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Hello. Let us count the number of twists and turns in the American presidential election of 2024. Joe Biden dropping out while I was at the theater. Donald Trump being the subject of two assassination attempts. I think actually while I was watching television for one of them and Kamala Harris becoming the candidate
as we were all listening to brat the charlie xcx album and those two things colliding headlong so we thought we would look back at those things and some of the other things that happened in the election campaign with friends of the podcast sumi and katrina and one quarter of americast just in web so that is what you'll hear on this pre-recorded episode of newscast
Newscast. Newscast from the BBC. Two chiefs of the same backside. Well, I don't think I'm that bad at politics. People do call me for short, Jenny Lex. On reflection, it was a mistake not to stay longer. We did it! Are you almost the debate? Winning the popular vote was very nice. I don't think I'm being rude, blimey.
Hello, it's Adam in the Newscast Studio, and I have to say one of the joys of being in this studio this year has been getting to know our colleagues who work on America, or who work in the American Bureau for the BBC in Washington, D.C. So I've reassembled them now so we can do a little wander down memory boulevard, joining us one quarter of America. It's Justin Webb. Hello, Justin. Greetings.
and were also joined by the BBC's superstar anchors in North America, although they're far too modest to ever call themselves that. Sumi, Sumiskanda. Hello, Sumi. Hi there, Adam. And Katrina Perry. Hello, Katrina.
Hi Adam, how are you? Very well, thank you. I know we very much live in the now, but I want you to go back in times you younger selves. Justin, what were you thinking about the US election in January 2024? I was thinking that it was going to be almost as exciting as it eventually turned out to be, though not
anywhere near with the twist and turns that actually happened. But we were looking ahead, weren't we, too? What was immediately ahead of us? Which was Iowa and the real possibility that Donald Trump would face some kind of upset in Iowa. In other words, that he wouldn't eventually be the candidate. It seemed to be receding, actually.
I think it's fair to say by this time and you remember Rhonda Santos, the governor of Florida and various other people at various other stages challenged him and it seemed, you know, when the court cases got going that, hey, maybe he was still going to slip. So I think the immediate thing was at this time, was he going to survive Iowa and do as well as of course we all now know he eventually did. And of course, Justin, you famously predicted that neither Trump nor Biden would be the candidates.
Yeah, well, it was half right, wasn't it? I mean, I did think, I mean, I must say, even at this stage last year, people were telling me, and I've got friends who have fundraisers from the time that I spent a decade in Washington, D.C., and knowing a lot of Democrats, and of course, a lot of very wealthy Democrats who then were backing Obama back in those days, and raising considerable sums of money for him.
They told me that they had stopped bothering with Biden because they thought he was completely useless. And there was this sort of beginning of what I think turned out to be, frankly, a piece of political malpractice where a lot of people, both inside the Democratic Party and, frankly, inside the journalistic community as well, knew perfectly well that he was very unlikely to be the candidate but didn't have the guts to say to.
I mean, my main thought from that time, when I really sort of interrogate my own memories, is thinking that if that was really the case, that would be the most sort of audacious cover-up of an incredibly important democratic thing. And so therefore, it couldn't possibly be true in a media and political culture as vibrant as America's. Katrina, what was your memory from January? Or maybe February or March, just before it all got kicked into gear?
At that point, I remember actually our biggest worry and concern was, was this going to be a boring year? And how were we going to keep the audience interested? And we were talking, if you remember, about how the couch would win out over voters on election day, because
The American people were so unentused by both Biden and Trump at that point. We were having conversations about low turnout and so on. Of course, that was not the case, as we know now. And it was kind of like, OK, this year is going to be punctuated by the usual things that you have in the election year. You have the conventions. You have the debates and so on. And we were trying to plan for that.
Little did we know that absolutely everything that can be thrown out the window basically was thrown out the window in this presidential cycle in this past year and the wild ride that lay ahead.
I was thinking a lot about the earlier part of this year and just how long ago it feels. I'm sure for all of us. And as you said, snow and cold. There were a few things that came to mind. There were questions, of course, about whether President Biden would continue to be the candidate. And remember that special counsel report that came out, the special counsel who was looking into classified documents being taken from the White House.
And in that report, Robert Herr had said basically that President Biden was someone who was failing in his memory, who was not sharp. And that report caused a huge controversy in Washington, particularly among Democrats, who said, you know, President Biden should not be the candidate. He came out and had this kind of testy exchange with reporters.
And I remember going to New Hampshire for the primaries there and seeing Dean Phillips make the circuits. You remember there that he was the congressman who was the only one really to launch a challenge to President Biden at that time. And very quickly, you saw in those weeks all of the other possible candidates. So California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, close ranks behind President Biden, I think.
I remember thinking at that time, okay, well, you know, this is going to be the candidate. At this point, there's not going to be enough time to change the candidate. Obviously, we know that that was not the case. And the other thing was, I was thinking a lot about Donald Trump's legal woes at that time. We've still thought that that could be a huge impediment to his bid to become president again. We know now, of course, with
The benefit of hindsight that that wasn't the case. Of course he was convicted in May, but Besides that the other legal cases have fizzled out and even that conviction Is questionable whether it will hold as well and soon. I can just tell you Donald Trump has been found guilty on count one Donald Trump the first former president to be convicted in a criminal trial of
This is a historic moment. This is a monumental moment in US politics, a defining one. And that was the case where he was found guilty of falsifying business records because he was giving money to his lawyer to give to Stormy Daniels to pay her off to kind of buy her silence. And Justin, it's quite, I mean, you were always quite skeptical about how serious Trump's legal problems could be.
But I remember at that time, people were speculating, could he end up in jail and like, oh, have you run an election campaign from behind bars? Which again, now in retrospect, seems more like his opponents hope over the actual legal realities. Yeah, I'm going to do one and sound like a note or I've got a lot of things wrong. You've forced me into position now where I look like a complete idiot claiming they've got everything right. But I mean, I got all sorts of things wrong. But one of the things actually on America, your sister podcast that I do,
where we focused on these things a lot, we were always a bit skeptical about the court cases, all of us were, because we felt that there was behind the scenes and it goes to this business which I suspect all of us would probably agree that one of the things this election has highlighted is that there is a completely separate conversation
that takes place in media studios, particularly in the kind of anti-Trump media, which is all of the media, except Fox, pretty much. But also in polite society and fancied inner parties in Georgetown, in Washington DC, etc.
there are those conversations, and then there is a completely separate set of conversations that people around America were having about the issues. And while everyone was focused on, oh my goodness, another court case, oh, people will certainly, you know, what has he said now? What has he done now? That's going to do for him. And actually around the place, the kind of thing that was again and again,
revealed to us during the course of the campaign that he would say things that other people would find offensive and actually most people found authentic and believable.
and all those conversations, whoever was having them, all collided into one big kind of pileup on Thursday, the 27th of June in Atlanta, when it was the first and only debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And I'll remember it for the rest of my life. I stayed up late. I watched it in bed under my duvet, completely in darkness, which just added to the sort of like the gloomy nature of it, because, and I'm not making a party political point here. Katrina, it was actually quite on a human level.
quite tragic watching Joe Biden's performance, just as one human being watching another human being flailing. Well, I was in Atlanta for that debate, and I remember writing down in my notebook 9.14 p.m. Eastern time. And I said, this time is going to be something that will win a table quiz question in the future, because that was the moment that Joe Biden
wobbled whatever word you want to put on it and he had that statement where he started talking about you know one thing and then he was talking about Covid and it was actually impossible to make out what he was trying to say in that sentence and then he kind of looked off into the the middle distance and the camera cut to Donald Trump who had this quizzical look on his face of like what
what's just happening here and it was from then on for the rest of the debate that you just watched someone struggling which is unpleasant to watch no matter who the person is you know we're all humans at the end of the day and you know it happens on live TV sometimes you don't know what to say and as presenters you try and help the person out a little bit but this was a situation where Joe Biden the president of the United States was completely exposed
And I'm going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the total initiative relative to what we're going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers. President Trump, I really don't know what he said at the end of this. And I don't think he knows what he said either.
and Donald Trump to his credit could have absolutely, you know, got him against the ropes and finished things off and he didn't. But it was a turning point where, you know, Justin, you were saying earlier about the sort of whispered conversations that were happening about Joe Biden and his capabilities and so on. This was the moment when the world saw that.
And anything that anyone was trying to, you know, keep the lid on for whatever reason, suddenly was there for the world to see. And, you know, the conspiracy theory is, did the big, bad, dark forces in the Democratic Party let Joe Biden go out on that stage to expose that, to sort of force the situation.
that maybe others within the party who wanted to keep him as candidates didn't want anyone to see. So, you know, there will be, I think, PhDs written on what the Democratic Party did and didn't and shouldn't and shouldn't have done in the lead up to that. But that was the key turning point, I think, above all else in this election cycle in terms of who would end up in the Oval Office.
And then sumi that kick started a frantic kind of two and a half three week period where there's a real concerted campaign to get Biden removed and replaced that drew in everyone from Nancy Pelosi to George Clooney. And then we've had that very odd Sunday morning moment where basically Biden just handed over to Kamala Harris and all happened sort of electronically in the ether while you were all having brunch.
Well, don't forget that, I mean, these few weeks, I think we all lost years off of our lives from they were yours to fix it. Actually, you probably didn't have time for brunch. I was just trying to conjure up the Sunday morning in D.C. No, we were just coming back from the RNC. Exactly. And the previous week, of course, had been the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
with this extraordinary moment and that an extraordinary image of Donald Trump raising his fist on the stage, blood streaking down his face. And then that next Monday we are starting our coverage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and, you know, he walks into the room and remember, I mean, just the atmosphere in that arena was describable, honestly. It really was.
There was blood pouring everywhere and yet in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side. I felt that. And that entire week was a celebration of Donald Trump and really you could sense that Republicans felt so confident about their position. And then we all come back from the RNC and try to get a day of course just to rest quickly and then on that Sunday. And we were somewhat prepared that there could be movement we had heard
rumblings that were coming from Washington. In fact, on the last day of the RNC, I got sent home early because there was concern that the entire Washington Bureau was in Milwaukee. And what if there is an announcement? It didn't come until Sunday, but then that statement that we saw on social media and everything kicked into high gear. And the next two days after that, quite frankly, are just a blur because
to understand kind of the momentous nature of that decision and what it meant for the campaign. And then we learned, of course, Kamala Harris. He had endorsed Kamala Harris and that she would be the candidate. And so, I mean, it really is, I think, three weeks or so that I will never forget covering. It was something truly remarkable.
And then just in that then led to the Kamala Harris campaign, which went through various different iterations and they sort of tried different sort of flavors of campaign, didn't they?
Yeah, and it had, which we tend to forget now because she lost pretty convincingly in the end, but we tend to forget it had real high spots. I mean, the, the, the democratic convention. The brat summer. Yeah, the brat summer stuff and the run up to the convention. Suddenly it was a breath of fresh air. It was a generational change. It was all the rest of it. It was joy. And the convention was a resounding success where everyone had thought it was going to be an absolute catastrophe under Biden and awake.
Frankly and in the end there was real you know we were all there was it was a Really happy occasion and they really thought they were getting somewhere and she made a pretty good speech
Our nation with this election has a precious fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past a chance to chart a new way forward.
She got a lot of good speakers in the hall supporting her, the Abamas, both of them speaking brilliantly. And it was all going really well. And the other high spot where I think people thought, goodness, she could actually do this was the debate, of course, the debate that she did against Trump, where frankly she just took into the cleaners. And he was all over the place and didn't have an answer. And she had memorized all these zingers and came out with them all and really did well.
You know, before we get to the things that went wrong, it's worth just reflecting actually at various stages. She seemed really much more credible, I think, than a lot of people thought she was going to be. And Justin, I know you've got to go. So let's fast forward to your conclusions then.
Pick out the key factors that contributed to the result that we saw, then. I don't know. There's many, many factors and many, many theories, and it's impossible to point to one. Give us a few. Yeah. Look, I mean, the main factor, I don't know what the other thing is. I think the main factor is that she was unable or unwilling to separate herself from Joe Biden. Joe Biden is a spectacularly
unpopular president. You may say that's not justified. You may say it is justified, but it is a simple fact reflected in the polls. He is very, very unpopular indeed. And I think there was a broad feeling that she would have at some stage to find a way of getting away from him. And she never found it. There was a moment when she went on the views morning TV program, and she was given a kind of softball. You remember this question, you know, how would you
Do things differently, maybe there's an area, maybe there's somewhere where you differ from Joe Biden. Dot dot dot. Okay, go for it. And she just said, I can't think of any. Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
There is done a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I've been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact. And in a sense, I wonder whether that was just the moment that she lost. But the other thing that did for her was that she was very much associated by Trump cleverly in his advertising. You remember that advert that ended with the words
Kamala Harris is for they, them, Donald Trump is for you. And she was associated with all the kind of progressive left causes that she had associated herself with when she ran the first time in 2020.
1920, where she wanted to be the candidate. And that was at a time when the Democrats were very much in the thrall of the progressive left. It was, you know, Black Lives Matter and defund the police and all of that stuff. And she sort of ran towards that then. But of course, that meant that the words weren't the record. And they could use them against her. And that I think damaged her enormously. So there's a combination of those things, her closeness to the Biden administration. She actually was vice president. And there was no way really of
getting away from that, but also the kind of whiff around her that she belonged to a democratic party, or a democratic party set of policies that this time round were never going to win. Well, Justin, thank you so much for keeping us company in 2024 and see you in 2025. Yeah, pleasure. Have a nice holidays. Katrina, do you want to respond to Justin's theory there?
Yeah, I think there are interesting points that Justin makes and they're valid. However, they're working off the initial thesis that Kamala Harris could win this election. She lost the election. It's not how did she lose the election. It's how did Donald Trump win? He was always going to win.
She had a task, an uphill task from the starting point. Donald Trump, I mean, we were talking about looking back at January February, he was the, you know, dead set winner at that point. And throughout that, traveling around the country, I don't think many of us were under any illusion other than Donald Trump was going to win. After the debate, after the assassination attempt, all of that, there was just a real strength of feeling for him.
in this country and in many ways Kamala Harris or any Democrat.
was never going to be able to beat that. The core argument around the economy, how people feel so hard done by, so ripped off, which he leaned into so well, was going to always be really difficult, no matter who was running from the Democratic Party. So the Democrats are doing a lot of soul searching, and she should have been this, and she should have been that, and she should have distanced herself from something else. But she was running against an almost unbeatable
candidate who was almost killed on live television as well. Like there's all these factories that just meant it would have taken some sort of
supernatural superhuman force to beat him. But Donald Trump is incredibly popular in this country. You have to respect the will of the voters, the democratic processes here. Americans like Donald Trump, he may not be to everyone's taste. And in fact, voters tell you that. I mean, I was on the campaign trail here in 2016 and people said the exact same thing. Don't like Donald Trump. Don't like what he stands for. Don't like what he says. Don't want my kids to grow up to be like him.
But he's a great president. He's a strong leader and I want him back in office. And that's something that was always going to be really hard for the Democrats to run against. I'm one thing related to that that I've been thinking the last few days and I remember when I came to see you guys in Washington DC and I remember being struck by thinking, oh,
Um, I hadn't realized how big a deal reproductive rights are. I mean, I knew intellectually because of the Supreme Court case and the fact that the States were introducing various degrees of restrictions and that it was in a motive issue and people cared about it. But when I arrived in DC, I was like, Oh, I think I'd underestimated how huge it was, but in retrospect to me, I think that was because I'd underestimated how central it was to the Democrat campaign, not necessarily that it was central to like the entire conversation, the entire nation was having.
And that then speaks to just the areas that the Harris campaign actually prioritized, perhaps wrongly. We saw very early on when Kamala Harris went to the top of the ticket and also under President Biden that it was clear the Democrats were searching for the issue that they felt they could build their campaign on. It wasn't clearly going to be immigration because that was a weak spot for them. It wasn't going to be the economy because if you looked at the polls,
It was very clear how people felt to Katrina's point about their economic situation. And reproductive rights, they had seen a pattern in a number of more conservative states where you had seen voters choose to enshrine rights for reproductive rights in their constitutions. They had seen that abortion was something reproductive rights had been something that could move voters if you looked at the polls. And indeed, it had only been a few years. It was the first presidential election
since Roe v. Wade was overturned since the constitutional right to an abortion was overturned. And so for Democrats, they thought, okay, first of all, Kamala Harris is strongest among women. So this is an issue that will speak to women. And indeed, you know, my experience on the campaign trail as well, talking to female voters in particular,
in those swing states is that they did believe in the right of a woman to choose for her for herself, but also that Democrats themselves needed to be able to implement some sort of common sense abortion policy. And I think what they perhaps overshot on was how important this issue was.
not only for women, but really for the general populace. And if you look in the end at the election results, it wasn't the most important issue, moving voters, driving voters. And of course, it might have been for some women, but there's a much bigger, women are one slice of population. And if it's their second or third issue, that's not going to win you the election. And so certainly, as you said, Adam, to your point, it was one that Kamala Harris and her campaign believed needed to be a or the central issue.
It didn't work out for them that way. I think as well, because we saw a lot of states put abortion on the ballot themselves, so take matters into their own hands at state level, that people disconnected what a president should have to do about abortion, that actually we can take care of this in our state.
and pick the president we want without that issue being a factor. And that's something I don't think anyone really saw coming in either party. Almost a split ticket. Yeah. And even the Democrats' point they kept making of like, you know, the president has no business in your doctor's surgery. That's between you and the doctor.
that actually people said, oh, yeah, you're right. The president has nothing to do with that. Let's deal with this in our state. And it had been the case not just this time, but two years ago, and abortion was on the ballot paper in a lot of states as well, that even those who were anti-abortion and anti-reproductive rights voted to allow it or at least give the option in the state that kind of let's put it back to the individual and take it out of the political realm.
And in terms of how the campaign unfolded, I'm thinking back to Justin's idea there being parallel conversations amongst the elite and amongst actual voters. And I'm thinking there's a parallel of conversations between what we cover in the news and what people are actually thinking about. And a prime example of that is the days and days of coverage of garbage gate. Do you remember when Trump did that big campaign rally at Madison Square Gardens in New York and the comedian that introduced him said that Puerto Rico, the American territory was a load of garbage.
in the ocean, and that dominated the conversation for days. But actually, that was just a thing that happened. That didn't contribute really to the result. Did it? And remember, Donald Trump didn't say it himself, right? This was a comedian who was brought onto stage, and that was a difference that many Republicans pointed out very quickly. And I think it is a valid point to say, obviously, that there is perhaps an elite media bubble that is not completely in touch with voters.
But I do think throughout the campaign, we did cover the issues that mattered most. Oh, yeah, of course. Oh, no, no, I'm not. I'm not accusing you. I didn't take it as a criticism, but only to say, if you looked across the media spectrum here, the issues that you saw on your liberal media outlets like CNN and MSNBC as well was.
Grocery prices aren't too high. People are upset about the state of the country. People are not happy with President Biden, and they're not sure that Kamala Harris can actually make up that gap either. I think in that sense, we kind of knew, to your point, what we were getting, because when you went out to talk to people and when you watched the news, those were the issues that people cared about.
And I think with that garbage thing or bins and rubbish, as we call it, we saw Donald Trump then riding around in a bin truck and wearing the high-visy vest because people expect kind of slightly wacky things from Donald Trump and it turned into a viral moment. So people were talking about it. They may not have been talking about it in a
Oh my goodness, oh no, this is terrible. But it was like, no, he is a man of the people. He's riding around in a bend truck there. And then suddenly people were turning up to his rallies in that last week, wearing high-visi vests and hard hats. And he's a man of the working person who drives a bend truck or works on a building site. And he is a master marketer, but he was able to turn what could have been absolutely catastrophic
into something to even pull more people into his tent. And now speaking on a call for her campaign last night, Crooked Joe Biden finally said, what he and Kamala really think of our supporters, he called them garbage, no way. No way! And they actually mean it even though without question, my supporters are far higher quality than Crooked Joe or Lion Kamala.
And then there was the night itself where you were both spending many, many hours on the television. And I was in the corridor outside. What's your main election night memory? Or is it all just one giant big unfolding drama? It's a bit of a blur.
I have this very clear image in my mind of when the call was finally made and we had that big slate put up on the screen and Katrina standing in this yellow dress next to this red screen of Donald Trump 47th president and just kind of you know you in that moment obviously as an anchor in the studio where you're continuing to cover the news it's hard to actually be to allow those moments to sink in but I remember I took a little picture with my camera which I haven't shared with you I need to share with you.
At that moment, because I thought this is a moment I will remember, because... No phones in the studio. That was it. What? No one told us. Sorry, no, right? Thank you, James. We've got to jump in there, James. Sorry to interrupt you, but we've got some big news coming in here in Washington, Katrina.
Thanks, Sumi. We do have big news. We have the biggest news of all. At this point, we can project. Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States, winning what had been expected, of course, to be a razor tight and historic race. And it has been just that, that projection coming to us from our CBS News Partners. Donald Trump, America's 47th president.
He claimed victory, of course, a couple of hours ago, but now it is official with that projected win for Donald Trump. We've been waiting on votes coming to us tomorrow. I think as well, I've been kind of warning people that we could get a result on election night. Like, there'd been all this chatter about, oh, it'll be days and blah, blah, blah. And I was saying to the parents, that'd be, I don't think it will.
I think we need to be ready for the result to come that night and it became very evident very early on that there was a move towards Donald Trump and there was a move towards the Republican Party and the other races and the House of Representatives and the Senate and that we would have sort of the arc of the story, as we'd call it in our world, all in that one self-contained program.
which, you know, was a great privilege for us to be able to do that because, as you're saying, Sumi, like these are moments of history and that's what I think we all love about our jobs, that you get to be there as, you know, your grandkids will learn about it in a history class and you get to actually be there and see it firsthand and be part of the first telling of history, which is an incredible privilege.
My two moments are election night. And actually the reveal of something how election nights work in America and how different they are from the UK because it all happens kind of in the ether. Like you're not looking, you're just looking at data and maps and results rather than what we have in the UK, which is like big names having to concede defeat and MPs crying because they've lost and all that stuff. So the two things were very sort of data related. And the first one was watching CNN because you guys program hadn't started yet. So I was watching the rivals.
And it's when the exit poll came out. And of course, the exit poll in the US is different as well. It's not a prediction about the result. It starts off, the first Tronshire results is about what people cared about or thought. And something like 73% of people thought the country was on the wrong track. And I just thought, right, if you're kind of representing the incumbent, i.e. you're a Kamala Harris, who's also part of the Biden regime,
how on earth you can win, win 73% of the people think the country's going in the wrong direction. So I thought, oh, this is done and dusted on the basis of that. But then about kind of 1 a.m. 2 a.m.
It's still looking a bit 50-50. And I was thinking, well, hang on, if it is a 50-50 race, which is what everyone assumes it is, this is what 50-50 looks like. Actually, right in the last minute, Harris could just edge ahead. But then, wiser, more experienced people who understood the electoral maths and the emerging picture way better than me was like, no, no, this is not what a 50-50 race looks like. This is what a race looks like when Trump is going to win. And not only is he going to win the electoral college, he's going to win the popular vote.
So those were my two very, very nerdy points as a bit of an amateur doing US elections. Right. Last question before I let you go, give me a seed that's been planted this year that's going to grow into something massive in the next year or two. There's a brain teaser for you. Oh my gosh. Beyond the apple pip in my back garden.
What's the thing that we've started now that's just going to become a huge thing? I think my seed is that there's going to be chaos within the administration because he's appointing people with such diverse opinions.
I wouldn't fully agree with that. I think Donald Trump is coming at this with the benefit of experience. He's surrounding himself with incredible loyalists. Nobody is divergent in opinion to him of the names we've seen.
so far. I think he'll run the administration as he did the last time, which is like a mom and pop business, which is the business he's used to running where he's the boss and you do what he says or you ship out. So I don't think that we'll see. I mean, it depends on your definition of chaos, really.
I don't imagine that it's going to be a particularly... In fact, I think it's going to be a far more streamlined administration than during the first time, because he not only has these loyalists, but this is not his first time in the White House. And for Donald Trump to be able to implement his agenda and what he wants to do, he has far more tools to do so this time. And he was very frustrated the first time around
Not realizing I mean the Paris of the president in a way are quite limited you know it isn't this all powerful I can do whatever I want to click my fingers and it happens type of role and I think that frustration the first time around so now he knows where his parameters are and foreign policy is the big one and there's you know to a certain degree some economic policy as well that he can do by.
executive actions and so on. But the key point is he has the House of Representatives, and he has the Senate, and he has, you know, MAGA is the policy of the Republican Party now. And, you know, we're wearing our Christmas jumpers here, because we were promised means by the way, which haven't materialized. But anyway, we've been going to it's Christmas party season or holiday party season here in the US. So, Sue, me and I have been at all these
working very hard at these parties every evening. But speaking to a lot of Democratic members of Congress, and I don't know if you'd agree with this, Sumi, the ones who have been reelected and are coming back in next room, they're all talking about a very different Republican party that's going to be on the Hill, not the party of decades gone by really the party of Trump, a MAGA party, and they're the policies that they'll be going hard on.
And in fact, you see some of those members already talking about ways that they imagine working together with this administration because they see the fact that with control of the House and the Senate and the White House, you know, being obstructionist is not perhaps going to get them very far. And they're looking at ways to work with, for example, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk. I've seen a few members talking about that in their efficiency, Department of Government efficiency efforts and so on. So I think for the Democrats, it's going to be a really difficult and also interesting next two years to see how they position themselves.
And they're going to look for things that they can find common grand on, like infrastructure. You know, I mean, you know, Adam from traveling around here, like the roads, the train networks, the buses, et cetera, in America still need an awful lot of investment.
And AI is another one where they'll seek to just find common ground to come together because at the end of the day, everyone is going to be facing reelection again. And the Democrats don't want to be on the doorstep going, oh, well, we just sat there sulking for two years. You know, they need some kind of deliverable as well.
I don't know, it feels around this town very different to how it felt just on the eve of Trump 1. There's a kind of, someone described it to me the other night as a desensitisation in a way, but there's a familiarity or maybe a resignation or something of don't try and resist this.
This is what America wants, and especially, as we've said, with such a resounding victory, that you have to work within these primaries, and that's what democracy is about. Your team wins or it doesn't win, but you still have to serve the people who put you there.
So interesting. And also that seems to me to clash slightly with what Kamala Harris' message the day afterwards, which was like, let's continue the fight just because we lost today. It doesn't mean we're going to lose again. So actually, I wonder if that's not quite the message that everyone else has taken away. Well, that's kind of what you have to say the next day, though, isn't it?
She's figuring out her own future as well, isn't she? She's trying to figure out what her political roadmap is going to be going forward, and that speech was kind of the first building block of that for her personally as well. I'm low to ask this question, but when does the 2028 election get started, or is it already underway?
Oh, it's already underway. It is. Oh, my God, midterms. We're thinking about the midterms two years from now in 2028. And JD Vance is thinking of, you know, Vance 28 already, as are maybe many others. But I mean, Donald Trump, sort of changing the constitution, can't run again. So already people have moved to that point. I mean, do you think he would try though? Because I mean, that'd be quite a Trumpian thing to do. It's like, guys, if you like me, let's change this constitution so I could have a third term.
I don't see it as likely. I think he is, obviously at this moment, very pleased with his victory and is going to get to work with his new administration. But let's not forget that he is also 78 now. He's been in his 80s. I think he wants to go and enjoy his life and take his winnings back to Aunt Mar-Lago in four years. And exert influence still, but not from the White House.
Yeah. Oh, well, it's been an absolutely amazing year. Who knows? Well, I know exactly. Who knows? It's been an amazing year, and it's been great to share all this airtime with you guys. So thank you for making time for newscast when you've been dashing around the country and just having this huge, big, epic iceberg of a new story to cover 24-7. So thank you so much. Oh, pleasure. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, Adam, and happy holidays. You too.
And that's all for this episode of Newscast. Thank you very much for listening. We will be back with another one very soon. Bye!
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