41. DONALD TRUMP WINS

0:06Welcome to the Rest is Politics US update at 1.15am on Wednesday morning. Anthony and I have been in separate places all evening, but I'm very glad that we've managed to finally get back together again to record an update on how things are looking. Anthony, what are you thinking? Rome, Paris, London? Well, right now I'm in an undisclosed location, Katty, so that I don't want to tell you what my plans are yet. What happened? The Kamala curious voters, it looks like they didn't turn out for her. You had great data early on about exit polling. What happened, Katty? So what seems to have happened is two things, that young men did turn out and vote for Donald Trump, and Hispanic voters voted in larger numbers than they have done in previous elections for the Republican candidate, and black voters voted in larger numbers than they have done in previous elections for the Republican candidate as well.

1:06So that looks like the combination. Now, all of those may be what you call low propensity voters. They may be lower income voters who have been particularly hit by inflation or have other reasons for voting for Donald Trump, which is like the guy. But that seems to be what happened. And women didn't turn out in numbers enough to compensate for that. So, I have a theory. I want to test it on you, get your reaction. We had a four-hour show that we live streamed tonight. I know this is very frustrating because you've been on a show and I've been on a show and I haven't had a chance to hear what you've been saying, which is…

1:41Yeah. But I went back to my room and I went back and watched some of Trump's speeches in the last three days. and he was saying something that I wasn't hearing. And so listen, one thing about me, because I'm a market participant, particularly when you're a portfolio manager, you get something wrong, you make a prediction, you get it wrong, you cut your losses, you admit you're wrong. I thought Harris was going to beat him. I thought she had momentum. I thought she had organization. She did not beat him. We have to talk about that. At some point, you and I have a whole list of things and a list of reasons why she didn't beat him.

2:18Of course, I would have had a list of reasons why She would have beaten him and I have both here. But what he did, which I think was masterful and I just want to point out to people, he said to black and Latino men, he said, you know, you're with me. You know, you're here legally and you're in my club. Oh, by the way, I'm protecting you from the migrants. I'm preventing those people who are trying to come in illegally and I'm protecting your seats at the table. Okay. You have to remember, this is a brilliant thing that he did. And this is exactly how he thinks is he's a zero sum transactionalist.

2:58He wanted those people to know, uh, and, and whether they are or not, it doesn't really matter. It's what he made them feel, right? Isn't that what Maya Angelou said? It's not what you're saying to me. It's how you make me feel. They looked around and said, you know what? I'm with Trump. Uh, he's talking about somebody else. Remember I told you that I did a podcast in Columbia and the guy said, well, you know, I'm a green card holder. My wife is a citizen. He's not talking about me. I said, well, he's not talking about you until he's talking about you. Okay. And so that's what happened here. And I think it was ruthlessly brilliant on his part.

3:35So you think it was all immigration, immigration, immigration, and that this was all a play about the border. And I heard that too in those speeches. And he made specifically points saying that immigrants were taking, I mean, he said it very as bluntly as that, immigrants are taking black jobs, is what he said early on in the campaign. And that's the message that got through. I think there certainly will have been some of that. I think there's a cultural affinity. Some of the kind of machismo that we've heard from the Trump campaign may have gone down well with some of these male voters, whatever race they are.

4:07I think there's also the fact that rents particularly are a big inflation wealth gap. So rich people who own their homes have not felt inflation as much as poor people in America who tend to rent rather than owning their homes. So he's talking to a group of the population which is lower income, is less college educated, and those are the people who are particularly hard hit by inflation. So, it could be a combination of all of those factors. I mean, I think the other interesting thing to ask is why was that not offset by women voting against him, which is what the Harris campaign as early as Tuesday, when I was texting with people, I'm sure you were too, senior people in the Harris campaign who felt they had a lock on this because women, we discussed it in our last podcast, that Ann Seltzer poll showing that women in big numbers were voting for Kamala Harris, particularly older women.

5:09And that doesn't seem to have materialized for her either. Well, again, she said plus three in Iowa. That state was called early for him. And he won by about plus eight or nine, I think. Plus eight. Yeah, that's a 13 point, sorry, 11 point discrepancy. But I want to channel something for you and I want to get your reaction to this because I've been sitting here distilling it. I'm going to speak to you like a Trump supporter, a disenfranchised Trump supporter, where I feel like I'm not getting a fair shake for my family. So you have this woke culture on your side. You're telling me that you're ambivalent about the bathrooms.

5:48You're telling me that men can play in women's sports. All they have to do is declare themselves as women. They can come in and play on my daughter's football team or against my daughter. You're distorting the country with hordes of immigrants that are coming in illegally. You reversed every decision that Trump made at the border. Anywhere from seven to 10 million people came in, which has wreaked havoc on the country. You've shot up the inflation. We're running two wars. And you went after my guy, my guy, Donald Trump. You used lawfare and went after him. You threw everything but the kitchen sink at him from a legal perspective.

6:31In the middle of the campaign, you made him sit in a courtroom in New York. You gave him 34 felony counts. He's got other cases that are going against him that I think they're a legitimate caddy, but I'm just talking like a Trump supporter that are specious. Right. And he still beats you. Hey, dummies, do you think you may be missing something about what is going on culturally in the United States? Oh, and by the way, Anthony Scaramucci, you're a dummy. You told me on your podcast that he had a 47.5 % ceiling, possibly 48. He wasn't going to go through that. And he's likely to win the popular vote by 1 % by tomorrow morning.

7:20So wake up. Okay. That goes for me and that goes for everybody listening. Wake up to what he is. And maybe Caddy Kay's friend is right. Your friend, Jennifer Palmieri. Hey, this guy's an unbelievable politician. And this is the greatest comeback in US political history. Now, I don't like what he's about to do to the country. And I will continue to remain a dissident should he do things that are hurtful to my country, our country. But anyway, I wanted to get those two cents in and get your reaction. Yeah. And look, if he gets, he's got the Senate and if he gets the House, which looking at how well Republicans are doing around the country, there's a pretty good chance that he gets the House.

8:01He will have for two years, pretty much unfettered ability to enact his agenda. I think what you just said is really spot on, Anthony. I was on set all evening with a Trump supporter for the last few hours. And I heard him say a lot of what you just said, that this is Democrats acting like elites, assuming that people don't hear it when Donald Trump is called a Nazi, and that they have not realized the degree to which the way American society has moved on issues of, potentially, even issues of gay marriage, on trans issues, have caused a lot of people disquiet. Potentially, even on women's equality issues have caused a lot of people disquiet and things have moved too fast.

8:59and they want a moment to think, actually, is that what we want for the country? Combine that with the immigration message, combine that with the inflation, which has hit them particularly hard. And they're going to look at the things that affect them. It reminds me of what Kellyanne Conway said in 2016, there's a difference for voters between things that offend them and things that affect them. And they feel these things affect them directly. But there is a degree to which Donald Trump as an avatar for dissatisfaction against elite, college-educated, urban America, the media, the universities, that's certainly quite a bit of what we see amongst Trump supporters.

9:44And they have some good reason to feel that. Katty, democracy, the exit polls. It turns out Elon Musk was telling people that democracy is on the line. And if you don't vote for Donald Trump, you're being threatened by the left. They're going to take away your democracy. They were using the mirror image narrative for their supporters. And when people exited these polling booths, the exit polls said that they were worried about democracy. So did Elon Musk, who I think was a better running mate for Donald Trump than J.D. Vance and a better RNC than the RNC, did Elon Musk literally single-handedly help this man get over the finish line?

10:30So I'm just going to break in here because Fox News has just called Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. So he's the president. It's only Fox News so far, but that would make him, if Fox is right, and Fox has a very good elections desk, they monitor the data like everybody else. They are not waiting for, I guess, the rest of all these mail-in votes to be counted. But that makes Donald Trump the president-elect of the United States. And as you said, this is the biggest political comeback in American political history.

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12:35I think that's a really good question. I mean, the degree to which Elon Musk affected the results of this election through Twitter or any, I think it's a combination, Anthony. I think it was Donald Trump making a concerted effort to use all forms of new media. And the Trump campaign, as we just talked about establishment and elite programs, they dish 60 Minutes. That's part of the elite establishment programming. He went on Joe Rogan. He went on a podcast that had a large audience with the types of voters he wanted to reach. And Elon Musk is part of that. I don't know that you can attribute this seismic wins that Donald Trump had tonight to just to Twitter.

13:26I mean, yes, Twitter has an enormous audience. And yes, Elon Musk has tweeted 1 ,400 times this year about voter fraud and illegal migrants. So that reaches billions of people. But this is not even about voter fraud. This is about people actively wanting. There's no one here suggesting that he has won these states nefariously. This is about people liking Donald Trump's message and just as importantly, not liking the Democrats' message. Yeah, there's no question. But the mobilization of the$44 billion megaphone, now known as X, and the ideas around the sweepstakes and the ideas around outsourcing and mobilizing people into the swing states paid for by the Musk Political Action Committee, these were tremendous benefits to the Trump campaign.

14:25Yeah, but do you think that if Elon Musk had gone all in with the Harris campaign and been on the other side of the equation, are you suggesting that this might have been a different result? Yes, I am suggesting that. I am suggesting that. I don't see him doing that based on his personality and his origin story. But I do think that people will look back at this and I'm channeling a little bit of Tim Alberta here. People will look back at this and they'll say, okay, what happened here? This was the campaign where Citizens United showed up on steroids. It didn't show up with a million-dollar check here and a million-dollar check there.

15:10It showed up with hundreds of millions of dollars. There were 60 billionaires that said, you know what? This man is a transactionalist. I am going to transact with him. I'm not going to put an op-ed in the Washington Post. I want that government contract for my space company. I'm going to make sure I'm on the right side of this person if he wins. It was a ruthless billionaire calculation because they knew if they were deriding Kamala Harris and she won, there would have been no action taken against them because that's what the traditional politician does. I guess the counter argument to that is that it was Kamala Harris's campaign that spent way more than Donald Trump did on conventional things that you and I have spoken about, like the get out the vote operation that she had in Pennsylvania.

16:04She spent almost three times more than anyone has ever spent on get out the vote operations. So it's not that she didn't have money. I mean, if Donald Trump Trump wins. Donald Trump has won, according to Fox News. It's not because of lack of money on the Harris campaign. They had tons of money. So is it then just a question of how they spent it and how they used that money? I think I'm making a different point. I'm saying that the money does matter to a threshold. And then when it goes over that threshold, the ideas matter more than the money, but Trump was successful at getting to that threshold by transacting with people that understood his quid pro quo nature.

16:54The Harris money was a little bit more organic. It was less quid pro quo in terms of his orientation. But your point is well taken that she had the money. And then the questions are going to be as follows. what do you think Joe Biden's legacy is through all this? He's probably sitting there at Gatty Kay saying, hey, I'm the only guy that beat Trump. Should have left me in the race. I personally think there would have been no chance of him beating him. What about Josh Shapiro? Should she have picked Josh Shapiro versus Tim Walz? There'll be so many different things that they're going to do. But I hope the one thing that they do do is say, wow, Trump is a formidable athlete in politics.

17:38He sees something about the cultural zeitgeist and the society that we have to accept. We can no longer poo-poo these people that are showing up for him, standing in line for him, waiting in the rain for him. We can't poo-poo these people. We've got to figure out a way to win these people. And Democrats are going to have to have a real think about the issue of race and their appeal to non-white voters. Now, they still won Hispanic voters and black voters by large margins. I mean, they're still getting a majority of Hispanic voters and they're still getting a very large majority of black voters, but they're not winning them enough that they can think, okay, we can rest on our laurels and assume these people are going to turn out for us and drive us into the White House every four years as they were thinking back after the 2012 election when it was assumed that demographics would be inexorable and inevitable for the Democratic Party because that's clearly not the case.

18:42And so, they're going to have to rethink. And they're going to have to rethink particularly their appeal to black men and to Hispanic men because that seems to be where they've really lost out. I mean, I think the gender split that we have spoken about is very real in the country. Why is it that you've got black men and Hispanic men, historic numbers turning to the Republican candidate when previously they would have gone for a Democratic candidate? What is the appeal there? And I think they have to think about that. I mean, they've got a lot they have to think about, but the autopsy will be done on the Harris campaign.

19:17We'll get into all of that in podcasts over the next week or two. And it's worth looking at because I think it gives us a sense of the direction of the country in terms of, I mean, elections are always fascinating because they tell you so much about the country and what people's priorities are and what they want. And I think we've had a, Democrats have had a big wake up call and a lot of people watching this election have had a big, we always knew it was possible Trump would win up until about a week ago, you and I were saying it was quite likely that Trump was going to win this. We always knew that it was possible, but the degree to which he's underperformed, I think I certainly didn't anticipate.

19:49And I did hear the confidence with which they were speaking over the last week and that Des Moines Register poll. And that seemed to feed into a different narrative. So, I think there's going to be questions about polling. There's going to be questions about how the Democrats fail to reach those groups. What do you think this means? And we'll get into this more, but just off the top of your head, Anthony, what does it mean for America and for the rest of the world that Donald Trump is reelected with the Senate and the House. If we don't know about the House, wait, because we don't know about the House, but certainly with the Senate.

20:22And I guess the House would make a difference. Again, I have, you know, and this is the complexity of Donald Trump. And I've said this before on our podcast, but it bears worth repeating because he could go in a direction of, here are the keys, I'm turning it over to some smart people, and I'm going to go play golf. It could go in a very arrogant, very narcissistic direction where you guys went after me, you scorned me, and I'm now going to go after you. And I'm going to organize in a way to go after you. And then of course, you and I, I got a lot of comments about the Trump mind virus that you and I were talking about.

21:05He may have a group of people in there that are going to try to out Trump Trump in terms of their immigration policies, in terms of their trade policies. The only person in American history to come back and serve a second term after losing an election is Grover Cleveland. And that happened in 1892. And Trump often - Just once before. And Trump often talks about taking this country back to the 1890s, where 97 % of the country's manufacturing was consumed here in the country. That it's literally an isolationist country, walled off metaphorically and walled off figuratively from the rest of the world.

21:47And so the real issue is which direction is he going to go in? And I think we'll learn quickly which direction he's going to go in and how many willing accomplices will he have in either of those two directions that I'm portraying. And so for me, I don't know the answer, but I do think if I was in Kiev this evening and I was part of Zelensky's leadership, I was part of his ministry of defense, I was Zelensky himself, I would be gulping in saying he's coming for me. He's already said publicly that the war is, quote unquote, my fault, even though Putin is the one that crossed into my borders. And he's coming for me.

22:35And he's going to give Vladimir Putin something that Vladimir Putin wants. And man, that's going to be a very rough time in Eastern Europe. It's going to be a very rough time in the United Kingdom and other parts of our alliance. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of nervous leaders in Europe at the moment. looking at these election results, looking at the prospect of tariffs on European goods, going into America if that plan is enacted, certainly looking at what Donald Trump does with NATO, the degree to which he decides that America is no longer going to be central to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

23:10And of course, what happens as well with Ukraine, just before we're going to leave, because you've got to get back to that live stream, Mark Cuban has tweeted out, congrats at real Donald Trump, you won fair and square, congrats to at Elon Musk as well hashtag godspeed I don't think that that's what you would have heard from Elon Musk if this had gone the other way around but and this is without the major networks apart from Fox calling Pennsylvania but Mark Cuban doing what is conventional in American politics and conceding to the other side yeah again yeah I will I will offer my same congratulations once it's official but in the immortal words of Barry Diller caddy k when he lost the Paramount merger in the early 1990s.

23:55He said, and I quote, they won, we lost, next. And I think it's really that simple. Can't be a sore loser, can't be a baby. Let's get going on the next project. The thing you can always rely on in American politics is the next presidential election starts the day after the voting in this one. And by the way, Katty Kay, it'll be the most consequential and most important election in our history. Most historic. And most historic. Judging from what Mark Cuban has just tweeted out, who's of course very close to Kamala Harris, I would expect that Kamala Harris will concede this election. The Democrats don't want to be in a position of not conceding and of not accepting the election results, particularly when they've been decisive.

24:42It seems like this one has, and we're getting these results much quicker. We haven't heard Donald Trump because he's about to speak in Florida. There had been speculation that he would claim victory, even if he didn't have it. It looks, Anthony, like he can now claim victory and he has got it. Yeah. And then the real question is, we know from the campaign, the Harris campaign, that she won't be speaking tonight. That's sort of something that Secretary Clinton did in 2016. 2016. The real question is, will she call President Trump tonight to offer her congratulations? I believe she will. I expect her to do so.

25:19And secondarily, will she attend his inauguration? I believe she also will. That's it from Anthony and me for the moment. We've got those results in. We can give you most of them. Of course, we'll be back with more on Wednesday evening. We're going to meet again and tape some more then, Anthony. We miss you here, Caddy. We miss you here. Wish I was with you. Yeah, we got Marina surrounded by, it's like a sausage factory for this poor woman, you know. All these brutal, depressed men, you know, just trying to keep things lively. You keep telling me about the sausages. Can I just say, don't swap me out for somebody surrounded by sausages, okay?

25:53No, no, you're stuck. If you're thinking of a change, then, you know. You're stuck with me. Even though you damaged my car, you're still stuck with me, okay? We'll be back, guys. We'll record more, of course, during the course of this week and bring you further episodes. Good to be with you. you