |
| Now, one of the people who tried to at least confront What was wrong with the Democrats as opposed to what was wrong with the voters was Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont. | |
| And he posted a pretty scathing letter about the Democratic Party. | |
| This was on November 6, rather, so the day after the election. | |
| And his tweet said, quote, And he posted this letter, | |
| and I'll just read some of it because I think it is a... | |
| Quite valid critique of the Democratic Party. | |
| Now, I should say here that Bernie Sanders is not a credible messenger to deliver this critique. | |
| He has spent the last four years insisting that Joe Biden is the most progressive, the most pro-working class president since FDR. | |
| And he was insisting that everyone do everything possible to reelect Joe Biden because he was so pro-working class. | |
| And in the minute Democrats lose, he wants to turn around and say, of course, the working class abandoned the Democratic Party when Democrats abandoned the working class. | |
| What happened to everything he was saying about Biden over the last four years? | |
| But leave aside the messenger. | |
| The message itself, after he wrote that, he continued, quote, today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. | |
| And we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before, unfortunately. | |
| Unbelievably, real inflation accounted for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago. | |
| And then you look at who represents the Democratic Party. | |
| Multi, multi-millionaires like Hillary and Bill Clinton. | |
| Barack and Michelle Obama with their gigantic estates on Martha's Vineyard. | |
| And then you have Kamala Harris who just constantly looks like she just got out of a board meeting of some Fortune 500 company. | |
| She's like the general counsel of a health insurance company. | |
| That's what she gives off. | |
| And that is the image of the Democratic Party, and it's not just their image, it's their policies as well. | |
| They're the ones sending billions and billions of dollars over to Ukraine and billions and billions of dollars to finance the war in Gaza and allowing people's neighborhoods and people's economic situation to crumble. | |
| And I think Bernie Sanders is right, at least to the extent he deserves credit for saying, let's look at what's wrong with us, not what's wrong with the American voters. | |
| One major symbol of the Democratic Party is Nancy Pelosi, who's extremely wealthy, one of the richest members of Congress. | |
| She has displayed extraordinary skills in stock trading with her husband. | |
| I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that she has inside knowledge as a top member of Congress. | |
| They call her Speaker Emerita. | |
| They made a little title for her, just for her. | |
| She's not the Speaker of the House anymore, but she's Speaker Emerita. | |
| And she was interviewed by the New York Times over the weekend and one of the questions they asked her about, one of the questions they asked her was what was her response to Bernie Sanders critique and You can feel all of the energy Nancy Pelosi is using to suppress and constrain the hatred and rage she feels for what Bernie Sanders said about the Democratic Party because the last thing Nancy Pelosi wants to hear is that American workers abandoned the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party | |
| abandoned the working class. | |
| Obviously that's a direct indictment of her as well since she's played such a vital leadership role in the Democratic Party for so many years and here's how she responded. | |
| I want to pick up on this working class issue because in a statement after the election, Senator Bernie Sanders said it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party, which has abandoned working class people, would find that working class people have abandoned them. | |
| And Joe Manchin, who's now an independent but was an important moderate Democrat for years, Also weighed in and had a similar diagnosis of what went wrong. | |
| And that was that the party doesn't stand for what it used to. | |
| Well, I just completely disagree. | |
| And in fact, might notice that Kamala Harris ran ahead of Bernie Sanders in Vermont. | |
| So what does that tell you? | |
| It tells you that the fact is that what we do, what our purpose is in the Democratic Party, is for America's working families. | |
| So why did voters... | |
| Go ask Bernie Sanders. | |
| Bernie Sanders has not won... | |
| With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don't respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class families. | |
| That's where we are. | |
| I mean, they just, they cannot, they're constitutionally incapable of acknowledging any flaws in themselves whatsoever. | |
| Even after they lose to Donald Trump for the second time in eight years. | |
| And they have an extraordinary migration of their most loyal voting base with the acceptance of black women who remain quite loyal to the Democratic Party and American Jews who also remain quite loyal to the Democratic Party. | |
| Otherwise, they had a gigantic migration of almost every demographic group over to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and after that, when working-class voters ditched the Democratic Party, they still can't accept that they're not a party that is speaking to those people's interests, speaking their language, speaking about or understanding what it is that they're experiencing in their lives. | |
| There is a Never Trump... | |
| Website called The Dispatch. | |
| It's very similar to The Bulwark, which is a Bill Kristol site. | |
| And these kind of never-Trump people, who are now fully Democrats, they used to be Republicans, neocons primarily, they have a particular contempt for the American people, especially when they don't do what they're told. | |
| And there's an extremely contemptuous article that was published on November 6th by a writer at this And again, these are never Trump people like Jonah Goldberg and those types at the dispatch. | |
| And he used to write under the name Alapundit way back at the emergence of Boggs in the early 2000s. | |
| He was a very vehement supporter of George Bush and Dick Cheney in the War on Terror. | |
| Never really changed, but decided that Donald Trump was this despicable figure, is now a Democrat. | |
| And his whole explanation for the election outcome is that Americans are too broken, too unworthy to have voted for Kamala Harris. | |
| Here's the title of the article, quote, you broke it, you bought it. | |
| The consolations of a Trump victory. | |
| And here's what's just part of what he wrote. | |
| It just drips with condescension and scorn, not about the Democratic Party and their ideology or the state of American life economically, but about the voter. | |
| Quote, re-electing Donald Trump after January 6th is the greatest dereliction of civic duty by the electorate in the history of the United States. | |
| We'll pay for it in years to come, over and over, sometimes in grotesque ways. | |
| Without exaggeration, the country that you and I knew no longer exists. | |
| But humans are vain even in their bleakest moments, so indulge a pundit in his vanity My strongest political conviction in middle age is that Americans are contemptible. | |
| And I think this is... | |
| He deserves credit for being so candid in his conviction because I think everything that we've heard up until now, all of the attempts to... | |
| Malign Americans as racist and misogynistic, as stupid and filled with disinformation, as not understanding all the reasons they ought to be grateful to Democrats, not angry at them. | |
| All of that was based on this premise, that only he was candid enough to write, My strongest political conviction in middle age is that Americans are contemptible. | |
| Not all of them, box-checked, and certainly not always or even often in their personal behavior, but if there's anything that ties the last 26 months of this newsletter together, it's that we the people as a political community are immoral, unserious about governing ourselves, and undeserving of our constitutional bequest. | |
| There is no, quote, Trump problem, and there has never been. | |
| There's only a voter problem. | |
| The lesson of this election is that the American people aren't worthy of their constitution. | |
| Trump's re-election means the end of the Pax Americana. | |
| He may or may not recall U.S. troops from Europe and the Far East, but the era of U.S. allies depending on a mayor's commitment to Western liberalism is plainly over. | |
| And that era won't return after Trump leaves office. | |
| NATO countries would be insane to ever again bet on the good sense of the American voter. | |
| So because American voters don't want to continue to fight these endless wars, they don't want to support a neoconservative agenda, they want to keep American money at home to improve their lives and their families and their communities, these are despicably stupid, amoral, and unserious people who are not worthy of the constitutional bequest that they've received. | |
| This was an article promoted by Bill Kristol, arguably one of the most influential people in American liberal politics in the Democratic Party as well. | |
| This really is what they think. | |
| You either do what you're told and vote how we tell you, or we're going to conclude that you're terrible people. | |
| You're stupid. | |
| You're malicious. | |
| You're not worthy of what we gave you. | |
| And that is the worldview of the American ruling class about everybody outside of it. | |
| Now one of the positives that has come from this election is that in the attempt to grope around for some kind of a explanation or an exculpation of these ruling class institutions, they're starting to recognize finally How little influence they have over increasingly large numbers of the American public. | |
| Imagine that you are an MSNBC host or a New York Times op-ed and every day you wake up and you write the same article, Trump is a fascist, Trump is a racist, Trump is the new Hitler, Trump's going to destroy our country, Trump is a rapist, whatever. | |
| All those things that they've been saying every day for eight years. | |
| He's a white supremacist, a white nationalist. | |
| And then you just wake up and you see a huge portion of the country went and voted for the person that you've been obsessively rallying against for eight years on what you thought were the biggest and most influential platforms in the United States. | |
| Obviously, you have to start wondering, wait a minute. | |
| It looks like Americans don't really listen to what I say. | |
| Either they listen and they don't believe it or trust it, or they just don't listen at all. | |
| So who are they listening to then? | |
| Of course, that's what they're finally being forced to grapple with. | |
| Here from Semaphore, which is a new-ish media organization that tries to, I think, cast a more objective or critical eye on what they call old media. | |
| Here is a title, A Tale of Two Jets, The Old Media Grapples With Its New Limits. | |
| Quote, Trump's victory isn't a result of a failure by news outlets to sufficiently hold them accountable. | |
| The real answer is one that is a lot more uncomfortable to grapple with. | |
| The national news media is more limited in its reach and influence than ever in the modern era. | |
| For the third presidential contest in a row, the legacy news media represented by newspapers, televisions, networks, magazines, and cable news networks spent months publishing and airing neutral to overwhelmingly negative stories. | |
| Let's say spent months publishing and airing overwhelmingly negative stories, coverage of the former president. | |
| And for the second of those three instances, the majority of American voters largely ignored the implicit and explicit warnings of that coverage if they saw it at all and voted Trump into office. | |
| There's no way that the media can ignore any longer How contemptible they've become, how distrusted they've become, how limited is their relevance in the eyes of the American people who they used to have a monopoly on how they thought and the information that they received. | |
| And that's why another excuse has been, oh, the problem is that the American right built this This message, this big machine of disinformation, millions of people listen to the podcast that we can't control, that just spew disinformation all the time, and the problem is that we don't have our own outlets, as if the entire corporate media isn't the pro-Democratic Party outlet. | |
| Here is, on MSNBC, We're going to be really blunt. | |
| We're going to be real about why Kamala Harris lost the election. | |
| Here was an attempt, and the op-ed that they were basing their coverage around was won by Frank Bruni in the New York Times entitled Democrats. | |
| Let's get real about why Harris lost. | |
| Let's get really down into the dirt. | |
| Let's get rid of any excuses. | |
| Let's get really candid about why we lost. | |
| This is the MSNBC explanation for why Kamala Harris lost. | |
| Jim VandeHei, I want to go back to something Derek Johnson, the head of the NAACP, said a few minutes ago on this show, because you've always been sort of the leading edge of where media is going with Politico, now with Axios. | |
| You understand the environment so well. | |
| How do Democrats, and frankly, how does legacy media need to change the way it thinks about getting information? | |
| I mean, a lot of the voters who went out and voted for Donald Trump that So many people are wondering what happened here. | |
| They're not watching, frankly, this show. | |
| They're not reading the New York Times. | |
| They're not consuming media that way. | |
| And the Trump campaign found those voters where they live. | |
| So how do Democrats need to change the way they communicate to voters if you think that's part of the problem? | |
| I mean, that is, again, that is a commendable admission, which they're almost forced to confront, finally. | |
| This is a fact that has been obvious for a long time. | |
| I don't know how many times I've said it over the last eight years, that because of their lying, because of their chronic partisanship, because of their willingness to manipulate the public, their belief that their mission is not journalistic but political, their inability to have anything that has any touchstone to the lives of most people, the complete lack of class diversity, people have just tuned these media outlets out. | |
| I mean, the numbers show it. | |
| And voting patterns do as well. | |
| Nobody listens to them. | |
| Other than American partisan Democrats who are going to vote for Democrats anyway. | |
| And that's what they're finally realizing. | |
| Hey, wait. | |
| Looks like we have this network that we like to think is so influential. | |
| It's NBC News after all. | |
| We don't seem to really matter at all. | |
| And here's what Jim van der Heij, the former founder of Politico and now at Axios, had to say. | |
| For sure. | |
| I mean, I think all of us have to come to grips with legacy. | |
| Media is just not as important as it thinks it is. | |
| It is to you. | |
| It is to me. | |
| That's a relatively small group of people who rely on us for their information. | |
| And you have to go into the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. | |
| And basically, the way people get information has shattered into 20, 30 different pieces. | |
| And so if you just look empirically at the numbers, Joe Rogan's more important than any of us. | |
| He just has a much bigger, hyper-connected audience that listens to his every word. | |
| So maybe listen to Joe Rogan and kind of understand, like, what is he talking about? | |
| What are the guests that he has on? | |
| What are the issues that they care about? | |
| Realize that the gravity of right-wing discourse is now taking place on X. It's not Fox. | |
| X is what matters. | |
| Elon Musk is now, I wrote about this yesterday, arguably the most powerful civilian in the history of the country. | |
| He controls information flow. | |
| He controls multiple businesses. | |
| He has the president's ear. | |
| He's going to be in charge of some newfangled organization to gut... | |
| Government spending. | |
| We've not seen a person with that kind of clout across those sectors. | |
| But where his real power comes from is X. People thought he was an idiot when he bought X because he lost a lot of money. | |
| He's got a lot of money. | |
| And now he happens to have the most powerful platform on the right. | |
| And politics is downstream from information. | |
| And there's just a whole new information ecosystem out there. | |
| So for us, for you, for Democrats, for Republicans, you have to understand that you now are going to have to basically navigate 20 or 30 different parts of the ecosystem if you want to connect with the American people who vote. | |
| I mean, what's missing again from any of that discussion that you will never hear, at least there's an acknowledgment. | |
| That they've lost their audience, they've lost their relevance, they've lost their influence, they've lost their credibility. | |
| They'll never ask why. | |
| It's like the Democrats trying to ask, why did we lose to Donald Trump again? | |
| They cannot engage in any self-criticism or self-reflection. | |
| So there's no part of this discussion about what they did to drive everybody into independent media and into podcasts and no longer believe what they were doing. | |
| And the reality is that Joe Rogan became extremely popular because he doesn't have a fixed ideology. | |
| He doesn't have a partisan loyalty. | |
| He's open to hearing whatever, and he doesn't usually talk about politics at all. | |
| So it replicates how human beings communicate. | |
| He sits down at the table with somebody. | |
| That's what he was saying why he wanted to interview Kamala Harris. | |
| He wasn't going to badger her on policy views. | |
| That's not what he does. | |
| He was like, I just want to sit down and have a long conversation in order to learn who she is. | |
| That's why that show became popular, because people don't feel like they're constantly being twisted and manipulated and lied to. | |
| And Joe Rogan is far from some right-wing ideologue. | |
| He endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020. | |
| He loved Tulsi Gabbard in that same race. | |
| He's a vehement, outspoken defender of same-sex marriage and opposed to the U.S. military-industrial complex, believed that corporate power is constantly suffocating the individual economic lives of people. | |
| He's very pro-choice. | |
| So this attempt to kind of put him now in this corner that he's just part of this right-wing ecosystem is itself just a complete lack of understanding about why they've lost so much influence. | |
| Here is their view of what Joe Rogan is and how they can start to compete with him. | |
| This is one of these people who is put on because he just accuses everybody of being racist all the time. | |
| That's basically his entire worldview. | |
| Here he is on Morning Joe explaining what the Joe Rogan universe is. | |
| Particularly the media ecosystem. | |
| It's not a good one. | |
| It's a negative one. | |
| It's a radicalization funnel. | |
| But what they have done in their online media ecosystem is build a radicalization engine, literally the way militant groups do around the world, that takes people... | |
| From relatively low-level annoyances with the world. | |
| Why are eggs so expensive? | |
| Why is my kid learning this new thing in American history in school that I didn't learn? | |
| And then moves them through YouTube videos, through podcasts, moves them from that annoyance all the way slowly, slowly, slowly to a full-blown fascist politics. | |
| Notice there how he says, very dismissively, that people's inability to buy groceries, to feel like they're not able to keep their heads above water, is just a little annoyance. | |
| It's just a little annoyance. | |
| and then these shows come around and make them think it's way worse than it really is and get them angry and direct them into fascism. | |
| It's an elaborate multi-billion dollar infrastructure and there is nothing like it on the pro-democracy side. | |
| We don't have an, when a man is just lost and lonely and not yet radicalized, we don't have the equivalent of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to move that man in a feminist direction. | |
| By the way, we should educate men that it's actually really great to live with a strong woman who makes money. | |
| It's actually easier. | |
| Life is easier. | |
| But I think... | |
| Just take a moment to think about how self-delusional these people are. | |
| He's saying we don't have a Joe Rogan. | |
| Joe Rogan is a comedian. | |
| He was the former host of Fear Factor. | |
| He's not some huge network that was funded by the Koch brothers. | |
| His show just grew organically in popularity. | |
| He's been at it for more than 10 years. | |
| Just sitting around, laughing, being goofy, occasionally having political conversations, trying to keep an open mind about things. | |
| That's why Joe Rogan's platform grew. | |
| It's not some multi-billion dollar funded right wing ecosystem. | |
| And then they're like, we don't have that. | |
| They're sitting on NBC News, a gigantic corporate conglomerate owned and controlled by people with billions of dollars. | |
| They're the ones who already have this gigantic billion-dollar ecosystem of information dissemination. | |
| They already have it, the, quote, pro-democracy side, the pro-Kamala Harris side. | |
| And they want to act like, oh, we're just, like, relegated to standing on a soapbox, like a cardboard box on the corner of Ranting and raving while Joe Rogan and all these right-wingers have this massive funded system. | |
| And that's why we lost because we can't reach people because they're listening to them. | |
| They have platforms. | |
| They have gigantic platforms. | |
| They squander the trust of those platforms and they have no more power in them because people turn them off in order to go listen to people they trust more like Joe Rogan. | |
| Here is a similar discussion from someone named Laura Baron-Lopez on CNN who tries to explain, there you see the chyron on the screen, Democrats point fingers as they reckon with Trump's win. | |
| Here's her explanation of the role of this information ecosystem and why Kamala Harris lost. | |
| And so one thing that I think stands out also, we can't have this conversation, a little bit to your point, Dana, is that maybe it's not so much Democrats' policies or messaging or the words that they use specifically, but there is an entire right-wing media ecosystem that doesn't exist on the left. | |
| It does not exist in the center or mainstream, and people are getting their information. | |
| What do they think they are? | |
| What do they think they are? | |
| There's a whole right-wing ecosystem of information that does not exist on the left, does not exist on the center, and they're like, absolutely. | |
| This is CNN, one of the largest media corporations on the planet. | |
| They're all pro-Kamala. | |
| They're all anti-Trump. | |
| They've been spouting it for years. | |
| And they're living in some fantasy world where they're just poor, like a little poor strapped NGO with no funding, unlike Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn and right-wing podcasts. | |
| These people are the ones in control of the most powerful and best-funded media corporations on the planet. | |
| They do have an ecosystem that people don't listen to because they've deservedly lost the faith and trust that people used to. | |
| It does not exist in the center or mainstream and people are getting their information in very different ways now and Donald Trump and Republicans and Elon Musk and Joe Rogan know exactly how to reach Americans where they are regardless of age and demographic and that played a big role in this because of the fact of like that whether it was disinformation, | |
| misinformation or different propaganda that they were feeding to the American public that made them feel the way they did and that and the American public felt as though that That they were being heard by Donald Trump. | |
| Now, at the end of the day, The one thing that none of these people are doing is actually listening to the voters themselves. | |
| And there's obviously a good reason for that, which is that the voters, what they have to say for themselves about why they voted for Trump is completely antithetical to the narrative they're trying to create. | |
| Before I get to that, though, I just want to observe one thing that I find unbelievably disturbing about what American liberals have been doing in the wake of this election. | |
| There has been a lot of talk About whether people who supported Kamala Harris should have anything to do with family members, parents, siblings, children who supported Donald Trump. | |
| And there is a very non-trivial Attempt to start encouraging people, and this has been going on since before this election, but it's really happening in earnest now, encouraging people to cut off ties with their family members, even their spouses, if those family members voted for Donald Trump. | |
| One of the biggest proponents of this is the MSNBC host Joy Reid, who obviously, in case you're wondering, believes that racism and misogyny are the explanations for why Kamala Harris lost. | |
| I know that's a great surprise. | |
| But she had on a clinical psychologist to explain and encourage people to cut off all personal ties with friends and family members who voted for Donald Trump. | |
| A challenge with the idea of how you interact with people who you know voted for this, right? | |
| If you are an LGBTQ person and you know someone in your family voted essentially against your rights or you're a woman knowing that, you know, this man was calling people the B word. | |
| J.D. Vance was literally calling Kamala Harris the trash and said we're going to take out the trash. | |
| I know a lot of black women were incredibly triggered by that. | |
| And if you meet somebody and you know they voted for the people who called you trash or if you're Puerto Rican and you know someone voted that way, Do you recommend, just from a psychological standpoint, being around them? | |
| We've got the holidays coming up. | |
| So I love that you asked this question because, you know, there is a push, I think just a societal norm, that if somebody is your family, they are entitled to your time. | |
| And I think the answer is absolutely not. | |
| So if you are going to a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you, like what you said, against your livelihood, And it's completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why. | |
| You know, to say, I have a problem with the way that you voted because it went against my very livelihood and I'm not going to be around you this holiday. | |
| I need to take some space for me. | |
| And I actually... | |
| She's on the Yale faculty, by the way, that clinical psychologist. | |
| And I can show you all sorts of examples of think pieces and cable news shows, social media posts where liberals are saying, Democrats are saying, get rid of, get out of any relationship you have with people who voted for Donald Trump, even if they're your parents, even if they're your siblings. | |
| And there are a lot of people's kids who are saying to them, I'll never talk to you again because you voted for Donald Trump. | |
| That is evil. | |
| That is cult behavior. | |
| That's what cults do. | |
| Cults say anyone who is not inside our program are people who you have to have no contact with. | |
| You cut off all connection with them because they don't see the truth of our cult. | |
| Anything that encourages people to cut off contact with their family members, other than things like pedophilia or child abuse or something really grave that requires domestic violence, but anything that encourages families to break up, people to cut but anything that encourages families to break up, people to cut off contacts with their loved ones, with their closest relatives, their immediate family members, their spouses, their friends, over political differences, that is a sick and twisted | |
| That is proof that these people have no religion, they believe, but politics has become their religion. | |
| Not just politics, but politics in the most, but in all ways, just partisan differences. | |
| Like, oh, you wouldn't vote for Kamala Harris and now you're not worthy in my life? | |
| Now, as I said, the best way to understand why people actually voted is to go and talk to them, to ask them, oh, why did you vote for Donald Trump? | |
| AP News did that with young black and Latino men and here's what they found. | |
| Quote, young black and Latino men said they chose Trump because of the economy and jobs. | |
| Here's how and why. | |
| Quote, Brian Leija, a 31-year-old small business owner from Belton, Texas, was not surprised that a growing number of Latino men of his generation voted for Donald Trump for president this year. | |
| Elijah had voted for the Republican in 2016 and 2020. | |
| His rationale was simple. | |
| He said he had benefited from Trump's economic policies, especially tax cuts. | |
| Quote, For Deshaun Galashaw, a consultant in Fairfax, Virginia, a vote for Trump was rooted in what he saw as Democrats' rhetoric not matching their actions. | |
| It's, quote, been a very long time since the Democrats ever really kept their promises to what they're going to do for the minority communities, he said. | |
| Galashaw, 25, who is black, also voted for Trump twice before. | |
| This year, he said, he thought the former president's, quote, minority community outreach really showed up. | |
| Trump gained a larger share of black and Latino voters than he did in 2020 when he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and most notably among men under age 45, according to an AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters. | |
| Voters overall cited the economy and jobs as the most important issue that the country faced. | |
| That was true of black and Hispanic voters as well. | |
| About 3 out of 10 black men under age 45 voted for Trump, roughly double the share he got in 2020. | |
| Young Latinos, particularly young Latino men, also were more open to Trump than in 2020. | |
| Roughly half of young Latino men voted for Harris, compared with about 6 in 10 who went for Biden. | |
| Juan Prauno, CEO of LULAC, the nation's largest and oldest civil rights organization for Hispanic Americans, said the election results have made it clear that Trump's messaging on the economy resonated with Latinos. | |
| So you can just go to these people and say, you're a young black man, you're a young Latino man, why did you vote for Donald Trump and not Colin Harris? | |
| And they'll explain in very informed, specific, and cogent ways. | |
| Why their vote was based on their economic interests and why they believe the Democratic Party no longer serves their interests. | |
| And then the people who go on TV who have no contact with people like that, yet purport to speak for them, will say, oh no, it's because they're misogynists, they're racists, they're not ready for a black woman. | |
| That, of course, is what Barack Obama told black men who were thinking about voting for Donald Trump. | |
| Now here's the data that we have here from The Economist. | |
| Five charts that show how Trump won the election. | |
| Let's look at this first one. | |
| And what you can see here is this is Latino voters comparing them from 2020 to 2024. | |
| And what you see here is that every single category of Latino voters, every one, moved in the direction of Of Donald Trump. | |
| This is whether they became more blue or more red. | |
| From the 2020 election to the 2024 election. | |
| So you have the media constantly claiming that Donald Trump is a white supremacist, white nationalist, fascist, Hitler figure. | |
| And yet you have Latinos in large numbers in every group. | |
| Men and women. | |
| More men than women. | |
| Young men. | |
| Latino men particularly, but then 30 to 44, 45 to 65, and 65 and over. | |
| Also, all groups who became more pro-Trump, ones with a college degree, ones with a non-college degree, moved toward Trump. | |
| Urban, suburban, rural, all moved in the direction of Donald Trump. | |
| These exit polls are somewhat reliable. | |
| They'll be more reliable with more time. | |
| But here's one of the ones that I'm not sure if he still is, but he's in mainstream journalism, and he cited this poll, this data, about who voted for Kamala Harris and who voted for Donald Trump. | |
| White men overwhelmingly voted for Trump, 60% to 39%. | |
| Black men Here you see 25%, 24% voted for Trump. | |
| That's what I was saying earlier. | |
| One out of every four black men who voted in the United States voted for Donald Trump. | |
| Latino men, basically 50-50. | |
| White women, we were told that, oh, women are going to rise up against Donald Trump. | |
| 53% have voted them for Trump. | |
| Black women, as I said, the one constituency that stayed very loyal to the Democratic Party, but still 10% of them, of black women, voted for Trump. | |
| And the Latina woman, he had 60% for Harris and 38% for Trump. | |
| It's very hard with data like that. | |
| These are tens of millions of people to say that it was because of white supremacy and misogyny. | |
| One of the things that I think has been very overlooked in the media discourse and also in the Democratic Party explanation has been the voting behavior of younger voters, of Gen Z. When Kamala Harris was first announced, there was supposedly so much excitement about her. | |
| She was part of Brat Summer. | |
| She was Brat. | |
| There were all these parties and clubs and college campuses celebrating her iconic status. | |
| And yet one of the problems all along for Democrats was that they were going to lose two constituencies on which they really did rely and do rely to win elections. | |
| One is young voters, the other is Muslim and Arab voters because of the support given by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the unconditional, unlimited, ongoing support of having the U.S. pay for and arm the Israeli destruction of Gaza and now in Lebanon. | |
| And when young voters got to see the reality of the Democratic Party instead of the branding, a lot of them either voted for Trump or just stayed home. | |
| Hear from The Guardian November 8th, quote, a big cratering, an expert on Gen Z surprise votes, and young women's growing support for Trump. | |
| Quote, as a whole, Kamala Harris won voters between the ages of 18 and 29 by six points. | |
| The preliminary exit polling indicates that Donald Trump opened up a 16-point gender gap between young men and young women. | |
| 56% of young men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump, while just 40% of their female peers did so. | |
| Even more surprisingly, Trump managed to improve on his 2020 performance among young women despite that gap. | |
| In 2020, only 33% of young women voted for him. | |
| Earlier in the campaign, polling indicated that abortion was the top issue for women under 30. | |
| Other surveys also found that young women have veered to the left, becoming by some measure the most progressive cohort ever measured in U.S. history. | |
| But many did not vote like it. | |
| In fact, many appeared not to vote at all. | |
| Early estimates show that only 42% of young people turned out to vote. | |
| That's less than in the 2020 election. | |
| Abortion really dropped as being the most salient issue for younger people. | |
| I think that was the most surprising to me. | |
| By and large, it was the economy. | |
| For Gen Z voters who care about the economy, they really broke for Donald Trump. | |
| Where in any of these autopsies of Democratic Party operatives or analysts or media personalities in an attempt to explain the election was an attempt to look at the Democratic Party's foreign policy of fueling endless war in Ukraine, sending billions and billions of dollars to Israel. | |
| And obviously younger voters are overwhelmingly opposed, especially to the destruction of Gaza. | |
| And it caused a lot of them either to stay home or to vote for Donald Trump. | |
| And you also had a lot of Arab and Muslim voters, in fact, a majority who refused to vote for Kamala Harris in places like Michigan and even throughout the whole country. | |
| If you're a Democrat and you actually want to figure out why you lost this election, there's a mountain Of behaviors that you've undertaken, a huge amount of ideologies and policies that you've supported, the entire infrastructure of your party that you could examine and should examine, but that isn't what they're doing. | |
| All they're interested in is what American political media elites are interested in after every single catastrophic failure for which they're responsible. | |
| Ensuring that they, and therefore other people, believe that they are blameless And that the fault lies with the inferior people, the people who are too stupid, too blinkered by racism and misogyny, to have done what they're told. | |
| And as we go on, that is becoming more and more the entrenched narrative of American liberalism. | |
| And I hope on some level that they continue that, to just continuously tell voters, the reason we lost isn't because we failed you. | |
| It's because you're too bigoted, you're too stupid, you're too drowning in right-wing disinformation to understand how great we are and to appreciate all the things we're doing for you. | |
| Speaking of people drowning in disinformation, one of the best things that you can do for yourself, even as you get older, I would say, especially as you get older, is make sure that you're continuing to exercise your brain muscles, that is make sure that you're continuing to exercise your brain muscles, that you continue to It's never too late to start studying, even formally, history, economics, the great works of literature, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. | |
| Maybe you didn't study those things in school, even if you did. | |
| It's probably a long time ago for a lot of you. | |
| It's difficult to remember. | |
| Time and technology have changed a lot of things, but they have not changed basic fundamental truths about the world and our place in it. | |
| That's why I'm always excited that Hillsdale College is one of our longest sponsors, and it's offering more than 43 online courses in the most important and enduring subjects. | |
| You can learn about the works of C.S. Lewis, the stories in the book of Genesis, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian church, all with Eldale College's online courses, all available for free. | |
| I personally would hope that people sign up for things like Marxism, socialism, and communism, or Constitution 101. | |
| These are online courses unlike anything Hillsdale has produced before. | |
| Over the course of six documentary style episodes, you'll hear from Hillsdale professors of history, politics and economics. | |
| For example, it's a book that marks his life in writing. | |
| The reality of the Soviet Union, how things are in Communist China, the proliferation of the cultural prongs that have come out of that as well. | |
| Maybe you'll disagree with them, maybe you'll agree with them, but you'll be reading tacks that tell you the actual formal It's really vital that we take these ideas and historical figures seriously so that we can see either the justice in them or the injustice in them, and you're better equipped to engage in these issues and defeat the ideas that you really dislike. | |
| You can go right now to hillsdale.edu slash Glenn to enroll. | |
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| MrHillisdale.edu/Glenn. | |
| So there have been, there's been a lot of questions and a lot of confusion now that Donald Trump has won about what this second Trump administration is going to look like. | |
| Will it be similar to the first Trump administration that was beset by all sorts of factional infighting, by people who were able to burrow their way into the Trump administration, even though they were clearly there to sabotage and undermine what Donald Trump said his agenda was? | |
| They were really impeded by all sorts of media scandals that they had to constantly attend to. | |
| And as a result, I think there was a lot of ideological incoherence in Donald Trump's administration, both in terms of economic policy and foreign policy. | |
| Remember, for example, that the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump's was very oriented toward economic populism. | |
| Steve Bannon's plan was, let's get into office, raise taxes on the rich. | |
| Then do a bipartisan infrastructure bill to create jobs and then build a wall. | |
| And instead, the first thing Donald Trump did was not anything remotely populous, but anti-populous, which was cut taxes on very large corporations. | |
| So, there was always this kind of tension between things that Trump clearly believed and things that the Trump administration did, and a lot of the explanation was, well, look, there's just certain, you need time to understand how Washington works, and if you don't have that, you'll get thwarted and defeated and subverted by a lot of the permanent power factions in Washington, the administrative state, the U.S. security state. | |
| And so a lot of Donald Trump's promises about what the second administration would be was that it would not be driven by neoconservatives or interventionists or warmongers of the kind that Donald Trump has long railed against. | |
| And there was a lot of concern over the last several weeks that people like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, who embody that ideology, would be part of his administration. | |
| And in response to those concerns, Trump announced, and obviously in general, you don't announce who won't be part of your administration, but Trump decided to try and signal to his base... | |
| That he would not be going in that direction again, and he said the following, quote, I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to join the Trump administration, which is currently in formation. | |
| I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously and would like to thank them for their service to our country. | |
| Make America great again. | |
| Now, that came after Ben Shapiro went on the Free Press a couple of weeks ago and basically... | |
| He said that he was certain that Mike Pompeo was going to be part of the Trump administration and that gave Ben Shapiro a lot of comfort because Mike Pompeo has a similar foreign policy to Ben Shapiro when it comes to wars, interventions and especially Israel. | |
| Here's what Ben Shapiro said. | |
| From a policy perspective, do you think a Harris administration would be better on Israel than a Trump administration? | |
| I do, because it would be staffed by sane people. | |
| And what we have... | |
| Again, do you want Mr. | |
| Pillow Guy in the conversation with Mike Flynn and who? | |
| Candace Owens? | |
| Who's going to be in there? | |
| Jack Posobiec? | |
| No, I mean, on his Israel policy, Mike Pompeo and David Friedman are the most likely people to be in the administration. | |
| And on Kamala Harris' side, it's most likely to be Philip Gordon. | |
| He is surrounded by grifters and maniacs. | |
| Sam, I know precisely the people talking to him. | |
| So, I'm not speculating about that. | |
| Alright, so, Ben Shapiro strongly suggested that Mike Pompeo was going to be part of the administration. | |
| I think Trump, for whatever reasons, said to preempt this concern, okay, they're not going to be part of my administration. | |
| Now, that was taken as a fairly positive sign by a lot of people concerned about the infiltration of warmongers and neoconservatives into the Trump administration that he was going to be making an effort to keep such people out. | |
| And in response to that, Dave Smith, who I think has become one of the most incisive political commentators, said the following, quote, The Stop Pompeo Movement is great, but it's not enough. | |
| Right now we need maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration. | |
| They have had their time at the table and brought nothing but disaster to the world and to this country. | |
| And above that, Donald Trump Jr., who by all accounts, and my information as well, is exercising more influence than he previously ever has. | |
| And I think he's one of the people in Trump's most inner circle most opposed to these kinds of neocons and to these kinds of war hawks. | |
| In response to Dave Smith saying, stopping Pompeo is not enough, We have to stop all people like that from getting into Trump's administration. | |
| Donald Trump said, I'm agreeing, agreed 100%, 100%, I'm on it. | |
| Basically saying, look, I agree with you, and these are not going to be the kind of people who were, who are going to be in the administration. | |
| Now, in response to Trump's announcement, That neither Mike Pompeo nor Nikki Haley would be in his administration. | |
| The Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which is very aligned with the Bush-Cheney Republican establishment foreign policy, had a conniption, a sort of fit. | |
| And they editorialized as follows on November 10th, quote, Don Jr. | |
| and his allies veto Nikki Haley and the former Secretary of State for the Cabinet. | |
| They don't want competition for J.D. Vance in 2028. | |
| Quote, They'd like to block anyone who might challenge Mr. | |
| Vance from gaining stature by holding a cabinet position in the second Trump term. | |
| Now that's the speculative gossip. | |
| Here's the key. | |
| Quote, The Don Jr. | |
| crowd and Mr. | |
| Vance want to pull back from some of those commitments. | |
| One online MAGA acolyte, which is Dave Smith, whose name they didn't want to use, tweeted Sunday what we just showed you. | |
| The Stomp Papéo movement is great, but right now it's not enough. | |
| We have to keep maximum pressure to keep all the neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration. | |
| Don Jr. | |
| retweeted his assent. | |
| Agree 100%. | |
| I'm on it. | |
| We told you before the election that Don Jr. | |
| was emerging as an inside power player, but we wonder if his father likes this boasting that the kid is telling dad what to do. | |
| Obviously trying to provoke Trump. | |
| To not listen to Don Jr. | |
| anymore when he says keep neocons out. | |
| It isn't clear where the president-elect will come out on all of this and the cabinet choices he does make will tell us more. | |
| But the ban on Mr. | |
| Pompeo who would have made a fine defense secretary and Arkansas defense hawk Tom Cotton's declaration that he wants to remain in the Senate aren't favorable signs for Trump's foreign policy. | |
| In other words, they are favorable signs for Trump's foreign policy. | |
| They signal that Donald Trump He's trying to avoid the infiltration of neocons and warmongers in his cabinet. | |
| That's what it seemed like as of December 10th when he announced that preemptive banning of Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo. | |
| What then happened, though, was that Trump began announcing more appointees to his national security team. | |
| And in many ways, it went in the exact opposite direction. | |
| It started including people whose foreign policy views are basically indistinguishable from Mike Pompeo's and Nikki Haley's. | |
| In fact, the position that Nikki Haley occupied in the first Trump term, which was U.S. ambassador to the U.N., is now going to be filled by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. | |
| As the New York Times reported yesterday, Trump offers Elise Stefanik a role as U.N. ambassador. | |
| Quote, Ms. Stefanik, who represents an upstate New York district in the House and is a member of the Republican leadership in the chamber, has been a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump. | |
| She has been an outspoken supporter of Israel and had a high profile role in the congressional hearings that led to the resignation of several university presidents over their handling of campus unrest following the terror attack by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. | |
| In a statement, Mr. | |
| Trump called her a, quote, strong, tough, and smart America first fighter. | |
| And she's a vocal supporter of the U.S. war on Ukraine and She tried to, right before the election, kind of give a signal that she was trying to wield in, rein in some of the unlimited spending, but she has a worldview that is very aligned with Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo. | |
| So it's good that Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley are banned, but the fact that Elise Stefanik, who's probably, well definitely is much of a supporter of Israel's How significant was the ban on Nikki Haley? | |
| Right before we went on air, just a few minutes before we did, Trump announced his choice for national security advisor, which is obviously an important position. | |
| That is a person who advises Donald Trump on national security matters as his top national security advisor in the White House. | |
| And for that position, he chose Congressman Mike Welts of Florida. | |
| Who was a former Green Beret who was deployed in Iraq. | |
| And he has a very hawkish and hardline view on things like supporting the U.S. war in Ukraine. | |
| In fact, his criticism has been that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris hadn't done enough. | |
| He's also now saying things like, we have to rein in the blank check. | |
| But he is, he actually, Mike Waltz, worked with Liz Cheney to oppose Trump's plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, saying that, look, I'm sorry, I know you want to leave Afghanistan, was his view, but you have to accept this is an intergenerational war. | |
| We're there to fight terrorism, and we have to stay until we win, even if it means we stay several more decades. | |
| He's also very hawkish on China. | |
| He is a skeptic on NATO. | |
| He believes that NATO countries should be forced to spend a lot more money on their defense because it's unfair to the United States, something that Donald Trump vehemently believes. | |
| He's been a longtime Trump supporter. | |
| So Mike Walts, who is definitely not an anti-interventionist, to put it mildly, is the person who will be national security advisor. | |
| And then after we went on the air, Trump announced his choice for secretary of state. | |
| That person will be Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican of Florida. | |
| Now, as you might remember, Marco Rubio in 2016 was one of the people who ran against Donald Trump along with Jeb Bush. | |
| In fact, once Jeb Bush was dispatched, Marco Rubio became the choice of the Republican establishment, and Donald Trump frequently criticized him at the time, validly so, for being one of those neocons, for being one of those war hawks. | |
| Marco Rubio is a fanatical supporter, for example, of U.S. funding of the war in Ukraine. | |
| He's been an ardent supporter of every American intervention. | |
| He will do anything to finance and arm Israel in its war. | |
| So these last three choices are conflicting with the first two, with that ban on Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo. | |
| At the same time, J.D. Vance, who was his vice president's choice, was campaigned for by people like Donald Trump Jr. | |
| and Tucker Carlson, was a choice that signaled a more populous bent. | |
| You can find statements from J.D. Vance that are supportive of Republican foreign policy, but you can find a lot of ones that are very skeptical of it as well. | |
| And that's why neocons like the Wall Street Journal page were very angry at the choice of J.D. Vance instead of Marco Rubio for... | |
| For vice president. | |
| So I think what you have here is something that seems quite similar to me to be what shaped and drove Trump's first term as president. | |
| I don't think Trump likes to give anyone too much power to make any faction feel like they have him under their thumb. | |
| I think he enjoys putting different factions in power, giving some people some things, giving other people other things. | |
| And on some level, we can sit here and try and decipher every signal from every one of these appointees about the direction in which Trump is going. | |
| But I think what Trump has proven is that he often operates by instinct. | |
| He's not very reliable ideologically. | |
| You don't really know what Trump's going to do. | |
| So he has been very clear that he wants the war in Ukraine to be over. | |
| The only way the war in Ukraine can be over is by handing the parts of Ukraine that Russia occupies over to Russia. | |
| And there are critical people that he's now appointed in top-level national security positions, including Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio, the last three, who would be vehement opponents of doing that. | |
| The same is true for trying to end the war in Gaza or the war in Lebanon. | |
| These are a lot of people who have beaten their chest in the war drums about war in Iran. | |
| So if you're looking for a series of uniformed anti-interventionists or anti-neocons who Trump is going to select as his key national security positions, you're already going to be disappointed. | |
| Marco Rubio, Michael Waltz, Elise Stefanik do not give any comfort at all in terms of avoiding the repetition of the problems of the first administration. | |
| Donald Trump Jr.'s vow that he was trying to keep people like that out, I'm sure he tried, but clearly Marco Rubio as Secretary of State is something that's going to make every single neocon and standard Republican warmonger very happy and very comfortable with, as well as these others. | |
| We already know that Miriam Adelson has immense power in the Trump administration, this fanatical Israel supporter. | |
| Trump himself said that she and her husband Sheldon Adelson were probably the most frequent visitors to the White House in his first term. | |
| And he gave them everything on Israel, including more than what they asked for. | |
| She now has given him $100 million for his campaign and obviously expects a lot in return from that. | |
| So I'm not going to be premature and sit here and describe a Trump administration that has yet to begin. | |
| And I think one of the things that makes people in establishment institutions so uncomfortable with Trump is that he is quite unpredictable. | |
| Sometimes he will affirm and follow and align with standard D.C. foreign policy consensus and other times he'll just be ready to blow it up. | |
| But if you're looking for signals in these early appointments and these early gestures, I don't think you can find anything that you're here to say that it looks likely like Donald Trump is going to wage war against American neoconservatives or warmongers in Washington. | |
| But a lot of times the people Donald Trump appoints are not people who end up expressing the direction in which he will actually go. | |
| There will be a lot of competition, a lot of factional conflict over who will influence and drive Donald Trump. | |
| You can find people like Tucker Carlson heaping scorn on many of the people that he just named. | |
| There's no question Tucker Carlson is influential in that world. | |
| Same with Donald Trump Jr. | |
| But obviously there's a lot of people who are important to Trump and who are close to Trump, who he also listens to, who have very different views. | |
| So I think it's premature to say the Trump administration is going to be this or that, especially given the question mark that Donald Trump always is. | |
| And I think that's always been the appeal of Donald Trump. | |
| I recently heard my former Intercept colleague Jeremy Scahill, no fan of Donald Trump. | |
| I think he was quoting Seymour Hersh, saying that Trump is the only person who can be a circuit breaker. | |
| On how the D.C. bipartisan foreign policy class operates. | |
| Just through his unpredictability, through his obvious dissent from a lot of foreign policy dogma and his instincts to avoid war. | |
| But he's certainly constructing his administration with people who are in key positions, top jobs, who are ardent supporters of the foreign policy that both the Democrat and Republican establishments I'm very comfortable with culminating in the appointment of Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State. | |
| So we will obviously continue to report on this. | |
| It's one of the big concerns about what the second Trump administration would be. | |
| I think the problem is there were no question marks about what the Harris administration would be. | |
| We knew exactly what it would be. | |
| She would be just an empty vessel and servant for establishment dogma. | |
| And if that's what Trump ends up being when it comes to foreign policy... | |
| Nothing gained, nothing lost. | |
| But I think the potential is a lot higher for Trump to buckle from that and deviate from it. | |
| But there's nothing in these initial choices that suggests that that's what he's planning on doing. | |
| All right, so that concludes our show for this evening. | |
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