Transcript of The Trump Comeback and the 2024 Election Results

Welcome to Raising Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.

And I'm Jessica Tarlev.

Jess, how are you doing?

How are you doing? Not on drugs, and so this is natural vibes of what's going on. I feel remarkably okay for the, and we'll see as the votes continue to trickle in, but like the shellacking, right, that the Democratic Party got and Kamala got. And for me, it feels so different from 2016, where it was sky is falling, how did this happen? Let's go blame Jim Comey for everything, which I still do. This feels like a big soul-searching moment. I'm more comfortable as a highly-educated elite. I get going back to school, right? I got to fix this. How do we rebuild our coalition? I'm in that zone, but emotions can be volatile. I'm sure I'll change in a bit. What about you?

I'll play out the blow by blow here. I was actually feeling pretty good leading up to the election the last few days. I was watching and I had PTSD or deja vu of 2016 when They were going over the Florida map, and I can do math, and I know where districts are blue or red. I just looked at the math and like, Oh, she's going to lose Florida by a lot, which means she's lost the election. I don't know. I do believe that the majority of media, except for your program, has a pretty strong liberal bias and wants to believe... I can't tell you how many times they sell on Amazon and CNN, which was the ones I was pinging in between, they kept talking about her viable path. When the path when the path was literally disappearing. I thought, Oh, my gosh, it got so late, so early. I started doing, and I'm curious. I want to hear about your coping mechanisms if you need them. But I thought, I was really bummed out. I was surprised how bummed out I was. I thought, I know. We had Dan Harris on the pivot pod, and he has this method for stress around mindful breathing, where you do this straw method, where you breathe in through your nose.

One, and then two seconds on the straw breath, exhale through your mouth. I did that five or six times. And just so you know, Jess, that shit does not work for me.

Yeah, I was going to say, I'm not even going to try that. That's just like it would never work.

It totally in effect. When Dan says it, you believe it. I went to my coping mechanism. I did a Peroni, then a Xanax, and then another Peroni, or what I affectionately called the Panics method. I was up till 4:00 in the morning watching her lose slowly then suddenly. And I found it wasn't a total loss. I found I am an amazing dancer on prescription-grade pharmaceuticals, especially to '80s music. So that was a bright, shiny light. And as of an hour ago, big move hour ago, I upgraded from my pajamas to athleisure. So I've been in my pajamas, drinking, watching Netflix, and my stocks are rocketing. So this is basically COVID I was going to say it's actually that you're a woman from 2016. That's what it looks like. What happened with you?

Give us the low by blow at Fox. I was on air. Yeah. It's like there's something about public Humiliation that obviously just hits differently. I say humiliation not in that everyone was actually incredibly generous to me. Of all people, Karl Rove was the most vehement defender of Kamala, where he said this was a fundamentals election, and there was basically no way to win this. If 70% of the country thinks you're on the wrong track, and if the prices of necessities are still too high for people, and you are the sitting vice president who did not do a good job detaching herself from Biden, which we should talk about how she could have done that better. But he said she couldn't this election. I thought that... I was like, Bless you, Karl Rove, because he was doing it also to be generous to me, which I appreciated, but to also really call balls and strikes, which I feel like is happening so infrequently in media these days because everyone has their horse, right? They're just like, I'm going to keep saying this no matter what, no matter what, no matter what. He was like, Let's take a step back and actually look at the terrain of all of this and what she could have possibly accomplished.

I appreciated that. But I was on three or four times throughout the evening. I was on when they called Pennsylvania for him, so that's over, right? Fox was the first to call the election in full, right? To say that he had won. Then I sat around about an hour waiting for him to start speaking. I thought he did a good job. There was no harshness, really, to it. It had some of the unifying stuff. It was typical Trump, like, Look at all the most beautiful people who did the best job, et cetera. But it continues to be, even though I have this awesome job all the time, one of the most incredible experiences to get to be sitting there on an election night when history is made. We'll see how the votes once everything is fully counted out of the West Coast, so it could be weeks, how it shakes out. But he pulled off this comeback of unprecedented levels in being able to do this and changing the map in terms of how red, blue states are getting. Jersey, only D plus 5, New York, only D plus 12. You're right about Florida. When Miami Dade went like that and at that level for him, you think like, Oh, something is afloat here that is larger than just Donald Trump is going to be the next President.

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about what issues who's showed up and what didn't. I thought it was basically three things. It was inflation, immigration, and incumbency. And so on inflation, they didn't do a good job of basically convincing people, Okay, our inflation is bad. It's better than it is anywhere else. And this is what we've done to bring it down to pre-pandemic levels. They just weren't successful talking about that. In terms of immigration, the Republicans were much more effective at convincing people that immigration has gotten out of control. There was some soft tissue. A lot of people don't think that this administration has gotten it right around immigration. But I think the reason she lost is incumbency. I think vice President Harris can hold her head high. I think given the card or the hand she was dealt with 107 days and just who she is, she's not an inspiring retail politician, in my view. I thought she did her level best. I go back to the debate. She prepared. She had the world on her shoulders, and she absolutely destroyed them. I think she gave it her best shot. I think she can hold her head high.

She left it all on the field, in my view. The Democratic Party and Joe Biden. Joe Biden should be buried in a crypt next to Ruth Bader-Gainsberg and Diane Feinstein that said, I'm a fucking narcissist, and I have ruined my legacy. For them not to hold him to account and do what he said he was going to do in 2020 and may a transition president, and for everyone around him not to have an honest conversation that you sound like someone about to go into hospice. This just isn't going to work. To basically throw someone who wasn't combat ready, to not give them the benefit of the process that produces great candidates in this country, specifically the primary process. What happens in a primary is that it's a person that not only rises and gets battle tested, but the person that rises in that moment. You find that some people just footwell to the moment. No incumbent that was anywhere near an administration during a period where two-thirds of America, feels like America is on the wrong track, has a shot in hell. There'll be a lot of forensics here, but I think the commission looking at the problems here, I don't think it was Vice President Harris.

I think she did the best she absolutely could. But the Democratic Party and Joe Biden made huge errors here in terms of what showed up and what didn't. What didn't show up, there was a bigger shocker in my view. If you didn't know bodily autonomy was supposed to be an issue, you wouldn't think it was an issue. She had fewer women vote for her than voted for Biden in 2020. I mean, it just wasn't... Now, whether that's because he, Trump, was able to distance himself in five of seven states, had referendums that went pro choice such that people thought it's really not on him, but it did not impact him whatsoever. Your thoughts on issues that showed up or didn't show up?

Well, I think that we need to be more specific about who showed up and what women did, because it's white women, again, that voted for Trump. It was 52% of white women, and it was 53% of white women in 2016. That was to our conversation earlier in the week about the shy Trump or the shy Kamala voter. That's who it was, and it was a shy Trump voter again. We could get into, and I'm sure people will, about the decision that Ann Selser made in weighting certain categories of women more than others. Senior women count for more than just one. If you're thinking of it as one person, they're like one and a quarter because they senior show up and women show up, and they feel extremely passionately about this. But That did shock me, and it completely turns the thinking that Democrats had about these abortion referendums on its head because we were hurt exponentially by the fact that they could make that choice, that they could vote for Donald Trump, and they could vote to preserve their right to choose. You see that margins in Arizona and Nevada, two key swing states, are astronomical.

They voted in Arizona, I think it's 23 points for being able to have the to an abortion, and 28 points in Nevada, both chose Donald Trump. I think some of that is that Trump has always seemed like a more moderate person, no matter what. But the other problem with it is that we made it the be all and end all. A lot of Conservatives were right in saying, This will matter, but it will not matter like you think it matters. The messaging about making it an economic issue, et cetera, that didn't resonate because, A, they thought That the other guy was going to be better for the economy, right? Kamala broke it, Trump will fix it, is what people essentially voted on when they went to the polls. There's a big piece in the Times about how could Trump and abortion win, and the reckoning that we're going to have to do in the future of understanding that, that the feelings about Roe or bringing back the Roe standards, et cetera, are more complicated. I also think they dropped the ball on talking the court appointments. Donald Trump will probably have two more court appointments in the next four years.

Thomas and Alito, I assume, will go, even if they feel fine, because we don't know what comes in '28 and beyond. Then he will have hand-selected five of the justices. I forget what year was the last time that a president had been responsible for a majority of the justices, but it was a long time ago. That was something that was really major to me. The low propensity voters, the dudes that you talk about all the time, showed up. There were all these surveys that said that they're saying that they're really interested, but who knows? Maybe they have something better to do that day, or maybe they don't get off the couch, or maybe they're at work. They don't really care that much, but they really enjoyed him on Joe Rogan. They all turned out. This shift amongst Latino men, I think, is really something. It feels like that That could be more enduring, especially with the contrast between accepting that a lot of the stuff that he says is racist, the demonization of migrants. They really separate themselves from that group. That doesn't have to do with me. Or are there all these interviews about how they don't think that he's serious about the deportation force, people who have undocumented parents and do not think that he's going to come to kick them out of the country.

We obviously did not talk about the seriousness of that issue well enough for people. I don't mean that we didn't talk about it because we did talk about it all the time, but it was all the sky is falling, and this feels like a chill-out election to me. It's just not that fucking serious. We lived through Trump before, we'll live through Trump again. We would rather be governed by people who look like they're having fun, who don't look like they're melting down all the time. They're not lecturing me. Some of it I don't enjoy. I think he goes off on these tangents. Maybe he's losing his mind a little or whatever. But Dana White is fun, and Tony Hinchcliff was funny on Netflix. Maybe I don't think he was that funny at MSG. I do think this cool realignment issue is going to be a really big deal. We always fashioned ourselves as the cool kids, and they really told us that we're super uncool. That's a tough pill to swallow for people who always owned the culture. How does Barack Obama feel right now and Michelle Obama as representatives of the rock stars of the Democratic Party?

They basically got the middle finger in all of this, not from Black women, should say, they showed up, Black women and Jewish women, two strongest demos for Kamala in this.

I'm trying to think of how to brand this election. So far, I've come with the Kids are not all right or the Manosphere election. I'll tell you why I think that. I'm curious to get your reaction. Of all the age groups, the one that swung the furthest towards Trump were 18 to 29-year-olds. And I mean, violently, 11-point difference between '20 and 2024 in terms of who they voted for. And I think they're facing a situation where their rent and buying a house has almost become unattainable for them. And they're looking at an administration that wants to bail out the one-third of the population that went to go to college, and they didn't. They see everything around them getting more expensive, and they don't feel good about their economic prospects, and they have social media algorithms telling them that their life sucks and that everyone else is parting a Coachella and has a boyfriend with ripped abs except you. So they're anxious, they're depressed, and they don't want change. They want disruption. And there's a difference because they might really be turned off by some of what Trump says. But your point is a really interesting one.

They're sick of the meltdown, and they're sick of Democrats being self-appointed social justice cops. In addition, the other age group that flipped the most is 45 to 64-year-olds, which I would describe as their parents That is, if your son's in the basement vaping and playing video games and has no economic or romantic opportunities and can't move out of the basement because everything's so damn expensive, okay, Maybe she's better on social issues. Maybe he's offensive. I don't care. My kid isn't doing well. I would call this what I call the kids are not all right. Then the other thing is what I'll call the manosphere election. We said early on or I said early on, I thought this was going to be about not a referendum on women's rights, but a referendum on who painted a more positive vision of masculinity. Essentially, Trump embraced the manosphere. He went on the five biggest manosphere podcasts, including Rogan and Alex Schultz and Theo Vaughn, I think, and then I forget the other two. I think it paid off hugely for him. But this was about, in my view, young people are not doing well, and it doesn't matter.

People don't have the luxury of thinking about bodily autonomy or what's going on in Ukraine when their kids are not doing well. Then when I think about the group and then Latinos, oh, my God, the biggest switch, hands down, was, I believe it was Latino men that went 23 points or something or 26. In the other direction. Oh, my God, 26 points. That's an earthquake. The interview I saw that was really shocking to me was a lot of Latinos who've been here for a while are like, No, I don't want illegal immigrants coming across the border. This is out of control. The border states have gone aggressively towards Trump. Anyways, I'm curious if you have another theme for this election, what do you think of the idea of this being the manosphere or the kids are not all right election?

I like it. I mean, this excellent marketing. I don't think in slogans as well as you do, but it's also the anti-elite election, which you work on it. You make that sound better. But there was an erosion in the Biden coalition, which he won with working-class voters across the board, not white working class, just working class. I was particularly struck by an interview. It was on MSNBC with a prison guard who had voted Dem. Hillary, Biden, then voted for Trump. Interview to ask him why. He said, The party doesn't make me feel good about myself. They look down on me. I hadn't taken a step back because we think of the way that we talk about groups. It's like, Well, what else am I supposed to call them? College-educated, without a college degree, whatever. I started to think about how implicitly hideous it is to talk about people without a college degree like that. I remember Trump, years ago, said, I love the highly uneducated or something like that, or I love the uneducated. But it ended up not hurting him because it's Trump. But I realized that Democrats, people who I believe really care about regular people who didn't go to these stupid schools that I went to, are talking in such a dismissive and derisive way about folks whose votes count the same way as mine.

I have a PhD, and that prison guard's vote is equal to mine. On top of it, he lives in a swing state. I'm just sitting in here, pottering around Tribeca thinking I'm so fantastic. That guy actually is resonant with the direction the country is going to go in. I think this is the anti-elite's election as well, that people coming together to say, I don't have a problem with the way you live, but you have a problem with the way that I live.

I'll put forward a thesis to you, and I'm curious what you think. I think there is, after waking up and recognizing Wednesday morning that we had elected a man where the two very credible qualified women had lost to a man who was a convicted felon, had been found guilty of rape, and it inspired an insurrection, I wonder if there's more misogyny in this country than there is actual homophobia. I think we're probably going to elect a gay president before we elect a female president. Your thoughts?

Well, I think that we're going to elect a female president. She's just going to be a Republican. I think that if Nikki Haley had It would have been on the ticket, it would have been even more resounding, and that they would have elected her or someone with her… I don't know if it's Nikki Haley or Kim Reynolds or something. I think the Democratic Party's identity politics issue is so complex. I think that Republicans have proved themselves actually to care a lot less about who you are, all the things that we think make us great. The people in this coalition actually said, We're more representative of what you purport to be to some degree and more accepting of people that are different, people that are rude, people who made a mistake. I mean, this anti-cancel culture thing that's going on, that is being led by the manosphere, by all these people who are saying, Okay, you want to take away my regular job? Well, guess what? I'm going to go get a better one. I'm going to make more money, and I'm going to have more power because I'm doing it this way. I don't think overnight, I don't think Tulsi Gabbard is going to turn into some wildly popular figure in all of this.

But I think these stories of this group that I was a part of that I really believed in and even represented is not who they used to be is incredibly persuasive to people and resonant with how a lot of them feel, especially when they look back through generations, people who had Kennedy Democrats in their families, for instance, and woke up and said, I recognize Bill Clinton, who, by the way, apparently told the Harris campaign, You have to say something about this anti-trans stuff. You have to get out there and say, We are not for that. We don't think that boys should be in girls' sports. In 2016, when they dismissed him, the guy who's the best retail politician ever, maybe, they okay boomered him.

She needed a Sister Soulja moment.

Yeah, but I don't know.

She needed to keep- Yeah, but I don't know.

She needed to keep- Go ahead. She did, but I don't think that she was capable of a lot of things that you need to win a presidential election. She didn't even show up at the view with an answer to, How are you different from Joe Biden? Which I think created a lot of concerns about her ability to do this job. And yes, all the headwinds against her, the economy, et cetera. I think Karl Rove was right. But when you say or when people have said, ran a flawless campaign, we've been talking about them. There are moments that she should have nailed that she didn't.

We'll be right back after this break to hear from CEMIFOR's political reporter, Dave Weigel. Okay, so we're blessed here or fortunate that we have someone who's probably an enormous demand today to help us break it all down, and that is Dave Weigel. Dave has traveled all over the country to cover the election, and we're big fans of his reporting. Dave is the senior political reporter with Semaphore. Dave, it's great to have you on the show. Let's dive right in with the big picture. We knew a Trump win was a possibility, but there was this last minute vibe that may be a hidden Kamala Wavela would surprise us. What happened? What was your initial thought?

There was some magical thinking happening among Democrats that was based on non-magical real-life interactions because I was out. Every reporter covering the race hopefully was out with canvassers. They were going to neighborhoods where people had not voted for a Republican in the past, where women were very angry about DOBS. And just you could tell there were some movement among people that might be reflected in a polling underperformance or undercount of those voters. And the real magic came in in the final weekend when Anne Selser's poll from Iowa, which was never wrong and now has been wrong, suggested that, yeah, that's happening. There are a lot of women, especially older women, who are maybe they don't normally vote Democratic, but they will this time. And that didn't happen. It was similar to 2022 and I'd say '18, a little bit more like the midterms. It just was within a point or so of the actual result. It was underrating some Trump performance in blue states. But as we get these results in, Republicans improved a little bit. They improved a little bit less than let's say, George Bush did in 2004 compared to expectations. Republicans are going to end up with probably 53 Senate seats, maybe 222 House seats.

They're treating it like a landslide, a mandate. That's what the poll said could happen. It's also weaker than they've come into power a few times in the past. So that's the thing. This is a very exciting election, and there were demographic changes that both parties are going to adjust to. But it actually was not that much movement compared to where things were at in the last couple of elections. Just every trend kept going with especially young men and Latinos toward Trump. I'll defend the pollsters. They said that was probably happening.

They did, repeatedly. Then we kept saying, well, then there would be a very high-quality survey that was actually, no, there's no problem. We're back to normal Latino support. We're back to normal Gen Z support. It seems like the Black vote is really the only one that did revert to the normal mean. At first, it's 2020. I think Biden lost 19% of the Black male vote, and Trump got 20% in this election. That's basically where it is. The blue city shift. I'm a New York City kid. I live in New York City. I grew up around the same age as Ivanka. The Trumps have always existed in my orbit. Seeing, especially post the MSG rally, when the floating island of garbage seemed like the main takeaway from Trump's final stand in New York was part of this Kamala shift. What do you think was pushing people to not care about those kinds of things that a majority of Puerto Ricans say there's racism in his campaign, and yet it didn't matter.

It's very asymmetrical, right? Because What happened right after Tony Hinchcliff comment is that Joe Biden mangled the statement he was giving, ironically, to Voto Latino, a Latino group that's been presiding over Democrats doing worse with Latinos. The charitable interpretation is that he was trying to say that Tony Hinchcliff was garbage. The less charitable, he was saying people who like that thing are garbage. And there was very high dudget. How dare he insult so many people like this, while at the same time saying, Hey, normal people can suck it up and take a joke. Probably the one Johnny Hinchcliff told. There is a better, maybe this is ironic, better weaponization of offense by Republicans. There has been for a long time. If you watch conservative media, Fox News, especially, there's so so much coverage of just this random college professor said something crazy. Somebody on Twitter with five degrees in their bio said something crazy. I'm a political reporter, and I say, Yeah, that guy start running for office. Who cares? But the same response when Trump says something offensive is, he says it like it is. People like this. Stop being so offended. So why didn't the Hinchcliff thing dramatically change the election?

Democrats were finding people who were inclined to vote for Trump and then changed their mind and we're saying they're going to vote Democratic after that. Just because you lose an election doesn't mean nothing worked at all. But the overall climate was that Trump has desensitized people over the last nine years of running for President to just saying that when something offensive is said in public, it's not going to work. Also, the media, and be careful how we describe the media, there was a, I think, monocultural media, mainstream media, people in big buildings in New York and DC that controlled what the story of the day was, and there's not anymore. So Trump is correct. I think the people around him are correct that just things that would have got you maybe taken off the air or condemned for days as a Republican 10 years ago, they're not now. The media can talk about it, but the people who are listening to that media, college-educated, liberals, mostly, they're offended anyway. They were never going to vote for you. Meanwhile, you can go on podcast, Theo Vaugh, Nelk Boys, Joe Rogan, and that's how they talk. They love talking.

They love not being offended. I've noticed just even words that were taken out of the lexicon maybe 10 years ago. For example, I've not seen somebody... I had not seen somebody for years without feeling embarrassed about it, use a slur for mentally disabled people that starts with the letter R, which I won't use. I see it all the time on Twitter now. And that's also part of the climate. Democrats I have moreets that are tied to the mainstream media, and Republicans do not, and they have a media that does not.

Just along those lines, my sense is what Aldous knew again. Wasn't this just about the economy?

In a large part, it was, and this is frustrating for Democrats, because if you, let's say, you took the numbers, the economic numbers that we had going to the election, and you went back in time and showed a Democrat in 2022, Hey, this is what you're going to be running on. Oh, okay. Unemployment's lower than it was in 2020. Inflation is down to 2%. That's pretty good. This is better than it was in Reagan one re-election. And there's a larger conversation, I can be long-winded, so I'm going to get into it, about why people blamed entirely Biden for inflation, why Trump got the credit for stimulus checks in 2020, but none of the blame. They couldn't dig out of that. That is true. I think it improved for them, but the election was held in June, they would have lost by more. It improved over the course of the year. What matter, I think, for Republicans is that they had a superstructure, and again, coming from not being offended and telling people not to be offended, which was if things are bad, it's because Biden sent people too many checks, and a lot of them, and led in too many immigrants.

And Trump and JD Vance, but also all of their surrogate operations, every Senate candidate, every House candidate. That was the story, is the country is falling apart, and it could be fixed if we got rid of these immigrants. I'm really barely bolterizing what JD Vance was saying. I think his rally has got a little bit less attention than his interviews, but everything was, This is tied to immigration. Is that true? No, it's not true. But when you have a constant theme here, and you pair it on the Republican side with, and we're going to cut taxes, and you're going to get tax cuts, and we're going to pay for it by kicking out the immigrants. Don't worry about it. We're going to do tariffs. They're going to work. Their economic message was not, We've done the math, and here is how it all adds up, and here is how it will reduce the deficit. Their math was, Democrats made this worse on purpose because they're woke and they love non-Americans, and we're going to fix that.

What do you think are the one or two biggest policy changes in a Trump administration in 2025? What do we feel first and foremost?

Well, the deportations are going to happen first and foremost, and that's going to be the first test of... There are a lot of voters, who I'm not calling stupid, who looked at Trump said, Well, Democrats told me something terrible is going to happen if he wins. But my memory of '17 to 20 is that they weren't that terrible. And there's an effort by the Trump administration in 17, 18 to take family separation, which was unpopular, and take it off TV by putting asylum seekers in Mexico. They learned how to just take it off the news because hard to remember in 2024, but Trump immigration policies really unpopular when people were looking at them and saying, This is inhumane. What happens when Trump takes office and they actually start working with law enforcement in states, working with the National Guard to roust out immigrants? He can very quickly start installing people as acting directors of agencies who act on, let's say, for example, taking the definition of gender as separate from sex out of the federal code, or saying that we're going to take fluoride out water, as RFK Jr. Saying. I can't predict that. I know that immigration will come first, and the rest of this stuff, like tax policy, that just has to work its way through Congress.

So there'll be some announcements, Okay, first bill we're going to move on taxes are going to deal with extending the tax cuts, maybe cutting taxes on tips, et cetera, et cetera. The first stuff will be executive orders. That's mostly going to be immigration and, I think, cultural war initiatives.

I wanted to You mentioned the trans stuff, and I have been talking about this a lot on air, so I'm a Democrat. I work at Fox News, and I was stunned when I saw that Trump was spending the most on anti-trans ads of any category. He was spending less on the economy, less on immigration. This trans ad that everyone saw during every football game 14 times where it ends with, She's for they/them, I'm for you, apparently moved the needle 2.7 points in Trump's direction. That was future forward. The Democratic group tested it. I wonder if you could talk about the impact of the culture war on this, because I do think it's the economy's stupid it, but there was a common sense deficit on the Democratic side. I think that we're missing it because we talk about, Oh, she shifted left. Like Bernie puts out the letter, shift left, working class. People say, You should have shifted right. You would have gotten more of these moderates. But I think that there just needs to be a common sense shift. It was only Colin Allred who released an ad saying, I am not for this. There should not be boys and girls sports.

It's those kinds of conversations that I think go on on Joe and Asra Klein had his conversation about it, and I saw you posting on Twitter about it as well, saying, We live in a media bubble that is not impactful anymore, and you need to sit down with Joe Rogan for two hours.

Yeah, I would repeat that here. That's everything that's been coming up in conversations with Democrats over the last... Republicans, too, but Republicans once. The conversation with Democrats were more interesting because they did explain what got screwed up. And one thing they're conceding, and some of them wanted them to do this. They feel vindicated. Some are conceding now they should do this, is that there is a bubble of 2017 to, let's say, 2021, where Trump had won the election. There was He had won it without winning the popular vote. There was just a sense culturally that there were dark spirits unleashed by Trump, and it was not good to indulge them. So the era of de-platforming, and this is pressuring, this is groups like Media Matters pressuring people, advertisers to quit a website, or people not to go on Joe Rogan's show. I think that's over, but that was how a lot of Democrats and progressives thought, is that we can't just indulge this far-right media, this manosphere media. We need to outvote it. The future is female, and this sexism is going to backfire because Trump won in a flu. Once people... And 2018 happens, there's a good Democratic midterm.

2020 happens, they win the election. It really only takes, I think, just the atrophying of the media's relevance and Trump's emphasis on talking on these podcasts for people to say, That's wrong. I was talking to John Federman this week because he was one of the few Democrats the last... I mean, him and very few Democrats went on Rogan this cycle, but that was his take. I mean, he literally left Pennsylvania and then had to come back immediately for rallies for Democrats because he thought, This is an audience I need to talk to. It's not like he's going to go there and deliver his talking points. It's just, You need me to see I am a human being, and I can defend my values in front of a skeptical audience. You can't go back to the mindset that if we just pretend Joe Rogan doesn't exist, those sexists are going to have their own little media, and we can win without them.

Dave, just as we wrap up here, any thoughts on people likely to fill senior positions in a Trump administration?

It's a good question because, again, Trump ran on the fact that he had been President before and fixed a lot of things, and he wasn't going to have the people around him that held him back. Democrats say, They call you a fascist. On record, they weren't holding you back. They were trying to protect the country. Trump won the argument, but he was less clear on who he's going to appoint. There's this habit in DC of mentioning names, people who might want a position, people that we've heard of in the Trump orbit or pro-Trump Republican senators. The ones that are more credible is Bill Hagerty, who was a Trump ambassador when he was President, now is a Senator from Tennessee. He's somebody who's walked between the Bush Republican world and the Trump world and have been very comfortable as a mega politician. He might be in the administration, a foreign policy role. He has a Senate seat where just the governor would appoint a new Republican to replace him. Not a problem for them. Rick Grinnell, also in a foreign policy role. He was Trump's Germany ambassador, his Director of National Intelligence for acting for a while, and he had a huge role in campaigning around the country, trying to convince people that Trump was going to be the anti-war President.

Elon will have a role. He doesn't need to be appointed to anything. He doesn't need to be confirmed to anything. But Elon and people in that orbit, I would watch for those Silicon Valley techno supremacist libert... I wouldn't even say libertarians, but fairly conservative guys whose basic premise is that you need to get the government off people's back and cut its spending because business knows how to create and the government doesn't. People like are going to be in the mix for these positions. I heard John Paulson's name mentioned for Treasury. That's not a crazy idea. There is not going to be a need, like there was in 2016, to get a bunch of Republicans who the old establishment trusts because Trump destroyed them. They don't matter, and they didn't support them this time, so they're out.

Dave Weigel is a political reporter for Semaphore. Dave, we really appreciate your time today.

Yeah, thanks a lot. I appreciate this.

All right, that's all for this episode. Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and David Tolito. Our technical director is Drew Burrows. You can find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That's right, Raging Moderates on its own feed. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.