Does Trump's midterm wipeout spell the end for MAGA?

The Democrats swept the US midterms, winning control of both the House and the Senate. So what happens now? In this bonus episode of If You’re Listening, Matt Bevan answers more of your US midterms questions with Dr Emma Shortis, Director of the International and Security Affairs Program at the Australia Institute. They look at which campaigns stood out, how Donald Trump has reacted to the results, and whether the Democrats can end the war in Iran. They also tackle the push to impeach Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Epstein files, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and whether this is the end of MAGA. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

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• 0:48Speaker 03

  G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. Last Wednesday, we went live on our new If You're Listening YouTube channel as the results for the US midterms rolled in. The Democrats seized control of both chambers of Congress, winning their largest House majority since 2008 and flipping more than 40 Republican-held seats. They also flipped a whole bunch of Senate seats, though exactly how many, it's still a little bit unclear. The count is still ongoing. The live stream was a lot of fun. I answered a bunch of questions submitted by the over 5,000 people who were watching live, but I'm only one guy and there were so many great questions I couldn't get to. Plus, we know a lot more now than we did then. So I've invited friend of the show, Emma Shorters, to help me answer more of

• 1:33Speaker 03

  your questions. Emma is the director of the International and Security Affairs Programme at the Australia Institute, and I believe she is, and I mean this in terms of time period, the oldest friend of the show that we have. Welcome back, Emma.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  Thank you, Matt. It's an honour to have that title.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  We've got a list of questions here, but before we get to it, I want to talk about mistaken identity for a minute. You and I, a couple of years ago, were in Philadelphia for the final night of the presidential election campaign, trying to attend Kamala Harris's final rally. I remember going there and being like, oh, we probably don't have time to do this, but I'd love to go and see Four Seasons Total Landscaping, which is in Philadelphia. People may recall Rudy Giuliani called a press conference, which he said was going to be at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. There is a Four Seasons hotel, which would be a great place for a press conference in Philadelphia, but it appears they accidentally booked a landscaping business in sort of an industrial estate. And so they did it sort

• 2:42Speaker 03

  of surrounded by wheelbarrows and piles of mulch and fertiliser.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  Rudy Giuliani's sweating fake tan.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Rudy Giuliani looking like he was melting.

• 2:57Speaker 05

  I can't hear two people at once, I'm sorry.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  We didn't have time to do that. But yesterday was the sixth anniversary of that fateful press conference.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  It was, yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  And mistaken identity is back in the news.

• 3:09Speaker 04

  Oh, I know where this is going, Matt. I've caught up.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  I want to get your opinion on this. Yesterday, Donald Trump announced on the anniversary of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco that Dana White, the president of the UFC, which is an organisation that he's very close to, that he'd offered Dana White the job of press secretary. And then subsequently emerged, this also may be a case of mistaken identity, because there is a woman who is a very long-term Trump employee. She has worked in the first Trump administration and the second Trump administration in the PR department at the Pentagon, and her name is Dana W. White. And now there's some confusion

• 3:53Speaker 03

  as to whether it's possible that Donald Trump actually was suggested that maybe Dana W. White should get this job of press secretary, and then Trump, for some reason, offered it to Dana White, the UFC president. What do you make of this theory? Because I so want it to be true.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  I desperately want it to be true as well, Matt. I think it's entirely possible that it is true, isn't it? I mean, the Dana White, that's been a kind of long-term employee, I think has Heritage Foundation connections as well. You know, that's an obvious candidate, but it would be completely, I mean, not unreasonable for Trump to hear Dana White and think of UFC Dana White.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 04

  And UFC Dana White would actually probably make a very good press secretary in the Trump universe.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  So of course his idea would appeal to Trump. So I think it probably is true, Matt. You know, we know Trump, like, hears things and picks them up and runs with them.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  You know, he has a new favourite word every couple of weeks that he hears from somebody. So yeah, I both think and hope it is true. And I mean, it was also extraordinary to post that he'd offered the job to Dana White, but there wasn't, it wasn't clear whether Dana White had accepted.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  I mean, it's very unlikely, I think, at this stage of the Trump administration, that Dana White would abandon his billion-dollar media and sports empire to tether himself even more closely to a lame duck president, Donald Trump. I can tell you that in the last few minutes, a journalist has posted that she's asked the Pentagon, Dana White, what the situation is with this confusion. So the journalist has texted Dana W. White, how are you? I understand that your name has been put forward for President Trump to appoint you as the White House Press Secretary. Is that correct? Dana W. White responds, hello, Maxine. No, the president wants the UFC, Dana White, not me. Thanks for reaching

• 5:48Speaker 03

  out. Dana W. White of the Pentagon then describes the whole thing as hilarious. I just enjoy that she works at the Pentagon and that the other Dana White works at an octagon.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Yes, this whole five-minute thing was a setup for that joke.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well done. Well executed. I liked it.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Let's talk about some actual listeners' questions. I did have a go at answering this one in the live stream. Natalie says, who do you think ran the best campaign and who ran the worst? What do you think, Emma? Let's start with who ran the best campaign.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  I think, given the significance of the potential victory, not called yet, but looking pretty solid, is Cullen in Mississippi.

• 6:29Speaker 06

  I'm Scott Cullen. This is my family. And I'm running for Senate to make life a little easier for yours, because Mississippi matters.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  Like, to turn a state that Trump won by 24 points, I think, around the centre, historically, of the slaveholding South, to have a black man senator elected is just extraordinary. And I think, you know, he did that. He stands out, I think, against some of the other extraordinary campaigns, like Talarico in Texas, because he did it with no money. You know, just had a great, like, great series of online ads that he actually had to just put online because he had no money. So I think that one is extraordinary.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  That's a really good answer.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Right now, if you're online, you will see there's this particular ad that Cullen wrote, which after his Republican opponent was sort of being asked about the price of beef being so high in the United States, and she, you know, said, look, you've got lots of different proteins to choose from. And then there's this ad that goes like this. Pick another protein. Shit, I'd rather pick another senator instead.

• 7:33Speaker 07

  Pick another protein. She done lost her damn mind. I'd rather pick another senator.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  And yeah, people are sort of describing that as kind of the best political ad they've seen in years. He's done a pretty extraordinary job.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  And then worst campaign? I don't know, Matt.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  It's hard to separate a bad campaign from a bad candidate.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  I feel like.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  I mean, it doesn't really matter what kind of a campaign Ken Paxton was going to run in Texas or Roger Marshall in Kansas, because they were basically selected by Donald Trump.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Over potentially more competitive candidates to run in those seats. It's difficult to nail down who could have won and didn't because they ran a bad campaign versus who just shouldn't have been the candidate in the first place. Do you think Donald Trump will have learned something from that? Not that, you know, it really affects him again. Next time there's a big election, he won't be a candidate. Well.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Sorry, I'm raising my eyebrows at Matt.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Do you think that he'll learn something from that? Just maybe leave, leave things alone?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  I can't imagine so, Matt. You know, Trump's ego is so enormous that you kind of can't make a dent in it, I don't think. You know, he came out so quickly and was like, well, I wasn't on the ballot, so it wasn't about me. Of course, he'd said the opposite right, right up to the end of the election. But no, I don't think it will change. I think he, he'll see conspiracies, he'll see other structures aligned against him. It will always be, I think, somebody else's fault, and his judgement is always going to be impeccable. Is that how you see it?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much, yeah. I thought it was odd how sort of quickly he sort of caved in. We had a question about this. Mike Silvestri asks via email, like a lot of people, I was surprised by Trump's behaviour during and immediately after the midterm elections, specifically his apparent contrition and lack of meddling on the day. What do you think is going on here? You know, there was so much expectation that there was going to be some effort by Donald Trump to interfere in the results or interfere in the running of the election. And there kind of wasn't. Do you think that's a sign that he didn't care all that much about the result of this election? Or is it a sign that he's got his mind on other things? Or it could be all of the above, really?

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there are a few things going on there, Matt. I think he absolutely cares. We know especially that he stews on things. And so the more time he has to stew on it, I think the angrier he will get. I think it's also true that, you know, this was kind of too big to rig. The result was so comprehensive, like he lost Mississippi and Kansas. And the Carolinas, you know, that that's almost impossible to contest with any credibility. And I think his political instincts are strong enough that he knew that.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  And particularly considering in those states, the elections are almost entirely being run by Republicans.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. And there wasn't that red mirage that there was in the last election as well. So it didn't look like the lead shifted kind of halfway through or a couple of hours in. So he didn't have that to kind of trade his conspiracy theories off.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was the exact opposite on the day in terms of the counting of what we've become used to over the last few years, where initially Republicans looked like, you know, win everything and then gradually the Democrat votes come in in the big cities and erode the Republican lead. Whereas this time, the Democrats were ahead in every race immediately.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  All the time, yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  That may simply be a product of the level of swing.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, and turnout.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  And turnout.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  I don't think it's not that there wasn't interference or significant attempts to interfere. I think they were successfully countered and overcome by people working really, really hard, people in organisations like the ACLU, for example, lawyers, election lawyers, state officials, who really pushed back on efforts by the Department of Justice and the Trump administration to interfere in those results. So it wasn't that they didn't try, it's that they were overcome and unsuccessful in their attempts. And then that was all overtaken by this enormous blue wave.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Do you think that the Democrats will learn from the success here? This seems like a very different sort of a selection of candidates than you often see in terms of candidates being chosen by the Democrats to run in lots of different places. You had a lot of Democratic candidates who were like, we're picking this guy because we think he can win in Kansas, not because he's in the right little club and he's not in the right faction and it's not his turn, that kind of thing.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  And that seems to have played out extraordinarily well for them. Do you think that they will learn something from that?

• 11:59Speaker 04

  I think that the establishment wing of the party will possibly be forced to learn something from it, precisely because of exactly where you were describing, Matt, that these candidates are, you know, they're not factional picks. It wasn't because it was their turn. Often the people whose kind of turn it was, lost their primaries. And so this quite a bit younger, vibrant, enthusiastic generation is sweeping into the Democratic Party and they're already making noise about significant change in the party. So there's a fair bit of behind the scenes action around Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and whether they will be re-elected to their positions of leadership. You mentioned Kansas there, Matt, the Senate elect there.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Hamilton has said quite specifically that he thinks it's probably time for a change of leadership to reflect, you know, this incoming generation, which is pretty committed to doing something with their victory. Like they're coming from the Mamdani School of Politics, where you get into office and you get stuff done really quickly and you tell people about it. So, I mean, TBC, never underestimate the Democrats' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But the signs are pretty interesting. Is that how you see it?

• 13:12Speaker 03

  I saw it as a sort of a warning sign for Democrats, particularly ahead of a 2028 presidential campaign. Because you look at this victory and you go, they've won because they picked a guy for Texas who's going to do really well in Texas, and they've picked a guy in Mississippi who's going to do really well in Mississippi, and they've picked a guy in Michigan who's going to do really well in Michigan. Then in 2028, they're going to have to pick one guy or woman who can somehow win votes in all of those places. And I don't know that that person clearly exists. A person who has appeal across all those places is going to be a tricky person to

• 13:57Speaker 03

  find. There's a lot of discussion about Jon Ossoff. He was the successful Democrat incumbent who has then retained his seat in the Senate in Georgia. His speeches were very magnetic and charismatic.

• 14:11Speaker 07

  And while the sailors on the link can fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Whether he's the kind of guy who can get votes in Michigan and Texas is a question, and I don't know.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  I mean, we can't possibly know. Until a couple of weeks ago, you know, us talking about Mississippi being flipped would have felt ridiculous. And here it has happened, so.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  The thing for me was the diversity of the candidates made me kind of go, hmm, it's going to be tricky for them to find one person, given how well finding very different people has worked in this, in this circumstance.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great point.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  We've got another interesting question here from Sam Morden in Parramatta.

• 15:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, g'day, Matt. Just had a question after the US midterm election. I had read a few tweets about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which I believe would give Democrats the ability to, my understanding is, overturn the Electoral College. How does that work? What does that mean? Thanks.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is basically an idea that the Democrats have, where they are basically hoping to bring enough states on board that they can start to ignore the Electoral College. The Electoral College works by each state, you know, you win a vote in each state. If you win the majority of votes in Kansas, then you get all of Kansas's Electoral College votes. Whether you win a state by a huge margin or a tiny margin, all of their Electoral College votes get put into your column. And that's how you can end up with circumstances like in 2016, where Donald Trump won the presidential election despite losing the popular vote.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  The theory behind this National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, what a catchy name, is that all of the state governments who sign on to this agreement would agree to give their Electoral College votes to whichever candidate wins the National Popular Vote. And essentially, this is a way of getting rid of the Electoral College without actually going through the constitutional changes that would be required to get rid of the Electoral College, because constitutional change in the United States is essentially impossible. So the question is, will this work? Probably not.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  What we've seen in the last year or so is that you can make all the nice statements that you want about, you know, this is a better way to run our government and to run elections. But the second that one side breaks the gentleman's agreement that we're not going to gerrymander too badly, the other side is just going to break it as well. You know, it's a tokenistic idea at best, I think. We've got a number of questions coming through about what the Democrats are likely to do with their power. Maddie Taylor Harris says, I'm interested to know what happens regarding the Epstein files now that the Democrats have control of both the House and Senate. Can they vote to release the rest of the Epstein files? Emma?

• 17:44Speaker 04

  Well, look, I mean, they certainly can do that. They have their power in Congress now to do that, to legislate. I guess my hedging around that would be that they've actually done that before and the Department of Justice slow walked the release or in some cases released some of it, but redacted, you know, anything of significance. And if we are to rely on the signals coming out of the Department of Justice and particularly from Trump's Attorney General, nothing about that is going to change. So the Democrats can certainly be louder about it, they can pass more legislation and they can use their investigative powers as well in congressional committees, which have significant power to subpoena people, to compel them to appear. So they will, I think, do that.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  But correct me if I'm wrong, Matt, that's not been, at least initially, what the Democrats have been talking about. They've been talking about things like impeaching Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Just this morning, Hakeem Jeffries, who will be the Speaker of the House, has said that he's supportive of that idea.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  Yes. And they may even have their numbers before the next Congress is sitting. Republicans are pretty unhappy with Hegseth too. So I think that may be the focus. They're talking also about investigating Trump's new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and potentially Elon Musk as well. So the Epstein stuff, I think, will continue to bubble away and it may come out through further investigations of Trump himself and other allegations against Trump, the president. But I haven't seen it coming up from senior Democrats.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Alex asks on YouTube, what power do they have to limit the use of the military in Iran?

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Well, they do have power if they choose to use it. Part of the problem has been that successive Congresses have just been unwilling to use the powers available to them to reign in a president. They've been very happy for a president to start wars and then take responsibility for them, as Trump has kind of been forced to do with Iran. So they can, I guess, use the War Powers Act to require congressional approval for conflict. Again, history suggests to us that Trump will just ignore that anyway and keep going. The question then becomes, how much is Congress willing to pursue that? And how much are they willing to use other powers, budgetary powers in particular, to defund that military campaign? Again, they've tried that a few times and Trump has managed to find money from other parts of the budget and use it.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  So, look, I suspect we'll see probably more of the same. And it is worth saying that foreign policy, broadly speaking, is one of the areas where the president is less constrained than in domestic policy. And that's why, you know, they were musing about resuming attacks on Iran even before the midterms, because Trump can kind of do that without much constraint. And like, we know that makes him feel better. You know, he likes watching things being blown up, he likes talking about violence. You know, it will be really interesting to see how activist this Congress is. But again, that new, young, vibrant generation that we've been talking about, Matt, is pretty committed to actually ending US forever wars.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  Abdul El-Sayed had this just incredible line, I thought, I think it was on Morning Joe, where he talked about the US complying with international law and being the first among equals in international law, and that that is how it should be.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Imagine.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Exactly, imagine. But it does, there is the possibility, I think, that we are in this strategic moment where there could be quite a radical change in how the US behaves. It's a big if, of course, you know, nothing is inevitable, but there could be that radical change underway as a backlash against the just appalling excesses of the Trump administration on that front.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Emma, last question. A Step Four asks on YouTube, is this the end of MAGA and is it time for a total Republican rebuilding and rebranding? What do you reckon?

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Matt, you know, and you would be the same. Like, over the last decade or so, I have been asked constantly and thought constantly about the MAGA coalition and whether it was fracturing, whether it would fracture over Epstein, whether it would fracture over Iran the first time around in the first Trump administration. And I guess my answer was to always pay attention to the power dynamics, because that was and is a broad coalition. But the ones who have kind of broken off are the, you know, the libertarian anti-war wing, which never really had that much power.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  You know, it was an important part of the coalition, but they never had power in the White House. And so MAGA may be over in the sense of that broad coalition, in that even men didn't vote for Trump in anywhere near as high numbers this time around as they have. And that's really important to understanding Trump's loss. But at the same time, he's just appointed Stephen Miller, his chief of staff, and it is in Stephen Miller's existential interests to keep the powerful part of that coalition together and also in power in the White House. So I guess that's a kind of yes and no. Yes, I think MAGA is fracturing. You know, you can tell by kind of all the finger pointing

• 22:43Speaker 04

  that's going on about whose fault this is. But Trump still has that power. He still has that hold over the Republican Party. They're still scared to criticize him. They're talking about what's going wrong, but they're not saying his name or blaming him directly. That may change. But yeah, so I think that's a yes and no. It's hedging, Matt, I'm sorry.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Well, it's the difference between, as you say, basically, MAGA as a governing coalition and MAGA as an electoral coalition. I think it's pretty clear that the MAGA electoral coalition has fallen apart from the look of the way that this election has gone. I mean, the 2024 MAGA electoral coalition included, yes, young men, many of whom seem to have abandoned them. It included a large contingent of Latino voters, almost all have abandoned them. I mean, that's the reason that the entire Mexican border, in terms of congressional seats, from the California coast to the Gulf of, whatever you want to call it.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Talarico, I'm pretty sure.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Is now Democrat controlled. Every seat there along that entire strip is now controlled by Democrats, which is a significant change from what it was like after the 2024 election. Yeah, I think as an electoral coalition, it has fallen apart. But that was the case in 2020 as well.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, they can rebuild.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  They can rebuild. Absolutely. Predicting the end of MAGA is a fool's game.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  Jinx.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  That's right. Jinx. There you go. Let's finish it with a jinx, because now we can't talk.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Emma, thank you so much for talking to us again. Maybe you and I can, you know, 2028, we can finally go and see four seasons of Total Landscaping.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, let's put it in the diary, Matt. It's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Thanks, Emma.