Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 335. 6am: Trump On The Brink About this episode Head to The Rest is Politics Youtube channel now for live coverage of the final twists and turns of the US presidential election, between 8pm-midnight GMT on Tue 5th Nov, again from 5am-9am GMT on Wed 6th Nov, and finally at 7-8.30pm GMT on Wed 6th Nov.
In the second of these special US election livestreams, Rory and Alastair are joined by Anthony Scaramucci from The Rest Is Politics US to break down the results filtering through. Dominic Sandbrook from The Rest Is History also provides a deep dive into past elections and how they’ve shaped today’s race, while Marina Hyde from The Rest Is Entertainment explores the cultural impact and high-stakes drama surrounding this year’s election.
Search for ‘The Rest Is Politics’ on YouTube or go to: www.youtube.com/@restispolitics
The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across the UK. Use referral code POLITICS after sign up for a chance to win a signed copy of Rory and Alastair's books with personalised messages. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics ⚡
Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅
TRIP Plus:
Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes.
Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics.
Instagram:
@restispolitics
Twitter:
@RestIsPolitics
Email:
[email protected]
Assistant Producers: India Dunkley, Alice Horrell
Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell
Social Producer: Jess Kidson
Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas, Callum Hill
Senior Producer: Dom Johnson
Head of Content: Tom Whiter
Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 11,741 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:48 Alastair Campbell? Hello and welcome to this Rest is Politics livestream on the most consequential of the many elections that have taken place in 2024. And right now, with almost 40 of the 50 states called, you would definitely rather be Team Trump than Team Harris. Now, Democrats might point to 2020, when at this stage, things looked similarly good for Donald Trump, but Joe Biden prevailed. This, however, does feel a bit different. The New York Times reckoned Trump has a 91% chance of pulling off what surely would be the most remarkable political comeback in American electoral history. The betting markets now have Trump as clear favorite, Harris a rank outsider. Of the seven so-called swing states, the first to be declared, North Carolina, has gone to Trump. Georgia and Arizona
2:33 Alastair Campbell? currently lean to him. So Kamala Harris needs the so-called blue wall. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where Trump is currently leading, to follow Biden into the Oval Office and the most powerful elected position in the world. I'm Alastair Campbell here in New York for the second of our live streams from the World Trade Center with my Rest is Politics co-presenter Rory Stewart, Anthony Scaramucci of the Rest is Politics US and the former Trump comms man Marina Hyde of The Guardian and the Rest is Entertainment, and Dominic Sandbrook of the Rest is History. And right now, it looks like Dominic is the only one among the five of us to have called the election right. But let me first start by asking you all to repeat the question asked at the start. Rory, Harris or Trump?
3:18 Rory Stewart? Harris.
3:20 Alastair Campbell? You're sticking with it?
3:21 Rory Stewart? It's looking very bad for her at the moment. It's extremely, extremely depressing. Really very depressing. But we'll get into that in a bit. But yes, I thought it was going to be Harris. It looks like I'm wrong.
3:30 Anthony Scaramucci? You know, it's obviously I'm not a great forecaster, but the New York Times is saying he's going to win all seven of the swing states by 2%. Marjorie, he's going to win the popular vote.
3:41 Marina Hyde? Trump. I mean, I've, the whole 18 months, I've said Trump. And then the last three, last three days, I allowed hope to creep in. This was a mistake.
3:52 Alastair Campbell? Dominic, so why do you think, if this is right, and you know, it does look like he's ahead in the so-called blue wall, let's just say for the sake of argument that he is winning and he is going to be president. Why did you think he would be?
4:04 Dominic Sandbrook? I worried that Harris is... The women wouldn't turn out in the numbers that she needed, that she wouldn't do well with Latinos, with black voters, and it looks like, and all those things, she hasn't lived, she hasn't hit the benchmarks that she needed to hit in order to keep up with Biden in 2020. She's underperformed Biden and Trump, I mean, we talked about this in the first show, Trump has a history of outperforming the polls and outperforming expectations. And it looks like he's done it particularly in rural areas and in the suburbs. He has done better than he did in 2020.
4:37 Rory Stewart? Dominic, one of the things I think you said when you were challenging me, I was obviously very firmly for Harris, you said that a lot of the arguments I was making for why she was going to win could have been made for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
4:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
4:48 Rory Stewart? And looked at in that way, if that's right, it may be that Joe Biden is more of the anomaly.
4:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
4:54 Rory Stewart? That these states were drifting strongly towards Trump and maybe because Joe Biden was from Scranton, Pennsylvania, he was able to hold those states. But tell us a little bit more about your analysis of 2016 and why you think Kamala Harris might be seen as the second Hillary Clinton.
5:10 Dominic Sandbrook? So I think Harris and Clinton have probably similar weaknesses. There's a portion of the American electorate, I think, that is reluctant to consider a woman as commander in chief. I think there's a large part of the American electorate, particularly rural, and what we might in Britain call provincial, that is suspicious of somebody from the coasts, from the big cities, who appears to be the embodiment of the kind of, for want of a better phrase, the liberal metropolitan elite. And I think the problem with Harris, and I know you have strong views about this, Rory, was that she's a Californian, she's a Californian mixed-race woman. And so she's, if you were picking from, if a casting
5:49 Dominic Sandbrook? agency were to provide, alab Joe Biden, the perfect person to beat Trump, to match him with blue-collar Americans, you wouldn't pick a mixed-race woman from California.
6:02 Alastair Campbell? Marina, what do you think it says about our country, Britain? We have had, admittedly all Conservatives, which is a bit of a black mark for the Labour Party, three female Prime Ministers, one of whom I know a joke, let's trust, but two, you know, serious political figures, particularly Margaret Thatcher. So Britain, back in 1979, was prepared to think you could have a Commander in Chief who was a woman, but here we are, it looks like, yet again, America is saying, no, we're not.
6:30 Marina Hyde? Yeah, I mean, and we haven't looked back, as you say, we've had several since. What it says about the US, I think, is so depressing, I think, in terms of like, when do you think you're next going to see a woman, if Trump wins tonight, when do you think the Democrats are next going to put a woman on the ballot? Like, there'll probably be a female Russian leader before you see one in the US at this rate, maybe even one of the Labour Party.
6:53 Alastair Campbell? What, leading Russia?
6:54 Marina Hyde? No, one female leader of the Labour Party.
6:58 Alastair Campbell? Anthony, you're a really interesting character in lots of different ways, but in terms of what's happening right now, so you're somebody who's been a lifelong Republican, you've raised tons of money for the Republicans down the years, you worked for Donald Trump, you then got given the bullet, since when you've really, really been on the campaign trail for Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump. So what do you think this says now for people like you, the Never Trumpers, as it were, and, more importantly, I guess, for America?
7:29 Anthony Scaramucci? Well, he owns that party, so the full transformation of what was once the Republican Party, of Eisenhower and Reagan and the Bushes, is now completely gone. He owns that party, he owns the minions of that party, and that party will fall in line for him. So if he wants to shut somebody down from the media perspective, the party will fall in line for him. The judicial system is about to go through a radical transformation in this country. So you're at six Supreme Court justices that are conservative and fairly young, there's a chance here that he gets two more in the next four years, you could go eight for nine at the Supreme Court.
8:13 Alastair Campbell? And what are the kind of things that he might look to them to do?
8:17 Anthony Scaramucci? Well, he'll farm that out to people like Leonard Leo at the Federal Society, like he did the three that he picked already, and they'll pass certain litmus tests that these very, very conservative people want. Remember, what Trump has said about his base consistently is that they are fiscally liberal. They want the government programs, but they're actually socially conservative, which is the opposite of most people on Wall Street, who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. And so he understands that. He'll pick judges. But remember, it's not just the Supreme Court. It's all the federal courts. The power that he's going to be bestowed is incredible, and he's way smarter about the power now than he was in the first four years. And he's got a different group of people working for them.
9:00 Alastair Campbell? Rory, you and I were in Chicago for the DNC, and there was a real feeling there that actually, particularly the abortion issue, and Roe v. Wade, that that was going to be the big driver of her route to victory. And because Joe Biden had not been that keen to campaign on it in the way that she has. But as Dominique said earlier, it does look like women have not turned out in the same numbers as expected for her.
9:25 Rory Stewart? It's completely fascinating. And of course, when a result happens, you rewrite history. If she was currently winning, we'd have a very good answer for why she was winning. Abortion would be number one. Number two, she had much more money than he did.
9:38 Alastair Campbell? Three times.
9:39 Rory Stewart? Number three, she had a real ground game. People were very clear. All my friends out in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Trump's people were nowhere to be seen. Was swamped with Democrats, leafleting hitting every door. We had Anthony Say in the first part of the show that were almost so many Democratic volunteers out, they couldn't even find doors for them to knock, right? Add to that a whole series of narratives about a campaign where she didn't really do anything wrong. She barely put a foot wrong during the campaign. And where Trump has been convicted of over 30 felonies. He's been responsible for the January 6th insurrection. You could provide a pretty good story for why she won, but she didn't. Which then means that we need to re... And you know, my friend Lickman, you were teasing me about my friend Lickman. He also called it for Kamala Harris, and he would have said, no, it's nothing about that.
10:23 Rory Stewart? It's also about the fundamentals. The economy was going reasonably okay. In terms of GDP per capita, there were no major scandals, there were no major foreign policy catastrophes. So actually, in terms of basic competence over four years, the incumbent, Biden, had ticked a lot of boxes. So all of that, I mean, this is your business as a historian.
10:43 Dominic Sandbrook? But aren't there a couple of things there?
10:45 Rory Stewart? This sort of counterfactual.
10:45 Dominic Sandbrook? There are a couple of things there, Rory. First of all, I think, I actually think she forged a pretty good campaign. I think, I don't think you look back now, I mean, Alistair may disagree, I don't think you look back and say, if she is going to lose, therefore, ergo, it must have been a terrible campaign. I think, given the position she was in, and given the products she was selling, she did a pretty good job.
11:03 Alastair Campbell? I think it was a good campaign, which could have been a lot better. Honestly, I've talked about this the whole way through. We thought there was not enough focus on the economy. And I think she never got the balance right. And we mustn't, we must, let's look at that, Harris 205, Trump 230, some big calls still to come. So we shouldn't be talking as though this is all over. But I do think that she never quite worked out how to get the balance between being the incumbent vice president to Joe Biden and the candidate for change.
11:32 Dominic Sandbrook? That's always a problem for the vice president. That was a huge problem for Gore in 2000. Always the issue. And Humphrey in 68. And Humphrey in 68. But Rory, going back to your point about, you know, about the fundamentals, it's not just about the economy, stupid. So I don't agree with James Carville, Clinton's campaign chief, who famously said that. What we see across the Western world is that in the 21st century, is that a lot of elections are about nationalism and about identity politics. And Trump is a master of playing those two cards. And he seems to have done it again.
12:04 Marina Hyde? In Pennsylvania, there's an exit poll saying that he, amongst people who care about democracy, and you may have your prejudices and think, oh, okay, well, I guess they all voted for Harris. No, he's got a seven-point lead amongst people who think that democracy is the top issue that they're voting on. And democracy in so many of the exit polls came out as the very top issue, above the economy, above abortion, above foreign policy, above all sorts of things.
12:29 Rory Stewart? And this is partly about Musk, isn't it? Because a lot of his narrative on Twitter has been playing this jujitsu of defining Trump as the guy who's for democracy, Trump who's the guy for human rights, Trump who's the guy for justice, Trump who's the guy for truth. It's an extraordinary, I mean, I don't know whether you call it gaslighting, but it's an amazing kind of inversion. Of of normal perceptions, right? Tell us a bit about that. I mean, how is he able to do that? I mean, have we just got in such a mad world that you can literally say black is white on Twitter?
12:58 Marina Hyde? And I don't know how much how much Twitter has how much of an influence it has because it's not the same as it was before. However, you can say that people amongst people who care about democracy, that that can be a real Trump position. And instead of people, so many people said, oh, no, this could be our last night in American democracy. And you had a lot of people sort of say that at the kind of coastal dinner parties.
13:22 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
13:23 Marina Hyde? Other people were thinking that, too, and in a very, very different way.
13:27 Alastair Campbell? Let's just, can we, can we have a look at the the map as things stand? And maybe, Anthony, you could just help us with this. We'll get that up.
13:35 Marina Hyde? Can we say that the polls were right? They were within the margin of error. It was incredibly close. It is, and we still don't know what the what the answer is, but that it can still be a landslide, and it can still be very close within the margin of error.
13:49 Alastair Campbell? So, Anthony, looking at that map, for those of our listeners and viewers who are not immersed in the the geography of the United States, just tell us what's gone, what's where it's gone, and what states had the fight won or lost.
14:04 Anthony Scaramucci? So the predictable, the predictable things have gone blue and red. A few of the swingy sort of things like North Carolina, which was leaning red, did go red. Georgia, which is probably going to go red, it's just too close right now to call it. But those two were probably states that the Harris campaign didn't think they were going to win. There's been a system failure in Nevada. I think you guys know that. And so people are online right now. They've been told if you're online, stay online, and you will be able to vote, even though the polls are technically closed. So some of those people will balk the line. You know, there's, there's a balk rate on a line where you just don't want to wait anymore.
14:45 Anthony Scaramucci? But those three states at the top there, which is the blue wall, let's assume Minnesota.
14:50 Rory Stewart? The three white states.
14:51 Anthony Scaramucci? So let's assume Minnesota will go to Governor Walz. But the Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, that blue wall. It appears that the president, President Trump is going to win Pennsylvania. It just, it appears that that's going to happen.
15:06 Rory Stewart? And to clarify for viewers.
15:07 Anthony Scaramucci? And he's also, he's also tied with her in Wisconsin.
15:10 Rory Stewart? It appears at the moment as though the only path left to victory for Kamala Harris, she has to now take Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. It's the only way she can do it.
15:19 Alastair Campbell? And she's behind in all three.
15:21 Rory Stewart? And the problem is in Pennsylvania, a lot of the vote has been counted. And she's significantly behind on key counties.
15:27 Anthony Scaramucci? She's down three.
15:27 Rory Stewart? Every time you're comparing Biden's performance against Trump's in almost every individual county, she's shedding a few votes and it only takes a few votes. He didn't win it by a big margin.
15:37 Anthony Scaramucci? Well, I'll give you, I'll give an example to Rory's point. In, in New Jersey, she won by 5%. That's just too low of a number in that blue of a state. And the Kamala curious voter that she was searching for did not show up for her. And you know what happened? The Nikki Haley voter returned home to the Republican Party. That's what you're going to see over the next 72 hours.
16:01 Alastair Campbell? So Dominic, can you see a way back for Kamala Harris in this, on the map we've just looked at?
16:06 Dominic Sandbrook? No, I don't think so. I'm looking at the figures right now, something like 89% of the vote counted in Pennsylvania, for example. I mean, I think it's this, this has felt to me always like it might be a rerun of 2016. And that's what it looks like. If you remember at this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton was looking at that blue wall area and, and hoping against hope that somehow they would find a load of votes in the college towns, in the big cities that never materialized. And we're in exactly the same position again. I think she, I suspect, strongly suspect that Kamala Harris is going to lose all three of those states. I actually think Trump's going to win all the battleground states. Maybe Nevada, there might be a question, Anthony.
16:44 Rory Stewart? And possibly the popular vote as well, which would be evident in 2016.
16:47 Alastair Campbell? And you were saying outside, Anthony, you, you actually think if he. If he's gonna be president,
16:53 Anthony Scaramucci? Yeah.
16:53 Alastair Campbell? it's better for the country that he also wins the popular vote.
16:55 Anthony Scaramucci? I think it is, because I think it'll force a reckoning for the Democrats. You'll have to say, hey, guys, it's been 20 years since the Republican Party actually won a popular vote, and they did it with an incumbent, sitting president that was at war, George W. Bush. Trump has had the greatest political comeback in US history. He's a convicted felon, we can name all the things, although I will probably at some point have to retract the fascist comment.
17:22 Anthony Scaramucci? Because, you know, and I'll say to Guantanamo. Yeah, because I'll probably be in Guantanamo with the meme that you guys put out on social media.
17:29 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but you've got a lot of friends in the UK.
17:32 Anthony Scaramucci? And Keir Starmer's not gonna extradite me? So when Trump calls him and says, hey, I wanna try this guy for treason.
17:39 Alastair Campbell? The one thing is, you'll have a lot of friends. You'll have a lot of friends.
17:41 Rory Stewart? Will you guarantee he won't be extradited?
17:43 Anthony Scaramucci? I may have to change my name to Anne Frank, but here's the thing. Here's the thing that I will say, that I think people on the Democratic side have to really pay attention to.
17:53 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
17:54 Anthony Scaramucci? You have lost the culture war in the United States. And maybe in the UK, in Europe, and other parts of the world, you don't understand that culture war and how significant it is to people in the United States. But I told Rory, they all vote against their economic interests to win that culture war.
18:11 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. I think, I think.
18:13 Anthony Scaramucci? And Trump knows that.
18:14 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think of the, I don't know if he's still up and still watching, but if Peter Hyman's still up and watching us, I wouldn't mind getting him bashed. This is some of the stuff he was talking about, that the left, the progressives have not really got their heads around why this kind of thing is happening. Now Rory, we have to, we have to pay to be here.
18:33 Rory Stewart? I wouldn't hammer it quite so hard. I think I'll just do the, you don't need to hammer it in.
18:38 Alastair Campbell? Our beloved NordVPN.
18:40 Anthony Scaramucci? I may need NordVPN Extra, because I'm gonna be in an undisclosed location.
18:43 Rory Stewart? So this livestream is sponsored by NordVPN. And a VPN is an incredibly useful thing that you can have to protect yourself when you're online. We have it on our laptops, we have it on our phones, it stops us getting tracked across the internet. So try it out for yourself at nordvpn.com/restorspolitics for the best discount available. I'm gonna use this opportunity, though, because I had to do that, to not have to do that, so I'm proud to do it, to come into the discussion. One thing that's worth thinking about is whether there were any alternatives for the Democrats getting another candidate. They were constrained. So Biden refused- You thought that they should, didn't you? Yeah, I thought they should have an open primary because, and I sensed, moves a little unfair,
19:26 Rory Stewart? I sensed that also President Obama was a little ambivalent about the idea of crowning Kamala Harris. Because the conventional wisdom amongst many Democrats had been that she had not been a very strong vice president, and she was vulnerable on the issue of immigration. So there were people out there saying, Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, would have been great because he could have delivered the state of Pennsylvania, which is a state's apt to vital, or Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan, again, deliver one of these vital states. Instead of which, they went for Kamala Harris, and she brought in her vice presidential running mate, somebody who was not from a key swing state. So, Anthony, I know you disagree with me on this. Your view is they couldn't have had an open primary, they needed to crown her and get on with it?
20:06 Anthony Scaramucci? So there was 105 days, you know, there's going to be a lot of criticism of President Biden about what took place, but there was only 105 days. If they ate up 30 of those days leading into the convention, I think that would have been terrible for them, and I think they would have been splintered. And something similar happened in 1968, if you go back to the podcast, and I think they didn't want a civil war and a, you know, someone that had a small portion of the overall party, they wanted to consolidate the party quickly.
20:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, divided parties, first of all, divided parties don't win. But also, the 68 comparison is a really good one. They had a president who drops out, and in 68, he's succeeded by his vice president, who's responsible, who's seen as embodying the Vietnam War, and Hubert Humphrey goes into the 68 general election, dogged by protesters who are shouting at him about the war. Now, to take your example, Rory, imagine that they did end up with Josh Shapiro. Wherever Josh Shapiro, who's a very strong supporter of Israel, went on the campaign trail, there would have been groups of demonstrators accusing him of being a war monger.
21:10 Rory Stewart? And let me just push back one more time, we don't want to get stuck in this kind of baseball forever, but I felt-
21:18 Rory Stewart? You know, my party, the Conservative Party, often goes through these leadership campaigns, far more often than anyone in the British public wants. And we always imagine that they're going to be unbelievably destructive because we're knocking chips off each other trying to work out who's going to be leader. Actually, we found them recently that it's quite a good way of airing some of the talent in the party. Boris Johnson emerged from one of these competitions without too much trouble. He was able to move on to an election that he won very, very soon after he came through as leader. I see it done well. It's actually a way of showing the talent in your party and making sure the person selected has the legitimacy of being selected through an open press.
21:56 Alastair Campbell? But I think Anthony's point is the one is that, and this is where, look, I feel, I mean, heaven knows what Joe Biden is thinking tonight because he probably still, he's probably still thinking, I'm the only guy who ever beat Trump and they decided I wasn't good enough and they got rid of me and look what's happened. But the fact is, I think if, if he had gone earlier, then I think, I agree with you, you could have maybe had an open contest which didn't rip things apart. But at the time they had, I don't think they could.
22:23 Anthony Scaramucci? You think Joe Biden in his current state at age 81, on the way to 82 with arthritic knees, hips and feet, he could have beaten Donald Trump?
22:32 Rory Stewart? He couldn't win.
22:33 Alastair Campbell? I don't, I don't think so.
22:35 Anthony Scaramucci? So he could be delusional thinking that, but there was no chance.
22:38 Alastair Campbell? No, but listen, that's what people do in those situations. I mean, he, he, he, he's bound to feel right now that the party, they pushed him out and it was the wrong thing to, he's bound to think.
22:49 Anthony Scaramucci? Well, I want to restate something else, okay, because Dominic again, once again, was right. He said that Biden would become irrelevant. I said he would be a better figure than that. He is going to be condemned for this in history. Fifty years from now, people go back and say, wow, what a guy.
23:04 Marina Hyde? He, she closed the campaign like eight points ahead of where, and the polls were not so far off within this margin of error. She closed the campaign eight points ahead of where he was. I do think, I agree with Anthony that you, it was, it was, there was not enough time, but there was something, there is something about it that makes it feel like a stitch up. It, they closed around her so quickly in those days, after, you know, after he withdrew and it was so quick. And I think that there was that, there is that sense then, and I suppose, as you say, if you're going for someone who was from a coastal elite, then there is that sense of stitch up that remains around her.
23:39 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, the great counterfactual.
23:40 Anthony Scaramucci? Can I ask a question of all of you, if you don't mind? Yeah. He was at forty seven and a half percent locked. Okay, he had a high floor, but a low ceiling. He's punched through that ceiling. He had people like me and many others that defected from him. So where did he find the votes? And how did he pull it off?
24:00 Rory Stewart? But it's such an interesting question because the conventional wisdom six months ago was everybody made up their mind. Trump was a total known quantity. Either you voted for Trump or you didn't vote for Trump. You weren't going to change your mind at the last moment. But and that's why there was a ceiling. Right, everybody said this is as far as he got. If he now wins the popular vote, he's done something which a lot of the experts thought he couldn't do, which is convert independents and undecideds over to him, who apparently had not expressed a preference for him in the past. Next thing.
24:31 Marina Hyde? He's done a lot to deal with racial depolarization.
24:33 Rory Stewart? But also some very weird things.
24:35 Marina Hyde? We have to say.
24:36 Rory Stewart? So he did well in 2016, but he did not perform in the way people expected in eighteen, twenty, twenty-two. So what is it about twenty-four that makes a difference? And is the answer just the disappearance of Biden?
24:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, here's an interesting thing. You've been talking about the fundamentals in the economy. But actually, if you look at the exit polls, people say they feel worse off than they were four years ago. Clearly, inflation has had a very big impact. And I mean, I don't disagree with you that bread and butter issues matter. But looking at these exit polls, it seems that people basically said, I'm worse off than I was. Trump is a brilliant businessman. They can't, they believed Trump's line about the economy was great under him. And I think it looks from these exit polls as though actually, the economy has loomed larger than immigration or abortion or any of these other issues that are sexier and that we in the media talked about.
25:27 Rory Stewart? Although paradoxically, Trump, you said, thought immigration was the big thing and kept focusing on that when his team told him to talk about cost of living.
25:33 Anthony Scaramucci? Let me tell you why he may not poll well on the exit polls. Maybe those dominance corrected, those are higher. But Trump lives in a zero-sum world. And so his methods, winners and losers, his message to black men and Latino men that are in the country, you're here legally. I'm protecting you from the migrants that are trying to come in illegally. So you're part of my group. And that message resonated with those people. Even if they're not part of his group, Rory, they think that they're part of his group. And it resonated.
26:09 Dominic Sandbrook? But is there an element as well of people voting against the Democrats? So the point about the kind of perception of that the Democrats are kind of permeated with wokeness and that they are too progressive, that they only care. I mean, Kamala Harris was not a great candidate to dispel that kind of argument.
26:25 Marina Hyde? Yeah, I'm not crazy about the word woke, but it's the we all know what we're talking about when we're talking about it. And the more woke that the Democratic Party have got, the more they have lost ethnic minority voters. And I'm saying one in three voted for Trump.
26:37 Alastair Campbell? One of the things that I heard from somebody who's been out and about on the campaign trail is that on off, under the radar, not sort of big public stuff, they've absolutely been hammering transgender. And I see you've just had elected your first transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride, absolutely hammering it, particularly with young black men who don't, and I'm not going to speak for all of them, nobody can, but but that they in particular had this sort of feeling that the woke thing was a little bit out of control. So is that the sort of thing that you were saying earlier, the Democrats need to go away and think about?
27:14 Anthony Scaramucci? A hundred percent. And by the way, Elon Musk algorithmically made that a great center of attention on that big megaphone.
27:21 Rory Stewart? But remember, the Democrats have had eight years to think about this. This is basically a replay of 2016. So all these super brains, I mean, Jake Sullivan, I remember, after 2016, totally shattered, went away, spent two years thinking, came up with a whole new foreign policy for the middle classes. Biden came in with the Inflation Reduction Act, which was all supposed to be about blue collar jobs, massive stimulus package, reshoring industry, he kept Trump's tariffs in place. I mean, it's if you were defending the Democrats, it's not as though Biden and his team didn't think that they hadn't spent the last eight years learning the lessons. And we're now talking as though this is somehow new. It's not new, it's a repeat, right?
28:03 Alastair Campbell? Just on the way the camp where we think the campaign's heads are going to be, I mean, their mindset. So I was getting endlessly being sort of sent stuff that was suggesting things are looking good, things are great, it's all looking fantastic. They're slightly fading away, not getting so many of those messages. So what will the Republican Party and Trump, the team Trump, how will they be thinking about this? And you know, a lot of the Harris people as well, how they feeling and thinking right now, do you think they agree with Dominic, there's no way through this?
28:35 Anthony Scaramucci? At this point, I do think that they think that. I think that they're probably making a decision on what tone she'll have as it relates to the concession speech. There are House races that are still out there. They thought they were going to flip the House. It now looks like it's 50/50 as to whether or not they can flip the House. He has coattails in this election. Again, whether they like it or not, he's drawing some of these House members with him. None of the Democrats expected that. But the one thing that they made the mistake on, which we have to accept, he is a prodigious and formidable, resilient, and talented politician. And the Democrats never really saw him like
29:18 Anthony Scaramucci? that. They never really could give him all of that due. You know, Stuart Stevens did, Rick Wilson did. They were trying to bang the drums, "Hey, Democrats, wake up. This guy's incredibly talented."
29:32 Alastair Campbell? This is the boy in Frank Luntz, to me.
29:33 Anthony Scaramucci? But they never saw him like that. They poo-pooed him.
29:36 Marina Hyde? I wonder whether it's something that bizarrely we ended up talking about for about three news days, the assassination attempt, that extraordinary moment, which is truly iconic in every way, and which the tech bros love, where he reflexively in that moment gets right back up and says, "Fight back." I don't think, there's very few humans that could possibly have done that. And that speaks to that point. It seems emblematic of what he's done perhaps tonight. And yet, we talked about it for sort of three days.
30:06 Anthony Scaramucci? And he won that county. He almost got every vote in that county.
30:09 Rory Stewart? I disagree. There are very few humans who can do that. I think there are many humans who can do that. But I think what matters is that people like Elon Musk believe there are very few humans who can do that. I think most people who've been in the military would be able to do that instinctively without blinking. Probably 20% of the population could do that. We shouldn't let Trump get away with the idea he's like a 0.01% superhero.
30:29 Alastair Campbell? No.
30:29 Rory Stewart? That's a normal macho thing to do.
30:31 Alastair Campbell? Anthony's point about his political instinct, his instinct for showmanship, his instinct for seizing a political moment, I don't think you can dispute that. And I think even, you've said to me before, that even during this campaign, he has had his own people saying to him... Don't do that, don't do that, don't do that. And he's always saying, I know better than you.
30:51 Anthony Scaramucci? And I'm doing it. And by the way, I looked at his movements in Pennsylvania. I know that state. My family's from that state. And I was like, wow, he has really figured out where these communities are. They're going to vote for him and he's sitting in those communities, not necessarily in the hub of Philadelphia. He's out in those farmlands. He's out in the coal mining industrial areas of the state. And when I looked at her running around the state, it was a lot like Secretary Clinton. And I said before we broke, I did not like that concert. Again, the concert was a waste of time last night.
31:25 Rory Stewart? It's so tragic, isn't it? Because it's, I do think to defend the Democrats, they did learn a lot of lessons from 2016, or they thought they had. And she did run a different campaign to Hillary Clinton. She was out on the ground much more. She didn't take the battleground states for granted. They saw what happened last time. She put in, I think, over 20 appearances in each of those battleground states in a way that Hillary Clinton didn't. And she hasn't been rewarded for that. And I know we're about to get into sophology and results. I'd love us at some point to just get into the fundamental facts, the horrifying facts of what it actually will mean for America and the world, that this guy has just won again and won in this way.
32:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Just one thing about picking up on what you were saying about Trump before we get into that. What Trump has done is phenomenal. So there's only one person in American history who lost the White House, spent four years in the wilderness and then came back. And that's a president that most people have never heard of, Grover Cleveland in 1892. And most people in the 20th century assumed that if you lost after one term, as Jimmy Carter did, as George Bush Senior did, that that was it, you were done. And I think most of us in, on this panel, in this room, in this building, in this city, thought after January the 6th, 2021, the insurrection, that that definitely was the end of Trump.
32:42 Alastair Campbell? But shouldn't it have been? Shouldn't it have been? If you look at the principles of American democracy, shouldn't it have been the end?
32:47 Anthony Scaramucci? Well, there was nobody that stopped them. You know, like I said, McCarthy had a chance to do it. So did McConnell. McConnell's writing a book now about it, like. Oh, I didn't really like him, but it's too late, you know, Mitch. But but here's the thing I want to say to you guys. And a lot of people inside his campaign have said this to me. He could staff up with the McCarthy's of the world. He could staff up with, because he's a big name dropper. He likes big names. He could say, you know what? I'm 78 years old. I'm going to play golf in Florida. And I got my vengeance by winning. I'm shoving myself up the you know what of every single person on this panel and all the people around the world. But I'm going to go play golf and hang out at this moment.
33:31 Anthony Scaramucci? Or he could operate Project 2025 and try to create a dystopian America. But there'll be people in America that would would fight him. He's not going to be able to get the military. You know, if he calls up the military like he did and says, hey, I want you to do this or I want you to do that. Those guys are trained and taken oath to the country. I say, okay, I'm resigning. I can't do that. I'm sorry.
33:54 Alastair Campbell? You just briefly, you mentioned Project 2025 there. So I guess the question now is, does he, as it were, a bit of a rerun, sort of do all the big stuff, meet Kim Jong-un, all the big showy stuff and go and play golf and leave it to these Project 2025 guys? Or do you think he'll be a different kind of president if he wins?
34:11 Rory Stewart? Well, just, I mean, yeah, I just might, just to follow up on that. I mean, I'm worried that this is terribly bad for his ego and his narcissism. If everybody's told you, you can't do something repeatedly and you do it, I think you get a slightly more arrogant version of Trump this time around than you have before. And that's, that's, that's bad.
34:32 Alastair Campbell? Well, it's impunity. We absolutely, this is absolutely.
34:35 Anthony Scaramucci? Well, your tell is going to be, she concedes and then he gives a speech. I don't know if he does it tonight or he does it 2 o'clock in the morning or tomorrow. But it'll be his speech. Now, who's writing that speech? The speech that was written in 2016 was a gracious speech. He also then did a 60 Minutes interview. And they said, well, you're going to lock up Hillary Clinton? He said, no, I was just talking like that. And he never took any action against Hillary Clinton. But is there vengeance in his heart? There's some level of vindictiveness and then who around him is going to allow him to do that? Because I believe that there's a Trump mind virus. And that mind virus is I need to out-Trump Trump to impress Trump. And so I go to I go to an MSG rally.
35:21 Anthony Scaramucci? Puerto Rico is an island of garbage. We're going to slaughter people. You say all of this stuff that you think is impressing Trump that you don't necessarily get away with, but he does. And then the question is, does he have his people around him doing things that they think he wants them to do?
35:38 Alastair Campbell? But the project 2025 plan is basically to sweep away the state, the swamp, call it whatever you will, and and surround him with these people chosen by Musk, chosen by Peter Thiel and the kind of the new oligarchs. And where does that leave United States? Where does it leave the administration? Where does it leave the governance of the United States?
36:01 Anthony Scaramucci? Well, there's not one of those people that doesn't think they can manipulate Donald Trump. There's not one of those people, J D Vance, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. They're sitting there the same way Steve Bannon was. You know, Steve Bannon got fired primarily because he went to the press and said, you know, Trump is a hand puppet and guess who's the hand? That would be me. And the minute he did that, he got caught doing that, he got fired. And so these guys are going to underestimate Trump and they're going to try to manipulate him and they're going to try to get what they want. You know, Elon's sitting there with all these government contracts, saying, okay, great. I'm on my way to a trillion dollars. I'm in a race with my other billionaire friends. Jeff Bezos is like, woo, thank God I didn't bury myself with that endorsement for Kamala Harris.
36:46 Anthony Scaramucci? I'm glad I pulled it at the last minute. My Blue Origin contracts are okay. And and they're they know that he is transparently transactional. They know that about him. Okay. Now, the flip side of it, I think we have to talk about is, I hope you don't mind, is the money. The money. Trump said, let's go. Shoot me the money. And the money flew in, a million dollar sweepstakes, money here, money there, 250.
37:14 Anthony Scaramucci? Million dollars came from the cryptocurrency lobbying community. We're not talking about Sherrod Brown. Your people don't know who he is, but he's a very powerful person in the U.S. He's the Senate Banking Committee Chairman ousted by a car dealership salesperson in Ohio who received forty million dollars from the crypto bros. Who said, okay, Sherrod Brown, you don't like crypto? Bye bye Sherrod Brown.
37:40 Alastair Campbell? Well, we're gonna have a quick break. We're in the process of getting hold of Dr. Samara Kla, who's an elections expert and will hopefully be talking to her.
37:51 Anthony Scaramucci? We're not getting a suicide psychiatrist on here or anything like that? No, I'm just wondering.
37:54 Alastair Campbell? We're not making jokes about suicide psychiatrists. But anyway, we'll be back shortly. And by the way, we had a few messages while we were off air that some of you during these breaks aren't seeing anything apart from some sort of hold or anything. That's to do with the way that I think that YouTube works. So don't worry about it. Go and get a cup of tea and we'll see you in a minute.
38:17 Speaker 05 Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.
38:20 Speaker 06 On October 2nd.
38:21 Speaker 05 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
38:26 Speaker 06 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
38:34 Speaker 07 What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.
38:38 Speaker 06 With great power comes great deniability.
38:41 Speaker 07 I'm not the first nanny.
38:42 Speaker 06 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.
38:47 Speaker 08 Fall flavors are waiting for you at Whole Foods Market. Cozy picks all through the store, like Maple Leaf Cookies from 365 Brand. Swing by the bakery for pumpkin cheesecake here for a limited time, and pumpkin turmeric bread freshly baked every single day. Sip the season with 365 Brand Cinnamon Spice Coffee and Pumpkin Spice Creamer while you still can. Spice up fall at Whole Foods Market.
39:17 Speaker 09 Clothes shopping really isn't my thing, but I still want to look sharp and feel confident. That's why I use Stitch Fix, the OG personal styling service. No more scrolling through websites or wasting my day at the store. My stylist sends pieces picked just for me straight to my door. Free shipping, free returns, no subscription required. Get started today at stitchfix.com. That's stitchfix.com.
39:46 Alastair Campbell? Welcome back to The Rest is Politics, live from the World Trade Center in New York. And I hope that we have with us Dr. Samara Klar. Do we?
39:58 Speaker 10 Yes.
39:58 Alastair Campbell? We do indeed.
39:59 Speaker 10 I am here.
40:00 Alastair Campbell? Lovely to see you. Now, you are a political scientist, you're a professor at the University of Arizona, and you specialize in voter behavior and political psychology. So for a British audience in particular, that kind of is probably waking up this morning absolutely reeling at the news that they're trying to digest. What do you make of the voter behavior and political psychology going on here now?
40:23 Speaker 10 Well, there was three big issues in Arizona across the country. And the primary issue that people were concerned about was the economy. And I think that what we're seeing is voters penalizing an incumbent administration, not distinguishing Harris from Biden and voting against an incumbent after inflation, increases in cost of living. That seemed to really outweigh, I was going to say Trump, but outweigh all the other considerations.
40:49 Rory Stewart? Can I come in on the results? So Nate Kern of The New York Times has just said, "Another hour has gone by, but the story is still the same. Trump is favored in each of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. We'll just have to wait longer to see whether maybe, just maybe, Harris will do better than expected in key Democratic areas." I mean, it's looking increasingly difficult for, isn't it? Because more and more of the vote is being counted.
41:14 Speaker 10 Well, you know, listen, I think if we look at how the polling was predicting that this election would bear out, we knew that there were seven key states. We knew that Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina were long shots for Harris. And we knew that Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan were really her most reasonable path to winning. We are still waiting on those three states. We're waiting on, I believe, all the swing states except for North Carolina. It doesn't look good for her. She didn't get any surprise wins. She hasn't been overperforming. She hasn't been overperforming in the polls, but the results aren't in. We'll have to wait and see. I would, you know, I'm sure she's not thrilled. I'm sure the campaign is prepping a concession speech if necessary, but that's exactly right. We still don't know. And the
41:56 Speaker 10 truth is, I'm not, I'm not sure which, um, which districts we're waiting for in Pennsylvania. What I've seen in Arizona here is that Trump is currently up by 10,000 votes, and I believe 700,000 votes still have to be counted. So we still do have a long night ahead. We've got a long few days ahead, I think is more likely. The Harris campaign was hoping for a much stronger night. It's not looking good, but that's, I, I agree that the election hasn't been called yet, that's for sure.
42:22 Rory Stewart? Professor, is, is this, just for, for viewers listening, is that you just being super cautious as an academic and trying to be absolutely on the thing? Because the New York Times is giving a 91% chance of victory to Trump. I mean, it, it, it, it sounds as though they really think this is Trump's.
42:38 Speaker 10 I would rather be Trump than Harris right now. There's no doubt about it. But we're talking about incredibly close races. Biden won Arizona by 0.36% in points in 2020. So, listen, if you're asking if I'd rather be in the Trump campaign or the Harris campaign right now, I would say the Trump campaign. It is looking much stronger for Trump. But there is a reason this election hasn't been called. So we can start to speculate as to why Harris hasn't overperformed, why she's actually underperformed relative to Biden in, in many areas. But to Nate Cohen's point, they're still waiting.
43:10 Alastair Campbell? Georgia's been called for Trump by the BBC and NBC, not yet the New York Times. I think we were, we were expecting that. When you, when you talk about those, those tiny numbers and there have been, if we look back at the last couple of elections in some of these states, you're talking about literally micro gaps between the two, the two candidates. But at what point do you kind of run out of road? When, when can we actually say, look, once you're up to 85%, 90% counts, and she's not catching up, then that then starts to look like this, this is all over. It's just very, very hard from looking at our perspectives to see any way back right now.
43:49 Speaker 10 Well, I think that's fair. I mean, listen, Trump is up and it's looking good for him. It really depends on the state. When you're talking about in Arizona, if you're still waiting for votes from Maricopa County, which is a transforming swing state, then you really need to get down to the very last ballots before you know for sure. I'm not sure which districts they're waiting on in these other states. If they haven't called them yet, it's because potentially they're waiting in cities for cities or suburbs, areas where they're not sure if they if there's enough Harris votes to make up the difference. At a certain point, yes, absolutely. They call it before before 100% of the ballots are in. It's just going to depend on each state to know where those missing ballots are coming from.
44:30 Alastair Campbell? Do you think people will say at the end of this, if it turns out as we we we it looks at the moment, that the polls got it wrong again or got it more right again?
44:41 Speaker 10 I mean, from my perspective, I think the polls actually are the winner of the night. I mean, the polls told us that this was going to be incredibly close in seven swing states. And it has been. The polls typically had shown Trump ahead by one or two percentage points within each of those states. It looks like he's winning each of the swing states at this point by maybe up to three percentage points. I'm saying potentially three, maybe. I I'm not sure he's going to be anywhere by four, but we're seeing these very, very small margins. He's up in Arizona now by about 0.6%. So I think the polls were showing us what is bearing out, very, very, very close races in these very particular states.
45:20 Rory Stewart? I it is though going to be interesting if Trump takes the popular vote as well as the electoral college. That that wasn't something that people seemed to anticipate, right? But he may be on track to do that.
45:29 Speaker 10 Right. Well, he lost the popular vote twice. So this will be his first time winning the popular vote. My understanding is that a lot of that could be due to a very strong performance in Florida, a state that he was projected to win. In a lot of these states, you know, Harris was not focusing her campaign on the states that she knew she would lose. She was really spending a lot of time in the battleground states. Trump overperformed, I think, in some of these red states. He got even more votes than anticipated, and that could push him over with the national popular vote.
45:58 Alastair Campbell? And what do you think this result, if it does pan out in the way it looks at the moment? What's that? What do you think that says about America? We, I think we are pretty stunned at the idea that somebody who is a convicted felon, the rape, the misogyny, the racism, the lying, the chaos of the four years when he was president, and America, which other democracies tend to follow the trends. What does this say about the future of democratic politics?
46:27 Speaker 10 Yeah, that's the question I get most often when I'm talking to people from outside the United States. Like, how is this, how is this possible? You know, we have two parties in the United States, two viable parties that stand for very different things. One tends to represent conservative policies and the other liberal policies. If you're a voter who values conservative policies, you essentially have two choices. You can vote for a party that disagrees, with which you disagree on everything, or you can vote for a party that agrees with you on most policies, even if you don't like their leader. And that is ultimately what a lot of Republican voters do. When we talk to Republican voters, we ask them, many Republican voters are voting for the party, they're voting for the policies, they're not voting for Trump himself, because the other option is a party that doesn't line up with their issue preferences.
47:14 Rory Stewart? Finally, for me, there were many people saying that Trump had sort of hit his ceiling, that he hadn't performed well since 2016 and 1820 and 22. And there were many people saying, everybody knew Donald Trump, you know, his name recognition was universal, nobody was going to change their mind on Donald Trump. But it's possible that we're actually seeing, as he wins the popular vote, that that theory isn't right, that he may actually have added votes in a rather unexpected way. Does that mean that he's maybe been able to pull over people who didn't previously vote for him? And if so, what is it that's different about the Trump in 24 compared to the Trump in 2022 and 2020?
47:55 Rory Stewart? Whereas, of course, for us, we feel he's a worse candidate, but it feels like he may have moved people over towards him.
48:01 Speaker 10 Sure, if we're comparing Trump in, let's say, 2024 to 2020, it's a really entirely different context, especially when you take his opponent into consideration. It's going to be, you know, days, weeks, months, years of speculating as to what went wrong for the Harris campaign in this election. But in 2020, Trump was running against an experienced candidate who'd been through a primary. 2024 was a chaotic election, to say the least, I mean, historically chaotic election. 2020, Trump had been overseeing COVID, the pandemic, people were deeply unhappy about what had been going on for those previous years. 2024, that has largely been forgotten. There's new issues that have arisen, largely the border crisis, the economy. So it is a different context. But you know what? I've got the
48:44 Speaker 10 same questions you do. I think these are questions we're going to be asking for several years to try to figure out how this has happened. To look back at this election, you know, some of us have been joking that soon there's going to be history books that focus just on this year. There's been so much to analyze.
48:59 Alastair Campbell? Well, Professor Cotters, we love to talk to you. I think our original plan, we were going to keep you on standby for several days as the thing became clear. But it looks like it might be going clear and more quickly than we thought.
49:09 Speaker 10 I'll get my pajamas. It's okay. We can stay all night.
49:11 Alastair Campbell? Okay, great. Well, we'll speak to you again. Thank you very, very much for your time.
49:14 Speaker 10 My pleasure.
49:15 Alastair Campbell? Okay. Now, to the viewer, to the listener, please do send in your own questions. Just go into the YouTube chat and put your questions in there, or on social media, hashtag Trip Live, and we'll get through as many as we can. Let's do a few questions now and see what we are.
49:36 Alastair Campbell? Or not, as the case may be. There we go. They've moved them on the screen. It wasn't at the bottom earlier, but we're doing the race to the White House. Is there any traction to the possibility that Donald Trump, I think this is for you, Dominic, will try to change the law so he can carry on after this next term? I believe there is. But let's see. Is it legally possible? Is it constitutionally possible?
49:58 Dominic Sandbrook? It's possible. Yeah. So before the 1940s...
50:02 Dominic Sandbrook? There was a convention that you didn't do more than two terms because George Washington had only done two terms. Franklin D Roosevelt did four terms. So after that, Republican-dominated Congress pushed through an amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified by the states, the 22nd Amendment, which said that it's two and then you're done. But there has been talk ever since of repealing that. Now, what Trump could well do is he could point to something that Bill Clinton talked about, and I think back in 2000 or so. Bill Clinton said, given how much longer people live now, how long political careers are, I mean, look, Joe Biden's had a political career of 200 years, that you can serve conceivably non-consecutive terms.
50:44 Dominic Sandbrook? So you could do two, then have a break, then return. Now, for Donald Trump, that is a gift because he could say, I did one term, then I had a break, then I can do another. So why not take Bill Clinton at his word and allow me to repeal the amendment and let me do another term?
50:59 Rory Stewart? Which is famously the Russian system. So people, listeners will remember that Putin was limited to two terms, so he stepped down, put Medvedev in.
51:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yep.
51:08 Rory Stewart? Medvedev then served, and then he was able to come back again.
51:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
51:11 Anthony Scaramucci? So the procedure from a constitutional perspective, it's a lot like what happened with prohibition. They have to go back to the states and create another amendment to repeal the amendment.
51:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
51:22 Anthony Scaramucci? But I guess what I'm wondering, is there something he could do from a judicial maneuver, something he could do through the Supreme Court? Is there something that he could promulgate that gets him there?
51:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Could the Supreme Court strike down the 22nd Amendment?
51:35 Anthony Scaramucci? I don't think so, but is there a force majeure somewhere where he could say, hey?
51:39 Dominic Sandbrook? He will be talking about it, I would imagine, within days.
51:43 Anthony Scaramucci? I think that's going to be his first move in the first hundred days.
51:45 Alastair Campbell? He's going to be, if he becomes president again, the oldest president ever.
51:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yep.
51:50 Alastair Campbell? So he'll be, what, at the end of two terms, he'll be, what, 86?
51:53 Anthony Scaramucci? Yeah, well, Biden is the oldest president ever because he's 78, about to be 79. But yeah, if he makes it to the fourth, you know, he's in good health, he'll be 83, 84.
52:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay.
52:05 Marina Hyde? But we will be talking about the 25th Amendment again.
52:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, sure.
52:08 Marina Hyde? Because he was rambling a lot, and, I mean, he's not in as good health as he was. He doesn't come across as... But just back to your point, I would say that one thing that he was going to feel really emboldened by this is that clearly, people don't really care about democratic norms in the same way that we wish that they did. Because... The whole things that should have disqualified him, or the January the 6th or whatever, it clearly just, it doesn't have...
52:31 Alastair Campbell? Lying?
52:33 Marina Hyde? Well, lots of it. I mean, I would have thought, the interoction just seems to be bigger than the permanent lying, but if people don't mind about it, not enough people mind about it.
52:42 Anthony Scaramucci? But Marina, can I just push back for a second? They do care about it because, they care about it in the way that Elon Musk cares about it, because he, it was number two on the exit polls, democracy.
52:51 Marina Hyde? Yeah.
52:52 Alastair Campbell? Well, in fact, I think we'll find our next question is about that very gentleman, Mr. Musk. Let's have a look. I don't know, credit's the right word. Sarah and Darwin, how much credit should Elon Musk get for Trump if he wins, winning the election? Marina?
53:08 Marina Hyde? It'll be really interesting to pick apart how his ground operation worked, because people kept saying, well, there's nobody there. People have said they've knocked on doors and the app has misregistered it, and they haven't. He has put himself at the top of his own, I mean, he bought, as we said, the right to be the main character on Twitter, and he's put himself at the top of it every single day. And there is something, I mean, obviously slightly compelling and mesmerizing about the world's richest man like dancing around behind, I mean, literally dancing around behind this guy. It drew a huge amount of attention, and that thing that we were saying about people saying, oh, Trump's a good businessman. Look, also, the richest man in the world is backing him. I think that makes a big difference in people's heads.
53:51 Rory Stewart? I mean, it's, obviously I spend far too much time down that weird rabbit hole, but it's very, very striking how, when I attack Elon Musk or Trump, the two things are now connected, and a lot of the people who come after me, they immediately come after me saying, this guy's much smarter than you, this guy made billions of dollars, he's the smartest man in the world. If he thinks Donald Trump's the right person, who the hell do you think you are to challenge him? So I do think there is particularly amongst a group of the young men that are attacking me on Twitter, Musk was a huge tick in the box, and the fact that he's been prepared to appear again and again, saying not just Trump is a man of integrity, but that he's going to run a great country, and that, by the way, I'm going to be in charge of Department of Government Efficiency, and I'm going to sort it all out.
54:33 Alastair Campbell? What, why is Elon Musk operating the way he does? Does he have genuine political convictions? Does he like Trump? Is it about getting a slice of the state when Trump wins? What's going on?
54:47 Anthony Scaramucci? Well, the most nefarious thing you can say is that they see him as a rube and a vessel that they can manipulate. And they have said repeatedly, yeah, I can't be the president. He said this on Rogan, he said this in lots of interviews. I can't be the president, but I can influence the president. And he sees this guy as a vessel. Remember, Trump said on Twitter that Elon Musk would have gotten on his knees in the Oval Office and done anything that I wanted. I don't know if you guys remember that tweet, but he did do that during the presidency. And he's done it to everybody. He crushes people. Megyn Kelly, I think you guys know this, he absolutely flattened Megyn Kelly. And then she did the sycophantic thing, got up there and gave the speech in support of
55:32 Anthony Scaramucci? him. He absolutely flattened Nikki Haley. She wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal praising him. He flattened Elon Musk. And so he loves doing this sort of thing to people, and he wants them to come back groveling. You know, who called Trump for the first America's Hitler? To me, it was Vance. Okay, now Elon Musk has been a better running mate for Donald Trump than J.D. Vance.
55:58 Alastair Campbell? Interesting. Right, let's take another question. This goes back to something you were saying earlier from Andy Start. What's the best way for the Dems to respond to this dramatic loss? Why were so many commentators so out of touch? I guess that would include us.
56:15 Rory Stewart? Particularly, I mean, I think to be fair to a lot of commentators, many of them were saying it's 50-50 within the margin of error. I was massively out of touch. I mean, I, you know, my mayor culprit of Trump is one.
56:25 Alastair Campbell? No, you were just wrong.
56:26 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I was, I was, I was wrong. Thank you, that's a nice way of putting it. But actually, to be fair to the commentators, when I came out strongly saying I think Kamala Harris is going to win, I didn't have a lot of people with me.
56:36 Alastair Campbell? No.
56:37 Rory Stewart? I had many, many people saying, wait a second, you're much too confident about this, the polls are suggesting it's 50-50.
56:43 Rory Stewart? I really, really would like to know the answer to the first question there and maybe throw it back to the panel and what the best way for the Dems to respond to this dramatic loss is. I keep coming back to this slightly boring point, which is they've been there before. They were there in 2016 and they spent the last eight years doing everything that they thought were the right things. And remember, the Inflation Reduction Act was a hell of a big thing. That's like a trillion dollar package. So, you know, my in-laws, for example, would say Biden understood the problem, yep, of blue collar workers. He understood the damage that globalization had done, this point that Anthony keeps making, and that they implemented some very smart policies on chips, on manufacturing, on infrastructure, precisely to try to win back the blue collar voters.
57:25 Alastair Campbell? Just one thing, why were you so confident? Because you don't normally take those unbelievably stark, strong positions, but pretty much from Chicago, you were absolutely adamant she was going to win.
57:37 Rory Stewart? So, number one, I think the polling companies' model's broken. Number two, I think Trump was, I believed Trump was weaker than he was in 2016 because of the performance in 18, 20, and 22. Number three, the theories on how Trump was going to win depended a lot on young African-American men voting for him, and they had not turned out in 18, 20, or 22. And finally, I just thought the fundamentals of the incumbent, fundamentals of what Biden had done, were pretty good. Hadn't done anything too bad, and she'd run an okay campaign. All other things being equal, I reckon that if it was 50-50 and I had to bet, I would definitely go with Kamala. Boy, did I bet on Kamala.
58:14 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think the thing that held me back was the fact that she ultimately is the incumbent, and at the moment, it's really hard for incumbents to win. Sorry, Anthony.
58:23 Anthony Scaramucci? She's, her campaign is reporting at the moment that we will not hear from her tonight. She has not shown up at her watch party. I don't know if she's called to concede, and obviously she doesn't have to because nobody's called it yet.
58:37 Alastair Campbell? I just had a message from somebody in the campaign who said that Pennsylvania is not looking great.
58:41 Anthony Scaramucci? Okay, so what Hillary did was, what Secretary Clinton did was she called at about 1:30 in the morning, she did call at that point President-elect Trump to say that she conceded, but we weren't going to hear from her. So I don't know if she's going to do that or not, but it's a very similar-
58:57 Rory Stewart? That's half an hour from now.
58:58 Anthony Scaramucci? Yeah, it's a very similar 2016. But here's the thing, you are either, you see him for what he is, and you become a dissident and part of that resistance, and you try to work on restoring the ideals around either that party, or you work with the other party to make sure that the system stays in place, or you synchophantically bend your knee to him. Okay, as I just tell you, you know, I didn't get to where I've gotten to in my life, okay, living in fear, or thinking about things in a fearful way. I ain't doing that over my dead body. Okay, so I will be spending my time trying to explain to people what they're about to do, because I understand their playbook. I know a lot of the people
59:42 Anthony Scaramucci? that are going to be working with them, and I know what they want to do. They want to fracture and systemically change the system, okay. And, you know, you guys will probably be mad at me for saying this, but I'm going to say it anyway. It's a democracy, we've got white people running the country, yes, okay, we got a democracy. Wait a minute, there are brown and black people that could overwhelm us demographically? Yes, okay, you know what, we got to change the rules on that, we don't like that. And that's what they're going to do.
Previous 334. 11pm: US Election Countdown Begins Next 336. 8am: TRUMP WINS Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
