Transcript of US election results: What will Trump do now? | BBC Americast

Hello, it's Sarah. I'm now in West Palm Beach in Florida, not very far away from Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's renowned residence.

And it's Justin in the temporary worldwide headquarters of AmeraCast in the basement of the Washington DC office.

And it's Anthony here with Justin in this windowless basement office, decorated with a few bobble heads and American flags. Makes it feel homey.

And it's Mariana also in, perhaps it's the windowless world headquarters, or whatever we're going to call it now, worldwide headquarters. In DC.

World windowless headquarters. But it's progress anyway, because we're all together. Although, Sarah, you've deserted us. And you've dessert us actually just after we did the last episode. So you've got to Florida, which is good news.

Now, of course, I came to West Palm Beach in the hope of catching a glimpse of Donald Trump, who has not been cited today. Kamala Harris came out and gave her concession speech. She spoke to him on the phone. Joe Biden spoke to Donald Trump on the phone, but we haven't seen him yet. So I'm going to stay here for at least another day, probably a couple, because how long can it truly be before Donald Trump feels the need to get himself out in front of either his supporters or the television cameras? He can't just let Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, who's going to do an address from the oval office I don't have all of the attention. So, yeah, I'm here on Trump Watch.

Let's turn to a question to kick us off. Good afternoon, team, Peter Hud says. Is it afternoon?

I literally don't know what time. It feels like the afternoon, but it's actually the evening for us.

Okay, it's our evening, your middle of the night. Anyway, thanks, Peter, for that. I hope you are well, he says, after a grueling and busy few months. That's very nicely. An idea for you. Why not write a list of everything Donald Trump has promised in the last couple of months, then in two years time, compared to how things are now? Peter's point being, Anthony, that Donald Trump doesn't always do the things he has promised to do.

He does some of them. He promised to do a Muslim ban when he was elected in 2016, and he tried to do something along those lines. He tried to spend more on border security, although that was towards as well. But I think it will be interesting because this time around, Donald Trump does have a much more explicit agenda. It wasn't just Project 2025, which was this independent book full of policy proposals that Donald Trump renounced. But his campaign, and Donald Trump himself, talked about mass deportations, millions of undocumented migrants living in America being sent out of the country, talked about tariffs, a broad-based baseline tariffs on all imports, and one's specifically targeting certain imports from Mexico and China, but even the tariffs on US allies. He has talked about a variety of different tax policies and tax cuts and tax credits and tax deductions for things like tips, earnings from tips, Social Security, which is the elderly pension benefits that all Americans of a certain age get, a tax credit for the interest on car loans for our used cars, a tax deduction for state and local taxes. This is all stuff that he might be able to get through.

It'll be interesting to see, though, what his first step is, because last time, his first step really was trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare reform that Obama instituted. That ran into a brick wall. Now, maybe he's going to move forward with immigration, maybe it's trade. I think we should keep track of it. I think it is a good idea.

Thank you, Peter. Yeah, I mean, Trump told us many, many times in his campaign speeches that on day one, he would close the border and he would drill baby drill, by which he means open up lots, lots more domestic oil production in the United States. But I wonder if Peter's point as well is that he also said lots of other things that he didn't maybe mean to be policy platforms. That was one of the things that was always interesting about listening to Donald Trump's speeches. When was he just saying stuff and when was he announcing policy initiatives? When he said that he wanted to make childcare free, but then never explained how he was going to pay for it. He hinted that he was going to make IVF available free for anybody who wanted it, but I don't think he really meant that. He mused on Joe Rogan's podcast about abolishing income tax because you could replace all of the money that you took in from income tax with high tariffs on imported goods. There were things he threw out there which he probably didn't mean. Then there's probably some stuff in a gray area that you might want to get done, but he can't or he maybe changes his mind about.

It's a very fluid manifesto, I think, that we got from Donald Trump over the course of the last year.

Yeah, I've just been I'm talking to a conservative Republican congressman who rolls back a bit on all of that. He says on this business of having a tariff on everything imported into America, including things that aren't made or grown here. In other words, stuff that is at the moment a certain price would suddenly have that tariff added to it. It would plainly be inflationary. Are they seriously going to do that? What they say is, Well, no, it's a negotiating position, and ultimately we'll do deals. It's really for countries that oppose us rather than our friends, because at the moment it's for all countries, including the UK, and it would have a considerable impact on people who export into the United States. The congressman was suggesting to me that actually when it comes to it, it won't be like that. We won't quite do that. The other thing that's really interesting about that maybe won't happen, as I put to him, this idea that you round up everyone who is in America illegally. It could be 11 million people, it could be 12 million. I mean, it's huge. I mean, you're talking about camps full of people to be deported, families, some children left here because they have the right to be here, because they were born here.

I mean, absolute chaos. He was really, really pulling back from that and said, Look, it's a few criminals. We got some gangs here. We'll send them back.

And that was it. Logistically, it just is an enormous task. Is that like Muslim ban, which he actually tried to enact early on, or is it like the the wall along the entirety of the US-Mexico border, which everyone said was impractical. You're not going to build a 2000-mile wall along the US-Mexico border. Donald Trump never really tried to do that. He built some walls, but not all of it. Is it more of one of those ones that is meant to show that he's taking the issue seriously, but not meant to be literally applied? Another thing that he's talked about is remaking the federal bureaucracy. That was something he tried to do towards the end of his administration coalition, where there are these career government employees who are career civil service folks. He wanted a change of the way they're categorized to replace them with political appointments. He began instituting this policy, and then when Joe Biden won, he reversed it. I think we will see within the first few days, him reinstating that and filling these bureaucratic spots, the agencies, the ones who sometimes blocked Donald Trump's more ambitious changes to federal policy, replacing those folks with people who are loyal as people who have been picked by the groups around Trump have been vetted already, thousands of people, and start filling them in and injecting them into the government workforce because they are going to be the foot soldiers in what could be a Trump revolution, the same way that we had a Reagan revolution back in the 1980s, really fundamentally changing the way government operates.

When I woke back up this morning after not very much sleep, I spent some time with my undercover voters to see what they were seeing.

Were they in bed with They were charging. They were charging. With the undercover and undercover voters.

Anthony.

That was good.

I was looking… It's tickled, Sarah. I was looking at my left-leaning undercover voters feed, in particular, Progressive Left, Emma. The thing that was popping up repeatedly was this conversation about abortion and what's going to happen there and what has Donald Trump said He will do or won't do lots of very videos from people who have really upset and really worried, particularly young women, saying, Hang on a second, what does all of this mean? You think of some of the promises he has made on that front. There was that female voters, Fox Town Hall that he gave about three weeks ago, where he said, There's not going to be an abortion ban. Then he also made these comments about IVF for free, where he said, I'm the father of IVF. It went quite viral. People questioning what that actually meant. But you wonder whether one of the reasons that we've ended up at this point is because perhaps some people didn't believe that he'd go through with some of the stuff that the Democrats were warning he might do on abortion, which perhaps could have motivated even more of that vote to come out. I don't know.

Sarah, if he has the House and the Senate, and they come up with a bill, conservative Republicans come up with a bill that bans abortion or limits it hugely for the whole of the United States, the question then is whether he signs it, isn't it?

No, the question then is whether he can get it through the Senate, and he's not going to have 60 senators. This is what the great misnomer about abortion has been throughout the whole of this election campaign. There was no need to worry about Trump bringing in a national abortion ban because he would never have the votes in Congress to do it. And he himself said that numerous times, actually, in debates and other forums. He said, Why are we even talking about this? Because it would never pass the House. But the converse of that... Well, yes, They could, but the converse of that was that Kamala Harris was never going to be able to do anything to protect abortion rights because she was never going to have the votes in the Senate to be able to do that either. We have a Democratic President at the moment who was really upset when Roe versus Wade was overturned and has been unable to do anything to restore abortion rights or protect abortion rights in the states that have restricted it very heavily. Kamala Harris was going to be every bit as powerless as Joe Biden was to reverse any of the abortion bans that have been introduced.

The only way you can make a difference to abortion laws is with the little state referendums that have been happening over the last few years. Several of them, of course, in this election as well, were mostly pro-abortion rights amendments were passed, not in Florida, but in lots of other states. But this whole argument about whether abortion would be more restricted under Donald Trump or freer under Kamala Harris has just been a mirage. It's not been true.

Well, what you could see happen with Donald Trump being President is restrictions that he does through executive action, limiting, for instance, the abortion pill and access to the abortion pill, whether through the mail or in states where they don't have legal abortion right now. You could also see him use the power of the FDA to make the abortion pill just harder to get full stop, that you have to have a doctor's prescription and an in-doctor visit. This was a Supreme Court case that the Supreme Court ended up knocking down earlier this year, but that was because they said the lawsuit lawsuit against it that was challenging the Biden administration policies didn't have standing. It didn't have the right to bring that lawsuit. If the Trump administration comes in and they dot all their I's and cross all their T's and change that policy, you could see it much harder to have access to the abortion pill, not only in states that have abortion bans, but also in states where it is very legal.

If we're speaking about health, it feels like an opportune moment to bring up Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And some of There are some promises that have been made or haven't been made about the role that he could play in what's unfolding. He's an interesting character. We've spoken about him a lot on America Cast at various points, particularly because he's often characterized as an anti-vaxxer. I think maybe the correct way of talking about him would be to say he's a vaccine skeptic who often is asking questions about big pharmaceutical companies and has flirt with, for want of a better word, or engaged with some of the more extreme anti-vax activists online. There's a There's more outlandish stuff that Trump has promised. We've got that. We spoke a bit about Elon Musk and, Oh, is he going to be this Department for Efficiency, Government Efficiency, that thing. Then also, that Joe Rogan, on that Joe In the podcast, Trump said that he'd release the JFK files.Is.

It going to happen?At last.

Yeah. Well, look, taking all of those, the JFK files, yeah. I suspect having made that promise on Joe Rogan and it being relatively easy to I would have thought he will do it, and I doubt there'd be, frankly, anything particularly interesting in them. On the RFK thing, if RFK really does take a pack saw to the whole structure of the administrative state, as they call it, when it comes to health and the broader idea of pharmaceutical regulation, et cetera, et cetera, in the US, That is a very big deal, actually, isn't it? I mean, a really game-changing thing and something that will be deeply upsetting to people and will have a real impact on lives. But it's quite a big if, isn't it?

Yeah, I guess it's how much that Donald Trump feels he owes RFK Jr. And how much freedom he wants to give him to do things like regulate processed foods, ban gummies is one of the things he's talked about, or get rid of fluoride in water, which is another thing RFK Jr. Has been very vocal about wanting to do or having warning labels on vaccines. It is funny that Donald Trump talks about all this deregulation and not having government dictate what you can and can't do. But then he might be bringing into the tent someone who wants to use the strong arm of government to crack down on corporate power and corporate agriculture and big food. That is something that really we're going to have to keep an eye on because it is up to Donald Trump how much power he wants to give him. He might decide that led him have free reign because it's not something Donald Trump really cares about.

It's quite interesting, Sarah, isn't it? When it came to RFK and what his role will be, all the talk about what that role will be has come so far from the man himself. In other words, RFK, not the guy in charge.

The guy in charge said he was going to put RFK Junior in charge of women's health. He didn't specify what's different about women's health or exactly what he would be doing. But of course, he's also made very clear that whilst he's welcoming him into the administration and saying he can have some health role, that he's to stay very, very far away from energy policy. Because, of course, the other thing that RFK Junior is famous for is he's actually a long-term environmental activist who's completely opposed to Donald Trump dismantling all sorts of climate change legislation and opening up all this new oil production. So he's been told to stay away from that. Don't touch the liquid gold, he's been told, but you can get the fluoride out of the water.

There is a wider thing here that we're touching on that I think is really interesting about the Trump administration, which is when it comes to the role of the state and regulation that Anthony mentions and all the rest of it, but also this thing that conservative Americans have long wrestled with and thought about, what is a good society? What should an ethical good society look like? What is the relationship of an individual to the state? You got, on the one hand, a lot of interventionists actually in the Trump team, potentially. I mean, look at agenda 2025, this thing, this apparent blueprint for government that some people in a right-wing think tank came up with. One of the things is banning pornography, which we talked about before, isn't it? You talk about all the time. You always bear the plan. Because I think it's so Because I think of Donald Trump and I think about his supporters and the ones that I've met, and I just think on their great list of things that they'd like to do, that probably isn't very near the top. Those sorts of tensions, actually, will become, once gets into office and has to pick the people for the various roles, much more obvious.

Yeah, the Republican Party used to be the party of small government and low government spending and a government that leaves you alone. That's not Donald Trump's Republican Party. There are places where Donald Trump really wants an aggressive dictating federal government on things like talking about tech companies and social media companies. He wanted them to elbow their way in, the government to elbow their way in. Regulate, right, Mariana?

Yeah, and it's really interesting because actually, I know I've spoken about this probably way too much over the past few episodes now, but the relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and to what extent is it beneficial to some of those big tech bosses to feel like they're on the right side of Donald Trump, and will that benefit them in terms of… There was a lot of criticism from Donald Trump about perceived censorship within the social media companies and that they were taking posts down and so on. But there's also been a shift, actually, I'd say, in global attitudes towards the social media companies, particularly when it comes to harm to kids and lots of parents who've been really vocal about the harm caused to kids. Donald Trump might find himself in quite an interesting position in the global sphere because there's generally been a bit of a shift towards, we probably need to do something to, for example, better protect kids from social media. But that might be slightly at odds with some of the tech bros we're talking about who that might make them a little bit less rich.

One thing he's going to do, Sarah, is end all wars.

Yes. Well, it's somehow or other because, of course, he said that Initially, he said he could end the war between Ukraine and Russia within 24 hours. Then more recently, he said he'll get it done before he even takes office. As President-elect, he's going to finish that war. He's never specified how the speculation, of course, is that he would pressure President Zelensky into giving up territory, possibly most or all of the territory that Russia currently occupies in Ukraine. What's going to be really interesting, of course, in the meantime, especially if he's going to delve into that diplomatically before he's even President, there It's almost three months left of the Biden administration who have given billions and billions of dollars and equipment and weapons to Ukraine to help them in their fight against Russia. Do they surge everything they possibly can into Ukraine, give Kyiv everything that they have been asking for, knowing that this is probably the last chance that Donald Trump will end the funding for Ukraine's defense. However, he tries to sort out the war. So could it be that finally, Zelensky will get what he's been wanting because this is the last chance that Democrats have got to give it to him.

Another thing that's been popping up a lot on social media, including on the undercover voters feed, has been the war in the Middle East and particularly concerns from people across the political spectrum, but people who are very distressed by the images and videos they've been seeing coming out of Gaza in particular. Before the election, I spent some time with some students in New York who had been targeted with hate and doxing, who had found themselves going deeper and deeper into their own echo chambers online and ended up deciding, actually, they didn't want to vote for the Democrats. One decided to vote third party, the other felt inclined to vote for Donald Trump. I think that's interesting. Where do these people sit now? Because I wonder whether some people that voted for a third party thought, believed this promise of Donald Trump, that he will actually stop the wars, or is he going to go in a direction that is actually even further away from what they would have wanted, and they might think, Oh, actually, I wish I hadn't voted for the third party candidate.

I met quite a few young Arab Americans in Michigan to talk about exactly this, one of whom was really, really encouraging people to vote for Donald Trump. Not only, a registered Democrat, previous Bernie Sanders supporter said she was voting for Trump and she was endorsing him and encouraging other people to do it. She's an intelligent, well-informed woman. We had a discussion about this, and she seemed perfectly well aware, actually, that Donald Trump would probably be even more supportive of what Israel is doing than the current administration is. She just thought there was so much hypocrisy in Democrats supplying all the lethal weaponry to Israel that they are and not managing to force the Israeli Prime Minister into some ceasefire arrangement that she just wanted to punish the Democrats. But I mean, It's a peculiar way of doing it to lend a vote to somebody who will be fully supportive of Israel's right to do what it wants. He has said that. He has phoned Prime Minister Netanyahu and said, You've got to do what you've got to do to finish this off. The idea that he will constrain Israel in any way compared to what the Biden administration has done is for the birds, isn't it?

Yeah, I think so. You've heard Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis talk about how Donald Trump called them after they began their offensive against Lebanon and congratulated the Israelis on that incursion. I think it is safe to say that the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, will be much like the first Trump administration, which ruled that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were no longer illegal in the American view, that moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, took all of these steps to support the Israelis. I think we're going to see more of that. Now, maybe there was a case where this entire election came down in Michigan, and all eyes were on Michigan today, and those hand a few hundred thousand Arab-American voters who broke for Trump and essentially delivered the White House to Trump, that Donald Trump would feel that he owed them something and would remember it and maybe moderate his views on the Gaza war as is in return for their support. But because this election was so across the board, a win for Donald Trump, and there's no one state or one constituency that I think Donald Trump feels he owes for this, I don't think that scenario is anywhere close to being realized.

They certainly think that Trump supporters, and I'm talking about the people who might be part of his administration and his political support here in Washington, DC. They genuinely think that a man who is unpredictable and staunch in his view that America should be great again and should at least threaten to use its power, but with the hope of never actually using it, that the relationship with Iran will change really profoundly. They think Iran has been energized by perceived weakness in the Biden-Harris administration, and indeed in the Obama administration. They think that Trump, because he does the things that he does or speaks the words that he does, that somehow the Iranians will be, in a sense, put back in their box. We'll see whether that actually happens. But there is a genuine belief that his coming to power will change the way in which the dynamics in the Middle East play out. Well, we will see now whether it happens.

Sarah, what are you getting up to over the next few days in Florida?

I am at the mercy of Donald Trump. I am here waiting to see what he does next. I think you were right, Justin, when you said it's probably going to involve a round of golf, which we may or may not see him doing. But just in case he wants to come out, give a speech, some public event, just in case he wants to come on a MaraCast, I'm going to hang out here for a couple of days just to see what he's up to next.

Okay, that's it. We got to go. Or at least, Anthony has got to go. He's got other things to do. I'm sure you do too, Mariana, and I need to go to bed. Actually, no, I can't get to bed. I've got to present another program. You do.

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