AI transcript
0:00:06 Everything about music is secretly a story about technology, how we listen to it from vinyl
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0:00:18 how we discover it from music blogs to TikTok. All this month on The Vergecast, we’re telling
0:00:24 stories about those changes and how technological change changes not just the way we experience
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0:00:39 Hello. I’m coming to you on a Friday, which is an unusual thing to do, but this has been
0:00:45 an unusual week. I am still sifting through it, and I know many of you are as well.
0:00:51 You will hear some of my thoughts soon enough, I promise. But in the meantime,
0:00:57 my colleague Jacqueline Hill at Vox’s new podcast, Explain It To Me, has swooped in to help.
0:01:03 Her team got lots of listener questions in the aftermath of Trump’s win on Tuesday,
0:01:09 and she got some answers for them from the Vox reporters who know the most about why the outcome
0:01:17 was what it was and what it might mean. Things are a little unsettled, I get that, but information
0:01:23 is about the best thing we can offer, and JQ and our team have a lot they can tell you.
0:01:29 We’re dropping that episode here, and I hope it helps. See you back in the feed on Monday.
0:01:43 You’re listening to Explain It To Me. I’m Jacqueline Hill. Wow. What a week.
0:01:49 As I’m sure many of you know, Tuesday was election day, and I know that you know because
0:01:55 of the tons of questions we received from you. I’m talking about from all over the country and
0:02:01 throughout the entire voting process. Hey, my name is Luke. I’m from Michigan. My question is about
0:02:06 the election. I waffle between anxiety and trying to reassure myself that everything’s going to be
0:02:16 okay about this election. It’s kind of really boring to have our entire world descend on just
0:02:22 a few states, and it’s really frustrating to have people who are nothing like me don’t really
0:02:27 represent my beliefs have such a major sway in the decisions of this country.
0:02:32 People called in with questions about their results, about the aftermath,
0:02:37 and what it all means for the next four years. You also shared what you were experiencing
0:02:42 throughout the day. Here’s a call we got pretty early on from Ronan, who voted for the first time.
0:02:49 It is currently November 5th, and it is election day. I’m a student at Utah State University.
0:02:54 I’m a first time voter and a college student who isn’t committed to either party. Tonight,
0:03:00 I will be hosting an election party. I went and got some, some little flags and some materials
0:03:05 for that. I’ll be making some brownies and some cookies. So I’m really excited because I think
0:03:11 no matter what happens, to me, it’s a celebration that we’re seeing democracy happen in real time.
0:03:15 And that might just be the political science student in me, but I’m really excited about it.
0:03:21 And people kept checking in with questions and reflections throughout the night.
0:03:32 Time is 9 24 p.m. I just got home from working election day. This was my first election cycle
0:03:41 and election day working as a poll worker. And overall, it was fantastic. The people I met there,
0:03:47 they were the most professional, the kindest, the most polite people I’ve ever met.
0:03:58 There was one unpleasant experience during early voting. This lady commented, “Oh, you have really
0:04:05 beautiful dark hair. Where are you from? Are you from Knoxville?” And I said, “No, I’m from Venezuela.”
0:04:15 And as soon as I said that, her face got incredibly serious as if that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
0:04:21 And I just let her know, you know, when you’re done voting, there’s a scanner at the end of
0:04:26 the room. You can turn in your ballot there, right? I hope she had an okay rest of the day.
0:04:31 All right. Thank you for taking your time to listen to this. Bye.
0:04:39 Now, what was I up to? I spent election night at the office with my fellow Vox journalists.
0:04:43 I got there around six-ish. Most of my colleagues were already there,
0:04:47 gathered around the tacos we were having for dinner, plenty of soda,
0:04:52 a desperate and successful hunt for cold brew, and emergency energy drinks on deck.
0:04:58 There were also special appearances from a co-worker’s baby and another co-worker’s dog,
0:05:04 two very cute additions to the evening. And I should say, the thing about election night in DC
0:05:10 is that people really let their nerd flags fly. On my way in, I saw people headed to bars for
0:05:16 results, watch parties, and I even ran into a DJ dressed as Steve Kornacki. For a lot of us,
0:05:22 it was a long night. I’m sure it was a long night for many of you too. In fact, I know it was because
0:05:28 the questions kept rolling in. I had so many questions about elections. First of all,
0:05:35 every time election comes, my question about the election results revolves around how various
0:05:40 demographics voted in this election and last night in the years. As the night wore on, the questions
0:05:48 started to change. I just wanted to call and ask, how are those Democrats feeling right now?
0:05:58 I bet they’re crying, huh? I bet they’re crying, huh? Trump 2024. With all of the stress and
0:06:04 disappointments that came with the election results this year, something that’s been going
0:06:09 through my mind is, when will America be ready for a woman to lead the country?
0:06:16 My name is Blake from Florida. My question about the election, seeing that Donald Trump has won,
0:06:19 so what’s going to happen with all of those indictments?
0:06:25 I am also curious about women’s reproductive rights. This was a huge issue for me when I
0:06:32 went into the polls this year. And so I’m curious how much this is really going to impact things
0:06:37 from where they are today. And when all was said and almost done, the questions we got
0:06:44 kind of fell into a few themes. What just happened? Why did it happen? And what’s going to happen next?
0:06:50 And so today, we check in with our colleagues who cover Republicans, Democrats, and the courts,
0:06:54 and we bring them your questions. That’s today on Explain It To Me.
0:07:07 Hi, Christian. It is the day after the election. It’s actually 3.42 p.m. on Wednesday. And I haven’t
0:07:15 seen you in, I don’t know, a few hours. I’m sure it was all a blur. How are you doing today? It
0:07:20 feels like we have come a long way from Tuesday night’s tacos. Yeah, we have come a long way.
0:07:29 I might sound similarly delirious. It’s pretty astounding what happened.
0:07:34 Yeah. So the first set of questions from our listeners can kind of all be boiled down to
0:07:40 what exactly happened this week in the clear light of the morning, or I guess the mid-late
0:07:48 afternoon. What are your takeaways? Yeah, the big takeaway obviously is just that this is a country
0:07:55 that was ready to issue a very stunning rebuke to Democrats, and specifically to Vice President
0:08:02 Harris and President Joe Biden. So top line, we saw red shifts in counties across the country.
0:08:11 Almost, I’m pretty sure no state was more liberal than in 2020. It’s almost impossible to talk about
0:08:19 what’s happening among subsects of the electorate without acknowledging that just across every
0:08:26 kind of category of voter, there was a shift to the right. And I can say very clearly now,
0:08:33 like one of the more interesting things that we saw last night, pretty early on, was places that
0:08:40 were Republican were getting more Republican. Places that were Democratic like urban centers
0:08:45 were not as Democratic as they might be expected to be. And the suburbs,
0:08:52 which have been making a slow shift toward Democrats since 2016, did not continue that
0:08:58 leftward drift to the degree that Democrats need in order to win some of these important races.
0:09:02 What surprised you the most about last night’s results?
0:09:08 I wasn’t expecting so many primarily Hispanic counties to flip so early or to flip to the
0:09:14 degree that they did. There’s been a lot of talk this election about the shifting electorate,
0:09:19 you know, how Trump was picking up support among Black men and Latino voters. And we
0:09:24 got some questions about that. Hi, everybody. This is Barton from Ann Arbor, Michigan. And my
0:09:32 question is, they’re saying that among Black men and among women and among Latino voters,
0:09:42 there’s a big surge in support for Trump. And my only question is, why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
0:09:50 Hi, John Cohen. This is Nicole. Last night, the media was heavily covering how Black men
0:09:57 were voting in battleground states. And I’m just curious if you could explain whether it did or
0:10:03 could have affected the election results. This question was in the air, I think. Here’s something
0:10:09 from the news. Well, votes are still pouring in, still being counted, but still a little too early
0:10:15 to tell exactly which minority will be the scapegoat in this election. But the night is young.
0:10:19 Plenty of groups are still out there. You have young voters, old voters, Asian voters all
0:10:24 still in play. Muslims, Cubans, certainly the list goes on. And some minority will be to blame
0:10:31 tonight. Okay. That last one was from The Onion, I will admit. So the fake newscaster said that
0:10:37 we’re definitely going to have a minority group to use as a scapegoat. Tell me again why the
0:10:43 scapegroup shouldn’t be the majority, why it tends to go towards those smaller groups.
0:10:48 Yeah. So I think there are two reasons. One, there are some assumptions already baked in about the
0:10:53 way that the majority is going to work, white voters. And so there’s a little bit less of a
0:10:59 shock perhaps at the same time, because some of these shifts among non-white voters, among the
0:11:06 minority, feel so novel. They feel so different. They feel so new, even though this is now what the
0:11:10 second time that we’ve seen Trump overperform with these groups of voters.
0:11:15 Is it too soon to find explanations for what’s happening? Like what do we know so far?
0:11:21 So we do know a few things. First thing is that turnout did not seem to be like an issue.
0:11:28 Turnout was pretty high this election. Turnout in battleground states was pretty high,
0:11:33 which in the past has usually meant pretty good things for Democrats, right? One of the easy
0:11:39 explanations in past cycles for why Democrats underperform is, oh, well, the base just didn’t
0:11:43 come out. Black voters didn’t turn out in urban centers. That doesn’t seem like it’s
0:11:47 going to be a pretty good explanation, because what we’re seeing is that those urban centers
0:11:52 shifted to the right. Conclusion is that lots of these places either did not continue their shift
0:11:57 to the left, like in the suburbs, or did by small amount. But we can also look at counties that have
0:12:04 large populations of voters of color, of non-white voters, and using that we can make comparisons
0:12:10 to 2020. Looking at South Texas, where we saw a shift in Hispanic and Latino, primarily Mexican
0:12:16 American and Tejanos, toward Trump in 2020, we can make a pretty easy determination that something
0:12:22 happened in Texas, because those counties that were drifting toward Trump either flipped,
0:12:28 or if they had voted for Trump in the last election, voted for Trump by a larger margin this time around.
0:12:36 Why are people asking about these specific groups? I think of pollsters, I think even in the
0:12:42 aftermath, there’s all this talk on voters of color, these people who don’t make up the majority.
0:12:47 But a lot of this is, it’s about blame. It’s about like, okay, who do we blame?
0:12:54 And it feels like the first place people point their fingers are to people of color,
0:13:03 even though a little over 75% of people in the United States are white. And I should point out,
0:13:07 we did not get any questions about what’s up with the white people who vote for Trump.
0:13:15 Why aren’t we necessarily seeing people parse out that part of the electorate as much as these
0:13:20 smaller groups of people? I think there will be some analysis that remains to be done as we get
0:13:24 better and better data, and more votes are counted, because white voters, as you said,
0:13:28 and in many of these American states as well as nationally, any kind of small shift just because
0:13:35 of how large that group is, is like, orders of magnitude more to affect the overall result
0:13:41 in a state than any kind of big shift happening among non-white voters. That’s true in Pennsylvania,
0:13:45 for example, where counties and areas that have large Puerto Rican populations that might have
0:13:52 shifted toward Republicans. But overall, there was just more underperformance among white voters
0:13:57 there that even if you were to subtract those gains from non-white voters, the state still
0:14:01 would have gone in the Republican direction because of Trump overperforming with white voters
0:14:08 in Pennsylvania. There’s still this assumption for so long, I’ve written about this a bunch,
0:14:15 we’ve talked about this, this assumption that a diversifying America would inevitably lead to
0:14:22 just progressive or liberal or Democratic dominance, regardless of other factors,
0:14:27 which once again, keeps being proven wrong and wrong. In fact, we’re probably seeing,
0:14:31 because of just how Republican the swing of the country was in general,
0:14:38 that this election will be one where racial polarization decreases, where especially among
0:14:44 Latino voters, they voted similarly or in the similar swing as white voters. But I think what
0:14:50 we’ll see is that this overall swing happened. I mean, Democrats got the turnout they wanted,
0:14:54 but it turns out that the voters that were turning out just didn’t want to vote for Democrat.
0:14:59 Okay, there is something that I’ve been paying attention to in politics,
0:15:05 and that’s the way people of color have often been grouped into one category.
0:15:12 And we aren’t all the same, like a black person and a Hispanic person and an Asian person,
0:15:16 we are not the same, we have different experiences, we are able to assimilate to different degrees,
0:15:23 if at all. Are we going to start seeing an end of POC as a political coalition?
0:15:26 Because I admit, I tire when people say people of color, and I’m like, “Do you mean black?”
0:15:31 Because sometimes they mean black, and sometimes they mean any other thing. Are we going to stop
0:15:37 seeing people talk about these groups of voters, like all together, and start seeing people discuss
0:15:43 us, I guess, more individually? Yeah, do you remember BIPOC? Oh my gosh, BIPOC. You cannot
0:15:48 tell me that that is not a bisexual person of color. So much fraught identity.
0:15:54 Right, this is the thing with identity is it’s complicated and it’s messy, and that’s why I get
0:16:00 the urge to use people of color, non-white voter, right? It’s a broad enough term to include as many
0:16:09 people, but is it too broad in terms of usefulness in politics? But there’s so much diversity that
0:16:16 underlies any one of the communities that makes up person of color, and so I do wonder how useful
0:16:21 it’ll continue to be, especially as there were some shifts potentially this year, maybe not
0:16:28 as dramatic as the polling suggested among black voters. But black voters’ behavior in this election
0:16:36 was very different from the behavior of Hispanic and Latino voters. One group still gave Democrats
0:16:42 a huge margin of support. The other looks more and more like a swing group. So there was something
0:16:51 in the water that people were just rearing to punish the incumbents. So there’s an aspect of
0:16:57 the incumbency problem now, maybe it’s no longer an advantage, like we thought in political science.
0:17:05 There’s the fact that if we’re to believe the exit polls, so have you copied out there, and then
0:17:13 the issues just did not break in Harris’ favor. So there’s definitely the economic kitchen table
0:17:18 issues that propelled a lot of this anger, but then even on some of the social issues,
0:17:25 some of these surveys are telling us that there was frustration about immigration,
0:17:32 there was frustration about gender and sexuality, which does lead to this idea of
0:17:42 something is a mess. There’s some kind of beyond just the kitchen table issues. There’s some kind
0:17:48 of other ideological aspect here. I’m curious, we got a question from Instagram. What’s next for
0:17:54 Democrats? Do they shift further left or further right? What’s next for them? The assumption is that
0:17:59 the lesson here will be they have to move to the right, that they have to move toward the center
0:18:03 to become more moderate. And there is a good criticism to be made that that tends to be the
0:18:08 lesson the Democrats get after every election. There’s maybe some social issues, some economic
0:18:13 issues on which a more progressive or a more populist stance were okay with the electorate,
0:18:20 but then you see other shifts like California deciding to implement stricter sentencing requirements
0:18:26 in the state. So there’s a mixed bag there of just what is it that the electorate wants? Is this
0:18:31 just a complete rebuke of progressivism and a complete rebuke of liberal politics? Is the solution
0:18:37 to move to the center? Yeah, we got another question from a Vox reader who wants to know,
0:18:43 do you think Harris underperformed or Trump overperformed? Can we even know that yet?
0:18:50 Yeah, it’s going to be hard to make a definitive statement. I will say that red shift makes me
0:18:57 think Trump overperformed. He did really well in rural regions. He did shockingly well in urban
0:19:06 places. On the Harris side, I don’t know that she underperformed. My whole take there is,
0:19:14 and this is kind of boring, there are complications to this, but every indicator pointed to
0:19:19 a landslide loss like more registered Republicans or self-identified Republicans in national
0:19:27 surveys, big discontentment with Joe Biden, Republican advantages on two of the top three
0:19:33 issues for voters, the economy and immigration, only abortion rights were a spot where Democrats
0:19:40 had an advantage, and then the just overall global trend that we’re seeing across democracies in
0:19:46 general, which is a COVID hangover, frustration at the way that the pandemic was managed by parties
0:19:53 that were in control, and then further frustration with the ensuing rise in inflation and cost of
0:19:59 goods. Parties in power were punished across the world this year, and Canada seems like it’ll be
0:20:07 next year. So you came to this call kind of bummed out, burned out. I know we are running on … We’ve
0:20:16 had so much coffee in the last 48 hours. What is the silver lining? I think what I’m perhaps most
0:20:28 optimistic about … That’s so real. What I’m most optimistic about is that Reputation Taylor’s
0:20:35 version is still going to come out. Christian Paz, thank you so much for joining us on Explain
0:20:41 It To Me, and helping us parse all of this out in the chaotic days after the election.
0:20:47 Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I hope you get to take a nap today. First, I’m going to need a
0:20:57 drink. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Maybe a cigarette. We’ll see. Yeah. Vice time. Vice time. Oh no, we’re Vox. Vox time.
0:21:07 Oh God, I missed the Harris speech. Oh God.
0:21:19 Vox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zell.
0:21:26 When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of
0:21:30 somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle
0:21:37 of the night, and honestly, that’s not what it is anymore. That’s Ian Mitchell, a banker-turned-fraud
0:21:43 fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists,
0:21:50 and they’re making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It’s mind-blowing
0:21:57 to see the kind of infrastructure that’s been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are
0:22:02 hundreds if not thousands of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business
0:22:07 people. These are organized criminal rings, and so once we understand the magnitude of this problem,
0:22:14 we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam
0:22:20 victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best
0:22:26 defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around
0:22:31 what do you do if you have text messages you don’t recognize? What do you do if you start getting
0:22:36 asked to send information that’s more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness,
0:22:40 a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim, and we have these conversations all the time.
0:22:46 So we are all at risk, and we all need to work together to protect each other.
0:22:53 Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com/zel. And when using digital payment platforms,
0:22:57 remember to only send money to people you know and trust.
0:23:03 Hi, Vox. Explain it to me. My name is Katie, and I have a question.
0:23:09 So even before results came in on election night, you all sit in lots of questions about
0:23:18 a specific topic. Why is Trump not in jail? President-elect Donald Trump and the law.
0:23:27 After being convicted of a ton of felonies, he’s just a convicted felon running around.
0:23:34 Like, why does this happen? Later in the night, another listener, my name’s Blake from Florida,
0:23:38 sent in a question about the courts that I’ve been wondering about since election night.
0:23:42 Seeing that Donald Trump has won, so what’s going to happen with all of those indictments
0:23:49 that feels like all of them were pushed to just after the election? And there’s this window now
0:23:54 between now and then when he’s actually inaugurated. Can any of those be expedited?
0:24:01 It feels like he committed crimes. We see that. He was able to somehow stall it,
0:24:07 and it seems bad. And in a just world, this would have been taking caros a lot earlier,
0:24:11 as opposed to letting it be something that could be kicked down the road. So thanks so much. Goodbye.
0:24:17 There’s an old legal principle. You don’t kick Superman in the balls.
0:24:21 For answers, I caught up with Vox’s senior correspondent and Supreme Court interpreter
0:24:25 Ian Milheiser for a speed round of court questions.
0:24:33 Is there some possibility that Donald Trump could spend some portion of the lame duck
0:24:40 period in jail? I mean, I’m a good enough lawyer that I could come up with an argument for why
0:24:52 that is permissible, but come on. I just think it would be unimaginably foolish to further antagonize
0:24:59 this man in this way before he becomes the most powerful man in the world at this specific moment
0:25:07 in history. So Trump has quite a few criminal cases, lots of charges. I want to talk a little
0:25:12 bit about something that Blake talked about in his questions, and that’s the president-elect
0:25:18 being able to somehow stall these cases. Can we take a step back and review all these criminal
0:25:25 cases against Trump? Give us a quick refresher on what those cases are and why each case hasn’t
0:25:31 resulted in any real consequences. So there are four cases, and each one is stalled for different
0:25:39 reasons. So, you know, the Georgia case. The Georgia case arises out of Trump’s election
0:25:45 of theft attempts. Like, you might remember the phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary
0:25:50 of State Brad Raffensperger. The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry.
0:25:57 Where he told Brad Raffensperger to try to find votes. All I want to do is this. I just want to find
0:26:08 11,780 votes. However many he needed in order to overturn the result in Georgia in 2020.
0:26:13 And there’s several reasons why that case was never likely to move forward before the election.
0:26:18 One was that they didn’t just indict Trump. They indicted all of his co-conspirators.
0:26:23 And so it was just a really complex case with, like, all sorts of normal legitimate reasons.
0:26:29 Why would take a long time to bring that to trial? The other problem there. The prosecutor didn’t
0:26:37 keep her damn pants on. Dang. The district attorney in that case had an affair with the
0:26:44 gentleman that she hired to be the lead prosecutor. And, like, my God, just a general
0:26:51 bit of legal ethical advice I will give is that if you are prosecuting one of the most important
0:27:00 cases in American history, maybe just quietly let the sexual tension build until the trial is over.
0:27:08 In the one about the documents where he just kept a bunch of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
0:27:13 This may be the most politically explosive raid ever undertaken by the FBI.
0:27:19 The FBI executing a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida.
0:27:23 The reason why that one’s been strung out can be summarized in two words, Eileen Cannon.
0:27:29 You know, he’s got a judge who’s basically on his side and who has gone out of her way
0:27:34 to do favors for him. The judge who threw out Donald Trump’s classified documents case
0:27:39 is now on a list of potential candidates to be attorney general if Trump wins.
0:27:45 The New York case where he has been convicted, this involves the least significant charges.
0:27:51 He was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to cover up the fact
0:27:55 that he paid hush money to the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels.
0:28:08 And what happened there was Trump just asked that the sentencing be delayed till after the
0:28:14 election. The judge didn’t want to interfere with the election and so he said fine, the prosecutors
0:28:19 didn’t oppose that motion. So everyone just sort of agreed like, look, let’s wait till after the
0:28:25 election before we resolve this. And then that leads one other case, the DC case.
0:28:29 The former president did just land here at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC.
0:28:34 And remember, this is a four count indictment of the former president of the United States,
0:28:40 all in the context of the former president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
0:28:43 The main reason it’s delayed is because it went up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court sat on
0:28:47 it for a really long time and then they held that he has really brought immunity.
0:28:53 The Supreme Court ruled former President Donald Trump does have immunity for some of his alleged
0:28:57 conduct as president in his federal election interference case.
0:29:01 Ian, you mentioned the Supreme Court immunity ruling that came down this past summer.
0:29:06 We’ve actually gotten some questions about what the Supreme Court’s role in all of these cases
0:29:12 against Trump is. Hey, John Cullen, Alexa here. I have a couple of questions. The biggest one being
0:29:18 the broad immunity decision. And I wonder what that means with Trump now in office and would
0:29:21 love to know more about how much the broad immunity decision really changes the scope
0:29:26 of presidential power. Yeah. Tell us about that Supreme Court ruling, which was really the head
0:29:33 liner out of the courts last term. What did that decision change and how could it play into a second
0:29:40 term for Trump or, you know, any presidency after this? So there’s a long standing rule that
0:29:47 certain high ranking government officials, including the president, prosecutors and judges,
0:29:54 cannot have civil lawsuits brought against them for like stuff that they do in the course of
0:30:00 their official duties. And I mean, there’s a pretty basic reason for that, which is that anyone can
0:30:06 file a civil lawsuit. There was a fear that, you know, those individuals would just be ground down
0:30:10 by a bunch of lawsuits that they’d have to defend against, they’d have to pay lawyers from, and it
0:30:16 would discourage them from performing their jobs or even wanting to have their jobs. So that principle
0:30:23 is long standing. The idea that the president is immune from criminal charges, at least after
0:30:29 they leave office, is completely novel and was made up by this Supreme Court. In the past, the
0:30:38 reason why this issue never came up, like most presidents just tried to comply with the criminal
0:30:44 law. And I mean, like the one thing that is clear about Donald Trump is that he thinks he can get
0:30:51 away with everything and thus far he has. And so I think that the Trump immunity decision makes a
0:30:58 second Trump presidency very dangerous, because he now knows for sure that there’ll be no consequences
0:31:06 for anything that he does. Okay, so I would love for you to bring out your crystal ball. You know,
0:31:12 we are going to look into the future. We’re going to pull that so Raven. The Supreme Court’s played
0:31:17 a really big role in shielding Trump from some of these charges through this immunity ruling.
0:31:23 It seems like most of the charges will likely go away anyway with his reelection. So
0:31:31 how will the decision affect his next term and, you know, even beyond these next four years?
0:31:36 I mean, I think they will give him a complete blanket immunity from criminal charges while he
0:31:41 is the sitting president of the United States. And I kind of think that’s the right answer as a
0:31:48 matter of law. I’m not at all sympathetic to Donald Trump, but like imagine if say,
0:31:55 Ron DeSantis’s Florida had decided to harass Biden with criminal charges, or if the state of
0:32:01 Mississippi had decided to bring fake charges against Lyndon Johnson after Lyndon Johnson signed
0:32:05 the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. There’s lots of reasons why you don’t want an
0:32:12 individual state to debilitate the president in that way. And so I think the constitutional
0:32:17 arguments against pursuing a criminal trial against a sitting president are very strong.
0:32:24 The question is like, could the charges then be revived after he leaves office? I can’t think
0:32:30 of any good legal reason why they couldn’t be revived. But by the time we would get around
0:32:36 to convicting him after he has served and then he’s an 82-year-old man, like I’m very doubtful
0:32:44 that there is still going to be the political will four years from now. But it’s such an unprecedented
0:32:49 set of circumstances that I think that’s a question we answer four years from now.
0:32:56 So one of the things that I really enjoy, and maybe enjoy is the wrong word, but one of the
0:33:02 things that I appreciate about when we are both in the office at the same time is that we, you know,
0:33:08 with clear eyes can think about the worst case scenarios for democracy together. And you know,
0:33:12 we got a pretty do-me-question and I want to play it for you.
0:33:17 Hey, my name is Luke. I’m from Michigan. I waffle between anxiety and trying to reassure
0:33:23 myself that everything is going to be okay. I’m not a Trump fan and I do think he’ll be horrible
0:33:30 for democracy. But the main question is, what can I do for the next four years to ensure that he
0:33:36 does not hold on to power, to hang on to power indefinitely? How can I prevent that from happening?
0:33:45 I mean, I think that’s a difficult question. We have a constitutional system that lays out
0:33:53 very clear processes by which you can weaken the incumbent party. The next major roadblock
0:33:57 where Donald Trump’s climb to power can be stopped is the midterm election.
0:34:02 You know, among other things in the midterm election, it might be possible for Democrats to
0:34:07 take the Senate. And once they take the Senate, that means they can stop all Trump judicial
0:34:13 confirmations. You know, no more people getting on the Supreme Court saying that Donald Trump’s
0:34:18 allowed to do crimes while he’s in office. Like, that is the biggest thing that could happen to
0:34:23 try to halt this man’s rise to power, electing a Congress that will check this man.
0:34:29 What outstanding questions do you have right now? We’re going to talk to some other people
0:34:32 in our newsroom. Is there anything you want to know from them?
0:34:40 I mean, the biggest question that I have is just how aggressive is Donald Trump going to be? Like,
0:34:45 is he actually going to bring criminal charges against his political rivals? Is he actually
0:34:51 going to be able to round up the millions and millions of undocumented immigrants who live
0:34:56 in the United States and find a way to deport all of them? And so the question I have is, I mean,
0:35:01 I don’t know which of the specific things that Donald Trump has said he wants to do are actually
0:35:08 going to get done. After the break, I call up a colleague who’s looked into just that.
0:35:14 So hugely important. I think it’s the story right now. A lot of people are going to focus
0:35:18 on the politics for understandable reasons, but the policy is the thing that’s going to govern
0:35:22 all of our lives for the next four years. And it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary
0:35:30 Trump’s policy agenda is. Stay with us.
0:35:39 We’re back. You’re listening to Explain It to Me. Before the break, I talked with my
0:35:44 colleague Ian about the courts and a second Trump presidency. What Ian wants to know is if
0:35:49 Trump will follow through on all those campaign promises he made. Lucky for us, we have another
0:35:53 co-worker who has thoughts on that. And he was also in the office on election night.
0:36:00 Zach Beecham, I’m a senior correspondent here at Vox. It is 9.09 p.m. on the east coast.
0:36:07 So like everybody else, I’m watching those seven key swing states, right? And we’re all trying to
0:36:11 see how they’re fitting in with each other. And as we speak right now, most of them don’t have
0:36:16 sufficient data for us to be really confident about what’s happening. Well, it is about 17 hours
0:36:24 later and we know what happened. And in fact, we got a call from a listener about what happened.
0:36:32 I want to go ahead and play it for you. Hey, this is Alex from Kansas City. I just wanted to call
0:36:39 and ask, how are those Democrats feeling right now? I bet they’re crying, huh? I bet they’re crying,
0:36:47 huh? Trump 2024. You’ve been monitoring right-wing media. I’m curious
0:36:53 what the reaction to the results has been like there. Is it similar to Alex’s energy?
0:37:00 Yeah. A lot of the American right is oriented around a shared antipathy towards the left.
0:37:07 Their glee is in part so many of these people being disappointed and humiliated and angry. And
0:37:13 it’s not just like a belief that Trump has done something impressive. It’s that he’s beaten
0:37:18 the people that they really hate. And it’s quite a source of joy for a lot of people on the right.
0:37:23 Yeah. So you cover Republicans in the right. And from your perspective,
0:37:28 how did this win happen? How did Donald Trump win the reelection?
0:37:32 If I have to give you a short explanation for what happened, a simple one sentence,
0:37:37 it’s that people don’t like incumbents, right? This is true not just in the United States,
0:37:43 but across the world, right? 2024 is the biggest year of elections in human history. Never have
0:37:48 more people voted than they have this year. And what we saw in the United States fits that theory
0:37:53 to a T, right? Across the board, there was a shift in the U.S. Like if you look at this,
0:37:57 the Washington Post has this really handy map where you can look at county results and they
0:38:02 can show you at the county level whether those counties swung left or right relative to the
0:38:08 2020 election. And if you look at it, it’s just a sea of red, right? Everywhere with a few exceptions.
0:38:13 Americans were more inclined to vote for a Republican than a Democrat. And to me,
0:38:16 that’s like the number one analytic question that you have to answer is what theory do you
0:38:22 have that can explain nearly everybody moving in one direction. And the answer is that most people
0:38:26 are dissatisfied with how things were going, right? Exit polls are unreliable for subgroups,
0:38:30 especially, but one consistent finding, which makes me have a little bit more confidence in them,
0:38:35 is that 70 plus percent of Americans think the country was on the wrong track or not doing well.
0:38:43 And that to me is the story of the election. I’m also curious about Donald Trump, the man.
0:38:48 A question we got about President-elect Trump, we got on Instagram from a Vox follower was,
0:38:53 what am I missing? Why is he so great? And there really is this cult of personality around Trump.
0:38:59 He has stands. It’s up there with the Beehive and the Swifties. What is up with Donald Trump’s appeal?
0:39:09 So Trump connects on a really fundamental level with a lot of voters, right? Part of it is that
0:39:15 he’s been a celebrity for several decades now, and he has a kind of magnetic charisma honed in
0:39:19 all of his public appearances over all this time that draws people to him. And like, I don’t really
0:39:25 know how to explain charisma. It’s hard to describe Riz, you know? But yeah, but like you see it,
0:39:29 right? If you watch him speak, yeah, a lot of the time he’s boring, but then he does like these
0:39:35 weird dances and says kind of funny stuff. And people really, they really like that. It makes
0:39:41 them feel exciting to a lot of voters. In my book on right-wing authoritarian politics called
0:39:47 “The Reactionary Spirit,” I argue that the core of Trumpism is a group of Americans who feel like
0:39:53 they have lost what their country was, what the country, what they believe the country ought to
0:39:59 be or what it should be. And this is primarily a reaction to social and demographic change.
0:40:05 And that’s like, I don’t think that that theory is like the only thing that explains the 2024
0:40:10 election results. It especially doesn’t explain like a uniform national shift in Trump’s favor.
0:40:17 But Trump got to this point despite, you know, being in terms of policy, a pretty radical extremist
0:40:22 because he got to the head of one of our two major parties, which normalizes and basically by default.
0:40:27 And he did that by expertly manipulating the grievances of a percentage of the population,
0:40:32 a mostly white, mostly older population. Huh, that makes sense. I’d like to bring you another
0:40:38 question we got from the Vox audience about executive orders, which, you know, our directives,
0:40:43 presidents can issue without waiting on Congress to pass a law. The question reads,
0:40:48 what do we expect to be Trump’s first set of executive orders?
0:40:54 So hugely important. I think it’s the story right now. A lot of people are going to focus
0:40:58 on the politics for understandable reasons, but the policy is the thing that’s going to
0:41:02 govern all of our lives for the next four years. And it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary
0:41:09 Trump’s policy agenda is. I would pick three policy areas to focus on here, right? The first is
0:41:14 trade, right? Trump has promised across the board tariffs, universal or near universal,
0:41:19 on all imported goods. I would expect that to happen immediately. The question is what level
0:41:24 they’ll be at? Regardless of the number across the board tariffs will do pretty significant
0:41:30 economic damage pretty quickly. It’s one of those areas where Trump has a very idiosyncratic view
0:41:35 that’s aligned against basically all economists left and right on this particular issue.
0:41:40 The second one, Trump, the Trump team is already talking about this right after the election is
0:41:46 mass deportations. I don’t know how mass is mass, but they have a lot of very specific plans about
0:41:52 how to restructure the way in which the federal government does deportations to be able to reach
0:41:58 a much larger group of undocumented immigrants much more quickly. So, I mean, we’re possibly talking
0:42:04 millions. And the third major area is staffing of the federal government. Tell me more about that.
0:42:09 Right? Trump has said that he will re-implement something called Schedule F immediately upon
0:42:14 taking power. Schedule F is a reclassification of parts of the federal civil service that
0:42:21 makes people whose jobs were previously non-political into political appointees. Trump can fire this
0:42:28 by some estimates. It’s well over 50,000 people that would be fired. And, you know, if Trump can
0:42:34 replace career civil servants in key positions with his people, he’ll be able to do a lot more
0:42:39 across the board and many of his other plans, especially plans to, for example, open investigations
0:42:45 into the Bidens and into Harris. So that is really sort of a lynchpin of the broader Trump agenda.
0:42:53 Yeah, I’m curious if any of this is actually going to happen. I mean, politicians say they’ll
0:43:00 do stuff all the time that they never do. And I think with Trump, it’s especially hard to tell
0:43:05 what’s real and what’s not because he’s just such a showman. Like a lot of times, he does it just
0:43:10 for the shock at all. You do it a bit. Yeah. And so how do we know if it’s a bit or not? Or how do
0:43:15 we know if he’s like, no, I’m actually about to do this? Well, you know, sometimes that can be
0:43:19 really hard to tell, right? Like one policy I’ve struggled with a lot, invading Mexico, that is
0:43:24 sending U.S. special forces into Mexico to fight drug cartels. Like that sounds totally nuts.
0:43:29 Yeah. Right? It’s just like totally insane. I’ve argued in print that we need to take it seriously,
0:43:32 but that doesn’t mean I think it’s guaranteed that it’s going to happen.
0:43:37 These other three things that I mentioned, though, those are all extremely likely to happen.
0:43:43 Right? One consistent finding in the political science literature, which I think maybe is a
0:43:47 little bit surprising to people, is that presidents tend to keep their promises.
0:43:51 Right? It’s not that they’re always telling the truth all the time. I mean, Trump lies constantly,
0:43:55 but when they say they want to do something, they’re stating their intent to do it.
0:44:00 Right? They’re not just saying it to say it. Right? It’s that they think that this is an
0:44:05 important part of their governing agenda. And by all accounts, on those three areas, immigration,
0:44:12 trade, and control of the federal government, like Trump is speaking for a place of conviction here.
0:44:16 He changes his mind all the time on different stuff. Like abortion is a great example.
0:44:19 You know, he’s swung wildly on abortion because I don’t think he really has core
0:44:23 convictions on that issue. But on trade and immigration, he’s been consistent for a very
0:44:28 long time. And on control of the federal government, his number one preoccupation is that throughout
0:44:34 his time in the White House and since has been that government wasn’t loyal to him personally,
0:44:39 that he couldn’t do whatever he wanted, that were people getting in his way. And now he’s in a
0:44:47 position to stop that. And even as he has said many times, to get retribution for the prosecution
0:44:53 and investigations into him that happened in his years out of power. And there’s just no
0:44:57 doubt in my mind that he’s going to pursue that. The only question is how effectively
0:45:00 he’ll be able to accomplish his goals and all of these things. And that I don’t have a clear answer
0:45:08 to. So, Democrats have been saying for a year that this election 2024 is the most important
0:45:14 election of our lifetimes. Now that it’s over, was it? How should we think about that part of it
0:45:22 now that the election’s done? I mean, I think they were right. And I think that that’s scary.
0:45:29 Because people did say that, but it was just clear from the way that the election was being
0:45:34 talked about the way it was being covered. People weren’t feeling the same level of
0:45:42 existential significance that they did in, let’s say 2020. People have difficulty imagining that
0:45:49 they’ve lost something until it’s actually lost. And I think we saw this pretty clearly with abortion.
0:45:56 For most Americans, the idea of Roe versus Wade being repealed was abstract until it was actually
0:46:01 repealed. And then we saw this massive political movement oriented around protecting abortion
0:46:06 rights and significant victories for abortion rights referenda, which continued in this election,
0:46:15 even though they lost some. But still, a majority won this time around. And I think that’s true with
0:46:21 a lot of things, not just rights that you can lose, but also basic elements of government
0:46:25 that we take for granted. And then just go on down the list with different policies.
0:46:32 It’s hard to imagine what it would mean for millions of people who are either are or alleged
0:46:36 to be undocumented immigrants being rounded up and put into camps. I mean, they’ve literally
0:46:40 talked about camps for these people. I’m not making this up. This isn’t anti-Trump hysteria.
0:46:45 It’s what Trump plans call for in order to house all of the people that they’re detaining,
0:46:51 putting them in camps and then deporting them. That is something that feels so removed from our
0:46:57 day-to-day experience of life that you can’t integrate it. You can’t even really process it.
0:47:03 But if we start to get massive measles outbreaks because RFK Jr. has destroyed our vaccine
0:47:08 infrastructure, if the American economy goes into a tailspin because Trump institutes these
0:47:13 wild and crazy tariffs, if you start to see your friends and neighbors getting thrown into camps,
0:47:21 people will realize that they’ve lost something really significant. But it just, it’s,
0:47:26 the hypothetical messaging didn’t go through. And now I fear we’re going to have to live through
0:47:32 the hypothetical. All right, Zach, thank you so much for explaining this to us. Thank you,
0:47:43 JQ. I’m always happy to chat with you. That’s it for this episode of Explain It To Me.
0:47:48 Thank you to all of you who called in with your questions. We hope to answer more of
0:47:52 them in the coming weeks. We got a bunch about ranked choice voting in particular,
0:47:58 so we’ll dedicate a whole episode to that soon. If you have a question about the election or
0:48:11 about literally anything else, please give us a call. 1-800-618-8545. We’d love to hear from you.
0:48:23 Our producers this week were Sylphie Lalonde and Gabrielle Burbay. Anouk Dousseau, Sarah Shweppy,
0:48:29 and Katie Pindsy Moog fact-checked this episode. It was edited by Jorge Just, Julia Longoria,
0:48:34 and Natalie Jennings. Mixing sound design and engineering by Christian Ayala.
0:48:41 Our supervising producer is Carla Javier. Special thanks to you, our listeners, for sending us
0:48:46 questions and making our show possible. If this was valuable to you, please consider supporting
0:48:52 this work financially by becoming a Vox member. Details, perks, and more at vox.com/members.
0:49:03 I’m Jonklin Hill, and I’ll talk to you soon. Take care out there.
0:49:09 First, will you tell me about your influence on tonight’s election dinner?
0:49:16 It was fully my decision. I rigged the vote. I first started off by shocking people with
0:49:22 the suggestion that we get pasta, and I knew in the end I wanted Chaya. Throughout, like, a
0:49:27 spoiler third-party DC vegan, which we’ve had before, very delicious, but I knew where this was
0:49:32 going to end. Oh my god, I was there when you threw out pasta, the fact that this was your plan all
0:49:37 along. I tricked everyone, and then I stopped the count.
0:49:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:13 to iPods to Spotify, how we make it from pianos to computer plugins to AI prompts,
0:00:18 how we discover it from music blogs to TikTok. All this month on The Vergecast, we’re telling
0:00:24 stories about those changes and how technological change changes not just the way we experience
0:00:31 music, but the music itself. All that, all this month on The Vergecast, wherever you find podcasts.
0:00:39 Hello. I’m coming to you on a Friday, which is an unusual thing to do, but this has been
0:00:45 an unusual week. I am still sifting through it, and I know many of you are as well.
0:00:51 You will hear some of my thoughts soon enough, I promise. But in the meantime,
0:00:57 my colleague Jacqueline Hill at Vox’s new podcast, Explain It To Me, has swooped in to help.
0:01:03 Her team got lots of listener questions in the aftermath of Trump’s win on Tuesday,
0:01:09 and she got some answers for them from the Vox reporters who know the most about why the outcome
0:01:17 was what it was and what it might mean. Things are a little unsettled, I get that, but information
0:01:23 is about the best thing we can offer, and JQ and our team have a lot they can tell you.
0:01:29 We’re dropping that episode here, and I hope it helps. See you back in the feed on Monday.
0:01:43 You’re listening to Explain It To Me. I’m Jacqueline Hill. Wow. What a week.
0:01:49 As I’m sure many of you know, Tuesday was election day, and I know that you know because
0:01:55 of the tons of questions we received from you. I’m talking about from all over the country and
0:02:01 throughout the entire voting process. Hey, my name is Luke. I’m from Michigan. My question is about
0:02:06 the election. I waffle between anxiety and trying to reassure myself that everything’s going to be
0:02:16 okay about this election. It’s kind of really boring to have our entire world descend on just
0:02:22 a few states, and it’s really frustrating to have people who are nothing like me don’t really
0:02:27 represent my beliefs have such a major sway in the decisions of this country.
0:02:32 People called in with questions about their results, about the aftermath,
0:02:37 and what it all means for the next four years. You also shared what you were experiencing
0:02:42 throughout the day. Here’s a call we got pretty early on from Ronan, who voted for the first time.
0:02:49 It is currently November 5th, and it is election day. I’m a student at Utah State University.
0:02:54 I’m a first time voter and a college student who isn’t committed to either party. Tonight,
0:03:00 I will be hosting an election party. I went and got some, some little flags and some materials
0:03:05 for that. I’ll be making some brownies and some cookies. So I’m really excited because I think
0:03:11 no matter what happens, to me, it’s a celebration that we’re seeing democracy happen in real time.
0:03:15 And that might just be the political science student in me, but I’m really excited about it.
0:03:21 And people kept checking in with questions and reflections throughout the night.
0:03:32 Time is 9 24 p.m. I just got home from working election day. This was my first election cycle
0:03:41 and election day working as a poll worker. And overall, it was fantastic. The people I met there,
0:03:47 they were the most professional, the kindest, the most polite people I’ve ever met.
0:03:58 There was one unpleasant experience during early voting. This lady commented, “Oh, you have really
0:04:05 beautiful dark hair. Where are you from? Are you from Knoxville?” And I said, “No, I’m from Venezuela.”
0:04:15 And as soon as I said that, her face got incredibly serious as if that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
0:04:21 And I just let her know, you know, when you’re done voting, there’s a scanner at the end of
0:04:26 the room. You can turn in your ballot there, right? I hope she had an okay rest of the day.
0:04:31 All right. Thank you for taking your time to listen to this. Bye.
0:04:39 Now, what was I up to? I spent election night at the office with my fellow Vox journalists.
0:04:43 I got there around six-ish. Most of my colleagues were already there,
0:04:47 gathered around the tacos we were having for dinner, plenty of soda,
0:04:52 a desperate and successful hunt for cold brew, and emergency energy drinks on deck.
0:04:58 There were also special appearances from a co-worker’s baby and another co-worker’s dog,
0:05:04 two very cute additions to the evening. And I should say, the thing about election night in DC
0:05:10 is that people really let their nerd flags fly. On my way in, I saw people headed to bars for
0:05:16 results, watch parties, and I even ran into a DJ dressed as Steve Kornacki. For a lot of us,
0:05:22 it was a long night. I’m sure it was a long night for many of you too. In fact, I know it was because
0:05:28 the questions kept rolling in. I had so many questions about elections. First of all,
0:05:35 every time election comes, my question about the election results revolves around how various
0:05:40 demographics voted in this election and last night in the years. As the night wore on, the questions
0:05:48 started to change. I just wanted to call and ask, how are those Democrats feeling right now?
0:05:58 I bet they’re crying, huh? I bet they’re crying, huh? Trump 2024. With all of the stress and
0:06:04 disappointments that came with the election results this year, something that’s been going
0:06:09 through my mind is, when will America be ready for a woman to lead the country?
0:06:16 My name is Blake from Florida. My question about the election, seeing that Donald Trump has won,
0:06:19 so what’s going to happen with all of those indictments?
0:06:25 I am also curious about women’s reproductive rights. This was a huge issue for me when I
0:06:32 went into the polls this year. And so I’m curious how much this is really going to impact things
0:06:37 from where they are today. And when all was said and almost done, the questions we got
0:06:44 kind of fell into a few themes. What just happened? Why did it happen? And what’s going to happen next?
0:06:50 And so today, we check in with our colleagues who cover Republicans, Democrats, and the courts,
0:06:54 and we bring them your questions. That’s today on Explain It To Me.
0:07:07 Hi, Christian. It is the day after the election. It’s actually 3.42 p.m. on Wednesday. And I haven’t
0:07:15 seen you in, I don’t know, a few hours. I’m sure it was all a blur. How are you doing today? It
0:07:20 feels like we have come a long way from Tuesday night’s tacos. Yeah, we have come a long way.
0:07:29 I might sound similarly delirious. It’s pretty astounding what happened.
0:07:34 Yeah. So the first set of questions from our listeners can kind of all be boiled down to
0:07:40 what exactly happened this week in the clear light of the morning, or I guess the mid-late
0:07:48 afternoon. What are your takeaways? Yeah, the big takeaway obviously is just that this is a country
0:07:55 that was ready to issue a very stunning rebuke to Democrats, and specifically to Vice President
0:08:02 Harris and President Joe Biden. So top line, we saw red shifts in counties across the country.
0:08:11 Almost, I’m pretty sure no state was more liberal than in 2020. It’s almost impossible to talk about
0:08:19 what’s happening among subsects of the electorate without acknowledging that just across every
0:08:26 kind of category of voter, there was a shift to the right. And I can say very clearly now,
0:08:33 like one of the more interesting things that we saw last night, pretty early on, was places that
0:08:40 were Republican were getting more Republican. Places that were Democratic like urban centers
0:08:45 were not as Democratic as they might be expected to be. And the suburbs,
0:08:52 which have been making a slow shift toward Democrats since 2016, did not continue that
0:08:58 leftward drift to the degree that Democrats need in order to win some of these important races.
0:09:02 What surprised you the most about last night’s results?
0:09:08 I wasn’t expecting so many primarily Hispanic counties to flip so early or to flip to the
0:09:14 degree that they did. There’s been a lot of talk this election about the shifting electorate,
0:09:19 you know, how Trump was picking up support among Black men and Latino voters. And we
0:09:24 got some questions about that. Hi, everybody. This is Barton from Ann Arbor, Michigan. And my
0:09:32 question is, they’re saying that among Black men and among women and among Latino voters,
0:09:42 there’s a big surge in support for Trump. And my only question is, why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
0:09:50 Hi, John Cohen. This is Nicole. Last night, the media was heavily covering how Black men
0:09:57 were voting in battleground states. And I’m just curious if you could explain whether it did or
0:10:03 could have affected the election results. This question was in the air, I think. Here’s something
0:10:09 from the news. Well, votes are still pouring in, still being counted, but still a little too early
0:10:15 to tell exactly which minority will be the scapegoat in this election. But the night is young.
0:10:19 Plenty of groups are still out there. You have young voters, old voters, Asian voters all
0:10:24 still in play. Muslims, Cubans, certainly the list goes on. And some minority will be to blame
0:10:31 tonight. Okay. That last one was from The Onion, I will admit. So the fake newscaster said that
0:10:37 we’re definitely going to have a minority group to use as a scapegoat. Tell me again why the
0:10:43 scapegroup shouldn’t be the majority, why it tends to go towards those smaller groups.
0:10:48 Yeah. So I think there are two reasons. One, there are some assumptions already baked in about the
0:10:53 way that the majority is going to work, white voters. And so there’s a little bit less of a
0:10:59 shock perhaps at the same time, because some of these shifts among non-white voters, among the
0:11:06 minority, feel so novel. They feel so different. They feel so new, even though this is now what the
0:11:10 second time that we’ve seen Trump overperform with these groups of voters.
0:11:15 Is it too soon to find explanations for what’s happening? Like what do we know so far?
0:11:21 So we do know a few things. First thing is that turnout did not seem to be like an issue.
0:11:28 Turnout was pretty high this election. Turnout in battleground states was pretty high,
0:11:33 which in the past has usually meant pretty good things for Democrats, right? One of the easy
0:11:39 explanations in past cycles for why Democrats underperform is, oh, well, the base just didn’t
0:11:43 come out. Black voters didn’t turn out in urban centers. That doesn’t seem like it’s
0:11:47 going to be a pretty good explanation, because what we’re seeing is that those urban centers
0:11:52 shifted to the right. Conclusion is that lots of these places either did not continue their shift
0:11:57 to the left, like in the suburbs, or did by small amount. But we can also look at counties that have
0:12:04 large populations of voters of color, of non-white voters, and using that we can make comparisons
0:12:10 to 2020. Looking at South Texas, where we saw a shift in Hispanic and Latino, primarily Mexican
0:12:16 American and Tejanos, toward Trump in 2020, we can make a pretty easy determination that something
0:12:22 happened in Texas, because those counties that were drifting toward Trump either flipped,
0:12:28 or if they had voted for Trump in the last election, voted for Trump by a larger margin this time around.
0:12:36 Why are people asking about these specific groups? I think of pollsters, I think even in the
0:12:42 aftermath, there’s all this talk on voters of color, these people who don’t make up the majority.
0:12:47 But a lot of this is, it’s about blame. It’s about like, okay, who do we blame?
0:12:54 And it feels like the first place people point their fingers are to people of color,
0:13:03 even though a little over 75% of people in the United States are white. And I should point out,
0:13:07 we did not get any questions about what’s up with the white people who vote for Trump.
0:13:15 Why aren’t we necessarily seeing people parse out that part of the electorate as much as these
0:13:20 smaller groups of people? I think there will be some analysis that remains to be done as we get
0:13:24 better and better data, and more votes are counted, because white voters, as you said,
0:13:28 and in many of these American states as well as nationally, any kind of small shift just because
0:13:35 of how large that group is, is like, orders of magnitude more to affect the overall result
0:13:41 in a state than any kind of big shift happening among non-white voters. That’s true in Pennsylvania,
0:13:45 for example, where counties and areas that have large Puerto Rican populations that might have
0:13:52 shifted toward Republicans. But overall, there was just more underperformance among white voters
0:13:57 there that even if you were to subtract those gains from non-white voters, the state still
0:14:01 would have gone in the Republican direction because of Trump overperforming with white voters
0:14:08 in Pennsylvania. There’s still this assumption for so long, I’ve written about this a bunch,
0:14:15 we’ve talked about this, this assumption that a diversifying America would inevitably lead to
0:14:22 just progressive or liberal or Democratic dominance, regardless of other factors,
0:14:27 which once again, keeps being proven wrong and wrong. In fact, we’re probably seeing,
0:14:31 because of just how Republican the swing of the country was in general,
0:14:38 that this election will be one where racial polarization decreases, where especially among
0:14:44 Latino voters, they voted similarly or in the similar swing as white voters. But I think what
0:14:50 we’ll see is that this overall swing happened. I mean, Democrats got the turnout they wanted,
0:14:54 but it turns out that the voters that were turning out just didn’t want to vote for Democrat.
0:14:59 Okay, there is something that I’ve been paying attention to in politics,
0:15:05 and that’s the way people of color have often been grouped into one category.
0:15:12 And we aren’t all the same, like a black person and a Hispanic person and an Asian person,
0:15:16 we are not the same, we have different experiences, we are able to assimilate to different degrees,
0:15:23 if at all. Are we going to start seeing an end of POC as a political coalition?
0:15:26 Because I admit, I tire when people say people of color, and I’m like, “Do you mean black?”
0:15:31 Because sometimes they mean black, and sometimes they mean any other thing. Are we going to stop
0:15:37 seeing people talk about these groups of voters, like all together, and start seeing people discuss
0:15:43 us, I guess, more individually? Yeah, do you remember BIPOC? Oh my gosh, BIPOC. You cannot
0:15:48 tell me that that is not a bisexual person of color. So much fraught identity.
0:15:54 Right, this is the thing with identity is it’s complicated and it’s messy, and that’s why I get
0:16:00 the urge to use people of color, non-white voter, right? It’s a broad enough term to include as many
0:16:09 people, but is it too broad in terms of usefulness in politics? But there’s so much diversity that
0:16:16 underlies any one of the communities that makes up person of color, and so I do wonder how useful
0:16:21 it’ll continue to be, especially as there were some shifts potentially this year, maybe not
0:16:28 as dramatic as the polling suggested among black voters. But black voters’ behavior in this election
0:16:36 was very different from the behavior of Hispanic and Latino voters. One group still gave Democrats
0:16:42 a huge margin of support. The other looks more and more like a swing group. So there was something
0:16:51 in the water that people were just rearing to punish the incumbents. So there’s an aspect of
0:16:57 the incumbency problem now, maybe it’s no longer an advantage, like we thought in political science.
0:17:05 There’s the fact that if we’re to believe the exit polls, so have you copied out there, and then
0:17:13 the issues just did not break in Harris’ favor. So there’s definitely the economic kitchen table
0:17:18 issues that propelled a lot of this anger, but then even on some of the social issues,
0:17:25 some of these surveys are telling us that there was frustration about immigration,
0:17:32 there was frustration about gender and sexuality, which does lead to this idea of
0:17:42 something is a mess. There’s some kind of beyond just the kitchen table issues. There’s some kind
0:17:48 of other ideological aspect here. I’m curious, we got a question from Instagram. What’s next for
0:17:54 Democrats? Do they shift further left or further right? What’s next for them? The assumption is that
0:17:59 the lesson here will be they have to move to the right, that they have to move toward the center
0:18:03 to become more moderate. And there is a good criticism to be made that that tends to be the
0:18:08 lesson the Democrats get after every election. There’s maybe some social issues, some economic
0:18:13 issues on which a more progressive or a more populist stance were okay with the electorate,
0:18:20 but then you see other shifts like California deciding to implement stricter sentencing requirements
0:18:26 in the state. So there’s a mixed bag there of just what is it that the electorate wants? Is this
0:18:31 just a complete rebuke of progressivism and a complete rebuke of liberal politics? Is the solution
0:18:37 to move to the center? Yeah, we got another question from a Vox reader who wants to know,
0:18:43 do you think Harris underperformed or Trump overperformed? Can we even know that yet?
0:18:50 Yeah, it’s going to be hard to make a definitive statement. I will say that red shift makes me
0:18:57 think Trump overperformed. He did really well in rural regions. He did shockingly well in urban
0:19:06 places. On the Harris side, I don’t know that she underperformed. My whole take there is,
0:19:14 and this is kind of boring, there are complications to this, but every indicator pointed to
0:19:19 a landslide loss like more registered Republicans or self-identified Republicans in national
0:19:27 surveys, big discontentment with Joe Biden, Republican advantages on two of the top three
0:19:33 issues for voters, the economy and immigration, only abortion rights were a spot where Democrats
0:19:40 had an advantage, and then the just overall global trend that we’re seeing across democracies in
0:19:46 general, which is a COVID hangover, frustration at the way that the pandemic was managed by parties
0:19:53 that were in control, and then further frustration with the ensuing rise in inflation and cost of
0:19:59 goods. Parties in power were punished across the world this year, and Canada seems like it’ll be
0:20:07 next year. So you came to this call kind of bummed out, burned out. I know we are running on … We’ve
0:20:16 had so much coffee in the last 48 hours. What is the silver lining? I think what I’m perhaps most
0:20:28 optimistic about … That’s so real. What I’m most optimistic about is that Reputation Taylor’s
0:20:35 version is still going to come out. Christian Paz, thank you so much for joining us on Explain
0:20:41 It To Me, and helping us parse all of this out in the chaotic days after the election.
0:20:47 Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I hope you get to take a nap today. First, I’m going to need a
0:20:57 drink. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Maybe a cigarette. We’ll see. Yeah. Vice time. Vice time. Oh no, we’re Vox. Vox time.
0:21:07 Oh God, I missed the Harris speech. Oh God.
0:21:19 Vox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zell.
0:21:26 When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of
0:21:30 somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle
0:21:37 of the night, and honestly, that’s not what it is anymore. That’s Ian Mitchell, a banker-turned-fraud
0:21:43 fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists,
0:21:50 and they’re making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It’s mind-blowing
0:21:57 to see the kind of infrastructure that’s been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are
0:22:02 hundreds if not thousands of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business
0:22:07 people. These are organized criminal rings, and so once we understand the magnitude of this problem,
0:22:14 we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam
0:22:20 victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best
0:22:26 defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around
0:22:31 what do you do if you have text messages you don’t recognize? What do you do if you start getting
0:22:36 asked to send information that’s more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness,
0:22:40 a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim, and we have these conversations all the time.
0:22:46 So we are all at risk, and we all need to work together to protect each other.
0:22:53 Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com/zel. And when using digital payment platforms,
0:22:57 remember to only send money to people you know and trust.
0:23:03 Hi, Vox. Explain it to me. My name is Katie, and I have a question.
0:23:09 So even before results came in on election night, you all sit in lots of questions about
0:23:18 a specific topic. Why is Trump not in jail? President-elect Donald Trump and the law.
0:23:27 After being convicted of a ton of felonies, he’s just a convicted felon running around.
0:23:34 Like, why does this happen? Later in the night, another listener, my name’s Blake from Florida,
0:23:38 sent in a question about the courts that I’ve been wondering about since election night.
0:23:42 Seeing that Donald Trump has won, so what’s going to happen with all of those indictments
0:23:49 that feels like all of them were pushed to just after the election? And there’s this window now
0:23:54 between now and then when he’s actually inaugurated. Can any of those be expedited?
0:24:01 It feels like he committed crimes. We see that. He was able to somehow stall it,
0:24:07 and it seems bad. And in a just world, this would have been taking caros a lot earlier,
0:24:11 as opposed to letting it be something that could be kicked down the road. So thanks so much. Goodbye.
0:24:17 There’s an old legal principle. You don’t kick Superman in the balls.
0:24:21 For answers, I caught up with Vox’s senior correspondent and Supreme Court interpreter
0:24:25 Ian Milheiser for a speed round of court questions.
0:24:33 Is there some possibility that Donald Trump could spend some portion of the lame duck
0:24:40 period in jail? I mean, I’m a good enough lawyer that I could come up with an argument for why
0:24:52 that is permissible, but come on. I just think it would be unimaginably foolish to further antagonize
0:24:59 this man in this way before he becomes the most powerful man in the world at this specific moment
0:25:07 in history. So Trump has quite a few criminal cases, lots of charges. I want to talk a little
0:25:12 bit about something that Blake talked about in his questions, and that’s the president-elect
0:25:18 being able to somehow stall these cases. Can we take a step back and review all these criminal
0:25:25 cases against Trump? Give us a quick refresher on what those cases are and why each case hasn’t
0:25:31 resulted in any real consequences. So there are four cases, and each one is stalled for different
0:25:39 reasons. So, you know, the Georgia case. The Georgia case arises out of Trump’s election
0:25:45 of theft attempts. Like, you might remember the phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary
0:25:50 of State Brad Raffensperger. The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry.
0:25:57 Where he told Brad Raffensperger to try to find votes. All I want to do is this. I just want to find
0:26:08 11,780 votes. However many he needed in order to overturn the result in Georgia in 2020.
0:26:13 And there’s several reasons why that case was never likely to move forward before the election.
0:26:18 One was that they didn’t just indict Trump. They indicted all of his co-conspirators.
0:26:23 And so it was just a really complex case with, like, all sorts of normal legitimate reasons.
0:26:29 Why would take a long time to bring that to trial? The other problem there. The prosecutor didn’t
0:26:37 keep her damn pants on. Dang. The district attorney in that case had an affair with the
0:26:44 gentleman that she hired to be the lead prosecutor. And, like, my God, just a general
0:26:51 bit of legal ethical advice I will give is that if you are prosecuting one of the most important
0:27:00 cases in American history, maybe just quietly let the sexual tension build until the trial is over.
0:27:08 In the one about the documents where he just kept a bunch of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
0:27:13 This may be the most politically explosive raid ever undertaken by the FBI.
0:27:19 The FBI executing a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida.
0:27:23 The reason why that one’s been strung out can be summarized in two words, Eileen Cannon.
0:27:29 You know, he’s got a judge who’s basically on his side and who has gone out of her way
0:27:34 to do favors for him. The judge who threw out Donald Trump’s classified documents case
0:27:39 is now on a list of potential candidates to be attorney general if Trump wins.
0:27:45 The New York case where he has been convicted, this involves the least significant charges.
0:27:51 He was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to cover up the fact
0:27:55 that he paid hush money to the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels.
0:28:08 And what happened there was Trump just asked that the sentencing be delayed till after the
0:28:14 election. The judge didn’t want to interfere with the election and so he said fine, the prosecutors
0:28:19 didn’t oppose that motion. So everyone just sort of agreed like, look, let’s wait till after the
0:28:25 election before we resolve this. And then that leads one other case, the DC case.
0:28:29 The former president did just land here at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC.
0:28:34 And remember, this is a four count indictment of the former president of the United States,
0:28:40 all in the context of the former president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
0:28:43 The main reason it’s delayed is because it went up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court sat on
0:28:47 it for a really long time and then they held that he has really brought immunity.
0:28:53 The Supreme Court ruled former President Donald Trump does have immunity for some of his alleged
0:28:57 conduct as president in his federal election interference case.
0:29:01 Ian, you mentioned the Supreme Court immunity ruling that came down this past summer.
0:29:06 We’ve actually gotten some questions about what the Supreme Court’s role in all of these cases
0:29:12 against Trump is. Hey, John Cullen, Alexa here. I have a couple of questions. The biggest one being
0:29:18 the broad immunity decision. And I wonder what that means with Trump now in office and would
0:29:21 love to know more about how much the broad immunity decision really changes the scope
0:29:26 of presidential power. Yeah. Tell us about that Supreme Court ruling, which was really the head
0:29:33 liner out of the courts last term. What did that decision change and how could it play into a second
0:29:40 term for Trump or, you know, any presidency after this? So there’s a long standing rule that
0:29:47 certain high ranking government officials, including the president, prosecutors and judges,
0:29:54 cannot have civil lawsuits brought against them for like stuff that they do in the course of
0:30:00 their official duties. And I mean, there’s a pretty basic reason for that, which is that anyone can
0:30:06 file a civil lawsuit. There was a fear that, you know, those individuals would just be ground down
0:30:10 by a bunch of lawsuits that they’d have to defend against, they’d have to pay lawyers from, and it
0:30:16 would discourage them from performing their jobs or even wanting to have their jobs. So that principle
0:30:23 is long standing. The idea that the president is immune from criminal charges, at least after
0:30:29 they leave office, is completely novel and was made up by this Supreme Court. In the past, the
0:30:38 reason why this issue never came up, like most presidents just tried to comply with the criminal
0:30:44 law. And I mean, like the one thing that is clear about Donald Trump is that he thinks he can get
0:30:51 away with everything and thus far he has. And so I think that the Trump immunity decision makes a
0:30:58 second Trump presidency very dangerous, because he now knows for sure that there’ll be no consequences
0:31:06 for anything that he does. Okay, so I would love for you to bring out your crystal ball. You know,
0:31:12 we are going to look into the future. We’re going to pull that so Raven. The Supreme Court’s played
0:31:17 a really big role in shielding Trump from some of these charges through this immunity ruling.
0:31:23 It seems like most of the charges will likely go away anyway with his reelection. So
0:31:31 how will the decision affect his next term and, you know, even beyond these next four years?
0:31:36 I mean, I think they will give him a complete blanket immunity from criminal charges while he
0:31:41 is the sitting president of the United States. And I kind of think that’s the right answer as a
0:31:48 matter of law. I’m not at all sympathetic to Donald Trump, but like imagine if say,
0:31:55 Ron DeSantis’s Florida had decided to harass Biden with criminal charges, or if the state of
0:32:01 Mississippi had decided to bring fake charges against Lyndon Johnson after Lyndon Johnson signed
0:32:05 the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. There’s lots of reasons why you don’t want an
0:32:12 individual state to debilitate the president in that way. And so I think the constitutional
0:32:17 arguments against pursuing a criminal trial against a sitting president are very strong.
0:32:24 The question is like, could the charges then be revived after he leaves office? I can’t think
0:32:30 of any good legal reason why they couldn’t be revived. But by the time we would get around
0:32:36 to convicting him after he has served and then he’s an 82-year-old man, like I’m very doubtful
0:32:44 that there is still going to be the political will four years from now. But it’s such an unprecedented
0:32:49 set of circumstances that I think that’s a question we answer four years from now.
0:32:56 So one of the things that I really enjoy, and maybe enjoy is the wrong word, but one of the
0:33:02 things that I appreciate about when we are both in the office at the same time is that we, you know,
0:33:08 with clear eyes can think about the worst case scenarios for democracy together. And you know,
0:33:12 we got a pretty do-me-question and I want to play it for you.
0:33:17 Hey, my name is Luke. I’m from Michigan. I waffle between anxiety and trying to reassure
0:33:23 myself that everything is going to be okay. I’m not a Trump fan and I do think he’ll be horrible
0:33:30 for democracy. But the main question is, what can I do for the next four years to ensure that he
0:33:36 does not hold on to power, to hang on to power indefinitely? How can I prevent that from happening?
0:33:45 I mean, I think that’s a difficult question. We have a constitutional system that lays out
0:33:53 very clear processes by which you can weaken the incumbent party. The next major roadblock
0:33:57 where Donald Trump’s climb to power can be stopped is the midterm election.
0:34:02 You know, among other things in the midterm election, it might be possible for Democrats to
0:34:07 take the Senate. And once they take the Senate, that means they can stop all Trump judicial
0:34:13 confirmations. You know, no more people getting on the Supreme Court saying that Donald Trump’s
0:34:18 allowed to do crimes while he’s in office. Like, that is the biggest thing that could happen to
0:34:23 try to halt this man’s rise to power, electing a Congress that will check this man.
0:34:29 What outstanding questions do you have right now? We’re going to talk to some other people
0:34:32 in our newsroom. Is there anything you want to know from them?
0:34:40 I mean, the biggest question that I have is just how aggressive is Donald Trump going to be? Like,
0:34:45 is he actually going to bring criminal charges against his political rivals? Is he actually
0:34:51 going to be able to round up the millions and millions of undocumented immigrants who live
0:34:56 in the United States and find a way to deport all of them? And so the question I have is, I mean,
0:35:01 I don’t know which of the specific things that Donald Trump has said he wants to do are actually
0:35:08 going to get done. After the break, I call up a colleague who’s looked into just that.
0:35:14 So hugely important. I think it’s the story right now. A lot of people are going to focus
0:35:18 on the politics for understandable reasons, but the policy is the thing that’s going to govern
0:35:22 all of our lives for the next four years. And it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary
0:35:30 Trump’s policy agenda is. Stay with us.
0:35:39 We’re back. You’re listening to Explain It to Me. Before the break, I talked with my
0:35:44 colleague Ian about the courts and a second Trump presidency. What Ian wants to know is if
0:35:49 Trump will follow through on all those campaign promises he made. Lucky for us, we have another
0:35:53 co-worker who has thoughts on that. And he was also in the office on election night.
0:36:00 Zach Beecham, I’m a senior correspondent here at Vox. It is 9.09 p.m. on the east coast.
0:36:07 So like everybody else, I’m watching those seven key swing states, right? And we’re all trying to
0:36:11 see how they’re fitting in with each other. And as we speak right now, most of them don’t have
0:36:16 sufficient data for us to be really confident about what’s happening. Well, it is about 17 hours
0:36:24 later and we know what happened. And in fact, we got a call from a listener about what happened.
0:36:32 I want to go ahead and play it for you. Hey, this is Alex from Kansas City. I just wanted to call
0:36:39 and ask, how are those Democrats feeling right now? I bet they’re crying, huh? I bet they’re crying,
0:36:47 huh? Trump 2024. You’ve been monitoring right-wing media. I’m curious
0:36:53 what the reaction to the results has been like there. Is it similar to Alex’s energy?
0:37:00 Yeah. A lot of the American right is oriented around a shared antipathy towards the left.
0:37:07 Their glee is in part so many of these people being disappointed and humiliated and angry. And
0:37:13 it’s not just like a belief that Trump has done something impressive. It’s that he’s beaten
0:37:18 the people that they really hate. And it’s quite a source of joy for a lot of people on the right.
0:37:23 Yeah. So you cover Republicans in the right. And from your perspective,
0:37:28 how did this win happen? How did Donald Trump win the reelection?
0:37:32 If I have to give you a short explanation for what happened, a simple one sentence,
0:37:37 it’s that people don’t like incumbents, right? This is true not just in the United States,
0:37:43 but across the world, right? 2024 is the biggest year of elections in human history. Never have
0:37:48 more people voted than they have this year. And what we saw in the United States fits that theory
0:37:53 to a T, right? Across the board, there was a shift in the U.S. Like if you look at this,
0:37:57 the Washington Post has this really handy map where you can look at county results and they
0:38:02 can show you at the county level whether those counties swung left or right relative to the
0:38:08 2020 election. And if you look at it, it’s just a sea of red, right? Everywhere with a few exceptions.
0:38:13 Americans were more inclined to vote for a Republican than a Democrat. And to me,
0:38:16 that’s like the number one analytic question that you have to answer is what theory do you
0:38:22 have that can explain nearly everybody moving in one direction. And the answer is that most people
0:38:26 are dissatisfied with how things were going, right? Exit polls are unreliable for subgroups,
0:38:30 especially, but one consistent finding, which makes me have a little bit more confidence in them,
0:38:35 is that 70 plus percent of Americans think the country was on the wrong track or not doing well.
0:38:43 And that to me is the story of the election. I’m also curious about Donald Trump, the man.
0:38:48 A question we got about President-elect Trump, we got on Instagram from a Vox follower was,
0:38:53 what am I missing? Why is he so great? And there really is this cult of personality around Trump.
0:38:59 He has stands. It’s up there with the Beehive and the Swifties. What is up with Donald Trump’s appeal?
0:39:09 So Trump connects on a really fundamental level with a lot of voters, right? Part of it is that
0:39:15 he’s been a celebrity for several decades now, and he has a kind of magnetic charisma honed in
0:39:19 all of his public appearances over all this time that draws people to him. And like, I don’t really
0:39:25 know how to explain charisma. It’s hard to describe Riz, you know? But yeah, but like you see it,
0:39:29 right? If you watch him speak, yeah, a lot of the time he’s boring, but then he does like these
0:39:35 weird dances and says kind of funny stuff. And people really, they really like that. It makes
0:39:41 them feel exciting to a lot of voters. In my book on right-wing authoritarian politics called
0:39:47 “The Reactionary Spirit,” I argue that the core of Trumpism is a group of Americans who feel like
0:39:53 they have lost what their country was, what the country, what they believe the country ought to
0:39:59 be or what it should be. And this is primarily a reaction to social and demographic change.
0:40:05 And that’s like, I don’t think that that theory is like the only thing that explains the 2024
0:40:10 election results. It especially doesn’t explain like a uniform national shift in Trump’s favor.
0:40:17 But Trump got to this point despite, you know, being in terms of policy, a pretty radical extremist
0:40:22 because he got to the head of one of our two major parties, which normalizes and basically by default.
0:40:27 And he did that by expertly manipulating the grievances of a percentage of the population,
0:40:32 a mostly white, mostly older population. Huh, that makes sense. I’d like to bring you another
0:40:38 question we got from the Vox audience about executive orders, which, you know, our directives,
0:40:43 presidents can issue without waiting on Congress to pass a law. The question reads,
0:40:48 what do we expect to be Trump’s first set of executive orders?
0:40:54 So hugely important. I think it’s the story right now. A lot of people are going to focus
0:40:58 on the politics for understandable reasons, but the policy is the thing that’s going to
0:41:02 govern all of our lives for the next four years. And it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary
0:41:09 Trump’s policy agenda is. I would pick three policy areas to focus on here, right? The first is
0:41:14 trade, right? Trump has promised across the board tariffs, universal or near universal,
0:41:19 on all imported goods. I would expect that to happen immediately. The question is what level
0:41:24 they’ll be at? Regardless of the number across the board tariffs will do pretty significant
0:41:30 economic damage pretty quickly. It’s one of those areas where Trump has a very idiosyncratic view
0:41:35 that’s aligned against basically all economists left and right on this particular issue.
0:41:40 The second one, Trump, the Trump team is already talking about this right after the election is
0:41:46 mass deportations. I don’t know how mass is mass, but they have a lot of very specific plans about
0:41:52 how to restructure the way in which the federal government does deportations to be able to reach
0:41:58 a much larger group of undocumented immigrants much more quickly. So, I mean, we’re possibly talking
0:42:04 millions. And the third major area is staffing of the federal government. Tell me more about that.
0:42:09 Right? Trump has said that he will re-implement something called Schedule F immediately upon
0:42:14 taking power. Schedule F is a reclassification of parts of the federal civil service that
0:42:21 makes people whose jobs were previously non-political into political appointees. Trump can fire this
0:42:28 by some estimates. It’s well over 50,000 people that would be fired. And, you know, if Trump can
0:42:34 replace career civil servants in key positions with his people, he’ll be able to do a lot more
0:42:39 across the board and many of his other plans, especially plans to, for example, open investigations
0:42:45 into the Bidens and into Harris. So that is really sort of a lynchpin of the broader Trump agenda.
0:42:53 Yeah, I’m curious if any of this is actually going to happen. I mean, politicians say they’ll
0:43:00 do stuff all the time that they never do. And I think with Trump, it’s especially hard to tell
0:43:05 what’s real and what’s not because he’s just such a showman. Like a lot of times, he does it just
0:43:10 for the shock at all. You do it a bit. Yeah. And so how do we know if it’s a bit or not? Or how do
0:43:15 we know if he’s like, no, I’m actually about to do this? Well, you know, sometimes that can be
0:43:19 really hard to tell, right? Like one policy I’ve struggled with a lot, invading Mexico, that is
0:43:24 sending U.S. special forces into Mexico to fight drug cartels. Like that sounds totally nuts.
0:43:29 Yeah. Right? It’s just like totally insane. I’ve argued in print that we need to take it seriously,
0:43:32 but that doesn’t mean I think it’s guaranteed that it’s going to happen.
0:43:37 These other three things that I mentioned, though, those are all extremely likely to happen.
0:43:43 Right? One consistent finding in the political science literature, which I think maybe is a
0:43:47 little bit surprising to people, is that presidents tend to keep their promises.
0:43:51 Right? It’s not that they’re always telling the truth all the time. I mean, Trump lies constantly,
0:43:55 but when they say they want to do something, they’re stating their intent to do it.
0:44:00 Right? They’re not just saying it to say it. Right? It’s that they think that this is an
0:44:05 important part of their governing agenda. And by all accounts, on those three areas, immigration,
0:44:12 trade, and control of the federal government, like Trump is speaking for a place of conviction here.
0:44:16 He changes his mind all the time on different stuff. Like abortion is a great example.
0:44:19 You know, he’s swung wildly on abortion because I don’t think he really has core
0:44:23 convictions on that issue. But on trade and immigration, he’s been consistent for a very
0:44:28 long time. And on control of the federal government, his number one preoccupation is that throughout
0:44:34 his time in the White House and since has been that government wasn’t loyal to him personally,
0:44:39 that he couldn’t do whatever he wanted, that were people getting in his way. And now he’s in a
0:44:47 position to stop that. And even as he has said many times, to get retribution for the prosecution
0:44:53 and investigations into him that happened in his years out of power. And there’s just no
0:44:57 doubt in my mind that he’s going to pursue that. The only question is how effectively
0:45:00 he’ll be able to accomplish his goals and all of these things. And that I don’t have a clear answer
0:45:08 to. So, Democrats have been saying for a year that this election 2024 is the most important
0:45:14 election of our lifetimes. Now that it’s over, was it? How should we think about that part of it
0:45:22 now that the election’s done? I mean, I think they were right. And I think that that’s scary.
0:45:29 Because people did say that, but it was just clear from the way that the election was being
0:45:34 talked about the way it was being covered. People weren’t feeling the same level of
0:45:42 existential significance that they did in, let’s say 2020. People have difficulty imagining that
0:45:49 they’ve lost something until it’s actually lost. And I think we saw this pretty clearly with abortion.
0:45:56 For most Americans, the idea of Roe versus Wade being repealed was abstract until it was actually
0:46:01 repealed. And then we saw this massive political movement oriented around protecting abortion
0:46:06 rights and significant victories for abortion rights referenda, which continued in this election,
0:46:15 even though they lost some. But still, a majority won this time around. And I think that’s true with
0:46:21 a lot of things, not just rights that you can lose, but also basic elements of government
0:46:25 that we take for granted. And then just go on down the list with different policies.
0:46:32 It’s hard to imagine what it would mean for millions of people who are either are or alleged
0:46:36 to be undocumented immigrants being rounded up and put into camps. I mean, they’ve literally
0:46:40 talked about camps for these people. I’m not making this up. This isn’t anti-Trump hysteria.
0:46:45 It’s what Trump plans call for in order to house all of the people that they’re detaining,
0:46:51 putting them in camps and then deporting them. That is something that feels so removed from our
0:46:57 day-to-day experience of life that you can’t integrate it. You can’t even really process it.
0:47:03 But if we start to get massive measles outbreaks because RFK Jr. has destroyed our vaccine
0:47:08 infrastructure, if the American economy goes into a tailspin because Trump institutes these
0:47:13 wild and crazy tariffs, if you start to see your friends and neighbors getting thrown into camps,
0:47:21 people will realize that they’ve lost something really significant. But it just, it’s,
0:47:26 the hypothetical messaging didn’t go through. And now I fear we’re going to have to live through
0:47:32 the hypothetical. All right, Zach, thank you so much for explaining this to us. Thank you,
0:47:43 JQ. I’m always happy to chat with you. That’s it for this episode of Explain It To Me.
0:47:48 Thank you to all of you who called in with your questions. We hope to answer more of
0:47:52 them in the coming weeks. We got a bunch about ranked choice voting in particular,
0:47:58 so we’ll dedicate a whole episode to that soon. If you have a question about the election or
0:48:11 about literally anything else, please give us a call. 1-800-618-8545. We’d love to hear from you.
0:48:23 Our producers this week were Sylphie Lalonde and Gabrielle Burbay. Anouk Dousseau, Sarah Shweppy,
0:48:29 and Katie Pindsy Moog fact-checked this episode. It was edited by Jorge Just, Julia Longoria,
0:48:34 and Natalie Jennings. Mixing sound design and engineering by Christian Ayala.
0:48:41 Our supervising producer is Carla Javier. Special thanks to you, our listeners, for sending us
0:48:46 questions and making our show possible. If this was valuable to you, please consider supporting
0:48:52 this work financially by becoming a Vox member. Details, perks, and more at vox.com/members.
0:49:03 I’m Jonklin Hill, and I’ll talk to you soon. Take care out there.
0:49:09 First, will you tell me about your influence on tonight’s election dinner?
0:49:16 It was fully my decision. I rigged the vote. I first started off by shocking people with
0:49:22 the suggestion that we get pasta, and I knew in the end I wanted Chaya. Throughout, like, a
0:49:27 spoiler third-party DC vegan, which we’ve had before, very delicious, but I knew where this was
0:49:32 going to end. Oh my god, I was there when you threw out pasta, the fact that this was your plan all
0:49:37 along. I tricked everyone, and then I stopped the count.
0:49:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]
This has been an unusual week. Sean and the TGA team are still sifting through it all and figuring out what to think about the presidential election. In the meantime, our colleague Jonquilyn Hill has leapt into action. She and her team from the Explain It to Me podcast collected lots of listener questions in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, and took them to the Vox reporters who know the most about what happened and what it all means. We’ll be back with a new episode on Monday. Until then, check out Explain It to Me.
________________________
Wow, what a week. The country has a new president-elect, and our listeners have a ton of questions about what comes next. Why did Latino voters swing right? How will Democrats respond? What’s going to happen to Donald Trump’s court cases? Will Trump really do all the things he said he would during the campaign? Host Jonquilyn Hill sits down with Vox correspondents Christian Paz, Ian Millhiser, and Zack Beauchamp to answer all that and more.
Submit your questions — about politics, or, if you need a break, about anything else — by calling 1-800-618-8545. You can also submit them here.
Credits:
Jonquilyn Hill, host
Sofi LaLonde and Gabrielle Berbey, producers
Cristian Ayala, engineer
Carla Javier, supervising producer
Caity PenzeyMoog, Anouck Dussaud, and Sarah Schweppe, fact checkers
Jorge Just, Julia Longoria, and Natalie Jennings, editors
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