Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Early Wednesday morning, former President Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election. Republicans also claimed control of the Senate and the tight house race is still too close to call. Today I’m joined by a panel of my dear friends to break it all down, Joyce Vance, former US attorney and my CAFE Insider co-host, Joanne Freeman, Yale history professor and former now and then host, and Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president and founder of Eurasia Group. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Voters across the country elected Donald Trump to be our next president. I’m joined today by Joyce Vance, Joanne Freeman, and Ian Bremmer to talk about what happened.

Joanne, Joyce, Ian, thanks for joining the day after the election and welcome to all of you.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, I guess it doesn’t work so well when you have three of us.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, I could just jump in.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s good to be here with you.

Preet Bharara:

So I will say that there has seldom been a time when I have awakened in the morning and thought, “Wow, I really don’t know what I’m going to say on the Stay Tuned podcast or the Insider podcast,” or had a moment where I’m like, “You know what? I would rather do something else to do.” And I will admit that I felt a little bit that way this morning, given how the election turned out and given how strongly I feel about how it should have turned out the other way and the definitive way in which Donald Trump appears to have won. And you can’t deny it. It’s a decisive, it’s the popular vote, it’s the Senate-backed popular by a good amount inroads into blue states, blue areas like New Jersey and New York among certain demographic groups like Latinos and African-American men. And across the board, big decisive victory.

But then I thought to myself, we should pivot, or I should pivot. And I don’t want to complain. I don’t want to be the moan the whole thing. And I don’t want to say, “Well, it’s due to misogyny or racism or even the Russian bomb threats.” This is a big deal change, I think, in the party alignment of the country, in the voting preferences of the country. And maybe I’m overstating that, but I think we have to acknowledge a few things.

I want to start with Ian, and I want to read back to you what you tweeted yesterday morning before the election concluded and you wrote kind of like in a sonnet form, “Whoever wins will be my president. I’m not moving. I’m not saying it’s rigged, I’m not even complaining about it. I’ve cast my ballot, you cast yours and then we get back to work.” Why’d you write that?

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I mean, I didn’t wake up this morning thinking I don’t feel like doing this. I mean, I’m an American and I live on this planet and I now have a new president. New president-elect was not my choice, but it was the choice of a majority of the country. It’s popular vote too. I mean even though the electoral college.

Preet Bharara:

By several million.

Ian Bremmer:

By several million. And I can live with that. I don’t have to be happy, but I can live with that. And the fact is that if he’s my president, I would rather him be successful and also not lead the country into ruin than I would want him to fail. And to the extent that you and I and others have any ability at all to influence that, that strikes me as something constructive and useful. And you know me, I mean I generally try to be a constructive and useful person. I’m also not a… I don’t hold on to anger and despondency very well. It’s just not who I am. And so I think what you got from me, it wasn’t like this was some deep philosophical point. It’s just like what I happened to be feeling right then with a Manhattan in my hand sort of expecting that this is what we’re going to be dealing with.

Preet Bharara:

Do you only drink drinks that are named after the place that you’re having the drink?

Ian Bremmer:

Not always, but twice historically, that and the Ward Eight. So I mean there is-

Preet Bharara:

The Ward Eight.

Ian Bremmer:

We do have some data at this point, which is important.

Preet Bharara:

I want to bring Joanne and Joyce in. Joanne, you were mentioning before we started taping, of course you’re a professor of history at Yale,, that you spent a long time talking to your students today. What’s their reaction been?

Joanne Freeman:

I did. I will say that I had a hard time getting out of bed this morning to go to this class. We were supposed to be talking about a book about anti-slavery activism in early America. And I told my students, “I’m choosing not to talk about that today not because it’s not important, but because the space in the classroom and the community of that class, it felt that we needed to talk.” And the last week when I walked into that seminar room, the vibe in that room was like death. And when I said, “Is it like midterm week?” And the students said, “No.” And I said, “Is this the election?” And they nodded emphatically. And we talked for about 10 minutes. And they talked about what they were feeling and they talked about what they were thinking about democracy. There’s a North Carolina student who said he went home to vote and there were people in line. He waited for a long time in line and there are people in line who had lost their homes and everything they owned and they were online to vote.

So last week’s conversation was about students being scared and students feeling encouraged by the fact that people were so engaged in this election. Today’s conversation, they’re scared and it’s personal. So I had a woman student say… I’m not going to get her words right, but she basically said, “I am a woman and now I feel like I don’t matter, that nothing I do matters.” So the vibe in the room was students… And I will say there are a couple students in that room that probably are not liberal in their politics. And I made it clear that this discussion was not about candidates, wasn’t about parties. They were struck by things that some of which I’m sure we’re going to be talking about. They were trying to figure out how things fell as they fell in ways that don’t make sense. So how do you have people voting to protect abortion in state constitutions and then voting Republican for example? How did that happen?

So they were scared. A couple were crying. All of us, I think, we’re going to be parsing this together. They didn’t fully understand what happened, but we had a really interesting conversation about political parties and American society. And I think in the end that’s some of what this election is going to be telling us.

Preet Bharara:

Joyce, can I put a question to you? I don’t know that I’ll say it the right way or the way that I mean it because a lot of people who wanted Kamala Harris to win feel like they don’t understand their neighbors and their fellow citizens who voted fairly decisively for Donald Trump, right? So for a lot of people that feels new. You, Joyce, live in Alabama and so presumably have almost always, if not always, been in a political minority as a progressive. What does that teach you about how the rest of us should handle this surprise for many people, although maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise?

Joyce Vance:

It is a hard question to answer in some ways, but a deceptively simple one in other ways because I am clearly a political minority except in my neighborhood, which votes very blue. But in Alabama, I am the political minority. And I think we get along with people whose politics we don’t agree with on a day-to-day basis, working together to do the common good.

I’m very much in agreement with Ian when he says, “This isn’t who I voted for, but this is my president.” Right? The compact we have with our fellow citizens is we vote and whoever wins the election is the next president. Donald Trump won fair and square. He’s the guy. I would prefer to have a successful Donald Trump than to have an unsuccessful Donald Trump because I want to continue to live a good life in this country.

And so the question you’re posing, Preet, is, can we do that? Can we work together? I’m a big believer in civil discourse. I read a Substack by that name. I think even when it looks dark today, what we have to do is commit to the fact that we have work to do. And a big part of that work will be figuring out how do we work with people who we have fundamental political disagreements with.

Preet Bharara:

Can I tell a brief anecdote that I was thinking about this morning as I was trying to figure out, as I always do, how to laugh about something even when you’re not sort of in the mood for it?

I went to an event some years ago to talk about public corruption, and one of the speakers was Ed Koch. And everyone in this conversation probably knows Ed Koch as the former larger-than-life mayor of New York City many years ago. And he was unceremoniously ejected from office when he lost in his reelection bid, I believe, to David Dinkins many years ago.

So Ed Koch tells a story, he was defeated at the polls. And then a year or two into David Dinkins tenure as mayor of the city of New York, people grew disenchanted with him, some of them, and said to the mayor, the former Mayor Ed Koch, “We wish you had won.” Ed Koch says, and I think some encouraged him to run again, and he says in this big voice that he had, “No, the people have spoken and so the people must suffer.”

Joanne Freeman:

Wow.

Preet Bharara:

He meant it as a joke. But does that resonate with anyone?

Joanne Freeman:

You get what you vote for, you know? I mean, we, sitting here and talking, didn’t ask for this, but in some form or another, Americans did.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So I was going to start with asking for anyone to explain sort of what happened, what the political lesson is, but since you mentioned it since I told that anecdote, what do you think it’s going to be like? I mean, in some ways, arguably, Democrats painted such a bleak picture. I mean Republicans did that too with respect to Kamala Harris, but Democrats presented such a bleak picture, and I did some of that myself because I believe it or believed it, that if Donald Trump is like one step above despotism, will he have exceeded expectations? Is he sort of primed to succeed because of the parade of horribles that his adversaries painted?

Joanne Freeman:

So I did the same thing, and I’m still in that space. That some part of me is just bracing for really, really bad. I do think it’s worth thinking about during the campaign, we were talking about possibilities. It could be this way. It could be as horrible and dark as we can imagine. Now we’re talking about probabilities, and that’s slightly different. And I don’t know what the probabilities are. Historian Freeman is going to speak up like, the hyper contingency of this moment, it’s not unprecedented, but we really on a sort of fundamental political landscape. Don’t know where the hell we are. And so I don’t know what’s going to happen. I do feel, and I say this as a liberal Jewish woman college professor, I don’t think it’s going to be good. And I also want to acknowledge the fact that as, and I’m not going to blame it all on racism or misogyny, but as white people or as men or as straight people, we are in a different place than a lot of people. And I think that’s going to be really important to think about.

Joyce Vance:

I think that’s so dead on the money, and I think I was so wrong in my political assessment. I thought that Donald Trump had signaled the death of the Republican Party. But what this election says to me is that it’s really the Democratic Party that died yesterday.

I’m not big on placing blame, by the way. I think it really would be a mistake to scapegoat Latino men or Black men or white women, take your pick. I think the more productive exercise is to think about why people voted for Donald Trump and how, as a party, Democrats failed to meet their needs. But we also need to grapple with this sort of basic misconception. Democrats acted like having control of pop culture was the path to success, while Republicans understood that it was all about seizing the levers of power, and that even as a minority, if you successfully seize the levers of power, that you could govern. Democrats I think have to confront just the style and our desire for inclusivity that sometimes has led us to be less than effective in conducting the power struggle in a way that permits us to accomplish what we need to do and then carry it further.

And I’ll give you a concrete example of that. Joe Biden has been the president for the last four years. Because he has continued to insist on honoring the blue slip, we have big parts of the country, some of the most conservative parts, that will end up with a federal bench that will be entirely Republican. There will be no Democratic appointees there now possibly for a generation. I don’t say that to beat up Joe Biden, who I really love and admire, but I think we need to do a better job of understanding how power works and what you do with it when you have it. And I think we failed at that too.

Joanne Freeman:

Can I weigh in on what Joyce just said as a political historian?

Preet Bharara:

The floor is yours.

Joanne Freeman:

Thank you very much. I actually think I totally agree that the Democratic Party has been redefining itself and has not redefined itself. But I actually believe that the Republican Party also is in transition. I think we don’t often think about fact that American political parties are fluid, that for a huge chunk of our history, they came, they went, there were three, there were two. And so we’ve taken it for granted. It’s Democrat versus Republican. I’m not entirely convinced that in the end, after however much time needs to pass, we’re going to have a Republican and a Democratic Party that are recognizable in any way because I don’t think we saw Republicans versus Democrats in the way that we thought we would see in this election. And I think that’s a little part of the explanation.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, look, Democrats used to be the party of slavery. Things change.

Ian Bremmer:

I want to address something more structural for me, which is the extent to which we have a representative democracy in the United States that functions as such and that people believe in. We saw in a lot of the exit polls, people did say that democracy was on the ballot for them. But of course that means very different things for different people.

For a lot of Democrats that meant, “Trump is a dictator and he’s going to destroy my country.” For a lot of people, a lot of Trump supporters, it is, “We don’t trust any of our elites, our media.” These people represent the deep state, “And they’re not doing anything for me, And I want to blow that up.” That’s not a sustainable trajectory. And that doesn’t say as much about the Democrat or Republican Party as it does about our citizenship and what America does and doesn’t stand for.

And I guess what does concern me a lot now with Trump as president and likely controlling Supreme Court and the legislative branch, both House and Senate, is that this is a man who has said that he believes that a president in office cannot actually commit a crime, that there is no accountability. There is no constraint on executive power. We’ve already given up on several constraints of executive power. I mean, impeachment no longer functions as a constraint on executive power because the US political system has eroded. So I do think that our country, our political system is now to a degree that we should be uncomfortable with. Its sustainability is in the hands of our president-elect. And I think that’s a problem. And it doesn’t change the fact that I really want him to be successful and not head in that direction, but I do recognize that it is a very real possibility in a way that in 2017 it really wasn’t.

Preet Bharara:

Well, one thing that’s going on here is he served a term and he’s undergone and survived a number of things, right? So when he takes the oath of office again, and if he decides to cross lines of legality, which I think there’s a good chance that he will do, at least in the minds of reasonable people, he will have done that not only with perhaps the blessing, as you pointed out, Ian, of a lot of latitude from the Supreme Court in a recent opinion. But having survived a special counsel investigation, having survived one impeachment, then a second impeachment, and will have survived three out of four criminal indictments of him, at that point, how is he held accountable? What are the constraints on him as he’s thinking about performing an act or engaging in conduct, having survived all of that, and different people have different opinions about whether they were in good faith or not?

But the fact of having gotten through all that and getting president with the popular vote for the first time and a broad consensus and mandate in his mind, should we be concerned, Joyce, maybe you want to address this, about how emboldened he will be?

Joyce Vance:

I mean, yeah, we have to be concerned. This is a presidency that if Donald Trump wants it to be so will have no checks and balances. And at least if passed his prologue, Donald Trump will be really happy about that. There will be no check from his own executive branch. He will control who’s there. He will use a loyalty test. There will not be, at least for the first two years, a check and balance from the legislative branch where the Republicans will dominate. And there will obviously not be a check from the courts where the Supreme Court has really fed this sort of notion that Trump really, I think, embraces that presidents can do no wrong. So look, I mean, we are now a country that has to rely on the good faith of Donald Trump, and that is a very frightening place to be.

Joanne Freeman:

But I had two conversations yesterday and today that really drove home for me that I think a lot of people who voted for Trump voted on social issues in a way or broad issues and not on political issues. And by that, I mean I spoke to a Trump supporter yesterday. I didn’t know he was a Trump supporter. He was actually helping fix up my apartment in New York City, and we had a different conversation.

And then at the end, he asked who I voted for. He’s Eastern European. But I asked him and he said, “Well, I’m voting for Trump.” And I said, “I want to really understand why. Why?” And he said, “Because I don’t like the system, and Harris is more of the same. And I think we need to shake it up. I think we need big change.” And when I said, “I understand that, but here’s what I’m scared of,” and I talked about things along the lines of what Joyce just said. “I’m scared of having a dictator, of someone who is not accountable, of someone who now has immunity, that he can be a dictator if he wants to be.” Now, this is an eastern European man, and that gave him pause and then he said “Dictator,” and he hadn’t thought about it. It wasn’t part of his scheme.

This morning I spoke to my Uber driver, and she’s a trans woman who voted for Trump, and she said, “I think we need change. I think that the system needs to be shaken up. I think that business will do better under Trump. And that’s why I voted for him.” And when I said, “What I’m scared of is him being a dictator.” She said, “I never thought of that. He didn’t use that word, did he?” Democrats are talking about democracy and dictators. These are two people who did not hear that. It didn’t compute at all. And I find that striking.

Preet Bharara:

We will be right back with more analysis of the election after this.

Here’s another reason I want to read a tweet that I saw, and I took a screenshot of it because it strucked me. We talk a lot about words that people on the Kamala side or the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton once upon a time used the word deplorables, and the level of antipathy allegedly that Democrats of some stripes have towards Trump. But there’s an antipathy the other way too. And here’s the quote, and I think this is a fairly widespread feeling on the part of Trump supporters, “Tomorrow, I’m voting for Donald Trump because I want the worst people in existence to (beep) cry.” Ian, discuss that.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. Obviously that’s a slightly more extreme version of owning the libs, I guess. It is an online manifestation. It’s something that we don’t see between human beings when they exist in front of each other in person.

I posted something this morning that you may find amusing in this context. I wouldn’t call it despondent, but I would certainly say it reflects that concern, which is that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards the algorithm. This is not just pushing back on Martin Luther King, but also on Barack Obama who really wanted to believe in the better nature, but didn’t see that there were big forces at play that were manipulating human beings. And I worry that you’re going to see a lot more of that kind of sentiment because a lot of people are not acting like citizens. They’re acting like products because they’re being manipulated by algorithms.

That worries me about Elon’s role in a Trump administration. It worries me not that Trump is going to be an effective dictator. I actually think he’s less interested in policy and frankly less competent as a leader and also doesn’t want to give it to someone else. JD Vance is not going to become the shadow dictator because Trump is not interested in letting someone else become more important than he is. But I worry that Trump is also by far the most transactional leader that we’ve ever seen. And people around him that are willing to give him lots of money and accolades, he might be willing to give large parts of the store to.

And in some ways, that’s a good thing in the sense that we’re probably not going to ban TikTok because Jeff Yass decided to give him a million and a half dollars. He’s also cheap in that regard. He can be bought easily. And maybe we won’t go to war with China because there are a bunch of people, including Elon, that want to make sure we have a sustainable relationship there. But there are other people that are prepared to do some very stupid things to the country and to the world that are very interested in buying Trump. And I fear that with fewer adults and more loyalty around him in a second administration, that is a bigger concern.

Preet Bharara:

What does Trump want? I mean, in some respects, he’s won not just the presidency a second time, but won on sort of everything, right? He’s vindicated with respect to people making fun of him. He’s vindicated with respect to people saying he doesn’t win. He’s vindicated with respect to not having won the popular vote before. He won the popular vote. Everyone is, as you said, and others have said, there’s not going to be a massive legal apparatus to try to prevent Trump from taking office. The transition of power will be peaceful. One of his goals, I’ve always thought and said, is to be the most talked about person on earth, the most famous person on earth, to be the person who gets the most attention of anyone who lives on the planet at the moment. And he has all that coupled with, as you say, his lack of interest and policy. Is the only thing that remains for him to do during his four years is get richer? Or does he have something else that he’s trying to accomplish? I’m not sure what it could be.

Joyce Vance:

I think he does, Preet. I think he has one thing on his mind, and it’s revenge. And he’s now in a position to accomplish that.

Preet Bharara:

He’s kind of gotten it. He’s kind of gotten it.

Joyce Vance:

Oh, no, no, no.

Preet Bharara:

If you’re his advisor [inaudible 00:26:32].

Joyce Vance:

We always underestimate Donald Trump’s capacity, I think, to be vengeful. And I remember in early 2017 when so many people thought, “It’s not going to be that bad. There’s the gravitational pull of government once you’re in it, and there are forces that will moderate Donald Trump.” And then of course came the Muslim ban and the horrors of family separation at the border. And things truly were far worse than most people had anticipated.

I think we have to anticipate that Donald Trump has a healthy desire to get revenge. And perhaps the one place where there might be some guardrails left will be he needs folks in the bureaucracy to carry that out. And the bureaucracy certainly has an ability to drag its feet and to move slowly and even to refuse to do certain things. So maybe that’s a little bit of a counterbalance, but I suspect we’ll see limited policy goals. Donald Trump really wants to do mass deportations. He’s staked so much of his personal credibility on that. I think we’ll see that. And then I think we’ll see revenge prosecutions and other revenge activities.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned the Muslim ban. I’m just not smart enough to understand. I mean, I guess I know what some of the explanations might be, and there’s the war in Gaza. But when you use that as an example of a terrible thing that Donald Trump did, he would think that the constituency who would never forget that and would feel more strongly about that several years on than even you, Joyce, would be the Muslim community. And he made incredibly significant inroads in every Muslim population in Michigan. Does that compute the political scientists and historians on in this conversation?

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, they targeted ads effectively, right? They made Kamala sound like she was super pro-Israel for Muslim populations and super pro-Palestinian for Israeli populations. And I mean, it looks like that played out. I mean, definitely her Gaza position was seen… I mean, the war in the last year was happening under Biden.

Joanne Freeman:

People don’t believe he’s going to do what he says. American exceptionalism is so powerful. “We’ll be okay. It’ll be fine. Yeah, he’ll do some bad things, but he’s talking extreme. It’s not going to happen.” There are some people who voted for him because they want it to happen. But I think there are some people who voted for him because they don’t think it’ll happen.

Preet Bharara:

But that means that he occupies rhetorically the most coveted perch in the history of American politics. He can say whatever the hell he wants, and the constituency that wants him to do those things believes it. And the constituency that doesn’t want him to do those things believes that he won’t. It’s a catch 22 for any opponent, is it not?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, there are a lot opponents who believe he’s going to do those things, right?

Preet Bharara:

Well, no. I mean, politically, politically, he overcame all of them on his side and on the democratic side, except for in 2020.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I mean not in 2020. And this time around, it was… We haven’t talked about the rest of the world.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, let’s do that.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, this isn’t all that surprising. Again, this is why I’m not so excited about the idea that, “Oh, this is the end of the Democratic Party.” I mean, almost every election in the world this year saw incumbents get completely destroyed. And the only reason that it was closed here was because Trump did have such vulnerabilities. This should have been a layup for him. Any Republican would’ve thumped the Democrats in this environment. It turned out that Trump benefited from that.

Preet Bharara:

But why a retread? Usually you would think when you talk about that dynamic as fresh blood, fresh new or younger blood often, Trump’s a change from Biden, but he’s a retread.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, I know. I know, but he still… Having said that, he is not responsible for the last four years. And that is the way when people are talking about change and you’re giving them two choices, they’re not really thinking about Cornel West or Jill Stein, that it is really, really hard to say that Kamala is that change, especially when the most important issue of the election, she’s asked the question as she comes out to the media, “What would you do differently from Biden?”, the most important question, she gives the worst possible answer, “There is nothing different I would do at all. I can’t think of anything.”

Preet Bharara:

On other occasions, she gave better answers. I don’t know why on that particular occasion-

Ian Bremmer:

Yes, there were future. There were later occasions. But the first one, and the ones that the Republicans played and played and played over and over, and the only points that Trump scored against Kamala in an election and debate that she actually won was when Trump was saying, “What would you do differently? You’re saying you’re responsible. You’re responsible. How can you not be responsible? Why didn’t you do this already? Why don’t you do this the last four years?” It was Trump’s closing argument.

So I mean, this is why the Japanese just got thumped Modi, the ANC in South Africa, the conservatives in the UK, France, Germany, everywhere you go. I mean, the shocker would’ve been in the United States if Kamala had won. That would’ve been a shock. It would’ve been a really, really exceptional counter trend move if Kamala had found a way to win. And it would’ve been because Trump is a really unpopular and divisive candidate. It’s not superpowers that this guy has. I don’t buy that. I don’t buy it at all.

Joanne Freeman:

I agree with that. I mean, Harris, and along the lines of the anecdotes that I just mentioned, to many people who voted for Trump, clearly Harris represents no change at all, right? And he represents change, but he represents change in a familiar way, right? You’re kind of, in a sense if you’re voting for him, that feels less scary than an unknown commodity. So-

Preet Bharara:

The devil you know?

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. Yeah. And for some people, the devil they like. He’s a known commodity for better and worse. And probably for some people, if you’re going to have change, he felt like, at least to them, change that’s predictable

Preet Bharara:

What’s going on in all the capitals of other countries, Ian?

Ian Bremmer:

It really depends on the capitals, My friend. The Europeans are freaked out. They’re the ones that are really worried because they think that Trump is going to try to end the war and he’s not going to coordinate with them. And that means that the Europeans have to do a lot more and they have to stay together. And they’re worried they’re not powerful enough. They’re worried their own leaders are weak. And they’re worried that some of them will flip to Trump the way Orban has. Maloney in Italy, for example, especially given her Elon relationship, that’s a real concern. So the Europeans are the most freaked out.

The Gulf states are very comfortable. I would not in any way be surprised if Trump makes his first trip as president, again, first to the Gulf and then to Israel. They’ve done very well for him and his family over the last four years while he’s not been president, and he appreciates that.

I think the Chinese are concerned because their economy is doing so badly, but they are in wait and see mode. The fact that Trump has come in probably makes them do more in terms of stimulus in responding to that. But they will wait and see who the Trump administration puts in place, and they will try to see if there’s a deal to be done as opposed to the announcements of these heavy, heavy tariffs coming from Lighthizer and others.

And American allies in Mexico and Canada, they’re having conniptions, but Canada’s about to throw out Trudeau and put in Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party, and he’ll be very aligned with Trump. That’ll be very friendly.

And then Asian allies are concerned, but not as much as the Europeans. They feel like they’ve been through this before. They can probably handle it again. So it’s all over the map, but the most important allies of the United States are the ones that are among the most concerned

Preet Bharara:

In Russia?

Ian Bremmer:

And Putin, of course, really wanted Trump to win. He did the most in favor of Trump illegally, illicitly to try to interfere with the US election as we saw including those bomb threats that were called in yesterday. Fortunately, it didn’t actually impact the outcome. But if you’re Putin, this has been a fantastic few weeks for you. You’re gaining territory on the ground in Ukraine. You’ve got the North Koreans sending you thousands of troops in addition to all of the munitions and ordinance that you’re fighting with. And now Trump who says he wants to end the war and end the war in a day, which means the territory you’ve taken you can keep taking, that you can keep, and that the Americans have spent way too much money on Ukraine, this is all music to Putin’s ears. So it would be hard to see him having a better trajectory in this environment.

Preet Bharara:

Coming back to the domestic front again, Joyce, you and I spend a lot of time talking about all the different legal quagmires that Trump found himself in. We’ve talked about this on the Insider pod a bunch, but why don’t you catalog briefly what’s going to happen to the four criminal cases?

Joyce Vance:

Yeah, so very little, right? I think there’s sentencing scheduled in the Manhattan case later this month.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s pause on that for a moment. That’s going to go forward.

Joyce Vance:

It’ll go forward. Trump won’t receive custodial time. If he does, he won’t serve it.

Preet Bharara:

People will ask the question, is that because he just got reelected president? Or is that because that’s what the right and just sentence should be?

Joyce Vance:

I think the thought was always that this was a case that was unlikely to yield a custodial sentence unless the judge decided to punish Trump for violation of the gag order, in which case there might be some limited sentence. But I think the reality is that during the transition, a recently elected president, whatever the rationale that’s employed is, won’t serve custodial time. So that’s that one.

Preet Bharara:

Now you have the two federal cases. You have the Florida case that has been dismissed-

Joyce Vance:

The Florida case. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

… by Judge Aileen Cannon and is on appeal. And then you have the DC election interference case. What happens to those two cases?

Joyce Vance:

So I think essentially nothing. A sitting president can’t serve custodial time. But more importantly than that, Donald Trump now controls the Justice Department, and I think that he will do whatever he needs to do to end those cases. There are a couple of moves, right? There will be some litigation over whether or not he can do it. There’s some chance that a judge could decide to try and appoint a special counsel, which is this weird power that judges sometimes have. Two prosecuting contempted court.

Preet Bharara:

But the odds of that are vanishingly low, right?

Joyce Vance:

I don’t think any of that stuff will happen. There might be a little bit of gasping, but no.

Preet Bharara:

This is a question for everybody, and we’ll come back to the cases. At 12:01 on January 20th, 2025, which people are being fired summarily? Jack Smith and who else?

Joyce Vance:

Jack Smith, every United States attorney in the country, folks who have made Trump angry because he doesn’t like the stance that they’ve taken towards immigration sorts of issues. And then just a cascading list from that point on.

Preet Bharara:

So the Manhattan case is basically over, but for sentencing, I agree with your assessment of what will happen to sentencing. The two federal cases go away because you’ll have control of the Justice Department that leaves the kind of messy Georgia case in Fulton County with DA Fani Willis. That’s a state case not controlled by Trump. Does that proceed?

Joyce Vance:

Fani Willis was reelected last night. I think she’ll try to move ahead. But look, the president of the United States is a very, very powerful man. For one thing, he can take any who might’ve cooperated with Fani Willis. And although he can’t give them immunity from state prosecution, I think he can find ways to effectively immunize them or effectively undo any problems that they might face and keep them in the herd. And Fani Willis’ case, and we’ve seen this in so many other cases with Trump, she really needs cooperators. She needs someone who will testify against Donald Trump. She’s not going to have that now.

Preet Bharara:

But isn’t Donald Trump and his team going to be able to make the argument under the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that we’ve discussed many times that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted, so they have to pause that for the duration of his presidency? Will they have a powerful argument to that effect?

Joyce Vance:

They will make that. I mean, state court is different from federal court, and technically you can’t tell a state DA what to do. But I think effectively you can, and particularly in Georgia where the leadership of the state is Republican and will step in line with Trump. And we’ve seen they have, for instance, the power to discipline prosecutors. There was sort of a narrow bypass of rules in that regard last year. I think that we will effectively see her work suspended.

Preet Bharara:

What do you think the future of political violence is in the trajectory there, Joanne? I mean, less so that since Trump got elected rather than Kamala Harris? I hate to ask that question.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. I’m not going to be predictive. I can say I’m a historian, I’m not going to predict. But I will say that one of the things, and this is obvious, but I’ll state it anyway, one of the things that Trump has done, even just in running for the presidency, is to validate violence, right? Even just in his words, that it’s okay, that he laughs at it and thinks it’s funny. So in that sense, do we have a different climate now regardless of the fact that he won regarding what people think is allowable or even approved of? Yeah, it’s a little different. I think he unleashed emotions that might lead people to act in a different way.

But I want to say the flip side of that. I’ll interject a little hope in this conversation. I think we’re in a really different place in this election than we were in 2016. And the reason I say that is explicitly because he was so extreme and he so talked about violence. And the things he wanted to do, mass deportation, he was so extreme in what he was saying. And the response to that has been a real coming together of people who oppose it, a real sense of community and purpose and organization. Even just look at women, but it’s bigger than women. And so, one of the things I’m thinking now is that that makes this moment different than before. That means that people have to think about how that the we, fact that there’s now a stronger sense of we among people who oppose him than there was before. And I think that that represents a possibility for impact. So that actually gives me some hope.

Preet Bharara:

Just going back to this question about the political parties and realignment. So I kind of understand what the Democratic Party stands for at this moment. I kind of understand what the Trump party stands for at this moment. A lot of it is disruption. What happens to the Liz Cheneys of the world? And there are a lot of people like her. Historically when there’s a realignment like that and there are folks who don’t have a home, do they just die out ideologically? Do they adapt? Do they splinter into different groups? Do they start a third party? I don’t quite know what happens to Cheney and other never Trump conservative former Republicans.

Ian Bremmer:

I think most of them adapt. I mean, I think most of them have adapted. There were so many never Trumpers in the Republican Party that found a way to get back to the Trump fold, from Nikki Haley on down. And especially once he’s in power for four years with the House and the Senate, I think you’ll find that the revealed preferences of an awful lot of never Trumpers is I’d like to find a way to work with this team.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with our conversation about the election.

Can I ask a question another way? I’ve asked this a few times before, and I still don’t fully understand. This issue of Trump being new but not so new. One argument you could make is you could describe it in this way, that contrary to popular belief in particular among the people who have opposed Trump, since he burst on the scene in 2016, his style, his rhetoric, his approach, his attitude has aged well. Is that fair, given the results of the election?

Joanne Freeman:

I don’t know if I would say it aged necessarily. I would say it resonates and it never stopped resonating, and now it resonates even more. And by that, I mean I’m floundering here a little bit because what I’m thinking of is the founders, but-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I don’t mean to say it in a positive light, but I’m just trying to understand the arc of his popularity.

Joanne Freeman:

He plugs into something that is part of democracy and is part of America and is part of elites versus non-elites. The founding generation thought that the greatest threat to the United States was then and would always be demagogues, because demagogues can play to emotion, can perform, can say things that’ll make them popular, can plug into popular passions without thinking about repercussions or realities. And once you find that person and that person manages to get power, that’s trouble.

I think there are a lot of things that the founders thought that are not playing so well or working so well now, but I think that fundamental fact that he’s doing what has always been a vulnerability in any democratic system and ours particularly. I don’t know if I’d say it’s aged. I think we are in a different climate now. And the same thing that he has always done is playing stronger now than it did before.

Preet Bharara:

Does the Democratic Party and its ideology or its approach deserve any criticism here, folks?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. It does-

Preet Bharara:

Have at it.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, it does insofar as the urban elites embraced progressives-

Preet Bharara:

Who are sipping Manhattans in their townhouses?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. No, no, not those because I mean, I think that I’m not a Democrat, I’m a bigger problem for a lot of these people.

Preet Bharara:

You’re a separate kind of urban elite.

Ian Bremmer:

I’m a separate kind of urban elite, yeah. And it’s the worst kind because I think of myself having grown up in the projects as not even a real elite, God forbid those people.

But anyway, no, you know that if you look at the issues that the campaign spent money on in television, transgender got three times more than any other issue. And that should not have been an issue that the Democrats were vulnerable on. It should have been one that they took off the agenda that they tacked to the center. I understand that for a small number of people in America, it really matters, but it is so out of touch with where the United States is and where it’s going.

Abortion is a real issue for an awful lot of Americans, and they were getting caught up in DEI and woke-ism and identity politics and what pronouns you’re supposed to use and political correctness and campus politics and all of this stuff that made them just juicy targets for so many Americans that were able to paint them as completely out of touch. And I think that they went way too long, way too hard on that.

I also think on immigration, which is not an issue that Biden’s particularly fluent on, he gave it to Harris in part because from Delaware, he never had to really deal with Hispanic constituents and thought that from California she was going to do a better job. But I mean, the reality is a lot of Americans, even in New York, if you ask me like, “Why did Trump do so well in New York?” I think a lot of that was illegal immigration. I think a lot of that was people not happy about all the folks coming over, staying in hotels, driving up costs in New York and making them feel a little bit more unsafe and what’s going on here. And I just think that the progressive movement was out of touch with a lot of that stuff. So yeah, yeah definitely I would blame the Dems for that.

Joanne Freeman:

They’re also divided, right? I mean, you saw at the Democratic Convention this new generation of people, as you suggested earlier I think, Preet, about… Or maybe it was Joyce, I don’t remember who, about popular culture and this younger generation plugging into that and that getting all of this positive emotion that we could see at that convention and elsewhere, that there’s a younger Democratic Party that I think is still figuring out what the heck it is. And then there was an older Democratic Party, which the contrast just visually between them at that convention was really striking.

So I also think that the Democratic Party doesn’t quite have its feet on the ground now as to what it is and how it works. This gets back to my idea that both parties I think are remarkably fluid and that this is a transition moment. But yeah, the Democrats in that sense didn’t come together in a way that could do some of what it is that we’re talking about here now.

Joyce Vance:

Yeah, I think that’s right. Democrats need to do some soul-searching about what the important common values that bind together the coalition are. And I understand Ian’s point. There are some issues that some of us may feel very strongly about but don’t resonate across the common. That’s a hard realization for Democrats who have always believed in this future vision of an America that’s ever more inclusive and that offers more of its promise to more of its people.

And I’m not suggesting that we should abandon those sorts of values and principles. I think it’s time for us to take a hard look at pragmatics, and that’s frankly not the way the Democratic Party’s DNA works. So it’s going to really require some hard work. Look, everybody can lick their wounds for a few days, but after that, the reality is this is a country that thrives on political discourse. We can’t just have one majority viewpoint that’s accepted without challenge. So the struggle for Democrats will be to figure out how are you going to be the loyal opposition in a difficult time, and how are you going to redefine your core and your center in a way that lets you do that work?

Ian Bremmer:

I agree with Joyce on this. I think it’s very well put. And I was talking to Van Jones the other day who I like a lot, and I know you know him well too, Preet. He’s been talking about the fact that the Democratic Party cannot be kicking out or pushing out a whole bunch of people through these issues. They have to be willing to engage. If it’s going to be diverse, it has to be seen to be diverse in understanding of different people’s perspectives. And I think that’s the issue, is that it is a broad-based party, but it’s also one that has been in its own way incredibly intolerant. And-

Preet Bharara:

People don’t like to be condescended to. I’ve never met a person who likes to be condescended to. And that’s part of the point of that tweet that I read about the kinds of people that this person wanted to see cry.

Joanne Freeman:

A student in my class echoed this. So I’m actually going to agree with both Joyce and Ian. A student in my class said that she felt that the Democrats, the attitude that they had about rightness and wrongness was offensive. She didn’t say to her, but I think she probably was speaking for herself because there was a sneer involved in it, that she felt that on a certain level there was a judgment attached to it in a way that she found offensive.

So I agree with Joyce and Ian that somehow or other that the Democrats have to figure out how to be inclusive and also to have a message that doesn’t have a wall at the edge of it, meaning you either believe this thing or you’re not with us. And on that level, I don’t mean like, “Oh, racism or the things that you can’t be sort of part of the general whole.” But by that I mean like woke-ism, right? My students talked about that this morning too. It’s not that they don’t believe that you have to think about marginalized people in smart ways and that there are things that you shouldn’t say. What they didn’t like was the deployment of it. I made the point that it also became a buzzword. It became obviously a tool, and then it suddenly didn’t mean what it started out meaning. But I guess I’m agreeing with Joyce and Ian that the Democrats have to figure out really who they are in a broad way and how they can come together with a message that feels inclusive in a real way and not just in an ideological way.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, to put a sort of more utilitarian gloss on that, they need people to know how to win. They need people to know how to win, right? And by that I don’t mean compromising values and being cynical and disingenuous about their politics. And I’m not casting any aspersions on Kamala Harris who I think, given what she inherited and given her ties to Joe Biden and given the lateness of her arrival, sort of met every opportunity and ran about as good a campaign as you could have run.

My view is if structurally there was a problem, she laid the groundwork for those problems long before she became the nominee three months ago. Some of the positions that she took as a senator, but the people who become president of the United States and the people who become governors and mayors in places that are not deep blue or not deep red, if you’re on the other side of the coin there, know how to win. Barack Obama knew how to win. Bill Clinton knew how to win. And that’s just a sort of pragmatic way of saying we got to pick people who consistent with the values of their party and their own personal values know how to win. And it’s not always the case that Democrats know how to do that.

Joyce Vance:

Who do you think that is, Preet? What do you think the future of the Democrat party looks like?

Preet Bharara:

I [inaudible 00:54:07] anyone.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, that’s what my students asked.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know. And the question I have in that regard is, what is the last… So look, Trumpism is not just about ideology. So when one asked the question, which was in my mind, “What’s a democratic Trump?” But by that, I don’t mean with all his illegal conduct and all the nonsense and the cruelty and the craveness and all of that. But the thing that works the most for Trump is his resonance with people who feel like the system is rigged and the country has left them behind and forgotten them. That’s real. I’ve said that over and over and over again. I said last week when I talked to Evan Osnos on the podcast, what is the lesson for a Democrat who doesn’t have all or many of, or any of Trump’s flaws, personal flaws, character flaws, criminality flaws? What is the way that a Democrat or anybody along the political spectrum should conduct themselves learning how effective it has been for Trump in winning this time, in particular, so decisively?

Joanne Freeman:

That’s what my students said this morning, what they asked this morning. They weren’t sure how they felt about Harris as a candidate, whether she was the strongest person for this moment, which then traveled along the line to, “Okay, who could have won that election?” Not an individual person. What kind of person could have won this particular election as a Democrat? And that’s kind of summing up a lot of what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the Democrats needing to find a message. We’re talking about them having to define who they are. Who in this moment, what kind of person in this moment has the right kind of message and skills in a general kind of a way that they would succeed now on the democratic side, I don’t have the answer to that [inaudible 00:55:56].

Preet Bharara:

Well, you can’t know. You can’t know, because I incorrectly thought that given everything going on with Donald Trump and all his baggage, that Ron DeSantis would be the presumptive nominee for the Republicans. I was wrong. I mean, the other way I think about it is, and this is very, very juvenile because I’m not a historian, but Joanne, you’ll correct me, I mean, lately I’ve been thinking about two categories of president. I’m not talking about governors and mayors and senators, but presidents because that’s a massive job and a very difficult thing to achieve. It’s a lightning strike or even much, much, much more rare than a lightning strike. And there are people who achieve the presidency, who you can say are singular figures in history or sui generis in their talents. And I would put in that category, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, maybe John Kennedy and some others. And then other people may be fairly or unfairly, I would not put in that category, including both Bushes.

Does that hold up? And the reason that’s significant in my head is when you say, “What’s the kind of person, what’s the strategy to be employed?”, if you believe that a majority of presidents are often the presidency is only attainable by a world-class Michael Jordan political athlete, then those questions don’t mean much.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. But the dichotomy that you just laid out, Preet, the people who you would say are the sort of superstars are extreme minority, right? So most American presidents are something different.

Preet Bharara:

Are they an extreme minority? If you go back, I mean, look, I don’t mean this as a compliment necessarily. Donald Trump has now achieved sui generis status. He’s done what nobody has done, and I don’t like him. And I had problems with Reagan. But if you go back, I mean Carter maybe is in the second category. Nixon was a very, very impressive candidate. Putting aside what he did later. Kennedy was extraordinary. Johnson was extraordinary. Roosevelt was extraordinary. Truman was not considered extraordinary.

Ian Bremmer:

I feel like we’re overcompexifying this.

Preet Bharara:

Uh-oh.

Ian Bremmer:

It’s not about all of these incredible characteristics. The United States has the longest, most expensive, most media intensive election in the world by an incredible margin. It’s an obscenity. It’s not about how people are governing. It’s about whether or not they are incredibly effective at campaigning, at rallying. It’s a very different skill set than actually being president. And Trump is not a particularly effective president, in my view. I don’t think he’s even very interested in the job, but he loves campaigning. It’s like his most natural, authentic place to be is in front of huge numbers of people and/or the media constantly all the time. He never gets tired of it. It’s incredible. He gets energy off it. It’s an extrovert.

Bill Clinton was, in many ways, the same kind of person. If you ask me who is most like that among the major democratic hopefuls right now, I’d probably say Gavin Newsom, who a lot of people think is odious, and yet nonetheless is the same kind of personality when it comes to campaigning. You got to find an amazing campaigner. And I don’t think it’s all that much more complicated than that.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I agree with you, but that partly is a matter of the modern age and technology because over the long haul of American history, there are a heck of a lot of presidents who people didn’t even know who they were.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Joanne Freeman:

Right? And so my point is that, yes, you’re absolutely right. People who are good at campaigning, people who are good at performing, people who fit well in that category, who have those skills, you’re not going to make it without that. And in some cases, you’re right, that makes them superstars. But there are so many presidents in American history that are there because politically they calculated they fit in correctly. Not even that they calculated. There was a gap. There had to be someone to fill the gap and one particular person was found in that gap.

So this is going back to Preet and what you said. I think you’re right that there are people who are sort of exceptionally talented. Ian as well. There are people who are just really suited in abilities in this current modern moment with our technologies selling campaigns in the presidency in a certain way.

But I also think, and I don’t know how this plays out, but I think there’s a political calculation component too that has also often in a powerful way put someone in an office that doesn’t fit into those two categories. I don’t know if that in the modern era can play out, but I think it’s worth putting out on the table.

Preet Bharara:

My favorite, and I have a question for Joyce to close it out. Did you see this one more thing to laugh about, I guess, even though it’s bizarre that there was a spike in a certain Google search in the past few days. Did you see this?

Joyce Vance:

Mm-mm.

Preet Bharara:

The search was, “Did Biden drop out?”

Joyce Vance:

Oh my God.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh my God.

Joyce Vance:

Oh my God.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a universe of people who focused so late, they didn’t realize that Biden had dropped out. It reminds me when I was a college freshman, I took expository writing 10, and this was in 1986. Ronald Reagan was the president. My writing teacher, whose name literally was Mr. Doolittle, said he loved all the polls that showed Reagan had 99% name recognition. And he was very fond of and envied the 1% who didn’t know that Ronald Reagan six years in was the president of the United States.

Joyce, can you make a prediction as to who might be pardoned when Trump becomes president again? And then we’ll say our last words.

Joyce Vance:

Wow. Well, that’s a really horrible question to ask. I noticed that this morning already a lawyer for one of the January 6th defendants has asked the judge to continue sentencing, anticipating I think a coming wave of pardons for the people who stormed the capitol on January 6th. Other folks connected to Trump can expect pardons.

But I’ll tell you what, you’ve sort of hit me cold with this one, but I’m reminded that Trump pardoned or commuted the sentence, at least for Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted by our former colleague, Pat Fitzgerald, for public corruption in connection with trying to sell Barack Obama’s newly vacated Senate seat when Obama became the president. And Trump did that maybe because he saw some of himself in Blagojevich. He did it because it set a precedent for pardoning for those sorts of crimes. And I wonder if we won’t see Donald Trump try to set a new standard of forgiveness that will encourage the people around him to join him in misconduct and misbehavior. So there’s nothing nice to say about Trump’s abuse of the pardon power. The question is, how broadly do we think he’ll abuse it or will he have other things to employ his free time?

Preet Bharara:

Ian, one sentence, final word. And then Joanne.

Ian Bremmer:

Glad to be, if we had to make a transition like this, I couldn’t be happier, but to make it with you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Pandering will get you everywhere. Joanne?

Joanne Freeman:

Two things. So I would say along the lines of what Ian just said, I am so happy to be able to be hashing this stuff out at this moment with you guys. I guess my one sentence throwing out there into the world would be to restock, restore, mourn, step back, and then return to figure out what we do next because that’s going to be the most important thing of all.

Preet Bharara:

I just say, as I’ve said many, many times, and this has been good for me today and on other occasions, find reasons to laugh and find music that you love, and then come back re-energized.

And we will be back, Joyce and I, for the Cafe Insider podcast next week. And Stay Tuned as usual. Thanks, folks. Great to be with you.

Joyce Vance:

Thanks Preet.

Joanne Freeman:

Thanks for having us.

Ian Bremmer:

See you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, Joyce Vance, Joanne Freeman, and Ian Bremmer. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.