AI transcript
0:00:08 Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner, and I would like to invite you to come see Freakonomics
0:00:16 Radio live in San Francisco on January 3rd and in Los Angeles on February 13th.
0:00:20 For tickets, go to Freakonomics.com/LiveShows.
0:00:21 One word.
0:00:25 I’m told that tickets are going fast, so you might want to do this soon.
0:00:28 I’m also told that these tickets make an excellent holiday gift.
0:00:36 Again, that’s Freakonomics.com/LiveShows, January 3rd in San Francisco, February 13th
0:00:37 in LA.
0:00:44 I’ll be there, and I hope you will too.
0:00:51 On January 6th of 2025, Vice President Kamala Harris will certify this year’s election results
0:00:55 and officially named Donald Trump as the nation’s 47th president.
0:01:01 She will do this in her role as outgoing Senate president, but also, of course, as the presidential
0:01:03 candidate that Trump just beat.
0:01:09 He is only the second president in U.S. history to lose the White House but win it back later.
0:01:12 The other was Grover Cleveland in the 19th century.
0:01:18 This is one of many ways in which the 2024 election was a historic one and a dramatic
0:01:23 one, the kind that generates a lot of bloviating from a lot of people.
0:01:26 So you may have had your fill of that.
0:01:30 I was thinking you might want to hear a different kind of conversation about the election with
0:01:37 someone who isn’t a bloviator, someone very smart and thoughtful with a wide perspective,
0:01:43 someone who maybe has a PhD in political science and is maybe an immigrant.
0:01:47 All of that describes our guest today, Fareed Zakaria.
0:01:52 We had him on the show earlier this year to talk about his book The Age of Revolutions,
0:01:56 Progress and Backlash, from 1600 to the present.
0:02:01 Zakaria is host of a weekly CNN show called GPS or Global Public Square, and he writes
0:02:04 a column for the Washington Post.
0:02:09 In the conversation you are about to hear, we will talk about the election results.
0:02:11 Trump is not a spasm.
0:02:12 It’s not a one-shot thing.
0:02:15 This is a deep, enduring change.
0:02:18 And what that deep, enduring change may look like.
0:02:24 I worry that we’re in a situation where this whole world order can unravel very quickly.
0:02:28 But if you were someone who didn’t vote for Trump, and you’re thinking about leaving
0:02:32 the country, Zakaria has something to say to you too.
0:02:37 If everybody who loses an election abandons the watchtowers, that’s not going to help
0:02:38 democracy.
0:02:42 And you don’t want to hurt democracy, do you?
0:02:49 We once ran a contest on Freakonomics.com soliciting new six-word mottos for the United
0:02:50 States.
0:02:52 Here is the one that got the most votes.
0:02:56 Our worst critics prefer to stay.
0:02:58 That was a while ago.
0:03:00 Does that motto still hold true today?
0:03:19 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:03:31 your host, Stephen Dovner.
0:03:36 I spoke with Fareed Zakaria on the 8th of November, just a couple days after Donald
0:03:41 Trump won a second term in the White House, bracketing his four years of exile.
0:03:46 The Republicans also won firm control of the Senate, while the outcome for the House of
0:03:48 Representatives was still up in the air.
0:03:53 And this was before Trump had made any significant appointments in his administration other than
0:03:56 choosing Suzy Wiles as his chief of staff.
0:04:00 But as we publish this episode, the appointments are coming thick and fast.
0:04:05 Tom Homan, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, Lee Zeldin, probably quite a few more by the time
0:04:06 you hear this.
0:04:12 I asked Zakaria for his first impressions of the election.
0:04:17 What I’ve been struck by is the degree to which the kind of things that I talked about
0:04:21 in my book, Age of Revolutions, have been borne out.
0:04:28 That is, that we’re in the midst of a huge backlash to all the economic change, the technological
0:04:34 change, the cultural change that has been roiling Western societies and really societies
0:04:37 everywhere for the last few decades.
0:04:42 We thought that these changes get digested, or maybe there’s a spasm of a backlash.
0:04:49 But we’re in a long period of reaction to these forces, and we’re developing almost
0:04:53 a kind of new politics around it.
0:04:59 What you’re seeing is a major realignment of politics around the idea that we’ve gone
0:05:00 too far.
0:05:08 We have to rethink the entire way in which we have been approaching these massive forces
0:05:15 of structural change, economics, globalization, information revolution, cultural change.
0:05:20 I’m not saying that I agree with that bad reaction and backlash in every case, but it’s
0:05:22 deep and it’s not a spasm.
0:05:23 It’s plainly not just here.
0:05:28 If you look at the incumbent party getting tossed out, it’s example after example after
0:05:29 example, right?
0:05:34 Austria, Japan, probably Canada next year, do you see that as further proof that we’re
0:05:40 living through, as you put it in the book of yours, the most revolutionary period in
0:05:41 recent history?
0:05:48 This is the first year in which every major country that has held an election has seen
0:05:52 the incumbent party tossed out or substantially weakened.
0:05:57 In some cases like France, Macron is still president, but his party was decimated.
0:06:03 So we’re clearly at a moment of enormous backlash and reaction.
0:06:05 Now sometimes it takes on a weird form.
0:06:10 In Britain, it became a backlash to the Tories because the Tories were seen as the incumbents
0:06:14 who had presided over the period of turmoil and inflation.
0:06:22 But for the most part, it is a backlash against what I call the policy of openness, open trade,
0:06:28 open information, open migration, even open politics in the sense of people doubting very
0:06:31 much where the democracy can deliver.
0:06:33 Let’s press a little bit further on what constitutes openness.
0:06:37 I want to read you a couple of things I’ve read this past week.
0:06:42 One is from Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker and an informal advisor to Trump said, “The
0:06:48 elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country.”
0:06:52 There’s a professor of communications and journalism at Stony Brook University named
0:06:59 Musa Algarbi who wrote, “The rise of populism, tensions over identity politics and the crisis
0:07:05 of expertise are all facets of a deeper struggle between knowledge economy professionals and
0:07:10 the growing number of Americans who feel alienated from the social order we, those professionals,
0:07:12 preside over.”
0:07:17 So that’s a bit of an indictment of you, me, a lot of people you and I both know.
0:07:19 What’s your feeling about that?
0:07:21 I think it’s broadly correct.
0:07:24 Now how you solve it is the bigger problem.
0:07:31 The post-industrial nature of modern economies, the move from first of all a manufacturing
0:07:36 sector to a service sector which is happening in every advanced industrial country and the
0:07:44 further effect of the information revolution has been to privilege knowledge workers, to
0:07:51 privilege people whom Robert Reich once described as symbolic analysts, meaning if you manipulate
0:07:57 symbols, code, images, language for a living and think of every profession we get, you
0:08:00 know, lawyers, accountants, software programmers.
0:08:02 You’ve just described our entire audience by the way.
0:08:03 Right.
0:08:05 You’re going to be doing well in that economy.
0:08:10 You’re going to be rewarded and you have pricing power over your labor.
0:08:17 If you manipulate physical things for a living, you do not have pricing power and that reality
0:08:22 has become more and more intense and it’s been an easy sort basically people who are
0:08:27 college educated versus people who are non-college educated, people who live in urban city centers
0:08:29 versus people who don’t.
0:08:32 And so these divides stack upon each other.
0:08:40 So you end up really with two countries, one urban educated, secular, multicultural and
0:08:47 the other one rural, less educated, more white, more religious.
0:08:51 And that creates a much greater chasm than we have ever had.
0:08:57 If you go back 50 years, what you notice is the steel worker made more than the accountant
0:08:59 or even sometimes the junior lawyer.
0:09:03 There were lots of blue collar professions and lots of blue collar towns which were
0:09:07 thriving and Detroit was one of the richest cities in America.
0:09:09 That world has gone away.
0:09:14 That’s the fundamental structural push which is creating this alienation.
0:09:19 I very much dispute the idea that the elites are looking down on this great unwashed.
0:09:21 I think that’s a nice way to indict them.
0:09:23 But look at Joe Biden.
0:09:29 Joe Biden as president has done more for blue collar workers, for manufacturing, for rural
0:09:32 counties than any president really in history.
0:09:38 I mean you could say it Lyndon Johnson, but the attempt to target the infrastructure bill,
0:09:45 the CHIPS Act, the IRA all towards what were really red counties was extraordinary.
0:09:50 It didn’t help them politically at all because the issues causing this divide are as much
0:09:52 cultural as they are economic.
0:09:55 I’m curious to know how surprised you were by the outcomes.
0:09:59 Did you predict a Trump landslide in a red wave?
0:10:04 Because other than some of the betting markets, I haven’t heard from many people who did.
0:10:05 I thought he would win.
0:10:09 I didn’t say anything publicly about it because I’ve always thought it was close enough that
0:10:11 it was almost a guessing game.
0:10:16 I would have preferred if Kamala Harris had won, but I thought Trump would win, but it’s
0:10:22 not as much of a landslide as people are making it out to be, you know, 175,000 votes in those
0:10:27 three blue wall states and the electoral college would have flipped and Kamala Harris would
0:10:28 be president.
0:10:30 She would have won like Trump did in 2016.
0:10:34 He would have won the popular vote, but she would have won the electoral college.
0:10:42 The striking feature of it is how you saw movement toward him among pretty much every
0:10:43 group.
0:10:48 The most significant ones were Hispanics, but everywhere you saw some movement.
0:10:52 And I tend to think that is part of this larger realignment that I’m talking about.
0:10:59 The country is coalescing into two groups, the party of that wants more openness at some
0:11:04 level and the party that wants more closed borders, closed trade, closed technology.
0:11:10 You know, it’s a big divide and you’re seeing these new alignments where Hispanic working
0:11:14 class people are voting more like working class people than like Hispanics.
0:11:19 So ethnicity is giving way to social and economic class.
0:11:24 Mali Hemingway, who’s a conservative pundit, writes for the Federalist said, “This is the
0:11:27 absolute end of the old Republican Party.
0:11:32 New GOP is more durable, more working class with a brighter future.”
0:11:34 Your thoughts on that?
0:11:35 I think she’s dead right.
0:11:41 I think that the old Republican Party, the party of the Chamber of Commerce, of the
0:11:48 upper class, of the affluent white professionals, that party is gone, the party of Paul Ryan
0:11:49 and Mitt Romney.
0:11:53 What Trump figured out was that that party was a minority party.
0:11:59 It had not been able to win the popular vote for 25 years almost with one exception.
0:12:05 What he has found his way to is a new coalition, which is almost the inverse.
0:12:08 The base of the party is working class.
0:12:13 It is a more durable majority or at least a larger coalition.
0:12:19 For the Democrats, the challenge is that if the great dividing line is college education,
0:12:26 you’ve got 40% versus their 60% because college educated people only make up about 40%.
0:12:28 So you have to supplement it with something.
0:12:33 The Democrats’ old answer was, “We’re going to supplement it with minorities.”
0:12:37 And blacks are still very reliably voting Democratic.
0:12:40 Jews, actually, interestingly, are still very reliably voting Democratic.
0:12:41 Right.
0:12:45 The exit polls, which aren’t totally reliable, showed that Harris won a bigger share of the
0:12:49 Jewish vote than any Democrat in 24 years.
0:12:50 Correct.
0:12:53 Again, what that tells you is that they’re a socially economic class by which I mean
0:12:57 college education, Trumped religion and ethnicity.
0:13:02 There is an old Democratic party itch, which is that we’ve got to be a working class party
0:13:03 as well.
0:13:05 You hear that in Bernie Sanders.
0:13:10 The problem is, no matter what policies they pursue, and as I say, Biden has been the most
0:13:15 pro-working class president in decades, the working class is abandoning them.
0:13:19 They don’t see the Democrats as part of their world.
0:13:24 They see the Democrats as this affluent, elite, urban cosmopolitan world.
0:13:31 Tony Blair said this to me, “When people feel deeply insecure, they don’t move left economically.
0:13:34 They move right culturally.”
0:13:37 Because your instinct is not to say, “Oh my goodness, I feel like my world is being
0:13:38 upended.
0:13:40 I need this government program.”
0:13:45 No, their impulse is to say, “I need a return to the world I knew.”
0:13:48 That’s why the politics of nostalgia are so powerful.
0:13:50 It’s a return to something comfortable.
0:13:53 That feeling trumps economics.
0:13:59 If you think about gender issues, you’re seeing on the one side a lot of women feeling like
0:14:04 they need to have their rights protected, but you’re also seeing a lot of men who feel
0:14:11 like politics has gotten too feminized, that they are being forgotten, and that in a post-industrial
0:14:13 world, women do better than men.
0:14:16 There is a kind of male backlash.
0:14:18 Just take me back to before all this was happening.
0:14:24 Take me back to that world where a man was able to be a man and was the dominant player
0:14:26 in the family and in society.
0:14:32 I find that whenever working-class people do this, liberals get so frustrated and they
0:14:37 say, “I can’t believe these people are voting against their interests,” meaning they’re
0:14:40 voting for a party that isn’t going to do something for them economically.
0:14:46 And yet, these same upper-class liberal professionals are voting against their interests.
0:14:51 They are voting against the party that is going to give them tax cuts, and they are voting
0:14:53 for the party that is going to tax them more.
0:14:54 Why?
0:15:00 Because even for upper-class liberals, it turns out that culture and social issues can often
0:15:02 trump economics.
0:15:04 Although their argument would be, “Well, I’ve got mine.
0:15:08 I’m comfortable, and therefore, I’m looking out for people who don’t,” right?
0:15:13 They would say that, but I would argue that what’s going on is that in their world, it
0:15:19 would be seen as so offensive to be voting for Trump, and what makes it so offensive?
0:15:21 It’s all these cultural issues.
0:15:28 It’s not that people in our world think it’s massively offensive to give a 3% cut in taxes.
0:15:31 No, it’s about abortion, and it’s about deportation.
0:15:32 It’s about all those issues.
0:15:39 So the main story being told now is pretty simple, that the Harris campaign focused primarily
0:15:42 on Trump as a villain.
0:15:47 Voters, however, were primarily focused on two things, inflation and immigration, which,
0:15:53 by the way, were two major Trump talking points, and that resounded much more, apparently,
0:15:55 than the Trump-the-villain story.
0:15:58 Does that narrative sit about right with you, or do you think it’s more complicated than
0:15:59 that?
0:16:00 I think that’s about right.
0:16:06 You can’t do that much about global inflation, because it was global, and secondly, it had
0:16:09 already come down, but people were living with the effects of it.
0:16:16 I think part of what’s going on is that there is a lagging indicator, and that people feel
0:16:22 the pain of inflation more than they feel the benefits of these very powerful positive
0:16:27 indicators that the U.S. has, by far the best large economy in the world.
0:16:31 One variable that you could do something about was immigration.
0:16:37 Immigration is the rocket fuel that is feeding right-wing populism, because, in a way, it
0:16:44 is the visible manifestation of all these revolutionary changes that are upending society.
0:16:51 How do you see or perceive or feel massive movements of capital around the world?
0:16:52 You don’t.
0:16:54 Even trade is an abstraction.
0:16:55 Information revolution.
0:17:00 They’re all abstractions, but what’s real is that you see these people on TV, and they
0:17:05 look different, and they sound different, and they’re changing the visual character
0:17:10 of your country, the sense you have of what it means to be an American.
0:17:16 All your anxieties get latched onto immigration, and so not realizing that this is a seismic
0:17:18 issue was a big mistake.
0:17:23 One element that the Trump campaign seemed to be incredibly successful with was getting
0:17:31 even first generation Americans and immigrants to also turn against, especially illegal
0:17:32 immigration.
0:17:39 Can you just talk about how the campaign did in organizing its real collage of constituencies?
0:17:43 The main issue was the reality on the ground, and they understood it better.
0:17:50 Look, I’m an immigrant, and I have very, very mixed feelings about all this crisis at the
0:17:52 border, the breakdown of asylum.
0:17:59 It took me 10 years of very patient, legal steps to become an American citizen.
0:18:04 To see people come to the border and essentially game the system by saying the magic words,
0:18:09 “I have a credible fear of persecution,” which then gets you in, gets you to court hearings,
0:18:15 gets you to stay for seven years, you disappear into the system, and you can work illegally.
0:18:18 All of that offends people at two levels.
0:18:22 One, it’s the sense of this is a violation of rule of law.
0:18:23 This is not what a country should be.
0:18:28 But the other is, I waited my turn, I stood in line, I did all these things, I jumped
0:18:34 through all these hoops, or my parents did, and you guys are getting in for free.
0:18:41 So I think that they understood that the breakdown in immigration, particularly around asylum,
0:18:43 was a very different thing.
0:18:46 They’ve realized that there was a real collapse at the border.
0:18:50 The Democrats will say, “Well, we had this legislation teed up ready to go bipartisan
0:18:56 and supported,” and then Trump spiked it by persuading sitting Republicans to not move
0:18:59 forward on it so that he could come in and fix it.
0:19:03 That seems to be not a very disputed story, even those on the Trump side seem to admit
0:19:07 that he’s the one that’s ready to come in and march with it.
0:19:09 Is that unfair to the Democrats?
0:19:12 Did they propose a proper solution and it was scotched, or should they have found a
0:19:14 different way to do that?
0:19:17 It is the correct solution for the Democrats politically.
0:19:20 The problem is it’s not completely true substantively.
0:19:25 What really happened is Biden comes in, he reverses everything Trump did on immigration.
0:19:26 Some of those things were terrible.
0:19:30 He was making it more difficult for legal immigration, he was making it more difficult
0:19:36 for even business visitors, but they also overturned all the asylum stuff.
0:19:41 They then get an inflow, part of it was post-COVID, and they don’t do anything about it.
0:19:45 And it’s only three years later that they do what you were describing.
0:19:49 So it’s disingenuous for them to claim that their solution was timely?
0:19:53 It’s disingenuous because they do it three years later, they’re doing it after they see
0:19:57 that the problem is spiraled totally out of control and that they’re paying a political
0:19:58 price for it.
0:20:03 But politically, even then they should have been making that case that look, we were waiting
0:20:07 for a bipartisan congressional solution and then from vetoed it.
0:20:12 So let’s say that you are sitting around a table this morning with a bunch of Democratic
0:20:18 Party leaders and you look at your standard bears of the past bunch of years and they’re
0:20:22 really, really old, they’re not a little old, they’re really old.
0:20:25 And then you’ve got Kamala Harris who just lost an election.
0:20:29 How do you think about the next couple of years if you’re the Democratic Party?
0:20:34 I think that it would be a mistake to over interpret some of these things.
0:20:40 The Democratic Party did reasonably well in a year that was profoundly anti-incumbency.
0:20:42 Kamala Harris ran a reasonable campaign.
0:20:47 There are a few lessons that should be taken that are not about this larger political realignment.
0:20:54 For example, the media environment has completely changed and you have to have candidates who
0:20:57 are very comfortable in the new media environment.
0:21:00 Kamala Harris in some ways is a very old school candidate.
0:21:05 She’s very good at the stuff that works on network TV, the teleprompter.
0:21:12 Clearly we are in an age where people want long form podcasts, they want authenticity.
0:21:17 So somebody like Pete Buttigieg works really well in this new format.
0:21:22 He could go for three hours, he could go for five hours with Joe Rogan or you.
0:21:25 Because what people are trying to get a sense of is who is the real person.
0:21:29 And I think what they love about Trump is he is authentic.
0:21:32 You can tell when he’s up there, he actually hates the teleprompters.
0:21:35 He can’t wait to get off them.
0:21:40 Even that moment when he starts to play his Spotify playlist, I think what people loved
0:21:41 about it is it was authentic.
0:21:43 He was tired, he was bored.
0:21:47 He said, guys, let’s just take a break and hear some music.
0:21:52 Democrats are still a little too form bound by an older world.
0:21:56 When somebody asks you a question which involves an awkward reality, you don’t answer it.
0:21:59 So that became her word salad.
0:22:03 And instead of that, you need a real answer on something like would you do something different
0:22:08 than Joe Biden would be, look, in retrospect, we should have shut down the border much faster,
0:22:09 much sooner.
0:22:11 And I’ll tell you what was going on.
0:22:15 It didn’t want to be as cruel as we thought Donald Trump had been.
0:22:20 And we were trying to solve it in a bipartisan way because really legislation is the only
0:22:24 way that you can durably solve this, but we probably waited too late.
0:22:27 And in retrospect, I would have shut it down fast and hard.
0:22:28 It was a mistake.
0:22:32 Now, in conventional political terms, that’s seen as the wrong answer because you just
0:22:33 said you made a mistake.
0:22:35 You said something bad about Biden.
0:22:40 I think it would have actually worked because what people are looking for is, look, we all
0:22:44 know that this ended up spiraling out of control.
0:22:46 Why can’t you just be a human being and admit it?
0:22:50 Do you think Joe Biden in his heart of hearts thinks it was a mistake to step aside?
0:22:52 Do you think he thinks he could have won?
0:22:56 Of course, every person is a hero in his own movie.
0:23:00 For better or worse, I happen to know a lot of people in their 80s who are very rich,
0:23:02 billionaires who run companies.
0:23:07 I’ve not noticed any one of them thinking I’m too old to be doing this.
0:23:11 Warren Buffett doesn’t think he’s too old to be running Berkshire Hathaway.
0:23:13 Rupert Murdoch doesn’t think he’s too old.
0:23:18 So it isn’t that surprising that a politician who is at the top of his game, holding the
0:23:23 most powerful job in the world, one he’s wanted since he’s been in his 20s, thinks he could
0:23:25 keep doing it.
0:23:29 Almost certainly Biden is looking at this and thinking, I should never have stepped down.
0:23:30 I could have made it happen.
0:23:32 I don’t think that’s true.
0:23:36 The problem for Biden was he looked and felt and sounded old.
0:23:40 In the world of politics, that all matters.
0:23:45 After the break, Donald Trump is going to the White House this time with more experience
0:23:47 and more leverage.
0:23:50 Fareed Zakaria tells us what that may look like.
0:23:51 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:23:52 This is Freakin’omics Radio.
0:24:04 We will be right back.
0:24:09 One of Trump’s biggest victories in his first term was appointing three conservative
0:24:14 justices to the Supreme Court, which led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
0:24:19 In this election, voters chose to protect abortion access in seven of the 10 states
0:24:21 where it was on the ballot.
0:24:26 But on many other ballot measures, progressive causes failed.
0:24:32 California voters rejected rent control measures and minimum wage increases, and they voted
0:24:36 in favor of harsher penalties for theft and drug offenses.
0:24:40 Marijuana legalization failed in all three states where it was on the ballot.
0:24:44 And in Massachusetts, a ballot measure to allow the legalization of some psychedelic
0:24:47 drugs was defeated.
0:24:50 Another big loser was ranked choice voting.
0:24:55 Even though many Americans expressed frustration with the two-party system, ballot initiatives
0:25:01 on ranked choice voting and/or open primaries failed in seven states, although they did
0:25:05 pass in Washington, D.C. and in some other cities.
0:25:13 I asked Fareed Zakaria what he thinks about this rejection of ranked choice voting.
0:25:17 I think our bitterly divided parties agree on one thing, which is to maintain the two-party
0:25:23 duopoly and to do everything they can to avoid any challenges to it.
0:25:24 Rank choice voting makes a lot of sense.
0:25:30 It just translates voters’ preferences more efficiently and intelligently into the political
0:25:31 system.
0:25:37 But until you get one of the parties to see an advantage to doing it and having one of
0:25:42 the charismatic politicians explain it, you’re not going to get there.
0:25:48 So besides Donald Trump himself, who do you see as the biggest winners in this election,
0:25:53 whether it’s individuals, constituencies, industries, countries, ideas?
0:25:55 Who comes out winning?
0:26:04 The biggest winner in a sense is the idea of a new ideology focused on the closed agenda.
0:26:08 Because it becomes clear that Trump is not a spasm, it’s not a one-shot thing, that this
0:26:14 is a deep enduring change, that Republican Party is now completely remade.
0:26:19 In personal terms, JD Vance comes out of this the best, because while a lot of politicians
0:26:25 went along with Trump because of his success, Vance is one of the very small number who
0:26:32 is genuinely ideologically a believer in this kind of closed agenda.
0:26:35 Now he has a slightly different version of it than Trump.
0:26:40 Vance in some ways represents the ideological underpinnings of MAGA.
0:26:47 And so I suspect that Vance will take this opportunity to really lay out that idea and
0:26:54 to push the Republican Party off the remaining libertarian elements.
0:26:59 People look at him and say, well, he worked at a hedge fund, so he must be pro-market.
0:27:04 He’s certainly a capitalist, but I think he’s a very particular kind of capitalist.
0:27:07 He really is in favor of massive industrial policy.
0:27:11 He’s in favor of much less trade and much more targeted trade.
0:27:17 He’s in favor of Lena Kahn, the Biden administration official, who is basically anti-big tech,
0:27:18 anti-mergers.
0:27:23 The second Trump term looks like it will be quite different from the first Trump term
0:27:27 in a number of ways, including probably a much quicker and smoother transition.
0:27:29 He’s used to the way things work.
0:27:34 He’s also laid down more of a wish list that might be more concrete this time around.
0:27:38 So how do you see the Republicans planning their legislative priorities for the first
0:27:39 year?
0:27:41 There’s plainly too much to take on all at once.
0:27:46 So if you look at the broader menu, tax cuts, immigration reform, perhaps repealing the
0:27:51 Inflation Reduction Act or the CHIP’s Act, what do you see as the first moves?
0:27:56 There’s one whole basket of things which is about reducing the power of the deep state.
0:28:02 There’s a much deeper anti-establishment impulse that these last few elections have shown that
0:28:05 I think they understand and they’re going to act on.
0:28:09 If you think about it over the last 20 years, the politics of the era has been dominated
0:28:13 by two outsiders, Donald Trump and Barack Obama.
0:28:14 That’s not an accident.
0:28:17 I think that’s all a legacy of ’08 and the Iraq war.
0:28:21 Then you get to the core promises that were made.
0:28:27 The economic agenda is really the most difficult because Trump has said he’s going to extend
0:28:29 his tax cuts.
0:28:34 He’s got a bunch of new promises, the central one of which is no taxation of social security
0:28:35 income.
0:28:39 Now, if you take the first one, the extension of the Trump tax cut, that’s $2.5 trillion.
0:28:43 When you say extension, this is a 2017, it would just remove the sun setting.
0:28:46 That would continue it, not necessarily amplify.
0:28:47 Correct?
0:28:48 Correct.
0:28:53 But in budgetary terms, the assumption has been that it sunsets, so if you think about
0:28:59 budget projections, that is an additional $2.5 trillion of lost revenue.
0:29:04 Then you have no taxing of social security, which is an additional $2.5 trillion of lost
0:29:05 revenue.
0:29:08 You’re adding $5 trillion to the debt.
0:29:14 Those two things alone are just so big in budgetary terms that the question will be,
0:29:17 will Senate Republicans go along with that?
0:29:21 How would the markets react if they were to do something like that?
0:29:26 You haven’t even brought up tariffs yet, which most economic-minded people think will not
0:29:28 accomplish what it’s meant to accomplish.
0:29:29 I agree though.
0:29:30 I don’t think it produces a short-term crisis.
0:29:32 Look, I’m very much a free trader.
0:29:35 I think it’s a bad idea and I think it takes the world out.
0:29:41 A bad path of mercantilism and protectionism, but it’s not going to produce a huge crisis.
0:29:45 Look, 85% of the American economy is a domestic economy.
0:29:50 We are one of the countries in the world that could survive a higher tariff world.
0:29:51 Europe gets really screwed.
0:29:56 Ironically, US and China probably can survive this kind of a world.
0:30:02 A lot of people, although they’re mostly academics and good government watchdogs, they’ve been
0:30:05 concerned for years about what they call government capture.
0:30:10 Industries and firms and lobbyists having too much leverage over government, even the regulatory
0:30:11 bodies of government.
0:30:15 I mean, if you look at private equity, the government’s rules have essentially been
0:30:20 written by the industry thanks to the revolving door between industry and government.
0:30:26 Now we’ve got Elon Musk, who helped Trump win the election and plainly has his ear and
0:30:31 Musk has a whole lot of business that could benefit from looser regulations with Tesla,
0:30:34 SpaceX, even ex, the former Twitter.
0:30:39 How do you see the relationship between government and commerce in this upcoming Trump administration?
0:30:46 You can see it in what happened a day after the election results became clear.
0:30:53 You got a flurry of tweets from every major CEO in America, every major tech CEO, every
0:30:59 bank CEO, phoning over Trump, congratulating him and telling him how much they wanted to
0:31:00 work well with him.
0:31:03 I think that this is a very sad development that’s happened.
0:31:10 It’s not entirely because of Trump, but we have politicized the economy in America.
0:31:14 All this industrial policy, these tariffs, these bans, what that does is it suddenly
0:31:20 makes Washington a very crucial arbiter to the success of business.
0:31:27 You add to it Trump, who personally loves the idea of finding Caterpillar for doing this
0:31:33 and Harley Davidson for doing that and Chase for doing he views it as his job as president
0:31:39 to literally dole out rewards and punishments to companies depending on whether they do
0:31:44 what he regards as the right thing or the wrong thing is deeply saddening to me as somebody
0:31:47 who grew up in India where this is business as usual.
0:31:53 Every business had to slavishly pander to whoever the prime minister at the time was.
0:31:59 You see it in Musk, Tesla’s stock in the two days after Trump won was up 20% or something
0:32:04 like that, adding tens of billions of dollars to Elon Musk’s net worth.
0:32:08 Nothing fundamental in the economics had changed for Tesla.
0:32:12 There was just an expectation now that he was a friend of Trump’s that he was going
0:32:15 to somehow be showered with federal largesse.
0:32:21 There’s a guy in India called Adani who’s Modi’s best friend and his stocks trade at
0:32:26 multiples 10 times that of every other Indian company because everyone assumes that at the
0:32:32 end of the day, being Modi’s best friend is worth $100 billion or something like that.
0:32:34 It’s probably a pretty safe assumption.
0:32:36 It’s a safe assumption in India.
0:32:41 What’s tragic is it might even be a safe assumption in America, but it’s not what the American
0:32:42 economy was supposed to be about.
0:32:45 And I think it’s a very sad trend.
0:32:49 What do you think immigration itself and immigration policy looks like in the next year or two?
0:32:53 I think you’re going to see a very severe crackdown on immigration in every form.
0:32:56 I think you’re going to see a shutdown of the asylum policy.
0:33:01 I think Trump might even invoke national security so that it gets through the courts and they’ll
0:33:03 just shut the border.
0:33:08 Some kind of massive immigration reform I think is unlikely.
0:33:15 It’s a very complicated issue in which everybody has different objections to different problems.
0:33:19 Trump doesn’t seem to enjoy doing big compromise legislation.
0:33:21 It’s politically unsatisfying.
0:33:25 So what he’s going to end up just trying to do is the border stuff and shut it down.
0:33:29 The deportations are the most interesting issues.
0:33:34 His people like Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy have even said we are going to deport 24 million
0:33:36 people.
0:33:40 If you start to try to do that, the scale of it is so breathtaking.
0:33:44 The use of police power you would need is so large and the economic effects would be
0:33:50 so negative that you wonder whether Trump will do it because he doesn’t like bad headlines.
0:33:55 All his Wall Street friends whom he still talks to and admires are going to tell him
0:33:57 this is bad.
0:34:00 This is one of the tightest labor markets in 50 years.
0:34:05 Even deporting two or three million people would probably spike inflation.
0:34:08 It would probably cause enormous economic dislocation.
0:34:11 To me, that’s going to be the bright line.
0:34:12 He has promised.
0:34:13 This is not Vance.
0:34:14 This is not Ramaswamy.
0:34:17 He has promised the largest deportation in American history.
0:34:20 He’s going to have to do something big.
0:34:24 One could imagine that he could pick a place, let’s say it’s New York or California, places
0:34:29 that voted against him and say, okay, let’s start New York City and let’s send in the
0:34:33 military and let’s deport everyone that’s not here legally.
0:34:35 How would you see that playing out?
0:34:38 Let’s say that armed forces are sent to New York City.
0:34:40 What options would the mayor have?
0:34:42 What options would the governor have?
0:34:47 We haven’t been in this situation since the late ’50s and the early ’60s when governors
0:34:53 like George Wallace would talk about interposition and nullification, essentially saying that
0:34:58 the states had the ability or the authority to resist federal police power.
0:35:01 I think it would be very hard to resist federal authority on this.
0:35:03 The civil rights era settled that issue.
0:35:06 The federal government does trump the states.
0:35:07 The challenge remains.
0:35:10 It is hugely economically disruptive.
0:35:15 So even if you pick New York and California, remember these are the two most vibrant economic
0:35:20 centers of the country and it’s going to have a spillover economically.
0:35:24 Tell me what you think the second Trump administration looks like.
0:35:29 It strikes me that there is a totally different vibe around the incoming administration than
0:35:30 there was in 2016.
0:35:33 The shock was much greater back then.
0:35:36 One of the biggest complaints was that the administration was just not professionally
0:35:41 run, that Trump didn’t act like a president, which maybe some of his supporters like, but
0:35:43 most of his staff did not like.
0:35:47 It was just chaotic and there was all kinds of infighting and firings and just a lack
0:35:50 of ability to move the machinery in Washington.
0:35:53 I wonder if you think it’ll be substantially different this time.
0:35:58 The first term was unusual in that first he didn’t expect to win.
0:36:02 They come to it very quickly without a lot of planning.
0:36:03 He makes two or three decisions.
0:36:07 One is to go along with the Republican establishment in many ways.
0:36:12 So the legislative priorities were largely those that were outlined by Mitch McConnell
0:36:13 and Paul Ryan.
0:36:14 And what were those?
0:36:20 That was to prioritize tax cuts and repeal of Armacare over things like infrastructure,
0:36:23 which Trump had been more in favor of.
0:36:28 The second is to use the Republican establishment to staff the administration.
0:36:33 If you remember, his first chief of staff was Rens Priebus, the chairman of the RNC,
0:36:35 who he barely knew.
0:36:39 Then finally, you notice he loved generals and so he appointed lots of generals.
0:36:43 So I suspect all three of those things are not going to happen anymore.
0:36:48 The priorities are going to be determined by Trump and his hardcore group of advisors.
0:36:53 They are not going to rely on the Republican establishment very much and he doesn’t like
0:36:58 generals anymore because he realized that the generals push came to shove were more loyal
0:37:03 to the Constitution than to him personally and for Trump, nothing is worse than disloyalty.
0:37:10 So I think what you’re going to see is a much more intense ideological vetting and personal
0:37:12 loyalty test.
0:37:18 You see this being in some ways a more typical administration or do you see Trump believing
0:37:24 he has a mandate to do exactly what Trump wants to do will be even more unorthodox?
0:37:26 I suspect it’ll run better.
0:37:31 A lot of the tension came from Trump giving orders that people would try to undermine
0:37:33 because they disagreed with them.
0:37:38 My guess is he’s going to have people around him who agree with him more, who will willingly
0:37:39 carry out those orders.
0:37:45 I mean, he’s always run a small mom and pop real estate operation and he approaches everything
0:37:50 like that so that he can change his mind and he can go off script.
0:37:55 I don’t think that’s going to change that much.
0:38:00 Donald Trump, especially when he’s campaigning, says a lot of things that he later says he
0:38:01 didn’t really mean.
0:38:08 This is part of what he calls his weave, part insult comedy, part braggadocio, part old-fashioned
0:38:10 sloganeering.
0:38:14 It all adds up to a highly unpredictable mode of communication.
0:38:20 So how will this kind of communication go over on the global stage in Donald Trump’s
0:38:21 second term?
0:38:28 If the U.S. walks away and disengages from the world, we will quite possibly return to
0:38:31 a world of realpolitik and the law of the jungle.
0:38:32 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:38:34 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:38:44 We’re speaking with Fareed Zakaria and we’ll be right back.
0:38:50 So far, we’ve been speaking with Fareed Zakaria mostly about the election outcomes and what
0:38:53 a second Trump term might mean domestically.
0:38:57 But Zakaria’s deepest expertise is geopolitics.
0:39:02 In a recent Washington Post column, he argued that the world is facing “the most dangerous
0:39:05 moment since the Cold War.”
0:39:10 As tensions spiral in the Middle East, he writes, “Keep in mind that this is only one
0:39:16 of three arenas in the world where revisionists are trying to upend the international order.
0:39:23 In Europe, a war continues to rage and in Asia, a perilous new dynamic is at work.”
0:39:30 So I asked Zakaria why he sees so much danger in this moment and how Donald Trump may intersect
0:39:32 with that danger.
0:39:38 If you step back, the world we’ve lived in for the last 75 years is a world system that
0:39:43 was largely created by the United States after 1945.
0:39:48 And it has, as the institutional architecture of it, the UN and the World Bank and the IMF.
0:39:55 But what it really is, is a kind of open world economy, rules-based system, some concern
0:40:00 to norms like no acquisition of territory by force.
0:40:03 And largely speaking, these norms have helped.
0:40:07 There aren’t a lot of cases of aggression in which land was acquired, absorbed into a
0:40:12 new country, and it was ratified by international law.
0:40:15 If you look before 1945, that happened every year.
0:40:20 So it’s a world that is distinctly different from the one we’ve lived in for many, many
0:40:21 centuries.
0:40:24 It’s largely the creation of the United States.
0:40:30 It’s one that has produced peace and prosperity on a scale unimaginable, I think.
0:40:35 And it is now threatened because of, in some sense, waning American power and waning American
0:40:39 willingness to be the underwriter of this world.
0:40:44 And so you see Russia mounting a classic military aggression in Europe.
0:40:50 You see Iran in its own way trying through asymmetrical means using all these militia
0:40:56 groups to upend the security system there that is largely American-created with the
0:41:00 moderate Arabs and Israel playing the role of regional policemen.
0:41:05 And in Asia, China slowly but steadily trying to replace the United States as the dominant
0:41:06 power.
0:41:11 Now, Trump will react to each one of them in an ad hoc manner in some ways perfectly
0:41:13 fine and other ways probably not.
0:41:18 But what I worry about is that he doesn’t understand the larger picture, which is that
0:41:24 the United States really has created a new world, that that world has been largely beneficial
0:41:28 to the United States and enormously beneficial to the rest of the world, and that there are
0:41:33 huge stakes here that if the US walks away and disengages from the world and retreats
0:41:39 to isolationism, nobody can fill that role and that this world is not natural and self-sustaining
0:41:45 and that we will quite possibly return to a kind of 19th century world of realpolitik
0:41:47 and the law of the jungle.
0:41:50 That’s not in America’s interest and that’s not in the world’s interest.
0:41:56 I don’t think Trump hears the music on that because from his first full-page ad in the
0:42:02 New York Times when he was a real estate developer, he was just berating the Japanese for taking
0:42:08 advantages economically, berating the Europeans for free riding on American security.
0:42:14 He’s always looked at that world and said, “All our allies are ripping us off.”
0:42:20 So if he brings to it that mentality, I worry that we’re in a situation where this whole
0:42:23 world order can unravel very quickly.
0:42:25 Let’s go through some countries one at a time.
0:42:32 Let’s start with Russia, a big one, a problematic one, one in a war right now with Ukraine.
0:42:38 We’ve learned about Trump having several private phone calls with Putin since leaving office.
0:42:41 It’s also been reported in the Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk, a Trump ally, has
0:42:44 also been in regular contact with Putin.
0:42:49 How do you see the shape of the U.S.-Russia relationship moving in the next year or two?
0:42:52 Clearly Trump has a soft spot for Putin.
0:42:57 I think it’s probably just he likes strong men, he admires what Putin has done and what
0:43:02 worries me about that is not that he’ll try to do a deal on the Ukraine war.
0:43:03 I think there’s a deal to be had.
0:43:07 I think it is time to find a way to end the hostilities.
0:43:13 The problem is the easiest way to do that would be to force Ukraine to accept Russia’s
0:43:18 terms and therefore effectively lose its independence.
0:43:23 So Trump could easily go to Zelensky and say, “Look, here are my terms, which are not that
0:43:28 different from Putin’s terms, you accept these or we stop sending you weapons.”
0:43:34 It’s very difficult to see how Zelensky can resist American pressure.
0:43:40 What you end up with then is a morally bankrupt piece, which is really just a Ukrainian and
0:43:42 Western surrender to Russia.
0:43:48 Putin is able to be victorious, that norm of no aggression is destroyed.
0:43:53 But more importantly, it still leaves Europe deeply unstable because all the countries
0:43:57 around Ukraine are going to be scared and nervous and insecure and Ukraine itself will
0:44:03 largely implode because unless you have a security guarantee that comes along with the
0:44:09 end of the war, the Russians are just going to wait and even if they don’t come back in,
0:44:13 they will be able to exercise leverage by wielding that threat.
0:44:17 So Ukraine becomes a basket case, Eastern Europe becomes insecure.
0:44:19 It’s a terrible idea.
0:44:24 And the most worrying part about it is JD Vance outlined a version of a peace deal and was
0:44:26 essentially Putin’s peace deal.
0:44:30 It was in fact a version of the deal Putin has put on the table in quote unquote peace
0:44:33 negotiations in Turkey.
0:44:35 Let’s move to the side of a couple other wars.
0:44:40 Israel is still fighting a war in Gaza, fighting kind of a war in southern Lebanon.
0:44:45 How does the Trump election change those wars, but especially the relationship with Bibi
0:44:48 Netanyahu and Israel generally?
0:44:54 The truth is the Biden administration has been so supportive of Israel and so supportive
0:45:00 broadly speaking of Bibi Netanyahu that there isn’t going to be that much difference.
0:45:03 There isn’t that much more that Trump could do.
0:45:09 The Biden people tried to restrain Netanyahu in the manner in which he conducted the war
0:45:14 in Gaza, you know, don’t go into certain civilian areas, make sure you have provided
0:45:19 for humanitarian assistance and tents when you displace people.
0:45:23 But those were things, you know, kind of on the margins of the fundamental issues.
0:45:26 People say Trump will give a green light, but what would that mean?
0:45:31 Well, Trump has said he wants to make rescuing the Israeli hostage is a priority, for instance.
0:45:35 So theoretically that could lead to a different phase of the war in Gaza.
0:45:39 Ironically, the big obstacle to that has been Bibi Netanyahu.
0:45:42 All the people I’ve talked to who have been involved in these negotiations, including
0:45:48 the Qataris who have been brokering them, say that the big obstacle initially was Hamas,
0:45:52 but then Hamas came to agree to certain terms and then Bibi Netanyahu didn’t want to agree
0:45:58 to those terms because those terms would have probably enraged the two members of his government
0:46:01 who are on the far right and his government might have had to collapse.
0:46:07 And everything I read is that Netanyahu is prosecuting the war in this direction, mostly
0:46:08 out of self-preservation.
0:46:09 Do you buy that?
0:46:11 I think I bought it initially.
0:46:16 I think he has maneuvered so well and gotten lucky in Lebanon, but at this point his poll
0:46:18 numbers look very good.
0:46:23 He’s probably in a situation where he could actually even go to the polls and win.
0:46:28 Donald Trump will certainly give Bibi Netanyahu a green light to do whatever he wants to do
0:46:32 in Gaza, but honestly, there isn’t that much more to do.
0:46:38 75% of Gaza has been destroyed, Hamas’ leaders have been killed, Hamas’ infrastructure has
0:46:39 been decimated.
0:46:44 The interesting continuity you’re going to see, which I think is one that Biden and
0:46:49 Trump have both been comfortable with, is what Israel is doing in the north, the war
0:46:52 against Hezbollah and the attacks on Iran.
0:46:58 And there, I think the Israelis have very shrewdly and effectively re-established deterrence.
0:47:03 They were in a circumstance where Hezbollah was launching rockets at them, Israeli citizens
0:47:09 had to flee northern Israel, they worried about Iran unleashing its missiles.
0:47:14 And what the Israelis decided to do was to take this moment and really push back.
0:47:20 And what they found was Hezbollah was a paper tiger, Iran was a paper tiger, that Israel
0:47:23 is much, much more powerful than both of them.
0:47:26 I think it’s actually been a force for stability.
0:47:30 The Biden administration has supported it, the Trump administration will support it.
0:47:35 So I think what’s going on in the north is very different from the issue of Gaza, which
0:47:38 is more about what Israel does with the occupied territories.
0:47:42 Is there any possibility Palestinians get political rights?
0:47:46 That’s almost a separate issue, but in the north, just from a regional stability point
0:47:51 of view, I actually think what Israel has done has been remarkably effective.
0:47:54 Last time we spoke, I remember you talking about Iran, maybe not necessarily as a paper
0:48:00 tiger per se, but it’s certainly less wealthy, less influential than it likes to present
0:48:01 itself as.
0:48:05 On the other hand, the last few months I’ve been reading about how much money Iran has
0:48:09 been making by selling oil to China, for instance, in other ways.
0:48:15 So it seems like they are at least very well dug in to sustain the status quo for a long
0:48:20 time unless there’s unrest from within or from outside.
0:48:26 So Trump says that he’d like to exert what he calls maximum pressure on Iran.
0:48:32 I also have read that Iranian agents reportedly tried to assassinate Trump and given how any
0:48:37 of us might respond to that, you can imagine there’s a little bit of personal thinking going
0:48:38 on there.
0:48:43 So how aggressive do you think Trump is willing to be with both Iran as a potential nuclear
0:48:48 power itself, Iran as a spreader of terrorism through all these proxy groups that you’ve
0:48:52 been naming and some others, militias in Syria and Iraq and so on?
0:48:57 So Trump talks about a maximum pressure campaign on Iran, but the truth is the United States
0:49:02 has had a maximum pressure campaign on Iran for 35 years.
0:49:04 Iran is under crippling sanctions.
0:49:09 You can tell how badly Iran is doing when you notice that a year ago, the president
0:49:14 of Iran and the foreign minister died in a helicopter crash because they were flying
0:49:20 in a 1979 American Bell helicopter for which they didn’t have spare parts or maintenance.
0:49:24 That is the military hardware being used by the president of the country.
0:49:26 Imagine what the average soldier has.
0:49:31 Iran’s formal budget, which I believe is inflated because they want to buff their chests up.
0:49:35 I think the Israeli defense budget is three times the size of Iran’s budget.
0:49:40 Yes, Iran is an oil exporting country and as we learned with Russia, they’re never going
0:49:46 to go bankrupt because the world needs oil, but they are massively dysfunctional, corrupt.
0:49:51 If you look at their armed forces, they’ve been unable to achieve anything of any significance.
0:49:56 So I think that Iran is very much on the defensive and these latest Israeli strikes have rendered
0:50:01 them completely defenseless, literally, because what Israel did was they took out all their
0:50:03 air defenses.
0:50:04 Iran’s in a very weak position.
0:50:09 The question that Trump will face, I think, if we were to think about this seriously is,
0:50:11 do you want regime change in Iran?
0:50:16 Do you want to push for some kind of internal revolt and revolution?
0:50:18 We’ve tried that before.
0:50:19 We’ve tried that before.
0:50:23 We also know that regime change in the Middle East does not end well.
0:50:26 Think of Iraq, think of Libya, think of Syria.
0:50:32 These things are massively disruptive, chaotic, bloody, and often end up with results that
0:50:34 are worse than what you started with.
0:50:39 So I would caution against trying to do something like that partly because Iran is an oil-rich
0:50:40 country.
0:50:44 The regime has plenty of means of repression to stay in power.
0:50:48 If you don’t want to do that, to me, the intelligent way to think about Iran is keep the pressure
0:50:56 on, but also think about what incentives are you giving them for changes in behavior?
0:51:01 If you put a country in a box where the four walls are so tight and there’s no door out,
0:51:03 it has no incentive to change its behavior.
0:51:08 I’m not saying Iran would, but I’m saying any serious strategy has to have lots of sticks,
0:51:10 but also a few carrots.
0:51:15 And at this point, I don’t see where Iran is supposed to go.
0:51:16 Let’s move to China.
0:51:22 What should we expect now with Trump as president, especially given the pretty interesting relationship
0:51:25 he had with Xi in his first term?
0:51:27 Trump will almost certainly try to do something with China on tariffs.
0:51:32 He’s always viewed it as an economic predator state that takes advantage of America.
0:51:34 Some of what he says is true.
0:51:37 China would probably be more than happy to work out some deal.
0:51:42 He and Xi were able to have those kind of conversations, but Chinese like managed trade.
0:51:46 They like the idea that they can cut some kind of bilateral deal in which they reduce
0:51:49 some of their obstacles and return.
0:51:55 It’s difficult to tell with Trump how ideologically committed he is to a tough stance on China.
0:52:01 I suspect that you’re going to see a more workable relationship with China than people
0:52:05 imagine just listening to his ideology.
0:52:10 It’s because he’s practical, he listens to businessmen, and don’t forget the central
0:52:12 role of Elon Musk here.
0:52:18 Musk has really become such a central figure in the Trump world, and Elon Musk needs the
0:52:24 Chinese market for Tesla to succeed in becoming the most important car company in the world.
0:52:30 The way things stand now, there are all kinds of restrictions on what Tesla can do in China.
0:52:36 My guess is Musk is going to try to be a kind of intermediary between the U.S. and China,
0:52:38 and who knows, he might succeed.
0:52:44 With Trump, these things are so transactional, there’s so much personality involved.
0:52:50 It is possible to imagine that U.S.-China relations under Trump are actually less hostile
0:52:53 than they were under Joe Biden.
0:52:58 So let me ask you, there are a lot of people who voted Democrat this time around and are
0:53:02 very frustrated, some of them are frightened, a lot bitter.
0:53:08 I’ve read reports about how many people are planning or hoping to leave the U.S. for Canada
0:53:09 and other places.
0:53:13 Of course, you read that same story every time there is an election, especially when there’s
0:53:15 a conservative Republican elected.
0:53:21 If you could take a step back for people who didn’t vote for Trump, who don’t like Republican
0:53:25 consensus in Washington, what do you say to that population?
0:53:27 How do you see the next few years playing out?
0:53:32 I think when you have a high-stakes election where you have somebody who’s very much out
0:53:38 of the traditional mainstream getting elected, it’s understandable that there is a kind of
0:53:39 reaction.
0:53:41 It’s almost like a flight from reality.
0:53:47 It’s a desire to just avoid all that, to watch an old movie, to get away from it all, to
0:53:50 seek solace in your private life.
0:53:52 And I understand that reaction.
0:53:57 I think, first of all, it’s not going to be as bad as people think, in the sense that
0:54:00 this is a country with a lot of checks and balances.
0:54:02 You have three branches of government.
0:54:07 I understand they’re all under Republican control, but Mitch McConnell is not the same
0:54:09 as Donald Trump.
0:54:15 Secondly, you have institutions, you have bureaucracies, you have laws, you have rules.
0:54:19 These can’t all just be willy-nilly dispensed with.
0:54:24 You have courts, you have states, many of them Democratic states, and by the way, even
0:54:28 some Republican states that are not going to easily accept everything and anything.
0:54:32 And most of the things that you live with on a day-to-day basis are determined at the
0:54:33 state level.
0:54:39 So, Robert Kennedy might advise states to get rid of the fluoride in their water systems.
0:54:43 He can’t force New York City to take the fluoride out of its water system.
0:54:48 There are many, many more layers and checks and balances, and there will be a back and
0:54:49 forth.
0:54:53 But the biggest thing is you can’t take the attitude that you’re going to abandon the
0:54:56 country every time things don’t go your way.
0:54:59 Like Biden said, you can’t love your country only when you win.
0:55:01 But it’s more than that.
0:55:06 You have to be willing to stay and participate and engage in civic terms and fight the good
0:55:11 fight for the things you believe in and oppose the things you don’t believe in, because that’s
0:55:13 what makes democracy work.
0:55:17 In a sense, loving your country and believing in it and wanting all these good things for
0:55:22 it, mean that even more so when things haven’t gone your way in one election.
0:55:27 You have to stay to try to help keep the things you believe in alive.
0:55:28 I certainly have never…
0:55:30 You’re not moving to Canada.
0:55:33 I’ve never entertained those kind of fantasies.
0:55:34 First of all, I’m an immigrant.
0:55:35 I made my choice.
0:55:40 Secondly, with all its flaws, with all the problems, the United States is the most amazing
0:55:41 country in the world.
0:55:44 I mean, it’s economically the most dynamic.
0:55:47 It’s socially the most open.
0:55:49 It’s an amazing place.
0:55:54 You’re not going to keep it amazing and you’re not going to allow it to continue to maintain
0:55:56 this kind of exceptional quality it has.
0:56:05 If you leave or even if you retreat into private life, you have to stay engaged.
0:56:07 That was Fareed Zakaria.
0:56:08 You can find him on CNN.
0:56:10 The show is called GPS.
0:56:17 His most recent book is The Age of Revolutions and I’d like to thank him for this conversation.
0:56:21 It’s hard to think of any topic that’s gotten more coverage than this year’s election,
0:56:25 but I still walked away having learned a lot from Fareed.
0:56:30 If you feel the same way or if you didn’t, let us know.
0:56:34 Our email is radio@freakonomics.com and we love feedback.
0:56:41 Also, a reminder to come see Freakonomics Radio live in San Francisco on January 3rd
0:56:44 and in Los Angeles on February 13th.
0:56:48 For tickets, go to Freakonomics.com/LiveShows.
0:56:55 Meanwhile, coming up next time here on Freakonomics Radio, there is an annual event that is deeply
0:57:03 beloved that is witnessed in person by 3 million people and by many millions more on TV.
0:57:06 It’s an event that has become part of the fabric of America.
0:57:13 I’m talking about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and we got to wondering how much
0:57:15 it costs.
0:57:19 Why do I need to know how much lying can cost to produce?
0:57:22 We don’t really get into the cost.
0:57:24 I can’t tell you that, that’s…
0:57:31 Oh, I can’t say how much they pay, could try.
0:57:32 We tried to answer the question anyway.
0:57:39 The cost of the parade and how much it earns from that massive TV viewership.
0:57:45 We also got to wondering if, with traditional retail continuing to shrink, if maybe the
0:57:49 Macy’s Parade is more valuable than Macy’s.
0:57:52 Unfortunately, Macy’s doesn’t stand for anything today.
0:57:57 It’s the first in a two-part series called Can the Macy’s Parade Save Macy’s that’s
0:57:59 next time on the show.
0:58:06 Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too.
0:58:08 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:58:14 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at Freakonomics.com where we publish
0:58:16 transcripts and show notes.
0:58:19 This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs.
0:58:23 Our staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abelagi, Eleanor Osborn,
0:58:28 Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jason Gambrell,
0:58:33 Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarr’s Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas,
0:58:36 Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski.
0:58:39 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers.
0:58:41 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:58:45 As always, thanks for listening.
0:58:50 Lindsey Graham’s switch from being a Reagan Republican to a Trump Republican, it was
0:58:51 no sweat.
0:59:08 Lindsey Graham’s core belief is Lindsey Graham should be a senator.
0:59:12 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:59:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:16 Radio live in San Francisco on January 3rd and in Los Angeles on February 13th.
0:00:20 For tickets, go to Freakonomics.com/LiveShows.
0:00:21 One word.
0:00:25 I’m told that tickets are going fast, so you might want to do this soon.
0:00:28 I’m also told that these tickets make an excellent holiday gift.
0:00:36 Again, that’s Freakonomics.com/LiveShows, January 3rd in San Francisco, February 13th
0:00:37 in LA.
0:00:44 I’ll be there, and I hope you will too.
0:00:51 On January 6th of 2025, Vice President Kamala Harris will certify this year’s election results
0:00:55 and officially named Donald Trump as the nation’s 47th president.
0:01:01 She will do this in her role as outgoing Senate president, but also, of course, as the presidential
0:01:03 candidate that Trump just beat.
0:01:09 He is only the second president in U.S. history to lose the White House but win it back later.
0:01:12 The other was Grover Cleveland in the 19th century.
0:01:18 This is one of many ways in which the 2024 election was a historic one and a dramatic
0:01:23 one, the kind that generates a lot of bloviating from a lot of people.
0:01:26 So you may have had your fill of that.
0:01:30 I was thinking you might want to hear a different kind of conversation about the election with
0:01:37 someone who isn’t a bloviator, someone very smart and thoughtful with a wide perspective,
0:01:43 someone who maybe has a PhD in political science and is maybe an immigrant.
0:01:47 All of that describes our guest today, Fareed Zakaria.
0:01:52 We had him on the show earlier this year to talk about his book The Age of Revolutions,
0:01:56 Progress and Backlash, from 1600 to the present.
0:02:01 Zakaria is host of a weekly CNN show called GPS or Global Public Square, and he writes
0:02:04 a column for the Washington Post.
0:02:09 In the conversation you are about to hear, we will talk about the election results.
0:02:11 Trump is not a spasm.
0:02:12 It’s not a one-shot thing.
0:02:15 This is a deep, enduring change.
0:02:18 And what that deep, enduring change may look like.
0:02:24 I worry that we’re in a situation where this whole world order can unravel very quickly.
0:02:28 But if you were someone who didn’t vote for Trump, and you’re thinking about leaving
0:02:32 the country, Zakaria has something to say to you too.
0:02:37 If everybody who loses an election abandons the watchtowers, that’s not going to help
0:02:38 democracy.
0:02:42 And you don’t want to hurt democracy, do you?
0:02:49 We once ran a contest on Freakonomics.com soliciting new six-word mottos for the United
0:02:50 States.
0:02:52 Here is the one that got the most votes.
0:02:56 Our worst critics prefer to stay.
0:02:58 That was a while ago.
0:03:00 Does that motto still hold true today?
0:03:19 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:03:31 your host, Stephen Dovner.
0:03:36 I spoke with Fareed Zakaria on the 8th of November, just a couple days after Donald
0:03:41 Trump won a second term in the White House, bracketing his four years of exile.
0:03:46 The Republicans also won firm control of the Senate, while the outcome for the House of
0:03:48 Representatives was still up in the air.
0:03:53 And this was before Trump had made any significant appointments in his administration other than
0:03:56 choosing Suzy Wiles as his chief of staff.
0:04:00 But as we publish this episode, the appointments are coming thick and fast.
0:04:05 Tom Homan, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, Lee Zeldin, probably quite a few more by the time
0:04:06 you hear this.
0:04:12 I asked Zakaria for his first impressions of the election.
0:04:17 What I’ve been struck by is the degree to which the kind of things that I talked about
0:04:21 in my book, Age of Revolutions, have been borne out.
0:04:28 That is, that we’re in the midst of a huge backlash to all the economic change, the technological
0:04:34 change, the cultural change that has been roiling Western societies and really societies
0:04:37 everywhere for the last few decades.
0:04:42 We thought that these changes get digested, or maybe there’s a spasm of a backlash.
0:04:49 But we’re in a long period of reaction to these forces, and we’re developing almost
0:04:53 a kind of new politics around it.
0:04:59 What you’re seeing is a major realignment of politics around the idea that we’ve gone
0:05:00 too far.
0:05:08 We have to rethink the entire way in which we have been approaching these massive forces
0:05:15 of structural change, economics, globalization, information revolution, cultural change.
0:05:20 I’m not saying that I agree with that bad reaction and backlash in every case, but it’s
0:05:22 deep and it’s not a spasm.
0:05:23 It’s plainly not just here.
0:05:28 If you look at the incumbent party getting tossed out, it’s example after example after
0:05:29 example, right?
0:05:34 Austria, Japan, probably Canada next year, do you see that as further proof that we’re
0:05:40 living through, as you put it in the book of yours, the most revolutionary period in
0:05:41 recent history?
0:05:48 This is the first year in which every major country that has held an election has seen
0:05:52 the incumbent party tossed out or substantially weakened.
0:05:57 In some cases like France, Macron is still president, but his party was decimated.
0:06:03 So we’re clearly at a moment of enormous backlash and reaction.
0:06:05 Now sometimes it takes on a weird form.
0:06:10 In Britain, it became a backlash to the Tories because the Tories were seen as the incumbents
0:06:14 who had presided over the period of turmoil and inflation.
0:06:22 But for the most part, it is a backlash against what I call the policy of openness, open trade,
0:06:28 open information, open migration, even open politics in the sense of people doubting very
0:06:31 much where the democracy can deliver.
0:06:33 Let’s press a little bit further on what constitutes openness.
0:06:37 I want to read you a couple of things I’ve read this past week.
0:06:42 One is from Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker and an informal advisor to Trump said, “The
0:06:48 elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country.”
0:06:52 There’s a professor of communications and journalism at Stony Brook University named
0:06:59 Musa Algarbi who wrote, “The rise of populism, tensions over identity politics and the crisis
0:07:05 of expertise are all facets of a deeper struggle between knowledge economy professionals and
0:07:10 the growing number of Americans who feel alienated from the social order we, those professionals,
0:07:12 preside over.”
0:07:17 So that’s a bit of an indictment of you, me, a lot of people you and I both know.
0:07:19 What’s your feeling about that?
0:07:21 I think it’s broadly correct.
0:07:24 Now how you solve it is the bigger problem.
0:07:31 The post-industrial nature of modern economies, the move from first of all a manufacturing
0:07:36 sector to a service sector which is happening in every advanced industrial country and the
0:07:44 further effect of the information revolution has been to privilege knowledge workers, to
0:07:51 privilege people whom Robert Reich once described as symbolic analysts, meaning if you manipulate
0:07:57 symbols, code, images, language for a living and think of every profession we get, you
0:08:00 know, lawyers, accountants, software programmers.
0:08:02 You’ve just described our entire audience by the way.
0:08:03 Right.
0:08:05 You’re going to be doing well in that economy.
0:08:10 You’re going to be rewarded and you have pricing power over your labor.
0:08:17 If you manipulate physical things for a living, you do not have pricing power and that reality
0:08:22 has become more and more intense and it’s been an easy sort basically people who are
0:08:27 college educated versus people who are non-college educated, people who live in urban city centers
0:08:29 versus people who don’t.
0:08:32 And so these divides stack upon each other.
0:08:40 So you end up really with two countries, one urban educated, secular, multicultural and
0:08:47 the other one rural, less educated, more white, more religious.
0:08:51 And that creates a much greater chasm than we have ever had.
0:08:57 If you go back 50 years, what you notice is the steel worker made more than the accountant
0:08:59 or even sometimes the junior lawyer.
0:09:03 There were lots of blue collar professions and lots of blue collar towns which were
0:09:07 thriving and Detroit was one of the richest cities in America.
0:09:09 That world has gone away.
0:09:14 That’s the fundamental structural push which is creating this alienation.
0:09:19 I very much dispute the idea that the elites are looking down on this great unwashed.
0:09:21 I think that’s a nice way to indict them.
0:09:23 But look at Joe Biden.
0:09:29 Joe Biden as president has done more for blue collar workers, for manufacturing, for rural
0:09:32 counties than any president really in history.
0:09:38 I mean you could say it Lyndon Johnson, but the attempt to target the infrastructure bill,
0:09:45 the CHIPS Act, the IRA all towards what were really red counties was extraordinary.
0:09:50 It didn’t help them politically at all because the issues causing this divide are as much
0:09:52 cultural as they are economic.
0:09:55 I’m curious to know how surprised you were by the outcomes.
0:09:59 Did you predict a Trump landslide in a red wave?
0:10:04 Because other than some of the betting markets, I haven’t heard from many people who did.
0:10:05 I thought he would win.
0:10:09 I didn’t say anything publicly about it because I’ve always thought it was close enough that
0:10:11 it was almost a guessing game.
0:10:16 I would have preferred if Kamala Harris had won, but I thought Trump would win, but it’s
0:10:22 not as much of a landslide as people are making it out to be, you know, 175,000 votes in those
0:10:27 three blue wall states and the electoral college would have flipped and Kamala Harris would
0:10:28 be president.
0:10:30 She would have won like Trump did in 2016.
0:10:34 He would have won the popular vote, but she would have won the electoral college.
0:10:42 The striking feature of it is how you saw movement toward him among pretty much every
0:10:43 group.
0:10:48 The most significant ones were Hispanics, but everywhere you saw some movement.
0:10:52 And I tend to think that is part of this larger realignment that I’m talking about.
0:10:59 The country is coalescing into two groups, the party of that wants more openness at some
0:11:04 level and the party that wants more closed borders, closed trade, closed technology.
0:11:10 You know, it’s a big divide and you’re seeing these new alignments where Hispanic working
0:11:14 class people are voting more like working class people than like Hispanics.
0:11:19 So ethnicity is giving way to social and economic class.
0:11:24 Mali Hemingway, who’s a conservative pundit, writes for the Federalist said, “This is the
0:11:27 absolute end of the old Republican Party.
0:11:32 New GOP is more durable, more working class with a brighter future.”
0:11:34 Your thoughts on that?
0:11:35 I think she’s dead right.
0:11:41 I think that the old Republican Party, the party of the Chamber of Commerce, of the
0:11:48 upper class, of the affluent white professionals, that party is gone, the party of Paul Ryan
0:11:49 and Mitt Romney.
0:11:53 What Trump figured out was that that party was a minority party.
0:11:59 It had not been able to win the popular vote for 25 years almost with one exception.
0:12:05 What he has found his way to is a new coalition, which is almost the inverse.
0:12:08 The base of the party is working class.
0:12:13 It is a more durable majority or at least a larger coalition.
0:12:19 For the Democrats, the challenge is that if the great dividing line is college education,
0:12:26 you’ve got 40% versus their 60% because college educated people only make up about 40%.
0:12:28 So you have to supplement it with something.
0:12:33 The Democrats’ old answer was, “We’re going to supplement it with minorities.”
0:12:37 And blacks are still very reliably voting Democratic.
0:12:40 Jews, actually, interestingly, are still very reliably voting Democratic.
0:12:41 Right.
0:12:45 The exit polls, which aren’t totally reliable, showed that Harris won a bigger share of the
0:12:49 Jewish vote than any Democrat in 24 years.
0:12:50 Correct.
0:12:53 Again, what that tells you is that they’re a socially economic class by which I mean
0:12:57 college education, Trumped religion and ethnicity.
0:13:02 There is an old Democratic party itch, which is that we’ve got to be a working class party
0:13:03 as well.
0:13:05 You hear that in Bernie Sanders.
0:13:10 The problem is, no matter what policies they pursue, and as I say, Biden has been the most
0:13:15 pro-working class president in decades, the working class is abandoning them.
0:13:19 They don’t see the Democrats as part of their world.
0:13:24 They see the Democrats as this affluent, elite, urban cosmopolitan world.
0:13:31 Tony Blair said this to me, “When people feel deeply insecure, they don’t move left economically.
0:13:34 They move right culturally.”
0:13:37 Because your instinct is not to say, “Oh my goodness, I feel like my world is being
0:13:38 upended.
0:13:40 I need this government program.”
0:13:45 No, their impulse is to say, “I need a return to the world I knew.”
0:13:48 That’s why the politics of nostalgia are so powerful.
0:13:50 It’s a return to something comfortable.
0:13:53 That feeling trumps economics.
0:13:59 If you think about gender issues, you’re seeing on the one side a lot of women feeling like
0:14:04 they need to have their rights protected, but you’re also seeing a lot of men who feel
0:14:11 like politics has gotten too feminized, that they are being forgotten, and that in a post-industrial
0:14:13 world, women do better than men.
0:14:16 There is a kind of male backlash.
0:14:18 Just take me back to before all this was happening.
0:14:24 Take me back to that world where a man was able to be a man and was the dominant player
0:14:26 in the family and in society.
0:14:32 I find that whenever working-class people do this, liberals get so frustrated and they
0:14:37 say, “I can’t believe these people are voting against their interests,” meaning they’re
0:14:40 voting for a party that isn’t going to do something for them economically.
0:14:46 And yet, these same upper-class liberal professionals are voting against their interests.
0:14:51 They are voting against the party that is going to give them tax cuts, and they are voting
0:14:53 for the party that is going to tax them more.
0:14:54 Why?
0:15:00 Because even for upper-class liberals, it turns out that culture and social issues can often
0:15:02 trump economics.
0:15:04 Although their argument would be, “Well, I’ve got mine.
0:15:08 I’m comfortable, and therefore, I’m looking out for people who don’t,” right?
0:15:13 They would say that, but I would argue that what’s going on is that in their world, it
0:15:19 would be seen as so offensive to be voting for Trump, and what makes it so offensive?
0:15:21 It’s all these cultural issues.
0:15:28 It’s not that people in our world think it’s massively offensive to give a 3% cut in taxes.
0:15:31 No, it’s about abortion, and it’s about deportation.
0:15:32 It’s about all those issues.
0:15:39 So the main story being told now is pretty simple, that the Harris campaign focused primarily
0:15:42 on Trump as a villain.
0:15:47 Voters, however, were primarily focused on two things, inflation and immigration, which,
0:15:53 by the way, were two major Trump talking points, and that resounded much more, apparently,
0:15:55 than the Trump-the-villain story.
0:15:58 Does that narrative sit about right with you, or do you think it’s more complicated than
0:15:59 that?
0:16:00 I think that’s about right.
0:16:06 You can’t do that much about global inflation, because it was global, and secondly, it had
0:16:09 already come down, but people were living with the effects of it.
0:16:16 I think part of what’s going on is that there is a lagging indicator, and that people feel
0:16:22 the pain of inflation more than they feel the benefits of these very powerful positive
0:16:27 indicators that the U.S. has, by far the best large economy in the world.
0:16:31 One variable that you could do something about was immigration.
0:16:37 Immigration is the rocket fuel that is feeding right-wing populism, because, in a way, it
0:16:44 is the visible manifestation of all these revolutionary changes that are upending society.
0:16:51 How do you see or perceive or feel massive movements of capital around the world?
0:16:52 You don’t.
0:16:54 Even trade is an abstraction.
0:16:55 Information revolution.
0:17:00 They’re all abstractions, but what’s real is that you see these people on TV, and they
0:17:05 look different, and they sound different, and they’re changing the visual character
0:17:10 of your country, the sense you have of what it means to be an American.
0:17:16 All your anxieties get latched onto immigration, and so not realizing that this is a seismic
0:17:18 issue was a big mistake.
0:17:23 One element that the Trump campaign seemed to be incredibly successful with was getting
0:17:31 even first generation Americans and immigrants to also turn against, especially illegal
0:17:32 immigration.
0:17:39 Can you just talk about how the campaign did in organizing its real collage of constituencies?
0:17:43 The main issue was the reality on the ground, and they understood it better.
0:17:50 Look, I’m an immigrant, and I have very, very mixed feelings about all this crisis at the
0:17:52 border, the breakdown of asylum.
0:17:59 It took me 10 years of very patient, legal steps to become an American citizen.
0:18:04 To see people come to the border and essentially game the system by saying the magic words,
0:18:09 “I have a credible fear of persecution,” which then gets you in, gets you to court hearings,
0:18:15 gets you to stay for seven years, you disappear into the system, and you can work illegally.
0:18:18 All of that offends people at two levels.
0:18:22 One, it’s the sense of this is a violation of rule of law.
0:18:23 This is not what a country should be.
0:18:28 But the other is, I waited my turn, I stood in line, I did all these things, I jumped
0:18:34 through all these hoops, or my parents did, and you guys are getting in for free.
0:18:41 So I think that they understood that the breakdown in immigration, particularly around asylum,
0:18:43 was a very different thing.
0:18:46 They’ve realized that there was a real collapse at the border.
0:18:50 The Democrats will say, “Well, we had this legislation teed up ready to go bipartisan
0:18:56 and supported,” and then Trump spiked it by persuading sitting Republicans to not move
0:18:59 forward on it so that he could come in and fix it.
0:19:03 That seems to be not a very disputed story, even those on the Trump side seem to admit
0:19:07 that he’s the one that’s ready to come in and march with it.
0:19:09 Is that unfair to the Democrats?
0:19:12 Did they propose a proper solution and it was scotched, or should they have found a
0:19:14 different way to do that?
0:19:17 It is the correct solution for the Democrats politically.
0:19:20 The problem is it’s not completely true substantively.
0:19:25 What really happened is Biden comes in, he reverses everything Trump did on immigration.
0:19:26 Some of those things were terrible.
0:19:30 He was making it more difficult for legal immigration, he was making it more difficult
0:19:36 for even business visitors, but they also overturned all the asylum stuff.
0:19:41 They then get an inflow, part of it was post-COVID, and they don’t do anything about it.
0:19:45 And it’s only three years later that they do what you were describing.
0:19:49 So it’s disingenuous for them to claim that their solution was timely?
0:19:53 It’s disingenuous because they do it three years later, they’re doing it after they see
0:19:57 that the problem is spiraled totally out of control and that they’re paying a political
0:19:58 price for it.
0:20:03 But politically, even then they should have been making that case that look, we were waiting
0:20:07 for a bipartisan congressional solution and then from vetoed it.
0:20:12 So let’s say that you are sitting around a table this morning with a bunch of Democratic
0:20:18 Party leaders and you look at your standard bears of the past bunch of years and they’re
0:20:22 really, really old, they’re not a little old, they’re really old.
0:20:25 And then you’ve got Kamala Harris who just lost an election.
0:20:29 How do you think about the next couple of years if you’re the Democratic Party?
0:20:34 I think that it would be a mistake to over interpret some of these things.
0:20:40 The Democratic Party did reasonably well in a year that was profoundly anti-incumbency.
0:20:42 Kamala Harris ran a reasonable campaign.
0:20:47 There are a few lessons that should be taken that are not about this larger political realignment.
0:20:54 For example, the media environment has completely changed and you have to have candidates who
0:20:57 are very comfortable in the new media environment.
0:21:00 Kamala Harris in some ways is a very old school candidate.
0:21:05 She’s very good at the stuff that works on network TV, the teleprompter.
0:21:12 Clearly we are in an age where people want long form podcasts, they want authenticity.
0:21:17 So somebody like Pete Buttigieg works really well in this new format.
0:21:22 He could go for three hours, he could go for five hours with Joe Rogan or you.
0:21:25 Because what people are trying to get a sense of is who is the real person.
0:21:29 And I think what they love about Trump is he is authentic.
0:21:32 You can tell when he’s up there, he actually hates the teleprompters.
0:21:35 He can’t wait to get off them.
0:21:40 Even that moment when he starts to play his Spotify playlist, I think what people loved
0:21:41 about it is it was authentic.
0:21:43 He was tired, he was bored.
0:21:47 He said, guys, let’s just take a break and hear some music.
0:21:52 Democrats are still a little too form bound by an older world.
0:21:56 When somebody asks you a question which involves an awkward reality, you don’t answer it.
0:21:59 So that became her word salad.
0:22:03 And instead of that, you need a real answer on something like would you do something different
0:22:08 than Joe Biden would be, look, in retrospect, we should have shut down the border much faster,
0:22:09 much sooner.
0:22:11 And I’ll tell you what was going on.
0:22:15 It didn’t want to be as cruel as we thought Donald Trump had been.
0:22:20 And we were trying to solve it in a bipartisan way because really legislation is the only
0:22:24 way that you can durably solve this, but we probably waited too late.
0:22:27 And in retrospect, I would have shut it down fast and hard.
0:22:28 It was a mistake.
0:22:32 Now, in conventional political terms, that’s seen as the wrong answer because you just
0:22:33 said you made a mistake.
0:22:35 You said something bad about Biden.
0:22:40 I think it would have actually worked because what people are looking for is, look, we all
0:22:44 know that this ended up spiraling out of control.
0:22:46 Why can’t you just be a human being and admit it?
0:22:50 Do you think Joe Biden in his heart of hearts thinks it was a mistake to step aside?
0:22:52 Do you think he thinks he could have won?
0:22:56 Of course, every person is a hero in his own movie.
0:23:00 For better or worse, I happen to know a lot of people in their 80s who are very rich,
0:23:02 billionaires who run companies.
0:23:07 I’ve not noticed any one of them thinking I’m too old to be doing this.
0:23:11 Warren Buffett doesn’t think he’s too old to be running Berkshire Hathaway.
0:23:13 Rupert Murdoch doesn’t think he’s too old.
0:23:18 So it isn’t that surprising that a politician who is at the top of his game, holding the
0:23:23 most powerful job in the world, one he’s wanted since he’s been in his 20s, thinks he could
0:23:25 keep doing it.
0:23:29 Almost certainly Biden is looking at this and thinking, I should never have stepped down.
0:23:30 I could have made it happen.
0:23:32 I don’t think that’s true.
0:23:36 The problem for Biden was he looked and felt and sounded old.
0:23:40 In the world of politics, that all matters.
0:23:45 After the break, Donald Trump is going to the White House this time with more experience
0:23:47 and more leverage.
0:23:50 Fareed Zakaria tells us what that may look like.
0:23:51 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:23:52 This is Freakin’omics Radio.
0:24:04 We will be right back.
0:24:09 One of Trump’s biggest victories in his first term was appointing three conservative
0:24:14 justices to the Supreme Court, which led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
0:24:19 In this election, voters chose to protect abortion access in seven of the 10 states
0:24:21 where it was on the ballot.
0:24:26 But on many other ballot measures, progressive causes failed.
0:24:32 California voters rejected rent control measures and minimum wage increases, and they voted
0:24:36 in favor of harsher penalties for theft and drug offenses.
0:24:40 Marijuana legalization failed in all three states where it was on the ballot.
0:24:44 And in Massachusetts, a ballot measure to allow the legalization of some psychedelic
0:24:47 drugs was defeated.
0:24:50 Another big loser was ranked choice voting.
0:24:55 Even though many Americans expressed frustration with the two-party system, ballot initiatives
0:25:01 on ranked choice voting and/or open primaries failed in seven states, although they did
0:25:05 pass in Washington, D.C. and in some other cities.
0:25:13 I asked Fareed Zakaria what he thinks about this rejection of ranked choice voting.
0:25:17 I think our bitterly divided parties agree on one thing, which is to maintain the two-party
0:25:23 duopoly and to do everything they can to avoid any challenges to it.
0:25:24 Rank choice voting makes a lot of sense.
0:25:30 It just translates voters’ preferences more efficiently and intelligently into the political
0:25:31 system.
0:25:37 But until you get one of the parties to see an advantage to doing it and having one of
0:25:42 the charismatic politicians explain it, you’re not going to get there.
0:25:48 So besides Donald Trump himself, who do you see as the biggest winners in this election,
0:25:53 whether it’s individuals, constituencies, industries, countries, ideas?
0:25:55 Who comes out winning?
0:26:04 The biggest winner in a sense is the idea of a new ideology focused on the closed agenda.
0:26:08 Because it becomes clear that Trump is not a spasm, it’s not a one-shot thing, that this
0:26:14 is a deep enduring change, that Republican Party is now completely remade.
0:26:19 In personal terms, JD Vance comes out of this the best, because while a lot of politicians
0:26:25 went along with Trump because of his success, Vance is one of the very small number who
0:26:32 is genuinely ideologically a believer in this kind of closed agenda.
0:26:35 Now he has a slightly different version of it than Trump.
0:26:40 Vance in some ways represents the ideological underpinnings of MAGA.
0:26:47 And so I suspect that Vance will take this opportunity to really lay out that idea and
0:26:54 to push the Republican Party off the remaining libertarian elements.
0:26:59 People look at him and say, well, he worked at a hedge fund, so he must be pro-market.
0:27:04 He’s certainly a capitalist, but I think he’s a very particular kind of capitalist.
0:27:07 He really is in favor of massive industrial policy.
0:27:11 He’s in favor of much less trade and much more targeted trade.
0:27:17 He’s in favor of Lena Kahn, the Biden administration official, who is basically anti-big tech,
0:27:18 anti-mergers.
0:27:23 The second Trump term looks like it will be quite different from the first Trump term
0:27:27 in a number of ways, including probably a much quicker and smoother transition.
0:27:29 He’s used to the way things work.
0:27:34 He’s also laid down more of a wish list that might be more concrete this time around.
0:27:38 So how do you see the Republicans planning their legislative priorities for the first
0:27:39 year?
0:27:41 There’s plainly too much to take on all at once.
0:27:46 So if you look at the broader menu, tax cuts, immigration reform, perhaps repealing the
0:27:51 Inflation Reduction Act or the CHIP’s Act, what do you see as the first moves?
0:27:56 There’s one whole basket of things which is about reducing the power of the deep state.
0:28:02 There’s a much deeper anti-establishment impulse that these last few elections have shown that
0:28:05 I think they understand and they’re going to act on.
0:28:09 If you think about it over the last 20 years, the politics of the era has been dominated
0:28:13 by two outsiders, Donald Trump and Barack Obama.
0:28:14 That’s not an accident.
0:28:17 I think that’s all a legacy of ’08 and the Iraq war.
0:28:21 Then you get to the core promises that were made.
0:28:27 The economic agenda is really the most difficult because Trump has said he’s going to extend
0:28:29 his tax cuts.
0:28:34 He’s got a bunch of new promises, the central one of which is no taxation of social security
0:28:35 income.
0:28:39 Now, if you take the first one, the extension of the Trump tax cut, that’s $2.5 trillion.
0:28:43 When you say extension, this is a 2017, it would just remove the sun setting.
0:28:46 That would continue it, not necessarily amplify.
0:28:47 Correct?
0:28:48 Correct.
0:28:53 But in budgetary terms, the assumption has been that it sunsets, so if you think about
0:28:59 budget projections, that is an additional $2.5 trillion of lost revenue.
0:29:04 Then you have no taxing of social security, which is an additional $2.5 trillion of lost
0:29:05 revenue.
0:29:08 You’re adding $5 trillion to the debt.
0:29:14 Those two things alone are just so big in budgetary terms that the question will be,
0:29:17 will Senate Republicans go along with that?
0:29:21 How would the markets react if they were to do something like that?
0:29:26 You haven’t even brought up tariffs yet, which most economic-minded people think will not
0:29:28 accomplish what it’s meant to accomplish.
0:29:29 I agree though.
0:29:30 I don’t think it produces a short-term crisis.
0:29:32 Look, I’m very much a free trader.
0:29:35 I think it’s a bad idea and I think it takes the world out.
0:29:41 A bad path of mercantilism and protectionism, but it’s not going to produce a huge crisis.
0:29:45 Look, 85% of the American economy is a domestic economy.
0:29:50 We are one of the countries in the world that could survive a higher tariff world.
0:29:51 Europe gets really screwed.
0:29:56 Ironically, US and China probably can survive this kind of a world.
0:30:02 A lot of people, although they’re mostly academics and good government watchdogs, they’ve been
0:30:05 concerned for years about what they call government capture.
0:30:10 Industries and firms and lobbyists having too much leverage over government, even the regulatory
0:30:11 bodies of government.
0:30:15 I mean, if you look at private equity, the government’s rules have essentially been
0:30:20 written by the industry thanks to the revolving door between industry and government.
0:30:26 Now we’ve got Elon Musk, who helped Trump win the election and plainly has his ear and
0:30:31 Musk has a whole lot of business that could benefit from looser regulations with Tesla,
0:30:34 SpaceX, even ex, the former Twitter.
0:30:39 How do you see the relationship between government and commerce in this upcoming Trump administration?
0:30:46 You can see it in what happened a day after the election results became clear.
0:30:53 You got a flurry of tweets from every major CEO in America, every major tech CEO, every
0:30:59 bank CEO, phoning over Trump, congratulating him and telling him how much they wanted to
0:31:00 work well with him.
0:31:03 I think that this is a very sad development that’s happened.
0:31:10 It’s not entirely because of Trump, but we have politicized the economy in America.
0:31:14 All this industrial policy, these tariffs, these bans, what that does is it suddenly
0:31:20 makes Washington a very crucial arbiter to the success of business.
0:31:27 You add to it Trump, who personally loves the idea of finding Caterpillar for doing this
0:31:33 and Harley Davidson for doing that and Chase for doing he views it as his job as president
0:31:39 to literally dole out rewards and punishments to companies depending on whether they do
0:31:44 what he regards as the right thing or the wrong thing is deeply saddening to me as somebody
0:31:47 who grew up in India where this is business as usual.
0:31:53 Every business had to slavishly pander to whoever the prime minister at the time was.
0:31:59 You see it in Musk, Tesla’s stock in the two days after Trump won was up 20% or something
0:32:04 like that, adding tens of billions of dollars to Elon Musk’s net worth.
0:32:08 Nothing fundamental in the economics had changed for Tesla.
0:32:12 There was just an expectation now that he was a friend of Trump’s that he was going
0:32:15 to somehow be showered with federal largesse.
0:32:21 There’s a guy in India called Adani who’s Modi’s best friend and his stocks trade at
0:32:26 multiples 10 times that of every other Indian company because everyone assumes that at the
0:32:32 end of the day, being Modi’s best friend is worth $100 billion or something like that.
0:32:34 It’s probably a pretty safe assumption.
0:32:36 It’s a safe assumption in India.
0:32:41 What’s tragic is it might even be a safe assumption in America, but it’s not what the American
0:32:42 economy was supposed to be about.
0:32:45 And I think it’s a very sad trend.
0:32:49 What do you think immigration itself and immigration policy looks like in the next year or two?
0:32:53 I think you’re going to see a very severe crackdown on immigration in every form.
0:32:56 I think you’re going to see a shutdown of the asylum policy.
0:33:01 I think Trump might even invoke national security so that it gets through the courts and they’ll
0:33:03 just shut the border.
0:33:08 Some kind of massive immigration reform I think is unlikely.
0:33:15 It’s a very complicated issue in which everybody has different objections to different problems.
0:33:19 Trump doesn’t seem to enjoy doing big compromise legislation.
0:33:21 It’s politically unsatisfying.
0:33:25 So what he’s going to end up just trying to do is the border stuff and shut it down.
0:33:29 The deportations are the most interesting issues.
0:33:34 His people like Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy have even said we are going to deport 24 million
0:33:36 people.
0:33:40 If you start to try to do that, the scale of it is so breathtaking.
0:33:44 The use of police power you would need is so large and the economic effects would be
0:33:50 so negative that you wonder whether Trump will do it because he doesn’t like bad headlines.
0:33:55 All his Wall Street friends whom he still talks to and admires are going to tell him
0:33:57 this is bad.
0:34:00 This is one of the tightest labor markets in 50 years.
0:34:05 Even deporting two or three million people would probably spike inflation.
0:34:08 It would probably cause enormous economic dislocation.
0:34:11 To me, that’s going to be the bright line.
0:34:12 He has promised.
0:34:13 This is not Vance.
0:34:14 This is not Ramaswamy.
0:34:17 He has promised the largest deportation in American history.
0:34:20 He’s going to have to do something big.
0:34:24 One could imagine that he could pick a place, let’s say it’s New York or California, places
0:34:29 that voted against him and say, okay, let’s start New York City and let’s send in the
0:34:33 military and let’s deport everyone that’s not here legally.
0:34:35 How would you see that playing out?
0:34:38 Let’s say that armed forces are sent to New York City.
0:34:40 What options would the mayor have?
0:34:42 What options would the governor have?
0:34:47 We haven’t been in this situation since the late ’50s and the early ’60s when governors
0:34:53 like George Wallace would talk about interposition and nullification, essentially saying that
0:34:58 the states had the ability or the authority to resist federal police power.
0:35:01 I think it would be very hard to resist federal authority on this.
0:35:03 The civil rights era settled that issue.
0:35:06 The federal government does trump the states.
0:35:07 The challenge remains.
0:35:10 It is hugely economically disruptive.
0:35:15 So even if you pick New York and California, remember these are the two most vibrant economic
0:35:20 centers of the country and it’s going to have a spillover economically.
0:35:24 Tell me what you think the second Trump administration looks like.
0:35:29 It strikes me that there is a totally different vibe around the incoming administration than
0:35:30 there was in 2016.
0:35:33 The shock was much greater back then.
0:35:36 One of the biggest complaints was that the administration was just not professionally
0:35:41 run, that Trump didn’t act like a president, which maybe some of his supporters like, but
0:35:43 most of his staff did not like.
0:35:47 It was just chaotic and there was all kinds of infighting and firings and just a lack
0:35:50 of ability to move the machinery in Washington.
0:35:53 I wonder if you think it’ll be substantially different this time.
0:35:58 The first term was unusual in that first he didn’t expect to win.
0:36:02 They come to it very quickly without a lot of planning.
0:36:03 He makes two or three decisions.
0:36:07 One is to go along with the Republican establishment in many ways.
0:36:12 So the legislative priorities were largely those that were outlined by Mitch McConnell
0:36:13 and Paul Ryan.
0:36:14 And what were those?
0:36:20 That was to prioritize tax cuts and repeal of Armacare over things like infrastructure,
0:36:23 which Trump had been more in favor of.
0:36:28 The second is to use the Republican establishment to staff the administration.
0:36:33 If you remember, his first chief of staff was Rens Priebus, the chairman of the RNC,
0:36:35 who he barely knew.
0:36:39 Then finally, you notice he loved generals and so he appointed lots of generals.
0:36:43 So I suspect all three of those things are not going to happen anymore.
0:36:48 The priorities are going to be determined by Trump and his hardcore group of advisors.
0:36:53 They are not going to rely on the Republican establishment very much and he doesn’t like
0:36:58 generals anymore because he realized that the generals push came to shove were more loyal
0:37:03 to the Constitution than to him personally and for Trump, nothing is worse than disloyalty.
0:37:10 So I think what you’re going to see is a much more intense ideological vetting and personal
0:37:12 loyalty test.
0:37:18 You see this being in some ways a more typical administration or do you see Trump believing
0:37:24 he has a mandate to do exactly what Trump wants to do will be even more unorthodox?
0:37:26 I suspect it’ll run better.
0:37:31 A lot of the tension came from Trump giving orders that people would try to undermine
0:37:33 because they disagreed with them.
0:37:38 My guess is he’s going to have people around him who agree with him more, who will willingly
0:37:39 carry out those orders.
0:37:45 I mean, he’s always run a small mom and pop real estate operation and he approaches everything
0:37:50 like that so that he can change his mind and he can go off script.
0:37:55 I don’t think that’s going to change that much.
0:38:00 Donald Trump, especially when he’s campaigning, says a lot of things that he later says he
0:38:01 didn’t really mean.
0:38:08 This is part of what he calls his weave, part insult comedy, part braggadocio, part old-fashioned
0:38:10 sloganeering.
0:38:14 It all adds up to a highly unpredictable mode of communication.
0:38:20 So how will this kind of communication go over on the global stage in Donald Trump’s
0:38:21 second term?
0:38:28 If the U.S. walks away and disengages from the world, we will quite possibly return to
0:38:31 a world of realpolitik and the law of the jungle.
0:38:32 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:38:34 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:38:44 We’re speaking with Fareed Zakaria and we’ll be right back.
0:38:50 So far, we’ve been speaking with Fareed Zakaria mostly about the election outcomes and what
0:38:53 a second Trump term might mean domestically.
0:38:57 But Zakaria’s deepest expertise is geopolitics.
0:39:02 In a recent Washington Post column, he argued that the world is facing “the most dangerous
0:39:05 moment since the Cold War.”
0:39:10 As tensions spiral in the Middle East, he writes, “Keep in mind that this is only one
0:39:16 of three arenas in the world where revisionists are trying to upend the international order.
0:39:23 In Europe, a war continues to rage and in Asia, a perilous new dynamic is at work.”
0:39:30 So I asked Zakaria why he sees so much danger in this moment and how Donald Trump may intersect
0:39:32 with that danger.
0:39:38 If you step back, the world we’ve lived in for the last 75 years is a world system that
0:39:43 was largely created by the United States after 1945.
0:39:48 And it has, as the institutional architecture of it, the UN and the World Bank and the IMF.
0:39:55 But what it really is, is a kind of open world economy, rules-based system, some concern
0:40:00 to norms like no acquisition of territory by force.
0:40:03 And largely speaking, these norms have helped.
0:40:07 There aren’t a lot of cases of aggression in which land was acquired, absorbed into a
0:40:12 new country, and it was ratified by international law.
0:40:15 If you look before 1945, that happened every year.
0:40:20 So it’s a world that is distinctly different from the one we’ve lived in for many, many
0:40:21 centuries.
0:40:24 It’s largely the creation of the United States.
0:40:30 It’s one that has produced peace and prosperity on a scale unimaginable, I think.
0:40:35 And it is now threatened because of, in some sense, waning American power and waning American
0:40:39 willingness to be the underwriter of this world.
0:40:44 And so you see Russia mounting a classic military aggression in Europe.
0:40:50 You see Iran in its own way trying through asymmetrical means using all these militia
0:40:56 groups to upend the security system there that is largely American-created with the
0:41:00 moderate Arabs and Israel playing the role of regional policemen.
0:41:05 And in Asia, China slowly but steadily trying to replace the United States as the dominant
0:41:06 power.
0:41:11 Now, Trump will react to each one of them in an ad hoc manner in some ways perfectly
0:41:13 fine and other ways probably not.
0:41:18 But what I worry about is that he doesn’t understand the larger picture, which is that
0:41:24 the United States really has created a new world, that that world has been largely beneficial
0:41:28 to the United States and enormously beneficial to the rest of the world, and that there are
0:41:33 huge stakes here that if the US walks away and disengages from the world and retreats
0:41:39 to isolationism, nobody can fill that role and that this world is not natural and self-sustaining
0:41:45 and that we will quite possibly return to a kind of 19th century world of realpolitik
0:41:47 and the law of the jungle.
0:41:50 That’s not in America’s interest and that’s not in the world’s interest.
0:41:56 I don’t think Trump hears the music on that because from his first full-page ad in the
0:42:02 New York Times when he was a real estate developer, he was just berating the Japanese for taking
0:42:08 advantages economically, berating the Europeans for free riding on American security.
0:42:14 He’s always looked at that world and said, “All our allies are ripping us off.”
0:42:20 So if he brings to it that mentality, I worry that we’re in a situation where this whole
0:42:23 world order can unravel very quickly.
0:42:25 Let’s go through some countries one at a time.
0:42:32 Let’s start with Russia, a big one, a problematic one, one in a war right now with Ukraine.
0:42:38 We’ve learned about Trump having several private phone calls with Putin since leaving office.
0:42:41 It’s also been reported in the Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk, a Trump ally, has
0:42:44 also been in regular contact with Putin.
0:42:49 How do you see the shape of the U.S.-Russia relationship moving in the next year or two?
0:42:52 Clearly Trump has a soft spot for Putin.
0:42:57 I think it’s probably just he likes strong men, he admires what Putin has done and what
0:43:02 worries me about that is not that he’ll try to do a deal on the Ukraine war.
0:43:03 I think there’s a deal to be had.
0:43:07 I think it is time to find a way to end the hostilities.
0:43:13 The problem is the easiest way to do that would be to force Ukraine to accept Russia’s
0:43:18 terms and therefore effectively lose its independence.
0:43:23 So Trump could easily go to Zelensky and say, “Look, here are my terms, which are not that
0:43:28 different from Putin’s terms, you accept these or we stop sending you weapons.”
0:43:34 It’s very difficult to see how Zelensky can resist American pressure.
0:43:40 What you end up with then is a morally bankrupt piece, which is really just a Ukrainian and
0:43:42 Western surrender to Russia.
0:43:48 Putin is able to be victorious, that norm of no aggression is destroyed.
0:43:53 But more importantly, it still leaves Europe deeply unstable because all the countries
0:43:57 around Ukraine are going to be scared and nervous and insecure and Ukraine itself will
0:44:03 largely implode because unless you have a security guarantee that comes along with the
0:44:09 end of the war, the Russians are just going to wait and even if they don’t come back in,
0:44:13 they will be able to exercise leverage by wielding that threat.
0:44:17 So Ukraine becomes a basket case, Eastern Europe becomes insecure.
0:44:19 It’s a terrible idea.
0:44:24 And the most worrying part about it is JD Vance outlined a version of a peace deal and was
0:44:26 essentially Putin’s peace deal.
0:44:30 It was in fact a version of the deal Putin has put on the table in quote unquote peace
0:44:33 negotiations in Turkey.
0:44:35 Let’s move to the side of a couple other wars.
0:44:40 Israel is still fighting a war in Gaza, fighting kind of a war in southern Lebanon.
0:44:45 How does the Trump election change those wars, but especially the relationship with Bibi
0:44:48 Netanyahu and Israel generally?
0:44:54 The truth is the Biden administration has been so supportive of Israel and so supportive
0:45:00 broadly speaking of Bibi Netanyahu that there isn’t going to be that much difference.
0:45:03 There isn’t that much more that Trump could do.
0:45:09 The Biden people tried to restrain Netanyahu in the manner in which he conducted the war
0:45:14 in Gaza, you know, don’t go into certain civilian areas, make sure you have provided
0:45:19 for humanitarian assistance and tents when you displace people.
0:45:23 But those were things, you know, kind of on the margins of the fundamental issues.
0:45:26 People say Trump will give a green light, but what would that mean?
0:45:31 Well, Trump has said he wants to make rescuing the Israeli hostage is a priority, for instance.
0:45:35 So theoretically that could lead to a different phase of the war in Gaza.
0:45:39 Ironically, the big obstacle to that has been Bibi Netanyahu.
0:45:42 All the people I’ve talked to who have been involved in these negotiations, including
0:45:48 the Qataris who have been brokering them, say that the big obstacle initially was Hamas,
0:45:52 but then Hamas came to agree to certain terms and then Bibi Netanyahu didn’t want to agree
0:45:58 to those terms because those terms would have probably enraged the two members of his government
0:46:01 who are on the far right and his government might have had to collapse.
0:46:07 And everything I read is that Netanyahu is prosecuting the war in this direction, mostly
0:46:08 out of self-preservation.
0:46:09 Do you buy that?
0:46:11 I think I bought it initially.
0:46:16 I think he has maneuvered so well and gotten lucky in Lebanon, but at this point his poll
0:46:18 numbers look very good.
0:46:23 He’s probably in a situation where he could actually even go to the polls and win.
0:46:28 Donald Trump will certainly give Bibi Netanyahu a green light to do whatever he wants to do
0:46:32 in Gaza, but honestly, there isn’t that much more to do.
0:46:38 75% of Gaza has been destroyed, Hamas’ leaders have been killed, Hamas’ infrastructure has
0:46:39 been decimated.
0:46:44 The interesting continuity you’re going to see, which I think is one that Biden and
0:46:49 Trump have both been comfortable with, is what Israel is doing in the north, the war
0:46:52 against Hezbollah and the attacks on Iran.
0:46:58 And there, I think the Israelis have very shrewdly and effectively re-established deterrence.
0:47:03 They were in a circumstance where Hezbollah was launching rockets at them, Israeli citizens
0:47:09 had to flee northern Israel, they worried about Iran unleashing its missiles.
0:47:14 And what the Israelis decided to do was to take this moment and really push back.
0:47:20 And what they found was Hezbollah was a paper tiger, Iran was a paper tiger, that Israel
0:47:23 is much, much more powerful than both of them.
0:47:26 I think it’s actually been a force for stability.
0:47:30 The Biden administration has supported it, the Trump administration will support it.
0:47:35 So I think what’s going on in the north is very different from the issue of Gaza, which
0:47:38 is more about what Israel does with the occupied territories.
0:47:42 Is there any possibility Palestinians get political rights?
0:47:46 That’s almost a separate issue, but in the north, just from a regional stability point
0:47:51 of view, I actually think what Israel has done has been remarkably effective.
0:47:54 Last time we spoke, I remember you talking about Iran, maybe not necessarily as a paper
0:48:00 tiger per se, but it’s certainly less wealthy, less influential than it likes to present
0:48:01 itself as.
0:48:05 On the other hand, the last few months I’ve been reading about how much money Iran has
0:48:09 been making by selling oil to China, for instance, in other ways.
0:48:15 So it seems like they are at least very well dug in to sustain the status quo for a long
0:48:20 time unless there’s unrest from within or from outside.
0:48:26 So Trump says that he’d like to exert what he calls maximum pressure on Iran.
0:48:32 I also have read that Iranian agents reportedly tried to assassinate Trump and given how any
0:48:37 of us might respond to that, you can imagine there’s a little bit of personal thinking going
0:48:38 on there.
0:48:43 So how aggressive do you think Trump is willing to be with both Iran as a potential nuclear
0:48:48 power itself, Iran as a spreader of terrorism through all these proxy groups that you’ve
0:48:52 been naming and some others, militias in Syria and Iraq and so on?
0:48:57 So Trump talks about a maximum pressure campaign on Iran, but the truth is the United States
0:49:02 has had a maximum pressure campaign on Iran for 35 years.
0:49:04 Iran is under crippling sanctions.
0:49:09 You can tell how badly Iran is doing when you notice that a year ago, the president
0:49:14 of Iran and the foreign minister died in a helicopter crash because they were flying
0:49:20 in a 1979 American Bell helicopter for which they didn’t have spare parts or maintenance.
0:49:24 That is the military hardware being used by the president of the country.
0:49:26 Imagine what the average soldier has.
0:49:31 Iran’s formal budget, which I believe is inflated because they want to buff their chests up.
0:49:35 I think the Israeli defense budget is three times the size of Iran’s budget.
0:49:40 Yes, Iran is an oil exporting country and as we learned with Russia, they’re never going
0:49:46 to go bankrupt because the world needs oil, but they are massively dysfunctional, corrupt.
0:49:51 If you look at their armed forces, they’ve been unable to achieve anything of any significance.
0:49:56 So I think that Iran is very much on the defensive and these latest Israeli strikes have rendered
0:50:01 them completely defenseless, literally, because what Israel did was they took out all their
0:50:03 air defenses.
0:50:04 Iran’s in a very weak position.
0:50:09 The question that Trump will face, I think, if we were to think about this seriously is,
0:50:11 do you want regime change in Iran?
0:50:16 Do you want to push for some kind of internal revolt and revolution?
0:50:18 We’ve tried that before.
0:50:19 We’ve tried that before.
0:50:23 We also know that regime change in the Middle East does not end well.
0:50:26 Think of Iraq, think of Libya, think of Syria.
0:50:32 These things are massively disruptive, chaotic, bloody, and often end up with results that
0:50:34 are worse than what you started with.
0:50:39 So I would caution against trying to do something like that partly because Iran is an oil-rich
0:50:40 country.
0:50:44 The regime has plenty of means of repression to stay in power.
0:50:48 If you don’t want to do that, to me, the intelligent way to think about Iran is keep the pressure
0:50:56 on, but also think about what incentives are you giving them for changes in behavior?
0:51:01 If you put a country in a box where the four walls are so tight and there’s no door out,
0:51:03 it has no incentive to change its behavior.
0:51:08 I’m not saying Iran would, but I’m saying any serious strategy has to have lots of sticks,
0:51:10 but also a few carrots.
0:51:15 And at this point, I don’t see where Iran is supposed to go.
0:51:16 Let’s move to China.
0:51:22 What should we expect now with Trump as president, especially given the pretty interesting relationship
0:51:25 he had with Xi in his first term?
0:51:27 Trump will almost certainly try to do something with China on tariffs.
0:51:32 He’s always viewed it as an economic predator state that takes advantage of America.
0:51:34 Some of what he says is true.
0:51:37 China would probably be more than happy to work out some deal.
0:51:42 He and Xi were able to have those kind of conversations, but Chinese like managed trade.
0:51:46 They like the idea that they can cut some kind of bilateral deal in which they reduce
0:51:49 some of their obstacles and return.
0:51:55 It’s difficult to tell with Trump how ideologically committed he is to a tough stance on China.
0:52:01 I suspect that you’re going to see a more workable relationship with China than people
0:52:05 imagine just listening to his ideology.
0:52:10 It’s because he’s practical, he listens to businessmen, and don’t forget the central
0:52:12 role of Elon Musk here.
0:52:18 Musk has really become such a central figure in the Trump world, and Elon Musk needs the
0:52:24 Chinese market for Tesla to succeed in becoming the most important car company in the world.
0:52:30 The way things stand now, there are all kinds of restrictions on what Tesla can do in China.
0:52:36 My guess is Musk is going to try to be a kind of intermediary between the U.S. and China,
0:52:38 and who knows, he might succeed.
0:52:44 With Trump, these things are so transactional, there’s so much personality involved.
0:52:50 It is possible to imagine that U.S.-China relations under Trump are actually less hostile
0:52:53 than they were under Joe Biden.
0:52:58 So let me ask you, there are a lot of people who voted Democrat this time around and are
0:53:02 very frustrated, some of them are frightened, a lot bitter.
0:53:08 I’ve read reports about how many people are planning or hoping to leave the U.S. for Canada
0:53:09 and other places.
0:53:13 Of course, you read that same story every time there is an election, especially when there’s
0:53:15 a conservative Republican elected.
0:53:21 If you could take a step back for people who didn’t vote for Trump, who don’t like Republican
0:53:25 consensus in Washington, what do you say to that population?
0:53:27 How do you see the next few years playing out?
0:53:32 I think when you have a high-stakes election where you have somebody who’s very much out
0:53:38 of the traditional mainstream getting elected, it’s understandable that there is a kind of
0:53:39 reaction.
0:53:41 It’s almost like a flight from reality.
0:53:47 It’s a desire to just avoid all that, to watch an old movie, to get away from it all, to
0:53:50 seek solace in your private life.
0:53:52 And I understand that reaction.
0:53:57 I think, first of all, it’s not going to be as bad as people think, in the sense that
0:54:00 this is a country with a lot of checks and balances.
0:54:02 You have three branches of government.
0:54:07 I understand they’re all under Republican control, but Mitch McConnell is not the same
0:54:09 as Donald Trump.
0:54:15 Secondly, you have institutions, you have bureaucracies, you have laws, you have rules.
0:54:19 These can’t all just be willy-nilly dispensed with.
0:54:24 You have courts, you have states, many of them Democratic states, and by the way, even
0:54:28 some Republican states that are not going to easily accept everything and anything.
0:54:32 And most of the things that you live with on a day-to-day basis are determined at the
0:54:33 state level.
0:54:39 So, Robert Kennedy might advise states to get rid of the fluoride in their water systems.
0:54:43 He can’t force New York City to take the fluoride out of its water system.
0:54:48 There are many, many more layers and checks and balances, and there will be a back and
0:54:49 forth.
0:54:53 But the biggest thing is you can’t take the attitude that you’re going to abandon the
0:54:56 country every time things don’t go your way.
0:54:59 Like Biden said, you can’t love your country only when you win.
0:55:01 But it’s more than that.
0:55:06 You have to be willing to stay and participate and engage in civic terms and fight the good
0:55:11 fight for the things you believe in and oppose the things you don’t believe in, because that’s
0:55:13 what makes democracy work.
0:55:17 In a sense, loving your country and believing in it and wanting all these good things for
0:55:22 it, mean that even more so when things haven’t gone your way in one election.
0:55:27 You have to stay to try to help keep the things you believe in alive.
0:55:28 I certainly have never…
0:55:30 You’re not moving to Canada.
0:55:33 I’ve never entertained those kind of fantasies.
0:55:34 First of all, I’m an immigrant.
0:55:35 I made my choice.
0:55:40 Secondly, with all its flaws, with all the problems, the United States is the most amazing
0:55:41 country in the world.
0:55:44 I mean, it’s economically the most dynamic.
0:55:47 It’s socially the most open.
0:55:49 It’s an amazing place.
0:55:54 You’re not going to keep it amazing and you’re not going to allow it to continue to maintain
0:55:56 this kind of exceptional quality it has.
0:56:05 If you leave or even if you retreat into private life, you have to stay engaged.
0:56:07 That was Fareed Zakaria.
0:56:08 You can find him on CNN.
0:56:10 The show is called GPS.
0:56:17 His most recent book is The Age of Revolutions and I’d like to thank him for this conversation.
0:56:21 It’s hard to think of any topic that’s gotten more coverage than this year’s election,
0:56:25 but I still walked away having learned a lot from Fareed.
0:56:30 If you feel the same way or if you didn’t, let us know.
0:56:34 Our email is radio@freakonomics.com and we love feedback.
0:56:41 Also, a reminder to come see Freakonomics Radio live in San Francisco on January 3rd
0:56:44 and in Los Angeles on February 13th.
0:56:48 For tickets, go to Freakonomics.com/LiveShows.
0:56:55 Meanwhile, coming up next time here on Freakonomics Radio, there is an annual event that is deeply
0:57:03 beloved that is witnessed in person by 3 million people and by many millions more on TV.
0:57:06 It’s an event that has become part of the fabric of America.
0:57:13 I’m talking about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and we got to wondering how much
0:57:15 it costs.
0:57:19 Why do I need to know how much lying can cost to produce?
0:57:22 We don’t really get into the cost.
0:57:24 I can’t tell you that, that’s…
0:57:31 Oh, I can’t say how much they pay, could try.
0:57:32 We tried to answer the question anyway.
0:57:39 The cost of the parade and how much it earns from that massive TV viewership.
0:57:45 We also got to wondering if, with traditional retail continuing to shrink, if maybe the
0:57:49 Macy’s Parade is more valuable than Macy’s.
0:57:52 Unfortunately, Macy’s doesn’t stand for anything today.
0:57:57 It’s the first in a two-part series called Can the Macy’s Parade Save Macy’s that’s
0:57:59 next time on the show.
0:58:06 Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too.
0:58:08 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:58:14 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at Freakonomics.com where we publish
0:58:16 transcripts and show notes.
0:58:19 This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs.
0:58:23 Our staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abelagi, Eleanor Osborn,
0:58:28 Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jason Gambrell,
0:58:33 Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarr’s Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas,
0:58:36 Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski.
0:58:39 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers.
0:58:41 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:58:45 As always, thanks for listening.
0:58:50 Lindsey Graham’s switch from being a Reagan Republican to a Trump Republican, it was
0:58:51 no sweat.
0:59:08 Lindsey Graham’s core belief is Lindsey Graham should be a senator.
0:59:12 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:59:20 [BLANK_AUDIO]
After a dramatic election, Donald Trump has returned from exile. We hear what to expect at home and abroad — and what to do if you didn’t vote for Trump.
SOURCE:
- Fareed Zakaria, journalist and author.
RESOURCES:
- “The Most Dangerous Moment Since the Cold War,” by Fareed Zakaria (The Washington Post, 2024).
- “America’s Failed Approach to Iran Can’t Really Be Called a Strategy,” by Fareed Zakaria (The Washington Post, 2024).
- Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, by Fareed Zakaria (2024).
EXTRAS:
- “Are We Living Through the Most Revolutionary Period in History?” by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
- “Are Private Equity Firms Plundering the U.S. Economy?” by Freakonomics Radio (2023).