Return to Transcripts main page

Fareed Zakaria GPS

Why Harris Lost And Trump Won; Where Do Democrats Go From Here; Are Republicans The Party Of The Working Class? Aired 10-11a ET

Aired November 10, 2024 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:30]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria, coming to you live from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA (voice-over): Today on the program.

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT-ELECT: Look what happened. Is this crazy?

ZAKARIA: Donald Trump wins the presidency again. I'll talk to two great political experts, Ezra Klein and David Frum, about how it happened and what lessons Democrats can learn.

Then, one of the intellectual godfathers of MAGA, Oren Cass, discusses what to expect for the next four years.

And I'll get the view from overseas with "The Economist's" editor-in- chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes.

TRUMP: This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

At first glance, it would seem easy to explain last Tuesday's election as part of a 2024 global wave against incumbents beset by post-COVID turmoil and inflation. The U.K. saw a huge Tory parliamentary majority turned into its thinnest minority in the party's nearly 200-year history. Germany's governing coalition has collapsed amidst soaring unpopularity. Emmanuel Macron's party was crushed in France's parliamentary elections.

South Korea's opposition party dominated in a huge parliamentary landslide. And even in Japan, where the ruling LDP Party has governed almost interrupted since 1955, the party lost its House of Representatives majority.

So it might have been preordained that Kamala Harris representing the incumbent administration lost decisively as well. But Harris could have been bucked the trend. The American economy is doing better than all these other nations. Employment is strong, wages are up, inflation is down. Productivity is soaring. More importantly, Donald Trump has many strengths as a political figure, but he also has many weaknesses.

Let's recall that after January 6th, 2021, Trump's approval rating was down to 34 percent in a CNN poll. In a Marquette Law School poll matchup a year later, Joe Biden was beating him by 10 points nationally, 43-33. Then came the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the 2022 midterms in which the Republicans did very badly for a midterm and MAGA candidates in particular got crushed.

Trump's favorability ratings sank to 31 percent in a CNN poll, with an unfavorable rating at a staggering 60 percent. Even Republicans were disillusioned with him. At this point, Trump had led a Republican Party that lost its House majority in 2018, its Senate majority, and the presidency in the 2020 cycle, and then felt historically badly in those 2022 midterms. In December of 2022, Ron DeSantis was outpolling Trump easily among Republicans in a "Wall Street Journal" poll.

That was the Democratic Party's strongest moment since Trump's arrival on the political landscape. But they blew it. "The New York Times" estimates that Harris will lose the national popular vote by about a point and a half. A first for Democrats since 2004.

Global inflation is something that was hard to shut down, but there were other issues that the Democrats flubbed, which enflamed the opposition and depressed their base. I'm going to talk about them here because it's the right time to do a postmortem. But to avoid appearing to have 2020 hindsight, I should say that I had noted each of these mistakes at the time often provoking angry responses from the left.

The first big error was the Biden administration's blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border. An asylum system that was meant for a small number of persecuted individuals was being used by millions to gain legal entry. Instead of shutting it down, liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist.

[10:05:05]

They missed a massive shift in American public opinion in just a few years. In 2020, the percentage of Americans who wanted to decrease immigration was just 28 percent. By this year, it was 55 percent.

When Kamala Harris went on "The View" and was asked how she would have differed from Biden, instead of basically saying nothing different, she should have said, I would have shut down the border early and hard.

The second error was an overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump. The most egregious of the cases pursued was Alvin Braggs one in New York, one that even he was once skeptical of, but was reportedly pressured by some on the left into pursuing. Some cases like the Georgia one were legitimate. But the host of them piled on in rapid succession, gave the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump. It confirmed to his base what it had always believed. That over-

educated urban liberals were hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes. It's worth noting that in this week's election, a CNN exit poll found that among those who believe that democracy in the U.S. is threatened, a majority supported Trump. Lawfare turned Trump from being a loser into a victor. And as his indictments grew, his campaign contributions surged and his poll numbers solidified.

The final error is a more diffuse one. The dominance of identity politics on the left, which made it push for all kinds of DEI policies that largely came out of the urban academic bubble, but alienated many mainstream voters. There's an irony in claiming to be pro-Latino by insisting that people use the term Latinx, only discovering that Latinos themselves think the word is weird.

This kind of obsession made Democrats view people too much through their ethnic or racial or gender identity and it made them miss, for example, that working class Latinos were moving toward Trump perhaps because they were socially conservative or liked his macho rhetoric, or even agreed with his hardline stance on immigration.

One of Trump' s most effective ads on trans issues had a tag line.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kamala is for they-them. President Trump is for you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: The problem is much deeper than simply one about nouns and pronouns. The entire focus on identity has morphed into something deeply illiberal. Judging people by the color of their skin, rather than the content of their character.

Similarly, university speech codes and cancel culture have become ways that the left censors or restricts that most cherished of liberal ideas, freedom of speech. One simple way to think about the lessons of this election is that liberals cannot achieve liberal goals, however virtuous, by illiberal means.

Go to CNN.com/Fareed for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

In 2016, when Trump won the first time, much was made of the fact that Hillary Clinton actually won the popular vote by two percentage points. The electoral college may have chosen Trump, but the majority of Americans didn't. In 2020, he lost the popular vote to Joe Biden by more than four appoints and he lost the election. But this year, he is projected to have narrowly won the popular vote. If projections hold, it will be the first time a Republican has won the popular vote in 20 years.

I'm joined now by two very smart people, "The New York Times" opinion columnist, Ezra Klein, the author of the book "Why We're Polarized," and David Frum, a staff writer at "The Atlantic" and a former speechwriter for George W. Bush.

Ezra, so, you know, first, fundamentally, how much of this was incumbency penalty that seems to have affected every election in the last 18 months, and how much of this is something special that we should analyze?

EZRA KLEIN, OPINION COLUMNIST, NEW YORK TIMES: So if you chart how every incumbent government has done in elections for the past 15 months, two years, virtually every one of them gets annihilated in the election by much more frankly than the Democrats did this time. So the Tories in U.K. did terribly. If you look north, Justin Trudeau in Canada is incredibly unpopular. The government in Germany is falling apart. We're seeing center-right and center-left governments go down.

So if you look at the coalition here, one very simple way of thinking about it is in 2020 and 2024, you have very similar coalitions in the election. And Trump is doing much better in 2020 also among Hispanic and black voters than people expected. But in 2020, Trump is the incumbent, there was a pandemic, people are mad at him.

[10:10:02]

He's not very good at being president. So you have this coalition, but Trump has a minus three-point incumbent penalty. Democrats win by four and they win the election. This year, Biden is president, the Biden- Harris administration are the incumbents. People are mad. It's a post- inflation period, we're seeing angry electorates at incumbents everywhere. Call it again a minus three, minus two incumbent penalty.

Democrats lose by one to two points in the popular vote which is what the projections show. So on that level, maybe you don't need to explain that much at all. But here's why I don't just take that and, you know, throw it around myself like a shawl and comfort myself to sleep. They lost by 1.5 points in the battleground states, right? When they were actually able to keep it very narrow compared to a lot of other incumbent governments --

ZAKARIA: 175,000 votes in those three states would have flipped the electoral college.

KLEIN: Yes. And they'll probably lose the popular vote maybe by 1.5 points-ish, right? So that means strategic decisions could have really mattered here. When you're talking about a swing of 2 percentage points of a vote, that is not something that only structure can explain. It is actually -- they were actually able to keep it close enough that maybe doing something different would have mattered.

ZAKARIA: Right. That's an interesting point. The point is not that it was a blowout and that's why the Democrats should be soul searching. It wasn't a blowout, it was -- they could have won this.

David, what about the economy? I mean, why is it that with what is unarguably the strongest economy in the world at this point, it didn't work? Was it a time lag? Was it that inflation matters a lot more than we thought it would? DAVID FRUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: If Donald Trump had presided

over this economy, as he soon will, he would have said again and again, this is the greatest economy since the 1960s, things are great, unemployment. The Democrats are inhibited that if there is someone in America who is sad, it is impossible for a Democratic president or a Democratic administration to speak positively about what they've done.

It is a -- I'm not a Democrat. I marvel at this. Because they are so -- there are so many veto points in the party. And this creates a very dangerous situation now. What do Democrats love on this earth more than soul-searching? I don't know. They love it. Maybe mutual accusation, a mutual recrimination. That's the one thing they like more than blaming each other. They hate each other, it's a very messy coalition, and they're now about to turn each other.

Should we have gone left on populism? Should we blame this part of our coalition or that part of our coalition? And meanwhile, the emergency is going to start immediately. Donald Trump is going to come to all this and immediately pardon the January 6th criminals. He is immediately going to abandon America's commitment to Ukraine. He is already signaling to the Chinese, Taiwan is yours if you want it.

And, of course, the floodgates of corruption are going to be massively opened. How will he pay the half-billion dollars he owes in civil judgments? Will he sell Truth Social to somebody? The Saudis, Elon Musk at some giant markup? The crisis is going to be here and the Democrats are going to be looking inward when the country needs protection from what Donald Trump is going to use his flimsy margin to do.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that -- I mean, how much is it worth for Democrats looking at the two key factors, it seems to me, are the loss of the Hispanic vote and the loss of the youth vote? And they overlap a bit because Hispanics are younger on average. But those seem the two kind of the big shifts. Almost 10 points in both cases.

KLEIN: I'm going to say there's one key factor which is an ongoing educational realignment. Democrats have gone from winning working- class voters, right? That's sort of the history of the Democratic Party. It's the party of the working class, to losing them. Democrats will have a significant margin among voters who went to college and a significant loss among voters who didn't.

It is that structure, right, of the electorate that is leading them to lose Hispanic voters, leading them to lose more black voters. Right? The educational polarization has breached racial walls. Right? The fact that Trump is assembling a more multi-racial coalition, but this is also a part of why they lost women by more -- they didn't lose women, but they didn't have the margins among women that they wanted to. So --

ZAKARIA: Why, because --

KLEIN: Because it's the same thing.

ZAKARIA: They didn't get the non-college educated. KLEIN: The Democrats are alienating a working-class electorate. Year

by year, worse and worse. That they need the win. The working class is very, very big in this country, and it's also the core of the Democratic Party's self-identity.

One reason I don't totally agree with David on this question of whether or not Democrats need to do some soul-searching is look, if you go back now through three elections, right, 2016, 2020, 2024. In each of these elections, the win in either direction is very, very close, right. In 2016, Trump loses the popular vote and wins on, you know, a butterfly's flap of its wings in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Probably if James Comey does not send that letter and Trump loses and American history is very, very different. In 2020, as big as the Democratic popular margin was, the swing state margin was quite narrow. In this year, too. The swing state margin is quite narrow. If you want to end what feels like a growing emergency in American politics, and I do agree with David that Trump is very dangerous and a lot of very dangerous things are about to happen, the Democratic Party doesn't need 50 percent or 51 percent or 52 percent of the vote.

[10:15:08]

It needs to build something more durable than this. And in order to do that, it needs to stop bleeding voters that it is bleeding at an accelerating level who are supporting a candidate that is so anathema to Democrats that they can't even imagine, they can't even cross the emphatic gap to what would make Donald Trump appealing.

When that is happening, when you have that kind of cultural distance between you and people you need to represent, you have to really ask, what closes that cultural gap. I thought a lot about the fact that Democrats are more culturally comfortable with Liz Cheney this year than with Joe Rogan. Right? That's showing you something that has really changed.

ZAKARIA: All right. When we come back, we're going to ask, what is the Democratic strategy to do just that. When we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:20:22]

ZAKARIA: And we are back with Ezra Klein of "The New York Times" and "The Atlantic's" David Frum.

So what we were talking about is how do the Democrats widen their base, how do they get beyond just their base, and what should they say in that circumstance.

David, what do you think?

FRUM: Well, the Democrats have the problem they don't -- or the challenge, they don't have one base the way the Republicans do. They have a bunch of different -- is it black women, the most loyal voters of the Democratic Party? Is it educated professionals? Is it the old unions? They all want slightly different things and they all turn each other.

And meanwhile, the Republicans have a failure of their elites because one of the things I think we all need to learn from this 2024 election is you can't expect people who are paying for groceries to care about the fine details of institutions in Washington. Those have always been protected by agreement among the leadership of both parties. There are things you don't do, like try to overthrow the government if you lose an election.

And Donald Trump has consolidated not just the Republican base, but the Republican donor class and the Republican leaders to say, trying to overthrow the government, acceptable.

ZAKARIA: So, if that's the case, you know, it's sort of this, the institutionalist versus the anti-institutionalist. Does it tell you that the majority American are actually anti-institutionalist?

KLEIN: I think the majority of the American public does not care. Right? And I don't know that it helped Liz -- I'm sorry, I don't know that it helped Harris that she was campaigning Liz Cheney and sort of, at the end of the day, it was sort of the guardians of the institutions versus counterrevolutionaries because what I think they misunderstood was the salience of institutions.

And this was built on 2022, right? Democrats have this midterm election in 2022. They win unexpectedly. The red wave never crashes ashore. In retrospect, it would be much better for them if they had gotten annihilated in 2022, as they'd expected. But because they didn't, the unusual thing that happens with Democrats is instead of having a pivot after the midterm defeat, as you did in 1994 and 2010, to think about the voters you were losing, they instead pivot to think more seriously about the voters they are winning.

Why are they overperforming in midterms? Why are they overperforming in special elections? And it's because they're winning these high- information, high-political engagement voters who turn out in these midterms and special election kind of votes.

ZAKARIA: So weirdly large turnout now helps the Republicans --

KLEIN: Large turnout now helps the Republicans because it's full of people who don't care about the institutions and they're not highly connected to politics.

FRUM: And this is the message that people need to take away from this program. We are now back to a world in which high information voters count and which people who care a lot about institutions count, and those institutions are going to be in enormous danger. So if you are someone who's watching this program, do not disengage. Do not engage in acrimony. Do not start finger-pointing. There's an emergency about to break over American institutions and you have to focus there.

ZAKARIA: And do you think, to extend that point, is Trump and what he's going to do, you think, enough at least temporarily to unify the Democratic Party?

FRUM: It's not about the Democratic Party because that's many people who, as Ezra said, care about groceries. It needs to confront -- unify everyone who cares about American institutions. The Liz Cheneys of this world to say he's going to pardon people. He's going to cut off the Ukrainians. He's going to sell Taiwan. He's going to try to pardon himself. He's going to create a new doctrine that we've never had before of presidential immunity from crimes.

The investigations against him are already being wrapped up. He'll put pressure on the states to cancel the state investigations. And he will look for ways to pay his civil judgments that are going to look to a lot of people like bribe taking.

ZAKARIA: So we've got about a minute. Do you feel as though, when you listen to all of this, the Democratic Party needs to, you know, in very broad terms, does it need to -- it's tried to move left economically a lot, but it's never really tried to move right on social and cultural issues.

What's the right strategy?

KLEIN: I don't think this is as simple as right and left. I think the Democratic Party needs to become more pluralistic. Right? Be better at talking to many kinds of people and going into many kinds of places that it does not find comfortable.

Also, it needs to govern better and with more of a laser focus on the issues of people who don't always agree with it. The swing in blue states and blue cities was about inflation. Also about disorder. Also about high home prices, right? There's a lot of Democratic mal- governance that how bad Trump was covering up.

But if you live in New York City, or San Francisco or L.A., I don't actually think the swing was such a surprise to you. I certainly felt it just talking to people day to day. So there does need to be a focus on actually delivering in the places Democrats govern.

ZAKARIA: Final thought, 15 seconds, do you think there is -- there's going to be a crisis in the Republican coalition?

[10:25:05]

FRUM: Unfortunately, no. I think this is going to be saluting one bad action after another. There may be some foot dragging and slowdown, some attempt by some senators to get something for Ukraine. But as we've seen, they're broken on the inside. They'll conform.

ZAKARIA: All right. Thank you both. This was absolutely terrific.

When we come back, is the Republican Party becoming the party of the working class and what does that mean? I will speak with the founder of a conservative think tank, Oren Cass, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:30:00]

ZAKARIA: For much of the 20th century, the Democratic Party was seen as the champion of America's working class. This was a legacy shaped largely by Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose pioneering social policies lifted up millions.

But this week's election proved Donald Trump's broad appeal among working class voters. Joining me now is Oren Cass. He's the founder and chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank.

Oren, welcome. I'm so glad to have you because you really have been in some ways laying the intellectual foundations for kind of Trumpism. So let me start by asking you, is the Republican Party now firmly a kind of working class party? Because it does seem to get the majority of working class votes. And yet, you know, the big thing that Republicans do whenever they come into office are these massive tax cuts that disproportionately help the rich. If you look at the transition team that Trump has appointed, it's two billionaires, one from Wall Street, they're talking about extending the Trump tax cut, which is $2.5 trillion over 10 years. What's going on?

OREN CASS, FOUNDER AND CHIEF ECONOMIST, AMERICAN COMPASS: Well, I think you've captured the tension very well that the Republican Party, the voters of the Republican Party at this point are squarely centered on the working class. And, you know, it's important to define what we mean by that. I think the best way to understand it is it's the majority of Americans who still don't have a college degree and experience, especially the economy and also the culture through that perspective.

They have turned away from the Democrats. They find President Trump's message much more appealing. But then, as you've said, if you look at the institutional Republican Party, the think tanks, certainly a lot of elected officials, certainly Donald Trump himself to some extent, there are still significant parts of it that are the legacy of what I would call the old right. So I think you're seeing a transformation in progress. And maybe, you know, the best marker to think about is the distance from Mike Pence to J.D. Vance, right? That's a very good concrete marker of -- the transition isn't complete, but it has clearly come a long way.

ZAKARIA: And when you think about the appeal, you said, I thought very, very interestingly, it's that they are attracted to the Republican Party of Trump for economic and cultural reasons. What I'm struck by is the degree to which it does seem to be more -- a more cultural phenomenon, at least in the sense that the Democrats say all the right things and do a lot of them. And Biden has been very pro- worker, very pro-blue collar workers, you Know? But culturally, you know, that working class base seems alienated. Is that the key to their -- to why Trump appeals to them?

CASS: Well, I would disagree with that characterization of the Biden administration and the Harris campaign. I mean, it's fine that they said things about workers, but, you know what -- where did you really see the Biden administration focus? Obviously, it was on a catastrophe at the border that led in -- estimates are up to 10 million migrants, many of whom are low paid workers undercutting American workers.

If you think about education, they say nice things about apprenticeship in the trades. But what was their main focus? It was for giving student debt while doing nothing to actually reform higher education.

They talk about industrial policy, but the vast majority of their industrial policy investment was on fighting climate change. And so I think -- and then certainly, if you look at the Harris campaign, it obviously struggled mightily. I mean, I think it's especially interesting to look at its attempts to reach young men, you know, their outreach to -- their opportunity agenda for young black men. One of the five points was about cryptocurrency. And one of the five points was about legalizing marijuana.

ZAKARIA: But you make this point or if I can -- you made this point in a piece you wrote, which I thought was fascinating, that Trump's advisors tried to show him how his tax cuts had helped the working class. And they fudged the numbers. When the real numbers came in, it turned out they had not helped. And if you plug Biden's numbers in, his policies did help the working class. Why does that -- I'm trying, you know, I know you don't want to give advice to Democrats, but why is it that, you know, all that money that went into red states, you know, to non-college educated workers, why didn't it help? My gut is because that working class is culturally alienated from the Democratic Party.

CASS: Well, I'm happy to give advice to Democrats. I spend a lot of time trying to get them to wake up because I think our political system would be much healthier if we had two political parties that were genuinely trying to speak to and address the interests of working and middle class voters.

I think the point in my mind is that there aren't clean buckets of cultural versus economic issues. You know, we did some polling recently at American Compass that looked really not, you know, what do you think about this policy, that policy?

[10:35:03]

But what are your real values and priorities? And what you find is that, you know, we have this idea of the American dream as opportunity, and dynamism, and entrepreneurship, and, you know, moving to the big city. And what most Americans want is stability, security, an opportunity to build a decent life in the community where they grow up.

And so I think what you start to see in the way Trump and J.D. Vance speak to American voters in the core of their agenda that does focus on bringing good manufacturing back to the United States, that focuses on tightening the labor market, making sure that employers have to actually hire American workers, it's a real commitment to building and really going back to the kind of the economy that supports most Americans in their aspirations. And there's obviously a lot of work to be done in translating that.

ZAKARIA: Stay with us. And you all stay with us. We'll be right back with Oren Cass.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:40:44]

ZAKARIA: I'm back with Oren Cass, the Founder and Chief Economist of the conservative think tank American Compass. Oren, I want to ask you about Trump governing going forward. It seems to me there's some areas where there's -- he'll move fast, the party will be united against the kind of woke agenda. I think at this point, the Republican Party is united on tariffs and against free trade. But it feels to me like the two big issues are going to be the tax cut and the deportations. So let's first talk about the tax cut. That's two and a half trillion dollars added to the debt.

If you take Social Security, which he now says that he's going to exempt from taxes, that's another $2.5 trillion. That's $5 trillion added to the debt. Will that all happen? What are your thoughts on that?

CASS: Well, I don't think it will all happen. I think one of the many shifts you've seen in the Republican Party over the past decade is the idea that tax cuts just pay for themselves and we should just do them and not worry about the deficits is really gone. I think what you see, especially in the House with more fiscally conservative Republicans, is a belief that if we should extend tax cuts where we can, but they're going to have to be paid for. And so I think there's going to be a lot more negotiation.

There's going to be a lot more, okay, what's in, what's out? And actually, that's where tariffs become potentially a big part of the discussion because one of the things that tariffs do is they do raise a lot of revenue. But I don't think we're going to see a repeat of 2017 when it's just a grab bag of everybody's favorite tax cut without concern for the deficit.

ZAKARIA: And Social Security?

CASS: That's an interesting one. I think that's in the sort of big pile of proposals that Trump put out. It's frankly hard for me to envision it actually making it across the finish line given the trade- offs and some of the other things on the table that are going to be better for the economy and better for workers as well.

ZAKARIA: And let me ask you finally, mass deportation, I mean, one of the tightest labor markets in history. You deport -- they've talked about deporting 24 million. Even if you deport 2 million, won't that be hugely disruptive? And do you think Trump will do something on that scale?

CASS: I think you will see an effort at significant removals, particularly focused on those who have arrived most recently. You know, estimates are that as many as 10 million people have come across under the Biden administration, many now under temporary protected status, abuse of the parole system. I'd expect to see a lot of that repealed and also hopefully a lot of enforcement on the employer side. A big part of the picture here is just actually telling employers, if you are employing people who are here illegally, we're going to crack down on you.

And so I think that'll absolutely have an effect on the labor market, but I think it'll generally speaking be a very positive one. Tight labor markets are labor markets that are good for workers. And, you know, what we saw in the first Trump term, for that matter, is when you do have a very tight labor market, the result is not inflation necessarily, it's rising wages and ideally investments in productivity. That's the secret sauce of capitalism, tight labor markets with employers therefore investing to make people more productive. That's what we haven't had in a couple of decades in this country and that we need to get back to.

ZAKARIA: Oren Cass, pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much.

Next on GPS, Zanny Minton Beddoes of the Economist on the World's reaction.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:49:00]

ZAKARIA: The current cover story of the Economist is called Welcome to Trump's World. So what will a second Trump term mean for the global economy for geopolitics? Joining me is the Editor-in-Chief of the Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes.

So Zanny, what do you think? I mean, when one says the world's reaction, you know, it's a big thing. But what strikes you most about how people outside America are reacting to this election?

ZANNY MINTON BEDDOES, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, THE ECONOMIST: I think it really depends on what country you're talking about and what leader you're talking about. If you are, you know, amongst the world's autocrats, you probably welcome this. If you -- and I think many people around the world were expecting it. But there are two places that I think are in dread. One is Mexico. I think Mexico is in real trouble right now, both because Donald Trump's deportation. Determination is going to really hit Mexico. And secondly, because Mexico is going to be hit very hard by any protectionism that comes in. So Mexico is one.

And the other, I hate to say, is Europe, because I think Europe is really, really in trouble. Firstly, again, the E.U. has a huge trade surplus with the United States.

[10:50:02]

Donald Trump is not going to like that. Secondly, it depends on the U.S. still for its security. And I think the Europeans -- you know, when Donald Trump came in for the first term, they thought this was a bit of an aberration. Then they slightly went back to sleep. We thought with the Ukraine war that they were going to come together and to an extent they did, but still there's this huge reliance on the United States. And I think that Europe is going to be a place that is really going to

be hit harder. We're going to see it very soon because the decisions he makes on Ukraine are going to be the ones in the next, you know, 100, 200 days are going to determine in an important way the future of Europe.

ZAKARIA: And in an important way, this is going to be a very big shift, it seems to me, from Trump one because Trump one had a lot of Europeanists, internationalists, institutionalists. And by signaling, I'm not going to take Nikki Haley, I'm not going to take Pompeo, what it tells you is the people who will influence his views are people like J.D. Vance who are frankly, you know, basically anti-Ukraine, think the U.S. should pull out. I think if you were Ukrainian looking at this election, you would be terrified.

BEDDOES: Well, I think we -- I think you would be having heard that up until the election. Actually, the interesting view in Kyiv was that people were getting so fed up of the self-deterrence of the Biden administration, the unwillingness to allow the Ukrainians to use long range weapons towards Russia, that actually some people were beginning to say, our reporting was telling us. Some people were beginning to say, let's throw the dice. Trump will be decisive. And hopefully, he will want to win and so he won't want to let Russia win. And they kind of were talking themselves into a view that perhaps actually a Trump administration would bring the conflict to an end, but in a way that ensured Ukraine would give up some territory, but it will be able to stay -- we'll have security for the territory it still holds.

ZAKARIA: Right. The key is the NATO guarantee, which I --

BEDDOES: That's absolute. I think now -- you're absolutely right, that was -- and I had the shorthand of was it the kind of Pompeo-Trump or was it going to be the J.D. Vance-Trump? And what's happened in the last, you know, day suggests that it's going to be very much more the J.D. Vance-Trump. And so you're absolutely right, I think in Kyiv, I would now be really, really worried about what's happening.

ZAKARIA: Could all this unify the Europeans and make Them spend more in defense and get more strategically oriented? I mean, they're rich enough to do it.

BEDDOES: I'm crossing every finger. I mean, if it doesn't, then Europe is finished, to be honest. Because Europe is in -- Europe needs to spend more money on defense. Europe needs to come together to support Ukraine if Donald Trump ensures that the United States doesn't. Europe is way behind on the cutting edge technologies of the world, AI and so forth. Europe is in a real mess and it's been sleepwalking in this mess.

But if you look at what's happening in European politics, the day that Donald Trump was elected, there was a crisis in the German government which is now going to have elections. French President Macron is completely impotent. He made a big mistake last year calling an election. Probably, the strongest leader in the EU right now is Giorgia Meloni. And I think Europe, Europe has always come together in a crisis. We saw that again and again through the euro crisis. Maybe this time, it will. But as of now, unfortunately, I just don't see it. And I really worry that Europeans will sense that they have to do something and they just won't do it fast enough. Because with Ukraine and with Putin there, there is real pressure, time pressure to do something fast.

ZAKARIA: When you look at the Gulf states, I mean, they generally like Trump and they like Trump one. Are they looking forward to Trump two? You were just in the Gulf.

BEDDOES: I was just in the Gulf. And broadly, yes, they -- this is a man they can do business with. Obviously, the Saudis have a very close relationship with Donald Trump. But I think there is also there too. So broadly, yes, they are welcoming it, but they feel a little scarred by the transactionalism and unpredictability too. And so I think the Saudis will be looking to get a defense deal signed as soon as possible. This could mean that there's going to be movement, I think, in the Middle East. I think it's -- it could be a contrary to what many people think. I actually think Donald Trump could push Bibi towards doing something that will allow the Saudis enough to have a Saudi defense deal.

ZAKARIA: And finally, what about China? This is the big question.

BEDDOES: The big one. Short-term, China gets hit obviously by whatever tariffs and (inaudible).

ZAKARIA: But they've been expecting that?

BEDDOES: They've been expecting that. They've basically been decoupling anyway. It'll hurt them. Their economy is in trouble. Their economy is slowing. But broadly, I think this plays into their view of where the world is going, which is the United States that you can't rely on and the United States that, you know, doesn't --

ZAKARIA: Pulls back.

BEDDOES: -- pulls back. And that's good for China, right? That not only plays into their view that it's China century, but also feels that it's good for them geopolitically.

ZAKARIA: Zanny Minton Beddoes, that's a good tour (inaudible) in a very brief amount of time. As always, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

BEDDOES: Very good to see you.

ZAKARIA: And thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you, as always, next week.

(Commercial break)

[10:59:26]

MAN #1: Clean sweep.

(Begin VIDEO CLIP) DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT-ELECT: We're going to fix everything about our country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MAN #1: As Trump allies jockey for roles, the President elect's plans take shape.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: This will truly be the golden age of America. That's what we have to have.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MAN #1: Maggie Haberman joins to talk Trump's mindset. How will his second term difference from the first?

Plus, Dems in disarray.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAN #2: A lot's on the line right now, people are going to be tested.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MAN #1: After widespread lawsuits, how will the Democratic Party emerge from the wilderness?

And full house.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAN #3: The American people spoke loud and clear on Tuesday.

(END VIDEO CLIP)