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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip
Trump Names Campaign Manager as White House Chief of Staff; Missouri A.G. Under Consideration for Trump's Attorney General; Blame Game, Scapegoating Erupt Among Democrats After Loss. "NewsNight" Tackles Trump Campaign; Panelists of "NewsNight" Discuss What Democrats Probably Lacked In Harris Campaign. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired November 07, 2024 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[22:00:08]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): Tonight, promises made, but who will keep them? The president-elect flips through a Rolodex to fill out his cabinet and finds his gatekeeper.
Plus, the candidate, the campaign, the incumbent and the manosphere, Democrats grapple with a landslide loss and where to point the finger.
Also, culture clash, Democrats grieving through an election loss, consider if they had a blind spot about who voters are and what they believe and where American culture is.
Live at the table, Julie Roginsky, Scott Jennings, Catherine Rampell, and Coleman Hughes.
Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here they do.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP (voice over): Good evening. I'm Abby Phillip in New York. Let's get right to what America is talking about, loyalty rewarded. Tonight, Donald Trump deciding to opt for the familiar in choosing a chief of staff. That is the most important person in the entire government who is not the president of the United States. Her name is Susie Wiles, and she'll serve in that role, according to Trump, who announced it tonight.
Wiles is breaking a glass ceiling with this appointment. She will be the first woman ever to play the point guard for the president. Wiles is a Trump loyalist. She is also the architect of the very campaign that he won on Tuesday night. She's close to the Trump family and she has the loyalty of the MAGA faithful who surround the president-elect.
Joining us now at the table, Tara Palmeri, senior political correspondent at Puck. Tara, so break down the importance of Susie Wiles deciding to take this role. And I say deciding, because Trump has gone through a lot of chiefs of staff, and not everybody wants to be in a place where your basic job is to corral Donald Trump and the people around him.
TARA PALMERI, SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, PUCK: Well, she may be the longest serving staffer to be around Donald Trump. She's been his chief of staff since after January 6th. I mean, she was there at Mar- a-Lago with him, and she's figured out how to survive. Her survival skill is to not be an intense gatekeeper. Essentially, she knows to let people in. Trump loves his kitchen cabinet. Look, you might not get a role in his actual cabinet, but you have, you know, an ability to call him, to go to Mar-a-Lago and speak to him. And she has learned that to try to put a stopgap between him and people say, like Laura Loomer, that might cause her some problems.
So, she's been able to figure out Trump. She tends to sort of bend to his will rather than push up against it. She knows when to pick her battles. There'll be times where she'll say, hey, this maybe isn't the greatest choice, but she's really been able to like pick and choose when it's time to come up against him and play the role of the adult in the room, sort of try to challenge maybe his worst instincts. And that's how she survived. I mean, she's a survivor.
She is a mild mannered, 66-year-old grandmother.
PHILLIP: Yes, and doesn't like the spotlight.
PALMERI: She is not a hard charging MAGA head.
PHILLIP: He tried to get her to speak on Tuesday night. She didn't really want to. The reporting from Steve Contorno tonight in CNN this is from a source who says, the clown car can't come into the White House at will. And he agrees with her. That is Susie Wiles' view of it. And the clown car situation is real, Scott Jennings. There are a lot of wild people around Donald Trump who have his ear. Laura Loomer, perfect example.
SCOTT JENNINGS, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, this pick is being greeted throughout all corners of the Republican party with great enthusiasm. Everybody loves Susie. She ran a great campaign. I think the hardest hit honestly was Mark Cuban. You know, his closing argument in the campaign was that Donald Trump just can't stand to be around strong and smart women. Both of his campaigns that he won were won by strong, smart women and now he's appointed the first female White House chief of staff.
This is a groundbreaking pick, it is a smart pick, and Donald Trump -- and it's a quick pick, by the way, decisive, he didn't meander on this, he didn't linger, a decisive move. It allows the rest of the transition to move forward and gives everybody great confidence in what they might be able to accomplish when they take over. So, home run tonight.
COLEMAN HUGHES, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, I think if you remember in 2022 and '23, Trump was running a relatively for Trump-disciplined campaign. He wasn't in the news every week. He wasn't saying something crazy. By all accounts, Susie Wiles is the one responsible for that discipline. She may be the Trump whisperer in the sense that she's someone that can actually push back on him.
[22:05:02]
She's a moderating force. But somehow she's --
PHILLIP: I think I've heard this before.
HUGHES: Well, look, she's able to do it somehow in a way that doesn't make him want to fire her. So, I think it's a great choice. I think as every American should be happy, he made a wise choice first.
CATHERINE RAMPELL, CNN ECONOMICS COMMENTATOR: I think I'm a little dubious of the keep the clown car away unnamed source comments in that maybe clowns are in the eye of the beholder, but it still seems like there are a lot of clowns, yes, a lot of clowns surrounding Donald Trump, including some of the reported cabinet picks.
JULIE ROGINSKY, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: And I've heard this, you know, this pivot from Trump. I remember going back to 2015. Here comes the pivot. This is the day Trump is going to be presidential. This is the day that the Boris Epshteyns of the world or the other clowns around him are going to go away and the smart, good people are going to be here.
Look, she's not going to be able to keep those people away from Trump, because Trump likes chaos.
RAMPELL: And she hasn't. Yes, she hasn't.
HUGHES: When Corey Lewandowski tried to gain influence in the campaign, when Corey, she was able to --
PALMERI: Laura Loomer was riding on planes with him to 9/11.
ROGINSKY: Yes.
HUGHES: I think they all saw that as a mistake.
PALMERI: Exactly. No, in the past, she hasn't kept any of these people out of the circle. She's allowed them to be within the circle. Boris Epshteyn is working on his legal legal matters. He may end up in the administration. Corey Lewandowski is still in the inner circle. He's still on the campaign or was on the campaign. He's a surrogate. She's just been able to manage Trump.
But actually in the past week, in the lead up to the election, Trump was seen as acting like very erratic and she was trying to calm him down. Like that's what she's good at doing. But I would not call Susie Wiles a gatekeeper. That is not her role, and that's the way she survived by not being a gatekeeper.
PHILLIP: You know, one of the names that has popped up in the last few weeks is an activist named Alex Bruesewitz, who's a J.D. Vance aide. The key thing to me that, as we were discussing the clown car, he's credited with the online, sort of, bro interviews that Trump did, but he's also credited with two other things, one, the Springfield eating cats and dogs lie, and, two, that comedian at the Madison Square Garden rally. I think Trump now probably feels like, oh, it's all, you know, fine and dandy, he won. But, I mean, is it really wise for people like that to end up being even closer in the inner circle?
HUGHES: No, it's not wise. I think the Tony Hinchcliffe inclusion was one that, by all accounts, even the senior staff in the Trump campaign didn't approve. Trump tried to distance himself from it. Anyone who's making those kinds of decisions, I agree, should totally be distanced from the campaign. So far, he's only made one actual decision, which has, if it's a signal of things to come, I think it's a good signal. But let's hope that he distances the crazier elements of his campaign --
ROGINSKY: Why are we pretending that somehow an almost 80-year-old Donald Trump is going to be a changed man, right? He is who he is. This is the man that we know. He's been around a really long time now. The clown car has always been here. It's never gone away.
HUGHES: Because he said --
ROGINSKY: He said? He said --
HUGHES: He said the big -- he's not one to admit to mistakes often. He's a very egoic man. We can all agree. But he said the biggest mistake of his first term was picking the wrong people.
ROGINSKY: Because the people that helped him were just (INAUDIBLE) the people restrained him.
PHILLIP: Actually not really the perfect pivot for what I want to talk about next, because when Donald Trump talks about picking the wrong people, I don't think, I don't think he's talking about picking people who weren't smart, picking people who weren't talented. He was talking about picking people who weren't loyal enough.
And the next biggest decision that he's going to make, Tara, is going to be about who is going to be his attorney general. This is a position that is a linchpin position for Trump and his agenda. He wants this person to, according to him, prosecute his enemies, enforce immigration policy, drop the cases against himself and perhaps his associates, investigate his 2020 election lies, perhaps pardon January 6th rioters. So, that's a tall order and he needs somebody who's basically going to say, yes, sir, and go and do it.
PALMERI: Right. And I spoke to someone who is up for this role. And they told me you have to be bold and fearless. That is the qualification that Donald Trump is looking for. But, really, that means loyal. That means willing to go to the brink and do what he says. And as you know, he has a tall list. I mean, going after political enemies. I mean, they call it going after Democratic lawfare. Essentially, I think what I was told at the top of the list, the priority is to go after the prosecutors who went after Donald Trump. They are the top of the enemy list, essentially.
So, this person is -- can't be anything like Jeff Sessions, no recusals. There is no case in which you can say, I don't feel comfortable with this. And so, yes, perhaps you have to be bold and fearless to be willing to go along with that.
PHILLIP: Yes. I mean, the list, according to our reporting is some of the people being considered Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, Andrew Bailey, Missouri attorney general, Matt Whitaker, who was the former acting attorney general in the Trump administration, Senator Mike Lee and John Ratcliffe, the former director of National Intelligence.
[22:10:03]
Scott?
JENNINGS: Yes, there's a couple of other names I've heard floating around to look. This is an important choice. This, defense, state, you know, these are the -- the treasury, I mean, these are some of the main cabinets. But just to go back to Susie for a second, the fact that he got to this first and the fact that she is going to have, you know, influence over how the rest of this transition unfolds, whether it's picking attorney general or any of these other high level positions. I think we ought to all look at this as a wise decision, a good decision.
And for everybody out there wanting Trump to pivot or change or somehow, whatever you want him to do, he just won a mandate from the American people to execute on the program that he laid out in this election. It wasn't particularly close. And I think he ought to put people in place who are going to do it. That's what the people are asking for.
RAMPELL: Who will go after his enemies? I mean, that's --
JENNINGS: That's not what he ran on.
RAMPELL: Yes it is.
JENNINGS: That's not what he ran on.
RAMPELL: Look at what he said in the past week. He literally said that he was going to exact vengeance.
JENNINGS: You still don't understand how you lost. He ran on immigration.
RAMPELL: Don't see me. I'm not a Democrat.
JENNINNGS: He ran on immigration.
RAMPELL: I'm journalist.
JENNINGS: He ran on inflation.
RAMPELL: I'm not here paid --
(CROSSTALKS)
JENNINGS: He ran on the issues that people care about. He ran on the economy. He ran on Immigration.
PHILLIP: Nobody's saying that he didn't run on those things, but he also ran on vengeance.
RAMPELL: Yes.
PHILLIP: He did also run on going after the, the people who went after him.
(CROSSTALKS)
ROGINSKY: Scott, he said -- literally said, I am your retribution, the Biden crime family, lock her up, went after Sessions repeatedly for not doing what he wanted Sessions to do, which was to indict Hillary or whoever he wanted to indict.
RAMPELL: You can want his campaign to have been about, you know, tax reform and things like that. That is not what he said on the stump time after time after time. He talked about going after his enemies.
JENNINGS: I'm heartened by the fact that the left still cannot figure this out.
PHILLIP: Even if you just take the January 6th part of it, he made that a big part of his campaign, that he would, if he were in power, pardoned those people. You can't say that that was not on the agenda. It absolutely was.
JENNINGS: What was the campaign about? Why did tens of millions of people --
PHILLIP: Okay. But do you think that he's going to do those other things when it comes to the Department of Justice?
JENNINGS: I don't know what he's going to do. I'm not -- I don't talk to him.
PALMERI: A big part of the campaign was being a victim. Like that was a big part of it, was his victimhood. They're coming for you, but they're going to have to get through me. That was his whole line. That is all about the enemies list. That is all --
JENNINGS: No, I totally disagree. I totally disagree.
PALMERI: The deep state.
JENNINGS: That's not --
PALMERI: I mean, this is the stuff that he talked about on the stump. Unless you just don't want to listen to him, those are his own words.
JENNINGS: I listen plenty.
ROGINSKY: Scott, if you believe that people who violated the Capitol on January 6th committed a crime, which I would hope you would because they weren't invited in the way they claimed they were, right? They were not there, they didn't go through security the way the rest of us have to go through to get into the Capitol, they were prosecuted, they were convicted, and now they're serving jail time. And he has said repeatedly that they're political prisoners and he is going to spring them, right? What does that tell you about how he's going to weaponize the Justice Department and on whose behalf? On behalf of people who committed crimes for him, for him, not for anybody else?
RAMPELL: I mean, I admire your, I don't know if I want to call it naivete or optimism, that Trump is going to run on the policies you care about, about deregulation and tax cuts and whatnot, that's just not what his campaign was about. That's not what he has indicated he'll do.
JENNINGS: With all due respect, I've run more campaigns than you, and I know what campaigns are about, and I know why people walk into voting booths, and you're totally wrong.
RAMPELL: Why people walk into voting booths and what Trump plans to do when handed the presidency are two different things.
PHILLIP: All right, guys, stick with us because we have a lot more ahead.
Coming up next, what Democrats call the hard truth, the blame game and the scapegoating that has erupted tonight as the party points fingers at just about everyone over this loss this week.
Plus, why Democrats are losing the culture wars and may have -- that may have been the difference.
Another special guest is going to join us in our fifth seat. That's next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:15:00]
PHILLIP: Kamala Harris' landslide loss to Donald Trump is prompting a nationwide therapy session for Democrats. And it has not been pretty. Everyone is catching strays here. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, the Pod Save Bros, people in charge of the Democratic Party, and, basically, it's a Spider Man meme. Andrew Yang points out that if the president, if he had stepped down in January instead of in July, we may have been in a very different place. Bernie Sanders, he says that the whole party decided to just outright ignore the needs of the working class.
And if you go to Philadelphia, that city's Democratic Party chair blames the campaign for not showing everyone some, R, E, S, P, E, C, T, quote, they were just elitist. They went out of they went out there, did their own thing.
Joining us now. Pete Dominic. He's in our fifth seat at the table. He's a comedian and the host of the daily podcast, Stand Up with Pete Dominick.
Catherine, what's the verdict? RAMPELL: I think we will be litigating this and re-litigating this for many years to come. I would say I think Joe Biden should have dropped out earlier and Kamala Harris wasted many a golden opportunity to distance herself from him, to throw him under the bus. She had many, many chances to do so, and which the public wanted, right? I mean, voters were eager for change, whatever that means. And instead, she refused to distance herself from him.
Not only that, she sort of enhanced the Bidenomics agenda. You know, she hired a lot of the same people. She had a lot of the same messaging. And, in fact, a more left wing version in, in some cases of, of that messaging, some of which I agreed with and some of which I didn't. And, you know, the thing that Americans disliked most about Joe Biden was Bidenomics. So, I don't understand why she didn't -- given, given the card she was dealt, she didn't use this as an opportunity to sort of rebrand.
PETE DOMINICK, COMEDIAN: I am having such a hard time trying to understand so many of the arguments, but I firmly believe, given the outcome, that it wasn't the candidate and it wasn't the policies.
[22:20:13]
Sadly, that many more people like this disgusting, horrible, horrible man. And he's popular. People like what he has done. People like how he behaves. They appreciate and root for his cruelty.
And I just had dinner with my 19-year-old daughter, who I hadn't seen since the election here in the city. She's a student here. And she's terrified. And I didn't even recognize her because she's been crying so much and she posted tonight. She said, as a woman, I'm terrified.
This election was a harsh reminder that a woman could be everything she needs to be, but it's still not enough. She said the majority of this country has chosen hate over humanity. It was a stark choice. It was a stark choice in 2016. I was on The Apprentice in 2004 and had the opportunity to meet Donald Trump and I said, I don't want to meet that guy. He's a horrible guy. He's always been a horrible person and people like that.
This is who we are. I think it's really important to be honest about who too many of us are, too many of us.
PHILLIP: The finger pointing is just everywhere. I mean, a Biden aide in Politico says we ran the best campaign we could considering Joe Biden was the president. Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.
ROGINSKY: Look, I think the Democratic Party needs to reckon with itself. It's not Joe Biden's fault. It's not Kamala Harris' fault. I haven't been talking about this for at least a decade, if not longer. The American bear with me here, the American people like authenticity. They like Trump because they think he is authentic. I agree with you about everything he said.
DOMINICK: You're authentically an asshole. ROGINSKY: Yes. I agree with everything --
DOMINICK: The worst kind of person you could ever imagine, all the worst qualities.
ROGINSKY: However, when the Access Hollywood tape came out, and everybody was horrified.
DOMINICK: Yes. They weren't.
ROGINSKY: That was a -- but, listen, that was a feature, not a bug of what they liked about him. He spoke publicly the way that they imagine people speak privately. People like -- before Joe Biden had his meltdown at the debate and before Joe Biden got old, Biden appeared authentic people like Biden. He got elected because he was authentic.
Women have an incredibly hard time appearing authentic because there is a whole structure created around women to prevent them from being themselves. Because I don't think people know what women authentically are like. They're frightened by it.
PHILLIP: Or women leaders.
ROGINSKY: Women leaders, I should say, right? Like, you know, what do people imagine women do when they sit around a table like this together? What do people imagine they talk about, right? I don't think anybody could even think about that authentically with women. And that's a very big challenge.
PHILLIP: Isn't the point Catherine is making, though? I mean, I buy that the country, like probably most of the world, struggles with gender and with race and all of that stuff. But there's a more simple explanation, which is that the Biden presidency was unpopular. Biden himself was unpopular. And the best way to run in that environment is if you can distance yourself from that, and that's an open question, can you if you are the vice president?
RAMPELL: So, the other undercurrent that I should have mentioned is that, around the world, incumbent parties have lost vote share, like the highest number --
DOMINICK: Because of inflation.
RAMPELL: Because of inflation, exactly. And I have been very critical of some of Biden's policies on this matter, but it is a worldwide phenomenon and incumbents worldwide are paying the price for it, which doesn't mean that Kamala Harris was helpless, right? It doesn't mean that she was powerless to fight back against that headwind essentially of having to deal with people being really frustrated by inflation. Again, she could have distanced herself from some of those Biden policies.
ROGINSKY: We also don't know -- I'm sorry, but as a party, we also have a very hard time, and I know a lot of my Democratic friends were upset with me when I said that this morning, but Democrats have a very hard time figuring out how to speak to people, right? PHILLIP: And we'll talk about that.
ROGINSKY: And that's --
PHILLIP: Yes, we'll talk about that more. I want to play one quick thing. This is Seth Moulton talking about another thing that -- actually, I've heard this from sources today that a lot of Democrats think this was the beginning of the end for the Biden presidency.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. SETH MOULTON (D-MA): I couldn't walk into a bar anywhere in America and not have people come up to me from both parties and thank me for what we did. So, actually, this is a great example of how the Biden administration, this Democratic administration was really out of touch with America, pulling us out of Afghanistan in a haphazard way that cost American lives and ultimately really impacted our foreign policy was a mistake. And we should be able to admit that. And we as Democrats should be willing to fix it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[22:30:00]
DOMINICK: I just came from an event where I was hosting this event tonight for Iraq and Afghanistan, the veterans of America. And I love how people just tuned in to caring about veterans during the pullout. Like that was like the worst --
PHILLIP: I just have to say, Seth Moulton is a veteran.
DOMINICK: I understand. And, and I, and I, and I think that the idea that Joe Biden had the courage to do what no other president, including Barack Obama, who surged in Afghanistan and those, how was it, 13 or 16 people who died in that bombing, thousands of other veterans died as a result of Republican policies. These were Republican policies, these wars.
So, I mean, a lot of people feel that way about that horrible day in Afghanistan and the things around it, but --
PHILLIP: It did create though -- there was a drop in support that they never --
DOMINICK: Because it was so dead --
(CROSSTALKS)
JENNINGS: Look, if you look at the arc of the Biden presidency, he was in really good shape until August of 2021. When Afghanistan happened, he went under 40, she went under 40 and they really lived there until the end of the -- he's still there.
DOMINICK: Why?
JENNINGS: I'll tell you why. Because he ran and told us he was that the adults were back in charge. And that was the opposite of that.
DOMINICK: Yes, they were, because Donald Trump was a child.
JENNINGS: And you know what else? The fact that they wouldn't give these 13 service members families' the time of day --
DOMINICK: Bullshit, dude. I'm sorry, but Donald Trump hates veterans. He called them suckers and losers. He did. He absolutely, despite he has his whole life, he has his entire life.
JENNINGS: I know you're super emotional. I just --
DOMINICK: Of course I am. I'm terrified.
JENNINGS: I'm telling you the political reality is that when they made that decision --
DOMINICK: It doesn't matter when you don't admit Donald Trump hates veterans. You don't admit it. You deny a man, Chief John Kelly, a Marine. You deny -- you say he lied.
JENNINGS: You're still campaigning.
DOMINICK: You say he lied still. It's not over. It'll never be over.
PHILLIP: I want to hear what Coleman has to say.
JENNINGS: The political reality is when they made that decision and everyone realized, oh my gosh, these aren't the competent adults that we were promised.
DOMINICK: Oh, yes, Donald Trump is.
JENNINGS: And then when you pile on top of it the decisions that made inflation worse, it was a compounding interest of political crap over time that they could never get out of. And that's how she lost the road.
HUGHES: There was a bipartisan consensus to get out of Afghanistan. That wasn't the point. It was the way it was done.
DOMINICK: It was Trump's decision to get out.
HUGHES: No, hold on. It was the implementation. I think that's what it's saying. It was the fact that they took out our soldiers. First instead of last, which is you would think would be common sense. And, again, it's like you said, we thought the adults were in the room, that's why people voted for Biden, a return to normalcy, a return to competence. He's a lifelong public servant. We thought we're going to get normal. We're going to get competent. And that's what --
DOMINICK: We did. And the veterans community,
HUGHES: Afghanistan doesn't signal that.
DOMINICK: The wars in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the Republican policies that led to those wars, the idea that, that Joe Biden made the final difficult decision and his administration and his military leaders. I mean, you guys live on the tippy top of bullshit mountain if you actually think that so many people think that the pull out of Afghanistan was the pivot point? Are you kidding me?
JENNINGS: Well, I mean, I can read a chart and I can read a poll. I guess you can't. But the reality is when he made that decision --
DOMINICK: Your petty insults are so weak, dude, you have no idea. Like I don't even understand if you hear yourself talking. You can laugh all you want, but like I can't read the chart, like it's so uninteresting and unconvincing.
PHILLIP: The reason that we brought this up is because that was from a Democratic senator -- a Democratic congressman.
I think that there's an acknowledgement broadly among Democrats that what happened in that Abbey Gate incident hurt them. They don't like that it did. They don't think it's fair that it did, but they recognize that it did. And the American people sometimes --
DOMINICK: (INAUDIBLE) with who?
PHILLIP: With voters, people who cast ballots, voters with writ large.
DOMINICK: So, you think voters were thinking about Abbey Gate on Tuesday night, really?
PHILLIP: No. I think I'm not telling you -- look, we heard Seth Moulton talk about it.
DOMINICK: Yes, but do we think voters were thinking about the fall of Afghanistan?
HUGHES: I remember talking to people at the time that lost faith in Biden because of that.
PHILLIP: It became a proxy for questions about leadership.
DOMINICK: I talked to plenty of people who did not lose faith in the veterans community in Joe Biden as a result of that.
PHILLIP: All right, guys. Stick around, much more ahead.
Coming up next, the Democrats, did they go too far on social issues? That's another one of the things being discussed. Are they afraid to offend people? We'll discuss that as well.
[22:30:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR: Fear and loathing. It's what Donald Trump bet on in one of his most controversial ads of this presidential campaign. And looking at the results from Tuesday night, some people think it might have worked.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNKNOWN: Kamala supports tax -- for prisoners.
KAMALA HARRIS, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED (D): -- surgery.
UNKNOWN: For prisoners.
HARRIS: For prisoners. Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.
UNKNOWN: Hell no, I don't want my taxpayer dollars going to that. Kamala supports transgender sex changes in jail with our money.
UNKNOWN: Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls and their sports. Kamala is for they, them. President Trump is for you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: That was the ad, according to many people, that was a sleeper issue in this campaign. Julie?
JULIE ROGINSKY, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: You know, I have a house in Pennsylvania and I saw that ad 24-7 and at the time I thought to myself, you know, way to exploit a vulnerable community. I thought it was disgusting and I still think it's disgusting. However, I do think Democrats have a very, very hard time communicating on not just this issue but on a lot of issues with average voters. We just do. We have to acknowledge that we have a problem communicating.
You know, the White House spent an awful lot of time, we talked about abrogate before this. They don't-- they didn't know how to communicate their position. The Biden economy was a good economy. They didn't, you may disagree with me statistically, it was, they didn't communicate it, that it was getting better and better, right? And that they needed to see it through.
[22:35:00]
They needed to communicate to people during these college protests, and I know there's a lot of hard feelings on both sides of the issue on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But when you have kids trashing college campuses and preventing other people from studying, if you're a parent, you look at that and you say, I just saved up hundreds of thousands of dollars or took out massive loans to send my kids to college and they can't make it to class because -- then some administration can't keep their own students under control.
And the White House doesn't have a viewpoint on this because they don't want to offend one segment or the other. Or to some extent, people putting pronouns after their names. Just call me by my pronoun. And by the way, if you call me by the wrong pronoun, I'll correct you and we'll move on. You don't have to virtue signal about everything. But they didn't do -- you know, it's the constant virtue signaling, I think, that really alienates people.
Because what most people care about is what they care about. They just want people to be authentic and take positions. And I think as Democrats sometimes, we are so busy trying to figure out how to appeal to Scott, because Scott lives in Kentucky and Scott's a white man. How do I speak to Scott?
And I speak to Scott differently than I speak to Abby, than I speak to Julie. And the reality is, you know what I know about Scott? He's got kids who love Pokemon and so do I. And sometimes those kids talk about Pokemon trading cards. We can talk about the same thing. We don't need to sit there and constantly try to segment how we talk to people. We don't have to look at focus groups at all times to figure it out. Common sense is common sense.
COLEMAN HUGHES, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I love the spirit of what you're saying. The only difference is I think it's more than a communication problem. I think it's deeper. I think it's the soul of the Democratic Party. It's about the beliefs. It's about the values. It's not simply a comms problem.
ROGINSKY: Values are inclusive.
HUGHES: It's that why couldn't any, it's a courage problem, too. It's a courage in standing up against the progressive wing of the party. Why can't any Democrat just say something simple like, of course we have no problem after you're above 18, do what you want, live and let live, this is America. But below 18, if you can't get a tattoo, you also can't concert to hormone therapy.
ROGINSKY: But that's not, listen.
HUGHES: Play whatever sport you want. But you can't play against people that have a natural disadvantage against you. This is common sense, and no Democrat can say this. That's deeper than a communication problem.
PETE DOMINICK, COMEDIAN: It's not common sense. It's not. I worked very, very hard for weeks, months in our local school board. And so many Americans know what this is like. We got thumped and threatened and beaten over trans kids using the bathroom. It was horrifying, what my community went through. I mean, so, and what the trans kids' community, we had a woman in the back who yelled, you're brainwashed to a person who identified as trans. She got elected to the board.
We can't compete. You say we have to be better on messaging. Tell me what we're supposed to do when Donald Trump says, boys are going to school and getting a surgery and coming home as girls. The fact that anybody would believe that is insane to me, but how do we -- how do we as a country combat that? I don't know what to do.
PHILLIP: One of the aspects of this--
DOMINICK: We should be protecting vulnerable people, but we can't.
PHILLIP: The issues underlying that are a whole discussion. But in this particular campaign, unless you live in one of these battleground states, you may not have known, if you heard Kamala Harris talking, that this was an issue that in October, according to the spending, constituted 21 percent of Republican ad spending in this election.
DOMINICK: Which issue?
ROGINSKY: The trans.
PHILLIP: That ad and this issue of trans people and the response from the Democrats was nothing. Literally nothing.
CATHERINE RAMPELL, CNN ECONOMICA COMMENTATOR: I just don't think this ad should be held up as a model for how to talk to people.
PHILLIP: Oh no, no.
RAMPELL: And I feel like that's sort of the sentence. Let me just be very clear. This ad, I'm not saying that this ad is the way to address the issue of trans people who are people, by the way. And I'm not holding it up as a paragon of ads. I'm just saying the reporting is the Trump campaign ran this ad, and their numbers came back and said this was the top ad for them. It worked the best out of all the things that they tried. And there was no response to it at all.
ROGINSKY: But there's a larger issue here, right? And the larger issue is this. The White House will constantly get into these little Twitter wars or little meme wars, for example, with Steve Doocy from Fox News, right? Constantly, they would try to own Steve Doocy from Fox News. Well, I'm sorry who cares about Steve Doocy from Fox News? That's great for Steve Doocy, but the average American person doesn't know who he is.
DOMINICK: On the transition?
ROGINSKY: Hold on, no, just generally. And what they do is they waste a time on that They should have looked straight into the camera every single day and said you know what? We just passed a bipartisan Infrastructure bill and in Northampton County, Pennsylvania or in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on route 212. Thanks to our bill.
There's a pothole on Regalsville Road and we filled it. That pothole that you've been riding on for the last 10 years, thanks to us, we filled it. Instead of that, they're talking about little memes with Steve D. I mean, again, the messaging was all over the place as opposed to laser focusing on their accomplishments. And I'm sorry to say it was a huge missed opportunity. And you ask why Biden's numbers consistently went down.
[22:40:01]
It's because nobody ever effectively communicated his accomplishments over and over and over and over again. And they should have because they are vast. They are vast.
PHILLIP: Go ahead, Scott. SCOTT JENNINGS, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think -- I hate to let you guys on a secret, but I will. The ad works not because of the trans issue. The ad works --
ROGINSKY: The Charlamagne.
JENNINGS: The ad works because it communicates something about what this person as a politician would say yes to when it comes to either your tax dollars or doing something in this case for an inmate population. Well over half the country sits around all the time going, why is the government so focused on everyone but me?
There's a lot of people in this country who believe they've been crushed by COVID, crushed by inflation, crushed because of their values, crushed because of where they live or who they are or what they believe in. And so, the ad works not because it's targeted at the trans community.
UNKNOWN: Yes, that's right.
JENNINGS: The ad works because it is -- they're showing you what this president would be willing to do with your money and who they would pander to if they were the commander in chief and that's why it was so effective.
PHILLIP: What Scott is saying about Americans feeling like the system isn't working for them, I think we can probably all agree that is true, right?
HUGHES: Well, it's working. People feel that. It's working. Absolutely.
PHILLIP: Yes, so, but so, the other part of the conversation of the ongoing autopsy Democrats are having is about why aren't they speaking better to working class people? I mean, one of the few demographics that Kamala Harris improved on in this race were people making $100,000 or more. So, wealthy people, probably more educated people, they're responding to what the Democrats are doing, and that's not enough people to win elections.
DOMINICK: The Democrats, they were so busy actually creating policies -- Catherine can talk more about them, that it actually improved the lives of working-class people.
ROGINSKY: But they did talk about them.
DOMINICK: But yes, I mean --
RAMPELL: They also did a lot of things for highly educated Democrats, I mean, like college grads, like -- I think one of, to Scott's point about the sort of symbolism, I don't entirely agree with your analysis of that ad. I think you have -- make some good points. I don't entirely agree.
But I think another policy that was symbolically about people other than the, you know, the median voter was the student debt forgiveness, which disproportionately went to, well, first of all, to people who went to college who are likely to have higher earnings in general. But also the way that it was structured went to a lot of people who are likely to have very high earnings including people who are going to come doctors and lawyers and things like that.
And part of the reason those policies were structured that way and worked out of that way is because that's who was staffing this administration. They're people who went to Yale law school who want their debt forgiven.
ROGINSKY: But look --
HUGHES: The Democratic party -- it has seen itself as the party of the working-class, multi-racial coalition. In any other country in Europe, they'd call themselves the Labor Party, because it's the party of labor, right? But what's happened over the past 10 years is that non-college-educated working-class voters have been hemorrhaged to the Republican Party and the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated.
No one would have predicted this 15 years ago. It is a massive devastation and humiliation to the self-concept of the Democratic Party, and it has to be reckoned with right now. That's what's happened. That's what just happened two days ago.
ROGINSKY: But my point is this, we segment, as Democrats, how we talk to people. As a Democrat --
HUGHES: Yes, because we're such a diverse party.
ROGINSKY: No, because it's -- but listen, what unites us is much, much -- actually, we're getting less diverse by the day if you look at where Latinos are going and African Americans -- that's a problem. That's a big problem for us. That's because I would be advised as a Democratic strategist to talk to you on a particular subject and I would be advised to talk to Abby on a very different subject and to each of you on a different subject.
HUGHES: But we're very different.
ROGINSKY: We're not.
HUGHES: Yes, we have a lot of different interests.
ROGINSKY: No, we're not. The bottom line is there's a lot more that unites us than divides us. And we start talking to people about common sense issues and common sense language rather than trying to figure out how to be too cute by half. That's how you message.
And that's not how the Democratic -- the last Democratic president who did that well was Bill Clinton. Senator Biden used to do that very well 20 years ago. But that's the last time a president did that was Bill Clinton. And you see the result.
PHILLIP: All right, everyone. Hang on. Coming up next, Donald Trump made quite a lot of promises on the campaign trail. So, how exactly is he going to enact them when he is in office again? We're going to discuss the economy. That's next.
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[22:48:28]
PHILLIP: Sugar high or signs of a boom. The markets are a big fan of President-elect Donald Trump, apparently. Even as economists suggest, most everything Donald Trump wants to do will usher in, perhaps, a recession. So, what are those things exactly? The specifics are suspect, but the broad strokes are these. Tariffs, lots of tariffs, the 2017 tax cuts, he'll extend those, and taxes, gone on things like tips, payroll taxes, and income.
Tara is back with us at the table. He's got a lot of things that he's planning on doing. And I mean, to Scott's point, he's feeling emboldened. He believes that he has a mandate, and he wants to do it immediately. What would the impact of doing all of these things be if it is done as he wants it to be done right away?
RAMPELL: It would be terrible. I mean, all of the things that are his priorities, whether it's global tariffs, deporting 10 to 20 million people, politicizing the Fed, devaluing the dollar -- all of those things would be inflationary and or cause the economy to crash. I think the very best thing Trump could do is nothing at all.
You don't go out, play golf, take credit for the economic trends that we already have that are already quite strong. Wages have been outpacing inflation for over a year, for example, inflation has come down a lot, GDP growth has been robust, quarter after quarter. Just take credit. Take credit for the economy he inherited and do nothing else and that's the best possible outcome we can hope for.
[22:50:00]
JENNINGS: Well, one thing that he is going to have to do and hopefully the Congress will work with the monitors extend the tax cuts. I mean, this is an immediate issue they're coming up and I think it was a big part of the economic pitch.
We focus on the tariffs a lot but to me, a lot of why the business community and you see the markets reacting a little bit is because there's an anticipation here that he is going to be able to get these tax cuts extended. I, as a Republican and a conservative, believe that would be the very best thing that we could do.
So, that's the one issue here. Extending those tax cuts and then even extending some tax relief to some of these groups that he talked about during the campaign, think it was exciting for a lot of Republicans to hear a Republican candidate for president still boldly leaning into the idea, let's cut taxes for working people.
PHILLIP: Okay.
RAMPELL: And if you look at who he prioritized last time around, it was corporate tax cuts. The individual side tax cuts are expiring. That's why we have this big food fight coming next year over the tax code because the individual side stuff is expiring because it was not the priority. It was corporate tax cuts.
PHILLIP: I don't want us to gloss over the tariffs. He said, you glossed over it. Donald Trump doesn't gloss over it. This is a big deal for him. He wants to do them. And he also has said that he needs to do them in order to pay for a lot of the other, you know, let's call them giveaways that he wants to have.
ROGINSKY: So, two predictions. The economy that Scott has been rolling his eyes at under Joe Biden at 12:01 P.M. on January 20th, Donald Trump and every Republican out there is going to say is the greatest economy on the face of this earth. And they will be celebrating how fantastic it is, right? So, the prediction number one.
Prediction number two is that if there's a Trump Tower Shanghai or Ivanka gets a few more patents or something happens in China and the Trump family, the Kushner's get to build some sort of resort, those China tariffs will probably not come to fruition.
Because if there's one thing we know about Donald Trump, there's one thing that Saudi Arabia knows about Donald Trump, there's something that Qatar knows about Donald Trump, something the Chinese and the Russians know about Donald Trump. If you make it worth as well financially, all the promises on the tariffs and everything else will magically disappear, and they know that.
PHILLIP: Tara, do you have a sense of the who of it all?
TARA PALMERI, "PUCK" SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes.
PHILLIP: Who might, first of all, might be coming in. And then also, he really doesn't like. Jerome Powell, but Jerome Powell's like, I'm not going anywhere.
PALMERI: Right.
PHILLIP: Will he try?
PALMERI: Of course, he's going to try, right? He's got a lot of friends around him, too, that come in. They're long-time friends, like Scott Bessent, who's being seen as someone who could be Treasury Secretary. You've got Witkoff, Steve Witkoff, who's been around him, a real estate magnet, who wanted the chief of staff role, but he'll be, you know, around.
He's got, you know, Wayne Berman from Blackstone, who wants a role in Treasury. Even Gary Cohn wants to come back. Remember him? Got Larry Kudlow who wants to come back into the NEC. These are people who've been waiting around for the past four years, people who have left for eyeing it.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these people -- because Trump loves a name brand more than anything, right? And so, he would love to even have someone like a Steve Schwarzman or a Jamie Dimon. Even though they came out against him during the campaign, I bet if they went back to kiss the ring, Trump would probably put them ahead of the line of even his friends. I think in the case of this, a brand name goes above loyalty because it validates him.
PHILLIP: Yes, especially on this economic stuff.
PALMERI: Exactly.
PHILLIP: That was a big factor. Those are the guys, the tycoons on Wall Street that he looks up to and have greater wealth than he has. So, I think he would like to see them working for him.
JENNINGS: I would just point out the whole economic package, the American people just voted for it. So, you know, for all the -- and this is the nature of our politics. You run on stuff, you win, you execute, and if it works, people will -- I mean, this is how it works. He deserves a chance to do this.
RAMPELL: To have global tariffs in --
PHILLIP: And we will be here for the execution.
JENNINGS: Yes, he won the election.
PHILLIP: Tara Palmeri, thank you very much. Everyone else hang tight. Coming up next, the panel will give us their nightcaps, including why Rudy Giuliani got yelled at by a judge today.
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[22:57:52]
PHILLIP: We're back and so is Pete and it's time for the news nightcap. You each have 30 seconds to say your piece. Julie, you're up first.
ROGINSKY: Well, I think this election has proven that people really, really hate politicians and until we realize that politics could be a force for good. We're going to keep electing people who are anti- politicians like Donald Trump.
At some point we have to remember this is why we're here, that we're here to do good and not just to go at each other all the time. But again, once again, this election showed. People hate politicians and that's why they responded to Trump the way they did.
PHILLIP: Scott.
JENNINGS: Well, here's some truth. Gen X has delivered Donald Trump to the White House. My people. They came before the internet. Your people, too.
ROGINSKY: Boo.
JENNINGS: Before we bubble-wrapped society, we shrug off those things. We aren't sure why everyone is offended by everything. We're all hulking maniacs. We took the reins of this election --
ROGINSKY: No, we're not. JENNINGS: -- to steer America back on track and out of the BS. We love rebels. We love innovators. We love disruptors. Does this sound like anyone you know? From Gen X, the message is clear. We're not putting up with it anymore. So, you're welcome, America.
PHILLIP: All right, lots of Gen X disagreement. Go ahead, Pete.
DOMINICK: You don't speak for Gen X. I prefer Ricky the Dragon Steamboat in any restaurant who's not Donald Trump. Hulk Hogan used the N-word. So, just to say, my mind is community. I think I learned during the pandemic that loneliness can kill. And now, we're terrified. A huge percentage of Americans are terrified about what is to come, especially vulnerable people. And through my daily show, I accidentally created this community.
And we had 100 people last night online together trying to help each other and then look out for each other and fight the fear and the loneliness that comes in is inevitable in coming with Donald Trump coming back to power. And this has been important throughout history. Community is so, so important. I hope people can find one.
PHILLIP: I think that's a bipartisan message. Coleman.
HUGHES: All right, so I've heard a lot of people today saying that misogyny is the reason Kamala Harris lost. Misogyny is a real thing, but it's not a good explanation of why she lost. We've had, you know, over two dozen women governors in this country since the year 2000, half of them in red states. Republicans and centrists have no problem voting for a women governor.
[23:00:02]
I think it's something that the Democratic party has alienated male voters. The fact that manosphere is an insult is a perfect example. And I think the Democrats have to really look into that.
PHILLIP: Catherine, sorry to squeeze you in.
RAMPELL: Sure. I have something sillier that I wanted to talk about, which is the list of things that a judge reprimanded Rudy Giuliani today for not handing over as part of his defamation judgment and included his apartment in New York, his Mercedes-Benz, a bunch of sports memorabilia and 26 watches. Why does this man need 26 watches? That's what I want to know.
PHILLIP: I don't know but I'll take of them. Everyone, thank you very much. Thank you for watching "NewsNight". "Laura Coates Live" starts right now.
