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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip

Mexican President Denies Trump's Claim Border is Closing; Trump Cabinet Picks Face Bomb Threats and Swatting; Trump's NIH Pick Backed Herd Immunity, Criticized Lockdowns; Joe Rogan Says Democrats Screwed Up; "NewsNight" Talks About How Politics Can Affect Some Families At Thanksgiving. Aired 10-11p ET

Aired November 27, 2024 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[22:00:00]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): Tonight, the ugly. The president-elect's cabinet nominees face threats from the public while Elon Musk puts an X on the back of civil servants.

Also, COVID's long memory, a pandemic fight raises questions about Donald Trump's pick to helm the National Institutes of Health. But is his science 2020?

Plus, the Blue Rogan Experience, liberals look around for their own version of the right's favorite podcaster.

And family feud, A-list liberal says it's worth turning your back on MAGA family members.

Live at the table, Coleman Hughes, Geoff Duncan, Ameshia Cross and Lance Trover.

Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here, they do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH (on camera): Good evening. I'm Audie Cornish in for Abby Philip.

And we're going to get right to what America is talking about. It's he said, she said, breaking tonight a dispute between the president-elect of the U.S. and Mexico's president over a phone call. Who agreed to what, and what it may mean for the U.S.-Mexico relationship.

Donald Trump brought out some of his best words, for example, wonderful, to describe a conversation with Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum, ending his Truth Social post by claiming she agreed to, quote, stop migration through Mexico and into the United States.

Sheinbaum actually just responded moments ago, and the short version is, never, no, not once, did she say anything of the kind. Sheinbaum on X was writing, we reiterate that Mexico's position is not to close borders, but to build bridges between governments and between peoples.

Joining us in our fifth seat, CNN Media Correspondent Hadas Gold. But, first, we're going to go to Lance on this breaking news, because it does kind of feel familiar from Trump 45. These initial kind of back and forth phone calls, interactions with other world leaders that sort of we hear one version of it and then we hear another version of it.

LANCE TROVER, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Yes, I think the big difference is Donald Trump has got a pretty big mandate, particularly when it comes to this border and getting fentanyl under control in this country. So, that to me is the big difference from 2017. And I don't think that any country, Mexico especially, should underestimate Americans tolerance for when it comes to getting the border under control and to getting fentanyl under control. I can remember being on the campaign trail. You meet families who have dealt -- they've lost children to this fentanyl. It is an epidemic across this country.

And, look, if you look back at the polling, the border was the number two issue consistently in every single poll. Donald Trump was leading --

CORNISH: If this is in a debate here about whether or not it needs to be done, it's him telling a world leader, telling us that a world leader said it was going to be close. You probably remember this from the first round of Trump, right, where we would find out there was a very beautiful phone call and maybe we'd hear another version of the call.

HADAS GOLD, CNN MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: And one thing that always stuck out to me in those years was hearing from the reporters who covered Trump. I think Maggie Haberman said this about whenever she was reporting on something that happened in Trump world, she would sort of take what everybody would say and almost put it through a cheesecloth and try to get to the truth of what came out of that, sort of what was alike in all of those things to try to get to the truth. Because often we would hear of these differing sort of statements from different world leaders, from what the president would say, from what the world leaders would say, and that was sort of the difficulty in covering Trump, but also made it a bit more, I guess, chaotic and exciting in certain ways.

CORNISH: Yes. It was also fascinating that Sheinbaum, who's a relatively new leader, used X.

GEOFF DUNCAN, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes. When I first read this earlier this evening, I was hoping it was true, right? I was hoping that all these things that were in there, fentanyl and a great relationship with the Mexico president, but history is a great predictor of the future, and Donald Trump does this too often. He splashes magic pixie dust on the page and it really doesn't come to be true.

And we need to take this serious. This mandate from the voters was we've got to take the border serious, but I really look at this as a two-pronged issue. We can't just take the border seriously without talking about immigration, right? I just don't think we can have that honest conversation. And if Donald Trump just hones this moment and he focuses in on trying to figure out where those illegal folks that are here that are committing crimes, where they're at, then we can actually have a substantive conversation. But instead, he's just going to gallivant around and act like he's playing global pit boss.

CORNISH: Anyone else?

AMESHIA CROSS, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: No, I think that that's true. And Trump is trying to rule with a stick and not a carrot. And we've seen this time and time again. He is out here trying to strong arm a leader, particularly a female leader, and he is known for saying things that quite frankly are not true. We'll never see the transcript of that call. We'll never -- you know, you can say it's, he said, she said, but we've seen time and time again where Trump will say something that happened in a call that is absolutely not true about that call.

[22:05:07]

What we know from Mexico is that, quite frankly, they have not been good faith partners when it comes to immigration reform or reductions at the border, or being honest about the fentanyl crisis or the caravans or anything else, like they have just not been helpful. But I do think that with Donald Trump being president again, he has the opportunity to try to bridge some of this. He has the opportunity to be honest, not like he was about the border wall, which he said that they agreed to pay for and they didn't do that either. He has the opportunity to actually work and ensure that we do get to some resolution.

But, honestly, this is going to come from Congress as well. When we talk about the crime, we have to be honest about the fact that a lot of the crime stats that Donald Trump has pushed out in the Republican Party have, quite frankly, been lies. The numbers aren't nearly as big as he would like to say that they are. And when we talk about the fentanyl crisis, we have to be honest that a lot of Americans are driving the fentanyl crisis, not people across the border.

CORNISH: But I think the thing that's intriguing me is you have two new leaders, and you have a world that is far more sort of familiar with the tactics of a Donald Trump, right? Like now you know, if you go into a room with him, what you can or should do after you leave that room if you're another world leader.

COLEMAN HUGHES, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: All of these leaders negotiate through media, to some degree. So, we should separate the public statements from what's probably going on behind the scenes. They may be testing each other to see how they react to Trump's characterization of the meeting, because that's a sign of whether his leverage is working behind the scenes.

So, I don't think you should read too much into these public statements, because at the end of the day, this is just a negotiation. It's brinkmanship.

TROVER: That's what I'm saying. I mean, no one was on this phone call, so no one knows exactly what happened, but that, to my original point, the one thing he comes in with is, to me, a lot more of a mandate, and I just think the folks in Mexico need to be thinking long and hard about what he's willing to do, especially as somebody who doesn't have to run for office.

CORNISH: She has her own mandate, right? Those are the dynamics that you don't know anything about.

TROVER: Absolutely. I get it, she needs to talk tough. But, I mean, I think this is an issue where the American people are lock solid in their mandates.

DUNCAN: The Americans that voted for him in the middle are expecting him to do something, not just build 20 miles of a wall for a selfie station.

CORNISH: This is going to come back. So, I want to follow up with something related to the cabinet appointees because a number of Trump appointees have actually been facing threats from the public and sometimes in the form of swatting, which, if people don't know, is when someone calls in an anonymous threat on someone's home and sends federal agents there, guns a blazing, it's something that a lot of politicians and journalists and public people deal with.

And I wanted to bring it up here because it's kind of coupled at the same time to my mind with Elon Musk publicizing the names of people on Twitter, federal workers who he thinks could be a problem for whatever reason going forward.

Geoff, I want to put this to you first because I think you know what it's like to take on the onslaught of unhappy political people and the things that they're capable of. Tell me I'm wrong , if you don't want to talk about it, but is this something that like, you know, it is tougher than people realize to deal with?

DUNCAN: Yes, this is a disgusting derivative of the current political environment and anybody that will tell you it's one side's fault or the other side's fault is just being ignorant to reality. It's both sides' fault, this political toxicity.

And when you're trying to raise three kids and you're married and your wife's getting death threats and people know your kids' names and your house is getting swatted, even recently getting swatted, I mean, the moment I stepped up and said Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election in Georgia, and there is no fraud, the phone started ringing and it's kept going.

So, look, this is a disgusting moment in time. But, look, Elon Musk knows better than to do this, right?

CORNISH: Why do you think that?

DUNCAN: Well, because, look, he's a successful human. He's the wealthiest human in the world. He's built two, three, four, five, six incredible companies. He knows better.

CORNISH: Yes, but someone else jumped in. Do you believe he knows better?

TROVER: Yes, I think he does know better.

CORNISH: I mean, I think he sees X as his weapon, right? X is his platform.

DUNCAN: Well, he lit $20 billion on fire to have the bully pulpit, and he's got what he wants.

HUGHES: And, remember, he was struggling with people tracking his location a couple years ago, and so he does know what it feels like, actually. I mean, obviously he didn't technically dox this person because it was public information, but the fact he has so many followers that he puts --

DUNCAN: So was his flight information.

HUGHES: Right.

CORNISH: Yes.

HUGHES: So, it's careless and it's actually counterproductive to all of his aims with DOGE, which I really support those aims. But doing something like this, associating it with basically bullying pretty much a private person is just totally counterproductive.

GOLD: The hypocrisy is rather glaring when you see what he did. Because, as you noted, it was just a few years ago that he was removing people from Twitter for tracking, as you said, his jets, the Elon Jets account, journalists as well, who were reporting just on the Elon Jets account. And as you noted, it was publicly available information. Anybody could figure out what the call sign was for his flight and track it and talk about it. But now he's doing the same thing. It's publicly available information. It's a federal database. But the difference is that all of these people that he listed, first of all, was four women. They all work on issues related to climate, and he called them fake jobs.

[22:10:00]

But they're all private federal government employees, civil servants.

CORNISH: Not posting the job, but posting their name.

GOLD: Yes, and they're not public-facing people. They're not the spokespeople for these departments. And now some --

TROVER: They're taxpayer-funded jobs. I mean, they're anybody can go look them up. I'm just --

DUNCAN: But so are soldiers. I couldn't imagine. I mean, same thing. Just because you work for the government doesn't mean you have to be exposed.

TROVER: I'm just saying that these are public -- they're paid for by the taxpayers for their funds. So, this is not a secret that these people --

CROSS: So are people. Because you can go --

TROVER: I work for the government too. Many of us have worked for the government. Our salaries are out there and we work for the government. I mean, I'm just saying that they are public-facing --

GOLD: But there's a difference when you're a private person who -- and then you're put on blast by somebody like Elon Musk saying that their jobs are fake, they shouldn't be there, because right now, those four women are facing a torrent of abuse online, and who knows what else they're receiving privately. I spoke to people who have been targeted by Elon Musk and his legions of fans in the past. people like Missy Cummings, she used to be on the National Highway Transportation Safety Advisory Board. She spoke critically about Tesla. And when he targeted her, she told me she received death threats, she had to leave her home, and she eventually moved from her home.

CROSS: We kind of do know what they're going through, actually, because we saw something similar when Giuliani called out those two poll workers in Georgia. We know that when you put a name in the public eye of individuals who are just going to do their jobs every day, what a lot of these sycophants online will do to those individuals. And it is a very scary place to be.

And as somebody who several members of my family who have dutifully worked in the civil service, it is really frustrating to see that be okay by a guy who didn't want to be doxxed himself. He clowned when it was happening to him and did everything to stop it.

CORNISH: Can I follow through on this idea, though, because there's a vulnerability here. Giuliani right now is fighting to have his couch not taken out of his apartment. You know what I mean? Like you can get sued to oblivion for doing that. So, why is it that you think this is a good idea heading into what is a new project in government efficiency?

TROVER: I'm not -- look, would I personally advocate that he do that? No. But I just also know that they are government employees. And, look, I think this speaks to the larger issue about the bureaucracy and what goes on in Washington. And I think this is the --

CORNISH: But it actually speaks to what lengths should you go to address that.

TROVER: To address what?

CORNISH: To address that efficiency, right? Is it okay to say that I am so interested in doing the government that I get to out random people?

TROVER: Would that be something I would choose to do? No. And you saw Ramaswamy come out and say, look, we are not targeting anybody individually. This is about the bureaucracy. And I do think there is an issue here about the bureaucracy. And let's face it, the American public, 75 percent of this country thinks we're heading in the wrong direction. They don't like what's happening in Washington and, clearly, they're for some streamlining of government. I do think that's the broader issue at play here.

But he did not dox them and the fact is they are government employees, they are taxpayer-funded --

CORNISH: So, this is a tax thing that works for you?

TROVER: Again, I'm not saying that is something I would do personally.

CORNISH: But you're not saying you disapprove.

TROVER: The idea that he doxxed them, I agree with you. I agree it wasn't doxxing.

HUGHES: I do think it was counterproductive to the mission of DOGE. What DOGE should be about is trying to unite people behind the fact that there's so much waste in government, there's so much red tape, there's so much B.S. And so let's highlight the jobs that need to be eliminated. I'm fine with that. But you just got to be a little more careful if you have that much power. And you have --

TROVER: It's a fair point. It's a fair point.

HUGHES: I think he's a bit of a Twitter addict, frankly.

GOLD: He does it for the lols.

CORNISH: You're saying he's high on his own supplies, is what you're saying?

HUGHES: In a sense, yes. I mean, and I think he would be a better leader and a better person if he could roll his own Twitter addiction back.

DUNCAN: And Elon's in this unique position. I mean, he's got the president's ear and he just has to decide, does he want to be a hell raiser or a problem solver, right, in this unique position? If he just wants to be a hell raiser, he owns Twitter, he do and say, I mean, if I log on this phone right now, four of the first ten results are going to be Elon's latest thoughts, right? He's rigged the algorithm so that we have to read what is what his thoughts are. He's either going to be a hell raiser or a problem solver. We're going to find out pretty quickly.

CORNISH: Okay. Everyone stay with us. Hadas, thank you so much for giving us some of that detail.

Next, Trump's pick to lead one of the nation's health agencies supported herd immunity and was also a critic of lockdowns. We have another special guest to join our fifth seat.

Plus, as Democrats search for their version of Joe Rogan, the podcaster has a response tonight.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [22:15:00]

CORNISH: Tonight, we're going to look back to a pandemic debate we haven't thought about in a while, which was worse, COVID or COVID lockdowns. Now, the reason why we're talking about this again is because Donald Trump's pick to lead the National Institutes of Health was fine with the idea of herd immunity, which you may or may not have remembered was the idea of letting a virus run unchecked until enough people have immunity so that when someone gets infected, the virus basically has nowhere to go.

Now, sorry, in our fifth seat today is Dr. Devi Nampiaparampil. Thank you for joining our table. Sorry about that.

I want to talk to you about Dr. Bhattacharya, who is Trump's pick to lead the NIH. What's notable about where his position was during the height of kind of COVID lockdown specifically?

DR. DEVI NAMPIAPARAMPIL, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, NYU SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: Yes. So, his argument was that the lockdowns were too severe, and part of that was because he was looking at, for example, people with heart disease, people with cancer, that would they be able to get the treatment that they needed in the face of the lockdowns. So, it was really a question of, you know, which is going to cause more harm in the long-term.

And it wasn't an all or nothing approach, like let's get rid of the lockdowns, it was more that maybe we should ease some of these restrictions for certain people, like he even pointed out for kids, for example, that their vaccination rates were going down because they couldn't get to the pediatrician. So, you know, balancing all these factors, he really asked some tough questions, and I think that provoked a lot of controversy at the time.

[22:20:02]

CORNISH: I think there are so many figures out of COVID who were, and I'm just going to use this word radicalized, so to speak, from the experience. And just from my own reporting, like parents who came out of the lockdowns, just like completely upset at their school boards, or one reason or another, tons and tons of voters who might not have been in the kind of anti-vax crowd, but had so many questions about the vaccine, that they saw it as a government overreach. Can you talk to me about like, how you see it having overhang in a way that I know Democrats have been suffering with?

CROSS: Well, as somebody who has spent quite a bit of my career working in education policy, I think that one of the most overt ways was what we saw when it came to students returning to school. We look at the lapses in education when it came to reading, writing and math. We look at the fact that, you know, the socialization of those young people was extremely difficult. The higher rates of depression, anxiety and other things from, you know, being in isolation essentially for quite some time.

And I think that, you know, in retrospect, the idea is that possibly those students could have gone back to school earlier. I think that we operated under what we had at the time, which, quite fortunately, or unfortunately in some cases, was changing rapidly. So, initially, they didn't necessarily know how COVID was passed. Then we had, you know, the social distancing, then we had businesses that shut down, many businesses that did not recover.

CORNISH: I think people understand that. And I just feel like maybe Democrats or progressives or the public health community hasn't acknowledged how much damage that was and in the ways that they were wrong.

DUNCAN: Yes. I think it's interesting. If you take a step back to 2020, one of the main reasons why Donald Trump got beat was because of his reaction to COVID, right? I mean, think about this. He let Dr. Fauci in the Oval Office every minute of every day. Our state, Georgia, Governor Kemp and myself and the legislature opened back up much quicker and got lambasted almost every minute of every day by Donald Trump.

To see the team he's building around him now is a totally different makeup. It's almost like he didn't make any of those mistakes, and that was a liability for him. So, I think that was really some political coaching to build a different team around it.

But, look, there's no doubt about it. One of the main reasons why Donald Trump got beat in 2020 was because of his reaction to COVID. And he just never seemed to have a good plan. It left people confused and was it lockdown one day and not lockdown the next day?

CORNISH: I mean, someone else can jump in here, but, in a way, I feel like one of the reasons why the Biden Harris team suffered is because of all the things they did in response to COVID as well.

HUGHES: Absolutely. A key thing about Jay Bhattacharya to understand is, obviously, he supported the kind of Swedish model, the no lockdown model, which agree with it or not, it worked out okay in Sweden, you know, but it wasn't a disaster. It was another choice. But what happened to him? When he shared his perspective on Twitter, we know from the Twitter files, it was revealed that he was put on the blacklist, right, for spreading, quote/unquote, misinformation when really it was just a minority viewpoint.

CROSS: But Sweden is also a much healthier country when we talk about the fact that there were so many preexisting conditions from diabetes, which affects a lot of youth here. We talk about people being overweight when we talk about blood pressure issues, autoimmune disorder. There are so much more here when we look into those factors, specifically of people who would have been at higher risk for COVID that just do not exist in the same proximity or population in Sweden.

HUGHES: Fair. But the important point for Jay Bhattacharya is that he was censored from Twitter for expressing a pretty scientifically- backed viewpoint that was a totally valid perspective and people at the time were complaining about you know excess censorship and regulation of Twitter and they were completely right. And the wisdom, what it really goes to show, is when you try to suppress something, it ends up ten times as strong and this is the proof of that.

CORNISH: Yes.

TROVER: You're totally right. That's the deep hangover that's helped propel Donald Trump back into office. I say this all the time. One of Donald Trump's -- he's been talking about it for eight or nine years that Washington is working against you. COVID created an even deeper distrust. We saw our health agencies fail us. We saw censorship come on. One of the things that we talk about men who turn to Donald Trump because they're tired of being told what to do. Well, that also stems from COVID where you were told, well, you had to get a vaccine to go into a restaurant, right? You had to -- this is how you had to behave. This is how you had to act during this time.

The hangover is real. The distrust in our government is real. And that's part of what has propelled him back into office.

CROSS: We also saw gun-toting American storm state capitols because they were upset about lockdowns, which is something that is completely ridiculous.

CORNISH: Dr. Devi, I want to talk to you about this as well because it feels like this is something that has rocked the public health profession in such a profound way. Like the struggle now to rebuild trust feels like pretty profound.

NAMPIAPARAMPIL: Exactly. I mean, medicine and science in general is fueled by peer reviewed research and a lot of discussion. You know, if you're trying to publish something, you take your work, you send it to your competitors so that they can tell you, I mean, anonymously, but so they can tell you everything that's wrong with it and then you try to address it. But COVID was handled a completely different way. So, that's like the broad sweeping sort of view.

But I think specifically in terms of medicine, we are going to see the consequences of it, and we're already seeing it.

[22:25:02]

Because it's not just the lockdowns were in the past. There are people who didn't get their screening and their treatment for cardiac problems. People are getting diagnosed with cancer at later stages where something that could have been treatable is no longer treatable, perhaps, right.

So, the people who are at risk for COVID are generally the people who are older, who are more vulnerable, immunocompromised, but those are also the same people who are at risk from the lockdowns.

CORNISH: Yes. And people have been upset about RFK Jr. having a position, obviously, in the health industry -- I'm sorry, in the cabinet. But do you think Bhattacharya, in a way, is an interesting choice? Is he corrective to some things that people now admit were a problem?

NAMPIAPARAMPIL: Well, I think he has the skills. You know, even before COVID, he was publishing tons of research about how to improve HIV, you know, identification and slow the spread. He looked at low back pain. He was writing about Medicare. So, he already had a lot of the skills and was accepted in the medical community. Not that that's the primary issue, but he was, you know?

And so then when he took this minority point of view, I guess it also shows like here's a person who's capable, who's motivated, kind of balancing these risks, but then also somewhat brave, you know? You know, he took on all this criticism, you know, at a very challenging time. And so I think those are the skills you need to be able to get anything done and really investigate and be transparent about what's going on because he wasn't afraid to be transparent before.

CORNISH: Dr. Devi, thanks so much. I appreciate that.

Everyone else hang tight. We're going to talk next about my favorite thing, podcasting, because as right wing podcasters and networks get louder, liberals are wondering where they go now and who their so called Joe Rogans might be.

Plus, would a comedian like George Carlin survive liberal scrutiny these days? We will discuss.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:31:12]

CORNISH: Imitation is the highest form of flattery and liberals are at lusting for their own version of the immensely popular Joe Rogan Experience. Then Rogan himself says Democrats kind of screwed up and that they didn't know what they had until it was gone.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE ROGAN, PODCASTER AND UFC COMMENTATOR: They're scrambling to try to create their own version of this show and this is one thing that keeps coming up, like we need our own Joe Rogan. But they had me.

MARC ANDREESSEN, ENTREPRENEUR: Number one, they had you. Number one, they had you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: ESPN commentator and former tennis pro Patrick McEnroe joins us in our fifth seat. So, Patrick, let's start with that idea. When people, if there are such people who say that they need a liberal Joe Rogan, what do you think they actually mean when they say that?

PATRICK MCENROE, FORMER PROFESSIONAL TENNIS PLAYER: Well, I think the short answer is they do need a new Joe Rogan. The question is what does that look like? And I don't know if you can actually create it, you know. Apparently, a lot of Republicans were creating some of these podcasters and so on.

So, now the mainstream media has changed quite a bit and I don't know if it's so much about who the person is or if there is a person. It's where they're getting their message to and how they're getting it out there because obviously, as Joe Rogan and Wilson, everybody's getting their information from their phone.

So, where you going to get that now? You can go on X like I do all the time and you get it from all sides there. But I think for the Democrats, they need to find a way to get their message out to the people that they didn't get it out to in this election.

CORNISH: Ameshia, I see you ready to jump here.

CROSS: I agree with that. I think it is more an understanding of the new ecosystem, where people are getting their media messages from. We know that a lot of it is digital and social media. People aren't picking up the newspaper anymore, right?

CORNISH: We thought this campaign did, right? They like TikTok their way through the coconut summer. Nobody cared about the coconuts.

CROSS: Yes, nobody cared about the coconuts. I think that it was a misreading of the electorate, but also a misreading of where people are getting their information. But in addition to that, it is not one person. I think that, you know, Joe Rogan has had more lives than cats when it comes to changing it up.

I grew up seeing Joe Rogan, you know, have people eat testicles of animals and crawl through the darkness when he was doing fear factors. Then he did MMA and now he's doing this. The man is -- he shapeshifts a lot. That's not necessarily what is the thing that's bringing people in.

What Democrats have to do is figure out ways in which they can get to the podcast that their people are listening to. That means your younger voters, your people of color voters, they're getting a lot of information from things that are not, unfortunately, shows like ours right now, that are not shows of the competitors either.

You have to find a way to break through that. And I think that for Democrats largely, their investments have been in ad buys and campaigns that are focused on media that the young people that diverse voters just aren't in anymore.

TROVER: I think Democrats need to find a message first. What is their message to voters? That I don't understand. Do they want to be the far-left? Do they want to be moderate?

Do they want to be -- where do they want to land? I mean this is -- it's like it's so inauthentic to me to hear like we need to find our own -- how are we going to create somebody out of thin air? First, they need to find a message and figure out who they are and then figure all that out.

CROSS: It wasn't healthcare access, it wasn't housing affordability. It wasn't childcare affordability. It wasn't having, you know, assistants in your home for the sandwich generation.

TROVER: It didn't work in -- CROSS: None of those things?

TROVER: No. Look, you guys are the one arguing all the time on TV and on radio and everywhere else about what the message is. I'm just saying they need to figure out the message and then --

CORNISH: To be clear, Republicans argue about their message all the time, and I think I grew up with right wing radio and obviously Rush Limbaugh. There's always been a robust right-wing media ecosystem. And the question I have is, how much of this is actually about audience and what you will allow?

Meaning, the campaign didn't let Kamala Harris sit for three hours. And I don't think the campaign would have put her in front of Theo Vaughn to talk about his cocaine habit. Like Democrats have a different sense of like what's okay to do.

HUGHES: That's actually precisely the point. However, Bernie Sanders had no problem going on Joe Rogan years ago when Joe Rogan endorsed him. I've been on Rogan's show three times. I've probably heard over 100 hours of it in the past decade.

A decade ago, Joe Rogan was a Bernie Sanders supporter who would get emotional talking about how important it is to legalize marijuana, who would get emotional talking about how important it is to get Christianity out of politics, in particular on the abortion issue, who had a host of left-wing opinions, including about health care. And liberals drove him away by calling him a racist, unearthing jokes he made, calling him a misogynist really with no evidence.

CROSS: When you make racist jokes about people of color, people calling you racist is likely going to happen.

HUGHES: Calling him transphobic because he didn't like seeing Fallon Fox eating up a --

CORNISH: He also didn't want the vaccine ting, right?

HUGHES: That also used to be a left-wing opinion to be against vaccines like 20 years ago. Again, so he actually hasn't shape-shifted very much to your point. The Democratic Party has shape shifted and driven him away and alienated his followers.

CROSS: I think what he ended up seeing was an American political spear that shifted and he found ways -- he's a lot smarter than people give him credit for. He found ways to walk into where those people were. Yes, he was a proud, you know, ultra leftist.

And then he became a proud person on the right, largely because he saw shifting towards the right. And that's where his money and his audience could come from. He shifted because more of his listeners shifted and that's where he drove it to. That's nothing more than consumerism at work.

HUGHES: Which of his beliefs changed in the past 10 years? It's really hard to point out which of his belief have actually changed. CORNISH: But can I zoom out from him? Because I think there is this, and I see you nodding as well, this kind of bigger question. Like you have a John Stewart, right? You have Pod Save America. You have all kinds of even --

MCENROE: Conan O'Brien.

CORNISH: The late night, yes, television brigade.

MCENROE: They're all left on the late-night shows. I think what he said to me, what rings true about this whole concept of finding the liberal Joe Rogan is, he said, inauthentic. And when you talked about what Kamala Harris did in this campaign, knocking on doors, doing it sort of the traditional way, right? Raising tons of money.

CORNISH: Yes.

MCENROE: But there's something -- there's something about Donald Trump, whether you like him or not, or Joe Rogan, or whomever, they are authentic.

UNKNOWN: Totally right. Totally right.

MCENROE: And that comes through to people. And when you're trying to get your message out, whatever that message is, you have to be authentic.

CORNISH: You can be authentic though when you have something like 20, 30 years in the public eye, specifically the tabloids. There's no gaff, there's no thing that you can be tripped up by. I mean, you're a politician, you know what it's like. Very careful campaigns are.

DUNCAN: The left needs to find a relevant voice that can live in that exact moment and be the that authentic person, not just carrying the party's water.

CORNISH: So, what about Pete Buttigieg? I see him everywhere online. And he goes on Fox constantly.

DUNCAN: But he's not a Joe Rogan. He's not running a day-to-day, hourly

CORNISH: No, no, I just mean, like, it's possible for figures to go out.

DUNCAN: Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, you've got to hit all the box. You've got to be a good communicator. You've got to be relevant. You've got to be able to push back. You've got to be able to invite guests on that are newsy. But I think at the end of the day, the left, the Democrats, need an honest umpire, one of the most damaging parts of this entire campaign.

CORNISH: Say that again, an honest umpire.

DUNCAN: An honest umpire to be able to call balls and strikes. And so, one of the most detrimental things that Kamala Harris, in my opinion, did during the campaign was when she answered the question, what would you do differently than Joe Biden? She said nothing. Now, I think that was born out of respect for Joe Biden, but it rang in the ears of everybody trying to figure out who they wanted to.

CORNISH: Which the campaign said just this week.

DUNCAN: If we want to have a relevant voice in the Democrat ecosystem, you've got to have somebody willing to try to take those steps. One of the things I heard often on the campaign trail in these swing states was, you can respect in the audience but you don't have to overcompensate for an audience and it felt like so much of the party platform of the Democrats were trying to compensate for parts of the party or part of the policy position.

CORNISH: Yes, this gets back to the coalition management argument.

DUNCAN: And somebody needs to stand up and grab the reins.

MCENROE: We also remember one thing here because I keep hearing from -- I heard it from you a couple of times -- mandate, OK? Donald Trump's gotten almost 77 million votes -- he's approaching 77 million. Kamala Harris is approaching 74 and a half million. That's a two and a half million dollar -- two and a half million vote difference which is big but not huge.

So, is it really, I mean, I know the Republicans have to always say it's a mandate. Is it really? I mean, that's still a lot of votes that Harris received in this campaign.

TROVER: When you have the Senate and the House, I think that's a pretty big voice that the Americans --

MCENROE: It was a solid victory, no doubt. Was it a mandate?

CORNISH: I actually want to know, I think X has a role to play in this because there's a little bit of shadowboxing the past activism of the past decade. And by that, I mean that when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, people were always worried about what would happen on Twitter and the Twitter mobs coming after you. And the kind of progressive politics that was able to punch up from Twitter more or less feels disbanded under X. I mean am I wrong?

CROSS: And part of that is because the algorithm has --

CORNISH: People are still going -- oh, my God, what about this? And I'm like --

CROSS: The algorithm has changed significantly and a lot of those activist voices have been quelled. Many of them don't pop up in people's regular search engines. Instead, you're still hearing a lot more from the right.

And that is because that's how Elon has set it up. He amplifies the voices of the right wing. He amplifies his own voice and he's trying to ensure that, you know, all voices are not heard equally.

[22:40:02]

And we've seen that time and time again.

CORNISH: But I think that also contributes to maybe the left feeling like they've lost a microphone and another thing.

TROVER: I think the left just doesn't like what they're hearing. That's why they're all running to this blue sky thing that they want to do now. I think a lot of these people don't want to hear conservative voices. That's the far left. They don't like hearing things.

That's part of the problem they had in this last election that we went through is that when people -- you don't agree with me 100 percent of the time, well, you're out the door. And I think that's what's been happening on X.

HUGHES: Harry Enten on this network reported that X's frequent users now are exactly split between Republican and Democrat. Now, if that's true, that means all of the people on the left leaving X right now are leaving essentially a reflection of the country because they're not comfortable with the power they used to have.

CORNISH: Yes but there wouldn't be right and left media if people didn't kind of flock to their corners.

DUNCAN: Yes, for me it just feels like it should be the public square. I think those are Elon's words. He referred to Twitter as the public square. It feels like his thumb is on the public square, right? He's influencing it with, like I said earlier, he's four out of the top ten feeds are coming from Elon Musk. That just doesn't feel authentic.

CORNISH: Yes, which is, I mean it's interesting. I think that sometimes I think it's too naval gaze-y, right? Like it's a media thing, like whether we're on Twitter or not. But you also saw in this last election how much media still matters. It may not be the traditional media the way we think of it, but sitting down and doing a good interview still means something.

MCENROE: Wherever you do it.

CORNISH: Yes. All right, everyone hold on because we have super serious conversation coming up next about turkey and politics and whether they go together. Spoiler alert, they do not. This season, some people are saying that it's okay to, you know, basically block political members of your family. We'll discuss that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:46:17]

CORNISH: Tonight, a very 2024 question. Don't talk politics at the Thanksgiving table or don't go to Thanksgiving at all. "The View's" Sunny Hostin says, skip dinner and ditch MAGA family members.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SUNNY HOSTIN, "THE VIEW" CO-HOST: And so, I think when people feel that someone voted not only against their families, but against them and against people that they loved, I think it's OK to take a beat.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Coleman, she just said take a beat. So, she didn't say for life but how do you hear that?

HUGHES: Well, I don't think people in our culture right now need extra encouragement to cut people off. I don't know what your impression has been from your friends and your families and your communities. But my impression has been that because of social media bubbles, everyone being fed, as we were just talking about, a narrative that is pretty much unique to them.

And assuming everyone else is in the same bubble as them when actually your family members are potentially seeing a totally different set of facts. You know, the idea that we don't have enough cutting off going right now, so we need to encourage that is a little crazy to me.

CORNISH: Ameshia, I want to ask you, because I think for Democrats in particular, because I've been actually reading up on family estrangement over politics, there are so many aspects of the platform that were also linked to values, right? And so, rejection was literally like rejecting, as she suggested, me, rather than some political idea. How does that affect that conversation?

CROSS: I love Sunny Hostin but I am in disagreement with her in that conversation. As somebody who was born in Chicago but raised in the South, Mississippi, North Florida, went to college in Tennessee, a lot of my friends are conservative.

I've set conservative tables on holidays for years, and at the end of the day, there is no, we're, you know, food fighting back and forth over who voted for who, and like, that's just not something that you do.

I also think that, you know, we live in integrated communities of politics and ideas. There's conservatives in my own family. And at the end of the day, like, we're not going to disavow you because you either voted differently or you chose in many cases not to vote in this election. That's another vote lost for Kamala. And that's not part of the conversation.

So, I think that, you know, some people are taking this way too far because this isn't the first election cycle the Democrats have had where they lost. It is what it is, the pendulum swings in both directions. But it's also your family is your family.

And I don't think that you should be someone who distances yourself based on the election or anything of that sort, just because this family is lifelong. It is not that serious.

CORNISH: So, you're not doing the like, protect your peace, mental health, Lance, your face says no. TROVER: "The View" is like Trump derangement syndrome on steroids, so

even talking about anything that they say on there just makes me crazy. This is so antithetical to who we are as a country, to who we are in America. We promote family. We should welcome people into our family.

We were talking about this before the show. I can't think of a time when I go to my family's -- and we have this big discussion about politics and who voted for who and oh my God, can you miss? So, anyway, it's a bunch of nonsense from these folks.

CORNISH: But it doesn't happen that way, right? It's like your brother-in-law makes a little comment and then you're like, why are we here with this guy? And then everyone gets mad and then he says things like, it's a little more insidious than just like.

TROVER: Those are the people who get disinvited.

CORNISH: How is that different?

TROVER: Why have we not seen them in a few years?

MCENROE: There are always family issues, right? Whether they're political or whether they're non-political, they come up over the holidays. And I think you have to try to put these aside. We all have to try to move on.

I will say that I have -- my wife and I have a friend coming over tomorrow who's a member of the gay community who doesn't want to go back to his family in Florida.

[22:50:06]

And that, to me, as a friend of his, hurts. You know, it hurts when you hear that because he feels that he's been excommunicated or that he can't go and see his family because they voted the other way from what is important to him. So, I think we all need to care a little more and, you know, be respectful and also be genuine to our friends and welcome people in.

DUNCAN: If I took a break from everybody that was a MAGA supporter or a Trump voter, I'd have a pretty lonely Thanksgiving. I live in an 80- 20 county. My county is an 80-20 Republican and certainly an overwhelming majority of my family. And of course, they know I'm probably one of the only Republicans that actually voted, publicly voted for Kamala Harris.

But look, I think this speaks to the general -- the bigger problem going on in this country. We've let politics itself around our axle. It becomes the most important thing. There's so many great things in our lives, right? I think about my situation.

I got a kid who just graduated from college, a kid who's playing football in college, a kid in middle school, I'm married to my high school sweetheart, I got great in-laws, a healthy dad.

CORNISH: So, all your other identities that are not --

DUNCAN: There's a lot going on that should be the last thing. And of course, I'm the last guy that wants to talk about politics. And as you mentioned, the people are really good at kind of, you know, they'll get to that, well, did you hear that and I'd just, I try not to take the bait. I know too much. I know too much.

CORNISH: All right, next, the panel gives us their nightcap, specifically, what they want to get off their chest before the table tomorrow.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:56:11]

CORNISH: We're back and it's time for the "NewsNight" cap and we're hoping to save one Thanksgiving dinner at a time. You each have 30 seconds to get something off your chest before you sit down tomorrow with whoever you are sitting down with. Ameshia, let's start with you.

CROSS: Just remember, Thanksgiving is a supper, not your final supper. Be demure, be mindful. As somebody whose parents are with the Lord, Thanksgiving is always a hard time. So, I would ask that, you know, individuals who are going through that same thing, find their love, find their friends, be with yourself, be with whatever your spiritual guide is. And I hope everybody has a great Thanksgiving.

CORNISH: Lovely. Patrick?

TROVER: Well, it sort of goes back to a little bit of what we've talked about in the previous segment. Everybody just take a deep breath. Everybody just relax. Republicans you won. Try not to gloat too much. Democrats, you still got 74.5 million votes. You'll be back.

We're all in this together. The sun is going to come up. We've got our family. Let's be thankful for what we got. Let's remember at the end of the day, we're still Americans.

CORNISH: All right, Coleman.

HUGHES: So, this Thanksgiving, I think we should think about some of the benefits of climate change. OK, hold on. Keep your pitchforks where they are. CORNISH: Yes, takes coming in hot. Coming in hot.

HUGHES: When I remember when I was a kid, we would always watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and these poor women out there in basically bikinis in 30 degrees, right? And now, because of climate change, we're talking about 52 degrees tomorrow.

It's going to be much more comfortable for them. It's going to be more comfortable to watch. So, climate change has a silver lining. We can be thankful for anything, including some of the worst things in the world.

DUNCAN: I think there's a 97 percent chance of rain. HUGHES: Yes, but it's going to be done by like 2 P.M.

CORNISH: I like that the only thing you remember from your childhood is the bikinis. We'll talk about that after.

CORNISH: Geoff?

DUNCAN: Well, I think this is a great place to announce to all those guests coming over to our house tomorrow for Thanksgiving dinner that we are not going to be serving turkey. My wife and I finally decided to just own it, and we don't like turkey. Our kids don't like turkey, and I don't know if anybody else that shows up actually likes turkey.

So, we're going to serve chicken casserole. We're going to serve some ham. We're going to serve some Jello salad. It's going to be an all- American dinner but we're not going to have turkey.

CORNISH: Wow, cheering for that.

CROSS: I am a turkey hater, so praise you and your family.

CORNISH: But is it maybe that you guys aren't good at cooking it? Or you just don't like it?

DUNCAN: We have tried it every way we've eaten it.

TROVER: Even the fried?

DUNCAN: Not even once has it been good.

TROVER: The fried?

DUNCAN: No.

TROVER: You didn't like it?

CORNISH: A fun fact, Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that it was like a campaign from a woman to Lincoln to say we need more holidays for our nascent country. And it was supposed to be kind of an independent style holiday. So, it's a --

HUGHES: So, do you hate Lincoln? Is that what you're saying?

DUNCAN: I love chicken.

CROSS: He definitely eats all-American.

DUNCAN: Eat more chicken.

CORNISH: Yes.

DUNCAN: We'll plug Chick-fil-A. Eat more chicken.

CORNISH: Ameshia, can I ask a sensitive thing, which is when you are thinking about people extending a hand to join you, right, on a Thanksgiving, the way Patrick was talking about, is that welcome? Or for some people, do you think it's like, I'd like to avoid this holiday?

CROSS: I think it depends on the year. For me, this year is really hard. I lost my Nana a couple years ago and I'm still working through that, to have your mom gone, to not really have a relationship with your dad. My younger brother committed suicide. Like it's just, Thanksgiving is not my holiday. So, I will be spending it in Jamaica.

CORNISH: I'm happy with that and we are grateful for you being here tonight. Lance, you?

TROVER: Oh, OK. So, this is a family tradition. I'm hoping my stepmother and father are not watching right now, but there's a tradition to make two different types of dressings, one regular, one with oysters. I don't like the oyster. No one eats the oyster and so I'm advocating hardcore, we should stop making the oyster again.

[23:00:00]

Hope you're not watching out there.

CORNISH: Well, where are you from? Maybe you can use stuffing?

MCENROE: No turkey, no oysters.

UNKNOWN: Yes, stuffing, of course.

CORNISH: Yes, the whole stuffing dressing term, but yes, I guess no on the oysters.

MCENROE: I'm no on the oysters.

CORNISH: All right.

MCENROE: My turkey is brining as we speak.

CORNISH: Good.

MCENROE: Getting ready.

DUNCAN: Maybe I should try your turkey.

MCENROE: Give it a try. I'll bring you some.

CORNISH: Yes. To Lance's stepfamily, it's all him. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Thank you for being here and thank you for watching "NewsNight". Please stay with us. You can also listen to more conversation with me. My podcast is called "The Assignment" and you can get that wherever you get your podcasts. "Laura Coates Live" starts right now.