The End of Trumpism

Tuesday night, a blue tsunami crashed across the political map. Democrats won control of the House and the Senate with room to spare, flipping seats in states that once seemed unimaginable: South Carolina, Kansas, Texas. Ezra Klein sits down with his editor Aaron Retica to survey the wreckage of Trump’s 2024 coalition, and what Democrats can learn from their victories.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 01

  The Big Ten is real and the political map is fake. That is a lesson of the Democrats' historic midterm, the blue tsunami that we saw on Tuesday. Democrats won in places nobody thought they had any chance even to compete in a year ago. Kansas, Texas, Iowa, South Carolina. As I record this, it's unclear which party is going to win Mississippi, but let me say that again. It is unclear which party is going to win the Senate seat in Mississippi. That was unimaginable three months ago. They won governorships in Ohio, in Texas, in Iowa.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  This was a win that destroyed the reality of the red-blue map people had come to believe in so firmly. And so we're entering a new era, an era when much is unsettled. The realignment may not be what we thought it was in 2024. The realignment may be a map that is entirely up for grabs from here on out. And Democrats did do this on their own, of course. To a very large extent, President Donald Trump did it for them. And both what he did wrong and what they did right were the same thing. Listening. Trump did not listen, did not listen to the voters, did not even sometimes listen to himself.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  He was elected promising to lower costs, to end wars, to bring order at the border. Instead, he raised costs through tariffs and through new wars, and he created disorder after closing the border and sending in masked ICE agents to harass and upend settled communities. Trump at no point pivoted. He dismissed almost everything that people were angry about, and his party paid the price. And at the same time, Democrats, who I think their central political failing for years has been an unwillingness to listen. They listen to themselves as opposed to the voters they need to win over. In state after state, district after district, they found people who fit.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Josh Turek in Iowa, Adam Hamilton in Kansas, James Talarico in Texas. They found seminarians. They found Paralympians. They found a whole new class of candidates who could put into play a whole new set of places. And then in some places, like North Carolina and Georgia, they just had candidates of such exceptional quality who understood their states so well that they won states that should have been purple by 20 points for Roy Cooper, 18 points for John Osif. So there was a tremendous amount to learn from this election and a tremendous amount that is now possible after it.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  But to think through both the lessons that we're seeing already, but then how Democrats, and for that matter, Republicans are going to respond to them. I'm joined here by my revered editor, one of the most beloved characters in our podcast cinematic universe, Aaron Radka, who's going to turn the tables and interview me. He joins me now.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Aaron, welcome back to the show.

• 4:13Aaron Retica?

  Thank you very much for having me. Let's start with almost a gotcha. Like, do you have any idea who George McGill is?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 4:22Aaron Retica?

  George McGill is the last Democratic senator in Kansas before Adam Hamilton, who won last night. He won in 1932. I was trying to think of all the different ways of expressing what happened last night, and that's the best I could come up with.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  That's a very good way of doing it.

• 4:41Aaron Retica?

  So everybody looking at this election, all the different constituents of the Democratic Party, they all got something. The left won some races. The center won some races. Charismatic candidates were a huge. Uncharismatic candidates also did well.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  The Roy Cooper juggernaut.

• 5:02Aaron Retica?

  Roy Cooper plus 20. This has long been the dream. Was there a breakthrough for the Big Ten Democratic Party last night?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Yes, but let me hold that to the side for a minute. Donald Trump asked America to vote like he was on the ballot, and it did. Trump, of course, had, I think, the funniest possible reaction to the election. Where in the middle of the night, he posts on Truth Social, "If I had been on the ballot, we would have won in a landslide. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump." And people today have been remarking how he doesn't seem very upset by the election results, and of course not. He does not mind when Republicans lose. And in fact, Republicans often lose because he intervenes in a way that is likelier to make them lose, right? Like bringing in Ken Paxton or assuring Ken Paxton's victory in the Texas Republican

• 5:53Speaker 01

  primary, pushing for Darlene Graham in South Carolina. But when Republicans lose, when Trump is not on the ballot, to Trump, it shows his importance. And so he, I think, doesn't mind this at all. It is more evidence to him of his essential winnerdom. What really happened here is Donald Trump has been a terrible catastrophic president who has betrayed the mandate he was given by voters. And as he was losing bleeding public support, not only never changed course, but never admitted what was happening at all. And so Donald Trump led his party to defeat, or certainly created the conditions for the party to go to defeat.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  And then there's a question of what Democrats did with that, which...

• 6:40Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, well, so what did they do right?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  The Big Ten is real and the map is fake. So Democrats ran candidates who fit their states and their districts. And I think it's just really important to center that. I mean, I, you know, last year I did this big essay on the show about the need for a Big Ten Democratic Party, other people making this argument too, that one of the problems that has emerged over time in American politics is the parties have become tighter in their ideological and cultural positioning.

• 7:15Aaron Retica?

  And geographical.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  And that has made them tighter in their geographical positioning because they're not willing to run candidates who differ as much from the kind of median member of the party. And what Democrats did really well here was in the way that they acted with power, right? Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer here, they kept things very focused on affordability, on the Iran War. They didn't get distracted by a lot of other things. And then when they ran candidates, I mean, they ran people like James Talarico, sort of leading an almost religious left revival in Texas against Ken Paxton, Adam Hamilton in Kansas, as you mentioned, a Methodist megachurch pastor. Adam Hamilton and Scott Colom, who's the candidate in Mississippi, who looks very

• 8:00Speaker 01

  much like he may win by like 100 votes or something.

• 8:02Aaron Retica?

  Not even 100.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  I mean, we'll see where it plays out.

• 8:05Aaron Retica?

  Truly insane, though.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Both of them described themselves, Hamilton and Colom, as pro-life Democrats. Now, they want to create conditions under which reproductive freedom is protected, but they ran as pro-life Democrats, right? Because of their Christian faith. Mary Petola, who ran, you know, what was her slogan in Alaska? Faith, Freedom, and Fish or something? So the Democrats did a very good job in this case of picking candidates who fit the state. And when I say the map is fake, one of the revelations from this election is you really should not treat states as off the table. People were not talking about Kansas. By the way, Adam Hamilton is not a Schumer recruiting victory.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Adam Hamilton decided to run. And by the way, shout out to my colleague at Vox and colleague here at The New York Times, Sarah Cliffe, whose bombshell story, bombshell investigative work on Roger Marshall's unbelievably brutal pursuit and persecution of people who are not able to pay his medical bills was a major, major, major part of that race. And that's a story Sarah Cliffe broke here at The New York Times. Shout out to Sarah.

• 9:16Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, I want to throw in a shout out while we're at it, and that's Howard Dean, right? Because the 50-state strategy is vindicated here, right? I mean, this is what you're saying, but like, there's two reasons. One, you might actually win some of these states, but also there are going to be talented politicians in these places who can't necessarily win their state, who are still worth having in your coalition, just being out there and not writing things off is critically important.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yes, and doing the work to recruit the candidates and then supporting them. So I think Democrats have sort of treated Florida as not winnable. And what you saw here, I mean, you know, Nixon's only going to fall a couple of points short. Florida is winnable if you have the right candidates in the right environment. And so you have to build that kind of party strength. You have to look for those people. Now, there's like an interesting question here. You were saying at the beginning that everybody got some of what they wanted, and that's at least somewhat true. I think it's going to be fascinating to see what lessons Democrats learn from Michigan, from Maine, and from Florida, which is where they ran in contested or contestable Senate elections, much more left-wing candidates.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  And Abdul Sayed won. It looks like he'll win by something in the seven range as we're taping. Maine, it's a little harder to say because they had the whole disaster with Graham Plathner. Susan Collins is actually a quite good candidate because she's, has a reputation for independence, not totally well-deserved from the other side. But Jackson's win there looks closer than you would expect, given the demographics of Maine, right? It's not like the John Osif plus 18 win in Georgia. And in Florida, Angie Nixon, you know, a more direct DSA candidate, lost, right? It's not, you're not looking in Florida at what you're seeing in South Carolina or Mississippi.

• 11:05Aaron Retica?

  I want to push back on that a little bit, right? Because it sometimes sounds like progressive candidates are just a hindrance to the party. But without their imagination, without their ideas, that's very important. And they, they didn't do as well as the... Less left candidates, but they didn't do terribly either.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  No, I don't think they did terribly. And I agree with you that whether you're an electoral overperformer is even correlated really with whether you are a good or important member of the House or Senate. A lot of, I think, the most creative members of Congress and the most important members of Congress are safe seat players who are not operating under the constant threat of electoral wipeout. You know, Elizabeth Warren, I think, is one of the most important senators, has been for some time, is not an incredible electoral performer by any means, but is creative and innovative as a policy thinker in a way

• 12:09Speaker 01

  very, very few of her colleagues are. I think, and I've said this on the show before, I think Abdul Sayed is going to be a superstar. And I agree with something that I think you think, which is that it's very likely he might build margins over time. The effort to otherize him was grotesque. And it's part of why, when he was on the show, like, we focus on his actual story. I mean, this is a, he's like an American boy who's a Rhodes Scholar and a doctor and a captain of his football team. I mean, I found what they tried to do to El Sayed reprehensible. And I find El Sayed to be a very impressive person. The question of how some of these people will play out in the Senate, you know, or in the House for that matter, is different to me than the question of can you extract

• 12:52Speaker 01

  any signal in terms of what it means for the Democratic Party to compete in places it has not competed before. And El Sayed winning by plus seven or eight, or whatever it's going to be, in a Democratic plus 13 environment, is just, it's an electrically impressive performance. Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, she wins by about, looks like it'll be about nine or 10 right now, 10-ish. Again, Minnesota, Democratic plus 13, it's not a good performance, right? You shouldn't take a lesson that that's what you want to run, right there. Angie Nixon, I think that there's a world, and I think the DSCC bears some blame for this, but a stronger Florida Democratic Party that picked a candidate

• 13:35Speaker 01

  who is better suited to Florida in the way that you saw in Kansas or Mississippi, and a DSCC that invested more in the state, I think that was a winnable seat. And so, you know, who you want to blame for that, I think, sort of like, both sides deserve some blame. But I don't think that the, I don't think there's any reason to look at the results and say, it was a brilliant strategic move to run the DSA candidate in Florida. That isn't what won in Kansas. It's not what won in Texas. It's not what won in Georgia. It's not what might win in Mississippi. It's not what seems like it will win in Alaska, or Iowa, for that matter. And so, you know, you got to hold these things in tension. Sometimes

• 14:15Speaker 01

  people take statements about electoral performance as moral statements about the worth of a candidate.

• 14:23Aaron Retica?

  Or the ideas.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Or the ideas. That's crazy, in my view. By the way, I do think we often end up too tight on this, like, moderate to progressive to DSA, or whatever it might be, scale. You can have candidates who have, like, many views all at once. So Dr. Annie Andrews in South Carolina, who, I mean, the moment you realize the night was really turning was when all of a sudden the Democrats were going to win in South Carolina, reflects a terrible candidate, and Darlene Graham as well.

• 14:53Aaron Retica?

  Okay, but South Carolina, I mean, wow.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  I know. Dr. Annie Andrews, right? Both somebody who fits South Carolina, but has, I think, if you were grading it on a scale, quite progressive views on healthcare. And progressive views on healthcare are very popular. That's also a good issue for Abdul Sayed. So I think sometimes you can get into this thing where people think what you mean by fit the district or fit the state is just to be more moderate. James Talarico should correctly be understood as a fairly progressive candidate, but he moved right on oil and gas. And he also moved right on border security. But he also was a very populist candidate running against billionaires, a very pro-building candidate, right? The sort of populist abundance

• 15:39Speaker 01

  synthesis that I think you saw in a lot of different places. So, in my view, there's a lot to learn from a bunch of these candidates, but I do think it is notable, if what you would like to see is Democrats building on this success, that I don't think the place you want to look for electoral lessons is Abdul Sayed, is Peggy Flanagan, is Angie Nixon, is Troy Jackson. And I think Maine has another lesson, if you go down. So the Maine's second House district was represented by Jared Golden. Last three elections, that is the reddest district represented by a Democrat. Golden is the most conservative, or was the most

• 16:18Speaker 01

  conservative, House Democrat. And he was tormented by the left for this, including facing a challenge by a more progressive challenger, Matt Dunlap. And Golden decided to retire. He was done with it. He was tired of it. And now it looks like, even in this gigantic wave election, Dunlap is either going to win it incredibly modestly or lose the seat. Jared Golden was like a most valuable player for the Democrats. He is a kind of person you want in the party and you should protect. And there's a lesson in that. If you want to build power, and the Democrats are excited about possibly winning Mississippi right now, excited about winning Kansas, in 2032, you're going to need to try to keep

• 17:02Speaker 01

  these seats. You want to build a supermajority. You want to build a durable majority. That doesn't just mean moderating, but it does mean recognizing that you need these candidates who are right for their states, right for their districts, and then you need to do everything you can to make their life easy. Not, as was done with Jared Golden, try to, like, hound them out of office.

• 17:25Aaron Retica?

  I want to rain a little bit on the parade, because since Trump first came down that escalator, right? What is that, June of 2015? Everyone on the liberal side, the centrists, the never Trumpers, everyone has been wondering, when are the scales going to fall from their eyes? What will it take? So what it took is kind of insane, right? It took an unpopular, unconstitutional, inconclusive war, driving up gas prices, and crucially, diesel gas prices. It took taking Latino voters for granted and attacking on immigration

• 18:08Aaron Retica?

  and shooting people in the streets. Like, all of that is what was needed to get where we are now. So like, it's a obviously tremendous victory for the Democrats, but it does give me a little bit of pause that it took so much.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I see it as more environmental, even than you're describing it there. So I think at this point internationally, we have enough examples of Trump-like politicians. Flavio Bolsonaro came out ahead in the first round of Brazil's presidential election, ended up losing to Lula in the second round. But there is just no evidence that the Trumpy style, or what we think of as the Trumpy style in America, but what you might think of as like, the populist right style worldwide, is a turn off to voters. What voters don't like is their life getting worse.

• 18:57Aaron Retica?

  Who likes that?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Nobody. But when you're saying it took so much, I actually think it didn't take so much. What you're describing is a chain of very intense events that led to real-world consequences for people. So you could have imagined a world where actually Trump governed much more modestly, but there was a recession.

• 19:18Aaron Retica?

  You can't, actually.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Well, but what I'm saying is, or maybe a different way of putting it, is in 2008, Barack Obama won a very big victory, but the unemployment rate continued to go up. And so 2010 was a historic wipeout for the Democratic Party. And that wasn't because Obama's personal style was repulsive to the electorate, right? He won in 2012. People liked him quite a bit. It's because fundamentally, if people do not feel their lives are getting better, in fact, they feel they're getting worse, and sort of another way of saying what you're saying, is people felt their lives were getting worse. And then particular groups, you know, Hispanic Americans, saw their lives getting much worse because of the amount of state force Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, who did a lot to lose this

• 20:01Speaker 01

  election for Republicans, was aiming at them and aiming at their communities. Bobby Polito, winning a Texas district for the House by 25 points, right? He's an amazing candidate, this very, very well-known singer, and just like, somebody who has, like, run a fantastic race. But I remember him getting in. That was supposed to be a safe Trump district. He won by 25 points. And that's a guy who I think should be treated in the Democratic Party right now as a star. And in the end, you cannot make people's lives worse. But conversely, the reason Trump was able to survive in the way he was at other times was he benefited from like, a pretty strong economy for most of his first term.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  And people remembered that when he ran for his second effort at reelection.

• 20:49Aaron Retica?

  Well, and he did better in the first, and people expected, in part because he was sending people checks, right?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is something that's worth noting, because you know what fell apart was the realignment.

• 20:58Aaron Retica?

  Oh, my God, the realignment.

• 21:18Speaker 03

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• 21:36Speaker 00

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• 22:21Aaron Retica?

  Okay, can I riff for one second?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  I would love you to riff.

• 22:24Aaron Retica?

  I am a racial realignment skeptic. As you know, I hated it from the beginning. It seemed insane to me. It was clear that the people who had moved into the Republican column, whether that's young men, younger black men, Hispanic people as a whole. And I'll say the thing we have to say, which is that there's a million different kinds of Hispanic, right? I mean, duh. But yet, all those groups surged toward Trump. They have all surged back at staggering numbers. The youth vote was like, what, plus 30 something? I don't know the exact number, but.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm going to pull up this number just while we're saying this because I think it's so striking. So right now I'm looking at House results at the New York Times, and this can all change a little bit on the margin as more votes get counted. But here we're speaking on Wednesday morning. Male voters swung 17 points towards the Democrats. Voters aged 18 to 29, this is just a crazy number, swung 32 points towards the Democrats, 32 points. Hispanic voters, 28 points towards the Democrats. I will say that there's something to be careful with here, which is we don't know how much of what happened here is persuasion versus turnout.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Voters who supported Trump in 2024 just didn't like him enough or didn't care enough to come out in 2026. You can't really see that in the voting data, right?

• 23:49Aaron Retica?

  Right, no, and you also can't see, I mean, roughly speaking, 150 million people vote in these presidential elections, right? And maybe 110, 115, 120 million decide the midterms. So, yeah, yeah, you can't, and it's definitely not necessarily the case that this person changed his mind or her mind. It's often these people showed up or they didn't, right? The true swing voters are the people in some ways who only vote sometimes, right? That said, though, two sets of historical examples from midterms, right? Okay, so we have two, on one side, we have 2006, where the Democrats do extremely well. It is a harbinger of the rise of the first black president, although very few people

• 24:34Aaron Retica?

  realized it at the time. He did, David Axelrod did, but like, it was not conventional wisdom in 2006. I had just started working here the year before. I would say no one was talking about Barack Obama. Very few people were talking about Barack Obama, right? And then two years later, he's the President of the United States. The flip side of that, though, is 1994, Gingrich and co. win the Contract with America. They do change the face of American politics quite a bit, and we're all still paying the price. Trump is in many ways, right, the fruit of that tree. God, that was terrible, but you know what I'm saying? But they lose to Clinton in 1996. In 2010, as you alluded to earlier, they, what did Obama say, right? There was a shellacking, right?

• 25:18Aaron Retica?

  But then he won really pretty comfortably in 2012, although uncharacteristically, he was a president who lost electoral votes the second time he ran, which is actually very unusual, right? Usually it's more like Reagan, where you win by a little bit and then you win by a lot. So what do you think this is?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  All right, so just in the modern era, you have wave midterms that lead to the party that won the midterm, winning the presidency and winning seats in the next election. So good examples of this are '06, where Democrats win in the kind of second Bush midterm. And then in '08, they win a super majority. It's not just that Barack Obama wins in '08, it's Democrats get 60 votes in the Senate.

• 25:59Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, unpopular war in the Middle East, I might add.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  And then ultimately a financial crisis, which given, I mean, there's a lot of shakiness around AI right now, particularly after this election and what that might mean for Texas data center construction. So the economy may not be getting better from here. 2018, big Democratic midterm, they win in 2020. Okay. But 1994, huge Republican midterm, Bill Clinton wins in 1996. 2010, huge Republican midterm, Barack Obama wins in 2012. Midterms are not a straight line to victory in the next election. You have to be thoughtful about what you do, thoughtful about who you run, thoughtful about how you run. I will say you often do have, to what you were just saying about Obama, the '06 midterm

• 26:41Speaker 01

  was this very like Americana flag and national security midterm on the Democratic side. You know, like a big start of that midterm was Jim Webb, the sort of Virginia, like tough talking Marine. You wouldn't necessarily have seen that going to Barack Obama, as you were saying. Trump winning in 2016 after the 2012 Republican wipeout. One of the big things Republicans believed after 2012 was they had to moderate on immigration. Then, of course, you end up getting the most nativist president in, you know, kind of modern America.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  I don't, I'm not predicting. The idea, though, that this era in politics with all the fights around Israel and antisemitism we're having does seem to be like more than any other recent one, leading to like possibly the first Jewish American president in John Ossoff, if he decides to run, the amount of energy around him.

• 27:36Aaron Retica?

  Wow, you heard it here first.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  It's not first, right? I mean, this is not a, this is not a new point, but it is just interesting. I mean, if you want to talk about a singular star coming out of this election, I'm not saying Ossoff wants to run for president. From what I hear, he doesn't. He may not really end up having a choice on this one.

• 27:54Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  He crushed his opponent in Georgia, right?

• 28:01Aaron Retica?

  And getting back to the Trump political malpractice issue, Ossoff is a senator because of Donald Trump.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  He's a senator because of Donald Trump. He's a senator who has a demonstrated capability to win in a purple state. By the way, he has co-tells. I'm not saying it's just him, and you got to look here at like organizing this is done by Stacey Abrams and, you know, Raphael Warnock as well. But Keisha Lance Bottoms, one for governor in Georgia. I mean, we've been talking here about a House and Senate, but Democrats won the governorship in Texas, right? Rob Sand won easily in Iowa. I mean, there are a lot of big gubernatorial pickups here. I think I saw a number floating around on Twitter yesterday. I think, can we call it X Twitter again? Is that part of the election?

• 28:45Aaron Retica?

  I'm going to get to him later.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  I saw a number floating around on Twitter yesterday. The Democrats now control the governorships in states worth 392 electoral votes, which is just huge, right? And so, you know, but, but John Ossoff, like being able to navigate this moment in the way he has, being able to be as dominant in the attention economy as he has been, but maintain a kind of highly message disciplined approach, like straddle the divide where, you know, both Hassan Piker and Matt Iglesias will talk up John Ossoff to you, like I've been talking him up for a long time. The guy is just demonstrating an incredible amount of political skill.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  And, you know, in terms of these sort of weird ways that American politics often leads to not the person you would have expected from narrative a couple of years before, he just has a, there's a lot of energy around him at the moment. I guess I'll say that.

• 29:45Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, I mean, there were so many remarkable things about last night, right? I mean, it became temporarily illegal to talk about identity, and of course, it wasn't actually illegal, but you know what I'm saying? Like, we weren't supposed to talk about that. But the result of that is actually quite striking in identity terms, right? We have the first openly gay male senator. We have the first Muslim senator. We're going to have the first black female governor. We have a man with spina bifida who's going to be a senator. We have, there's Native American first. It's like an amazing array that, you know, 1976 Democratic Party is like, woo-hoo. So what do you make of that contrast that people read, they didn't run on it, but they

• 30:30Aaron Retica?

  won with it?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  I don't find that surprising. It just was never the case, even though some people took this as like a lesson of 2024, that candidates who are women don't perform well, candidates who are black don't perform well, candidates who are Native American don't perform well. What didn't perform well was candidates taking very unpopular positions. Some of them, though, by the way, not all of them tied to race and gender and identity. But, you know, you look at Barack Obama. Obama is by far the most popular political figure in America, has been for a long time. You know, at the same time, people were saying that, well, this goes to show you, a woman can't win in the Rust Belt. It's like you had a woman governor in Michigan. You know, we just had like, obviously Amy Klobuchar win in Minnesota last night. And so.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  This was always, people were conflating wrongly, the identity of candidates with identity politics. And what you see here is that that just was incorrect. And you have these candidates who are just like running really, really strong races, right? Josh Turek, who the, you know, the Paralympian with Spina Biffida, just ran a really strong race. But by the way, Josh Turek was somebody who, one reason that there was excitement about him running was in Iowa, in the state, I think it was state senator, he ran in a district where he had to learn how to appeal to Trump voters.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  I would say like the heuristic you often want is, does this candidate have a record of appealing to the kind of voter they're going to need to win? And Democrats ran a bunch of people like that, and they did a really good job.

• 32:14Aaron Retica?

  So we talked a lot about how they should campaign and how they succeeded in campaigning, but how should they govern? Which would, if you're Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and by the way, shout out to New York, last shout out, New York in control of the House and the Senate. Very weird.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And by the way, also, Chris Gillibrand, a New York senator, was leading the DSCC this cycle, and sort of leading that project. And New York has like the country's most famous mayor and Donnie and AOC. I mean, the New York is-

• 32:44Aaron Retica?

  And of course, the president.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  The New Yorkization.

• 32:47Aaron Retica?

  But he's Florida.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  The president.

• 32:49Aaron Retica?

  But he wants to be from Florida. He can be from Florida.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Democrats have three, like, broad things we're gonna have to balance, right? One is what I'd call resistance, which is fighting Trump, investigating Trump, holding Trump and the Trump administration, Trump family accountable, sending him bills that are going to lead to contrast that the public can see, right?

• 33:12Aaron Retica?

  He said he was gonna be Mr. Veto.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Mr. Veto. You know, Ed Markey said they're gonna need to cut down trees for all the subpoenas that are gonna be offered, which I'm not sure is the most helpful comment from one of senators from Massachusetts, but nevertheless.

• 33:25Aaron Retica?

  And environmentally unfound.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, for a big environmentalist. But then there is actually getting things done. So, you know, you have this big permitting bill that's gonna get voted on, but I think there's interest, and you're hearing people talk about doing things on AI regulation. You know, you can imagine things potentially on immigration, at least around the corners of it.

• 33:44Aaron Retica?

  Because now it's hurt both parties.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Now it's hurt both parties. But that doesn't mean they'll be able to do it, right? I'm just saying that there is a bucket of how much do you work with the other side and even work with Donald Trump to get things done? And I mean, after 2018, there were things that got done, and particularly, once you got into the pandemic period, I mean, there was huge agreements between, you know, the Nancy Pelosi-led House and Donald Trump. And then there is, what I would think of as like, power building and agenda setting, which is not so much what you pass through the House or the Senate, but beginning to hammer out, say, what is the Democratic position look like on healthcare reform that they would bring into a 2028 and then 2029, you know, first campaign and then governing agenda? What is the Democratic position on AI regulation?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  How do Democrats in general begin to create a sense of what the center of the party, not like the centrists in the party, but the center of the party, believes? And I think you're gonna see a lot of work done on, say, Medicare for More policies, which are gonna unite the sort of more moderate and the more like left parts of the party. I think you're gonna see a lot on AI, a lot beginning to be thought through on sort of, you know, pre-K and other forms of childcare. So how do they balance it, and particularly how they balance the first two, you know, confrontation and compromise? That's gonna be a lot of the, a lot of the work. The only other thing I'll say, though, is that when I look at the next two years, I think a lot is gonna go sideways.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  And it's hard to predict exactly what, but the economy looks very shaky to me, given how much is built on an AI capex boom, which could very, very, very easily collapse into a market correction. You have the Iran war, right, which could explode into something completely different, or, you know, Israel could, you know, launch a gigantic round of new attacks. There had been talk about, you know, would Iran use chemical weapons? I mean, there's all kinds of ways that could go sideways, even more so than it already has. There's Russia, Ukraine, there's AI, not from the economic standpoint, but, you know, rogue swarms of AIs hacking into China. There's China and Taiwan. There's Donald Trump's health.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  He's an 80-year-old who is, you know, very, you know, increasingly discursive and all over the place, with all the corruption around him. There is so much that is unknown.

• 36:02Aaron Retica?

  You know what it makes me think of?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  What?

• 36:04Aaron Retica?

  It makes me think of the first line of the Shelley poem, "England in 1819." Uh, let's see if I could do it right. It's an old, mad, despised and dying king. That's the beginning. Uh, you know, princes, dregs of the dull earth. I could go on, but that poem actually speaks to what we're talking about, because at the end of it, he asks, you know, goes through how horrible the Senate is, but then at the end of it, he asks, you know, what's the glorious phantom that's gonna come from this, right? Which is what we're, we're talking about. And also, just Trump's personality, I don't know what to call it, uh, because I'm not a doctor and I wouldn't, if I were, I wouldn't say, but there's some kind of disintegration

• 36:47Aaron Retica?

  going on, I guess, or a man not in super great contact with reality to begin with.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  You don't feel like the reflecting poll speech was a pleasing argument Republicans needed?

• 36:57Aaron Retica?

  I just, I'm like, if you look at the world in a sort of historical and literary frame, as I tend to, right? The anxiety is, and you just outlined it well, that this is 1912, this is 1913, this is 1914.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  This is '06.

• 37:12Aaron Retica?

  And these things are all converging on us, right? And then, the president is not, let's just say, he is not adaptable, right? He's not, and you, as you pointed out earlier, he doesn't react to events, he doesn't even seem to know they happened, in the way that other people experience reality. And so that is unlikely to go super well.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  And his staffing is not gonna get better-

• 37:33Aaron Retica?

  Right.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  -in the lame duck period of his second term. And some of these people might get shuffled out, as some of them have, like Kristi Noem. But the people who come in are not, Trump is not gonna suddenly surround himself with a team of rivals. He's not gonna suddenly begin listening to people's advice. And so what you tend to have in the second, you know, particularly in a second term, particularly in the back half of it, is an exhausted staff, less able to challenge the boss. As you say, the boss is more erratic, more mad. He is not obsessed with Republicans winning in 2028. He does not want to lose control. And so the more Republicans try to win in 2028-

• 38:12Aaron Retica?

  On your theory, he would like them to lose.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  I think he would-

• 38:16Aaron Retica?

  In part.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  I think he would prefer them to lose while embracing him-

• 38:20Aaron Retica?

  Yeah.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  -than to win while running away from him.

• 38:22Aaron Retica?

  Yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  I don't think there's any doubt about that.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  Hey, it's Anna Martin from the New York Times.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  You've heard that line before, right? Wherever you get your podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. Of course you have. But what if I told you, you never have to hear that line ever again? You know what? You caught me. I actually can't tell you that. But I can tell you somewhere I think you might want to go. It's the Shows tab in the New York Times app. You can find full episodes of The Ezra Klein Show, The Interview, Modern Love, the daily new and classic episodes from Serial, and so much more. So much to listen to and watch. I think that's really special. I did this interview once on Modern Love with the actor Andrew Garfield. He was reading an essay, and suddenly he was moved to tears. And when you watch the video, you feel like a part of it. The Shows tab.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  Find it wherever you get your, just kidding. It's in the New York Times app. Explore the Shows tab and follow a show today.

• 39:34Aaron Retica?

  To get to your point about investigation and corruption, there will be people who say, let it all go, don't impeach him again, don't do this, don't do that, we have to govern, right? But here's the problem with that. First of all, there's the level of the corruption and incompetence and just grotesque, grotesque behavior, just staggering, like, amazing stuff that they did. They destroyed, I mean, huge agencies, the USAID and the Department of Education and the Consumer Protection, I mean, all of that, it's just, right? There's that, there's the immigration, there's all these things. So what do you think they should do on the investigation and corruption front?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  I don't think anybody in the party is saying, don't investigate. I mean, I've not, I think there's gonna be-

• 40:20Aaron Retica?

  Don't impeach, they are saying that.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Let's hold impeachment aside, because they're not gonna impeach right now, right? That's not their first day plan. What they've been planning for is investigation. And the challenge they're gonna face on investigation is actually how target-rich the environment is. The resources of Congress are significant, but the amount of corruption, malfeasance, law-breaking, et cetera, in the Trump administration is, like, so vast.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  In order to make anything stick, you need to focus on things people like a couple of things people can can begin to hold in their minds. It's something that it's one reason John Ossoff has been better at making the corruption argument than a lot of others. He tends to focus on one small thing at a time, right? It allows you to to kind of conceptualize a whole and a part. The way I hope they will do it as an organizing threat, at least at the beginning, not because it'll be the most emotionally satisfying or even important, but because I think it actually reflects like what the American people are interested in, is I want them to follow the money. I want to know who bought what from the Trump administration, who gave what to the Trump administration, things like the Qatari jet, how much did he not know? How much did the Trump family get? What contracts

• 41:33Speaker 01

  went into Trump family hands during all this? What's going on with Jared Kushner's fund? I would love to know real details on that Jared Kushner fund that has seemed to be so popular among Gulf state funders.

• 41:46Aaron Retica?

  It's surprisingly popular, yes.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Um, and on the flip, right? Not just like who bought what, like what did they get? And then where has the money been going for the Trump family, for Trump associates? Right? As you've been getting hosed at the pump and in the grocery store and like, you know, when you're trying to buy a home, how many billions of dollars has he made exactly? And not just him, Don Jr., Eric, right? All their friends and family, Steve Witkoff's son.

• 42:16Aaron Retica?

  Right.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  What's going on with all the crypto? Right? There is so much money that has been moving around. To me, like, that is the place to start. But as you were kind of suggesting too, there's all these other questions about what laws were broken in different agencies. And and I'm not saying they can't do that too, but they're going to have to choose what to focus.

• 42:38Aaron Retica?

  Well, and which things to try to put back, right? Do you just try to reopen the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Do you, what do you do there?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Well, there's that, it's maybe we're spending a moment on what happened to the Doge co-chairs, right? Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who I think together, like Vivek lost the Ohio governorship to Amy Acton, running one of the most grim and disreputable campaigns in history.

• 43:07Aaron Retica?

  I thought you were gonna say that, because that was the worst thing ever.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  The ad for, people didn't follow this, where he had an ad on from her estranged mother, who said Amy Acton is a liar, and what she was suggesting Amy Acton lied about was being sexually abused by her stepfather, of which there was quite good evidence. Um, grotesque, like just reprehensible behavior. Ramaswamy is already on track to lose that election, but you know, he's lost it and really.

• 43:35Aaron Retica?

  He should be drummed out of public life, no question.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  So then, and then Elon Musk.

• 43:38Aaron Retica?

  It's only $500 million.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  I mean, for him, it's like nothing.

• 43:41Aaron Retica?

  What are you talking about?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  But it's not just that that money didn't do anything, or it doesn't appear to have done very much. A huge amount was spent in Texas, and there is nowhere, there is nowhere in the country that Republicans collapsed like they did in Texas.

• 43:56Aaron Retica?

  If you do this for a living, right? The dream of blue Texas has, or really would appear to be at first, the fantasy of blue Texas has been alive and well for decades.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:06Aaron Retica?

  And now it's here.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Alive and unwell for decades.

• 44:10Aaron Retica?

  Fantasy was alive.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the fantasy was alive.

• 44:12Aaron Retica?

  But here it is.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  But hopes kept getting dashed. But Musk spent a tremendous amount of money, a large amount of that money, certainly plurality, that went into Texas specifically. And I'm not sure it, I would go further than it, it bought him nothing. I think it.

• 44:26Aaron Retica?

  No, it hurt.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  It hurt, right? People don't like their elections being bought.

• 44:31Aaron Retica?

  There were two forms of one man rule on the ballot, right? Trump's and his, and they both got crushed.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  And Musk has moved himself and a lot of his corporations to Texas. So the question of Musk is going to be a very interesting one going forward.

• 44:45Aaron Retica?

  The, uh, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to say about Musk. I hope that this means that when you verge, or maybe more than verge on, you know, white supremacy, or certainly white dominance as your central idea, that you'll fail. Like, I hope that's true.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  And replacement of human beings.

• 45:08Aaron Retica?

  And replacement of human beings.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Might also be hugely popular.

• 45:11Aaron Retica?

  Also not great, right? The AI centers are a huge electoral issue, right? That elites are maybe not focused on as much as they should be.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I think they're pretty focused on this election. They, like, the amount that Democrats ran on that, I mean, Sherrod Brown running against Husted in Ohio ran heavily on data centers. Hinojosa in Texas ran aggressively on data centers. Abdul Sayed ran on data centers. I mean, so there were dozens of of data center moratoriums on the ballot, and I think so far, every single one of them, except for one, has passed.

• 45:45Aaron Retica?

  The exception that proves the rule. So a little inside baseball, you came to the New York Times the week of January 6th, 2021. You and I had already met, obviously.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, my first week at the Times.

• 46:00Aaron Retica?

  But his first week, your first week at the Times was January 6th. That was effectively the down payment on the second Trump term. It also made this even more the Trump era than it might have been. Is this finally the beginning of the end of Trumpism? It's definitely the beginning of the end of Trump, right? He's out in two years, no matter what. But is it?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  So there's no Trumpism, there was only ever Trump. Which is to say that the work that various right wing intellectuals and pseudo intellectuals tried to do.

• 46:38Aaron Retica?

  Emphasis on pseudo.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  To paint a coherence around Donald Trump's impulses and extract from that what he was going to try to do with the tariff, say, right? What a highly structured tariff regime during manufacturing back to America would look like. That was a failure. Donald Trump's tariffs were insane. Trump is an end of the neocon Middle East meddling era in foreign policy, a failure. Trump did not agree with you. That was not Trumpism. Over and over and over and over again, there have been these efforts to say what Trumpism is. But Trump himself would not hold to any of them. And so one reason all of this collapsed, the one reason I think the infighting of it on the right is ultimately going to be

• 47:25Speaker 01

  so vicious, is because you're still going to have the real Trumpism has never been tried people. You already saw this happening on.

• 47:32Aaron Retica?

  It was happening last night. The MAGA people were all like.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  The neocons did this to us.

• 47:36Aaron Retica?

  The neocons.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Who were the neocons? It was Trump.

• 47:39Aaron Retica?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Marco Rubio didn't get you into Iran. It was Donald Trump himself with Benjamin Netanyahu who got into Iran. That wasn't Bill Kristol. You kidding me? It's ridiculous. J.D. Vance is gonna, you know, presumably run for president as a human sacrifice. To say this is what Trumpism could have been, right? There's this whole.

• 48:02Aaron Retica?

  Trumpism, right, without the war.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  This is his whole view, right? That J.D. Vance could have been the intellectual nerve center of the Trump administration. He wasn't in the end. But maybe he'll run as that. The problem is, nobody actually thinks Vance-ism, which is what that really is, is appealing. J.D. Vance was not a electoral juggernaut in Ohio when he ran. He underperformed terribly, and he's not popular now. And so the movement is going to be to try to figure out, like, what can come after. And that jockeying, particularly outside of the House and the Senate, is already going to begin. And the the key thing is, Trump cares about his control. He doesn't care about his ideology. Trump wants fealty. He doesn't want consistency

• 48:44Speaker 01

  or coherence. He's not an ideas guy. And so in that way, like, he wants to keep his family out of jail, keep their, keep their profits right. But everybody knows it to be true. The Republican Party all knows it to be true.

• 48:58Aaron Retica?

  You don't think he's home reading Patrick Deneen?

• 49:00Speaker 01

  I don't think he's home reading Patrick Deneen.

• 49:03Aaron Retica?

  Yeah. Okay. Um, before we go, I want to ask you something. So I was on my way here, I was texting with a friend of mine who's, well, she's a historian, and she was saying, I was telling her what I was doing, and she was like, okay, but don't, don't, you know, as my mother always used to say, don't gloat. And I, you know, I don't want to gloat. But I do want to focus on something. People that we are very glad to see the end of who lost last night. So I'm gonna go first, and that is Susan Collins. She has the mask of the moderate, right? And she did. She voted when, when things were close, she was

• 49:42Aaron Retica?

  the most likely senator to vote against Republicans. But that's still 15, 16, 17% right? Most of the time, she voted with them. And she was the chief enabler of the destruction of women's right to choose because of the change in the court. And I'm very, very happy to see her go. Who are you happy to see go?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  I think that the place where I am happiest to see politicians and political tactics fail is when they front load unabashed cruelty. And I think that describes Ken Paxton in Texas.

• 50:26Aaron Retica?

  Definitely.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  And immorality. I think there's a world where he ran a much more honorable campaign than this, but it's not the world he ended up living in. Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio. I think Roger Marshall in Kansas, and the way that he, like, the incredibly cruel interest he like imposed upon his own patients, right? The 18% interest rates he had.

• 50:50Aaron Retica?

  It's just amazing.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And the flip.

• 50:53Aaron Retica?

  It's an OBGYN.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  And the flip of that, because I'm, I think more about who I'm happy won than who I'm happy lost. The flip of that is I'm really interested and optimistic about this rise of a religious left, this revival of a religious left and a moralistic left, right? A left that is interested and able to speak in a language of virtue. James Talarico, Adam Hamilton, Abdul El Sayed, and John Ossoff. Ossoff is really good at speaking in a biblical cadence, thick with language of virtue. I think one of the giant opportunities in in

• 51:33Speaker 01

  politics right now is to rebuild a politics that is explicitly moral, within the moral wreckage of Donald Trump.

• 51:43Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, it's a thermostatic response to their depravity and immorality, right?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  And so I am quite interested in the candidates who are figuring out how to do that. And I particularly think the Talarico, Hamilton, El Sayed, Ossoff, like, group there has that moral language in a way relatively few of the others do.

• 52:07Aaron Retica?

  Let's give it a name. You always like to give things a name, right? We'll call it the Love Thy Neighbor Coalition. And we'll call it a day, I think, yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Aaron Reddick, thank you very much.

• 52:17Aaron Retica?

  Thanks a lot, Ezra.