There’s a lot to consider about what Trump 2.0 portends for the future of our country, lives and democracy. A lot of questions remain. And perhaps maybe now more than ever, it’s all been keeping Chris up really late at night, like so many of you. Chris and WITHpod producer Doni Holloway unpack post-election thoughts and discuss moving forward.
More information about Chris’ latest book, “The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” + info about the book tour here.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. Well, we’re going to try something today. Obviously we’ve been doing a fair amount of post-election sorting, conversing, dissecting. I think it’s part of the way that everyone, I’ll speak for myself, it’s the way that I’ve been processing the aftermath, the election, sort of trying to get my hands around what happened, why it happened. And I do feel like I actually have a fairly clear sense of things now.
And so, today we thought we’d try something a little different. Because I have a lot to say and don’t want to basically talk over a guest while I just completely bull rush them with all of my takes about the election, we’re just going to do a little flipping of the script today. And our own WITHpod producer, Doni Holloway is going to be interviewing me about the election aftermath. So, I can just offer said takes in a clear, no judgment safe space with Doni. So Doni, it’s great to be doing this with you.
Doni Holloway: Welcome to your program. How are you?
Chris Hayes: I’m good. You know, I’m trying to, you know, part of the idea here was I’ve been sort of obsessively thinking through what happened, why it happened, where we are now, what to do next and, you know, stuffing. I like to use the metaphor of the T-shirt guns that they have at the halftime of like a basketball game.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: The little T-shirt cannons that they, so I’d just been like stuffing takes into my T-shirt gun.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like wadding up my takes stuffing them in, stuffing them in. And then I thought, well, I kind of, for this week, we’re recording the day before Thanksgiving, which is a tough week to book anyway, for this week, that I would just unload the take gun and rather than having a guest that I unload the gun on them —
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: — I would just be the guest.
Doni Holloway: And I know you said everybody has a take in this moment, which is so true. And you jokingly kind of said that like you hate all takes, except for yours.
Chris Hayes: I only like the correct takes, which are my takes. Those are the takes that I like about the election.
Doni Holloway: That’s right. Well, there’s so much to unpack, so much has happened over the past few weeks, of course, a tsunami and avalanche of developments. Chris, I think maybe we should rename the podcast, “Why in the Hell is this Happened?”
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right.
Doni Holloway: It’s giving strong WTF vibes, but I figure we could start off by, we could break down the conversation in a few different sections could start off with a little bit of a historical comparative analysis, and then get into the present moment and talk about the future outlook. I know you got a lot of takes about that.
When we think back in the past, I think about Grover Cleveland and Trump kind of makes you wonder if the past is perhaps a little bit of prologue. They both were vehemently against the media throughout their political careers and disagreed with the majority of economists on tariffs and they didn’t get along too well with establishment politicians we’ll say.
So it kind of makes me think about this idea of giving people something new, which is something that Trump does perhaps, and that point being something that you talked about on “All In” recently.
So as we think about Grover Cleveland being reelected in 1892, the only president other than Trump to regain the White House after previously losing a reelection bid, he won in 1884, lost in 1888, and was reelected in 1892. But then it turns out that recapturing the presidency essentially reworked the Democratic Party for a generation. I wonder how you feel about the parallels and then perhaps the likelihood of this set of circumstances ushering in the same outcome in this moment.
Chris Hayes: Well, the thing about the Grover Cleveland example, there’s I think a few relevant analogies. One is that it was during an era of where the sort of political coalitions were in influx and unsettled. So it’s coming out of the reconstruction project where you have Republican dominance for a period of time because the Democrats are the party of treason in slavery, you have Lincoln wins. He gives way to Andrew Johnson. Of course, Johnson then gives way to two terms of Ulysses S. Grant.
And then you get this election in ‘76, between Tilden and Hayes where Tilden actually probably won, he was the Democrat, but Hayes ends up emerging triumphant. Grover Cleveland’s the first Democrat to win post-Civil War.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: So, it’s a moment where the political coalitions are shifting, the sort of relevance of the Civil War is fading, although not on the ground, particularly in the states of the old Confederacy.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: What I think is really interesting is that, I do think there’s a lot of analogies or similarities between that period and this. One, enormous inequality, this kind of gilded age wealth concentration that’s happening during this period of time. A sort of question about whether the country goes forward with or retrenches away from multiracial democracy. This incredibly corrupt set of circumstances in which like, the richest people just sponsor candidates and spend a ton of money on them. We’ve got that again. So there are a bunch of, I think, similarities.
One of the things I think about Grover Cleveland that’s also worth noting is he’s not really remembered except as the answer to this funny trivia question.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And part of the reason is that there’s a huge financial crisis in his second term that basically destroys his legacy.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: We’re like, this sucks. And the reason I think that’s important is it’s very easy to spin out your takes about what happened and what’s going to happen. But in the end, events end up having a huge say whether that’s, you know, that’s 9/11 or the great financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble or COVID, or Lord knows what else, like those end up defining presidencies and eras as much as the underlying tendencies do.
And so I think that’s another sort of word of caution about, you know, will Trump be this kind of fulcrum figure who kind of realigns the parties in the way that say Andrew Jackson did when he sort of created some of the DNA of the modern Democratic Party, or will he be more like Grover Cleveland that no one remembers except as a trivia answer, because in the end people are like, yeah, that was a disaster. And the reason that I think that that’s also relevant too, is the morning after George W. Bush was reelected, it looked like he was going to be this kind of colossus.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: This figure who created this new coalition and enduring, you know, there was a book about Bush and Roe called “Building Red America” by Thomas Edsall that did not work out because basically the second term was a disaster, and it ended with the worst financial crisis in 70 years. So who knows?
Doni Holloway: Yeah. It’s all up in the air. So when we think about those historical examples, and something you’ve also talked about when we fast forward a little bit from Grover Cleveland time, Reagan, Milton Freeman era, the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s with Thatcher and Reagan, just wonder your thoughts when we juxtapose that with more contemporary Republican ideology and commitments in your view on sort of the differences and similarities.
Chris Hayes: Well, McKay and I talked about this last week. I think that the sort of central ideological project of the Reagan revolution, Reagan and Thatcher and Milton Friedman and, you know, neoliberalism has basically been ideologically bankrupted and rhetorically discarded because of the great financial crisis.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: I really think that was the end of it as a rhetorical project. It’s still the project of Elon Musk. I mean, it’s still the project of a whole bunch of people who are trying to make it happen. But one of the things about the Trump era and one of the advantages I think Trump has, one of the reasons I think he won and has been an effective politician, is he doesn’t speak in the terms of neoliberalism. His rhetoric is post neoliberal. It’s not about freedom and free trade and free movement of capital that was the kind of watch word freedom of that era.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: And he’s completely discarded. He never talks about freedom. Everything is zero sum. Everything’s a fight between two entities. He’s fundamentally, his worldview is everything’s zero, zero sum. You’re either screwing or getting screwed. Everything having to do with trade is like this mercantile list throwback idea. He even says like, you know, the peak of the U.S. was in the 1890s when we had tariffs on everyone and no income tax and, you know, McKinley, he said this like, this is, you know —
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: And so his worldview is in many ways a complete remediation of the logic, the conceptual coherence and the kind of rhetorical approach of Reagan conservatism. Even though once they’re in power, all the same people that want to do things like deregulate the bank, get rid of the consumer financial protection bureau, you know, deregulate large corporate America, make it harder to organize unions. All that stuff is still there, which is all the same Reagan project.
Doni Holloway: Right. So, yeah, that’s a really good point, Trump’s view and not a lot of in between, but one extreme or the other. One thing that we’ve covered a lot is some of the biggest factors at play in this political moment when we consider the voter turnout in this last election. And we’ve covered it from different angles, including the episode that we did about the rise of the Latino far right with journalist Paola Ramos, also the polarized by degrees episode that we did with authors, Matt Grossman and Dave Hopkins. And then we’ve talked about the rejection of the status quo and the experience that people have had post-COVID, but with so many things to consider, it’s a little tough to pinpoint Trump’s win on one thing though. Would you agree?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So let me do my sort of big breakdown of how I sort of understand what happened.
Doni Holloway: Yep.
Chris Hayes: So I think it’s worth thinking in a few different categories. One is specific things that were unique to this cycle and this set of circumstances. So the biggest one is just inflation and the post-COVID surge inflation, which hurt incumbent parties across the world. Not everyone, you know, Mexico’s incumbent party did quite well, although it did lose voting share, basically every incumbent party that was around and in empower for the surge inflation after COVID saw a loss of vote share even incredibly powerful political parties like Narendra Modi’s party in India.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: So the first thing you got to say is look, there was a global crisis, and when people came out of it, there was a lot of frustration, anger and resentment, really focused on prices spiking, and it hurt incumbent parties. And the Democratic Party was the incumbent party for that.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: So that’s the first thing. That explains quite a bit. It gets you a pretty long way to the result, right? And if you look at the exit polling data and all the reporting, people talked about the cost of stuff, the right track, wrong track numbers were not good. People were not happy with the economy.
Doni Holloway: No.
Chris Hayes: And that was centered on the fact that they felt that they couldn’t afford things. They felt squeezed. Now there’s a question about the fact that, you know, in real terms, wages went up and there’s some complicated stuff we can get into, so that’s number one. We saw this across the world. Number two is Joe Biden was too old to be an effective communicator.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Full stop. Just like, we know that because it happened, the debate was like the point at which that could not be denied or avoided anymore.
Doni Holloway: Right. And isn’t there a certain point in the afternoon or the evening where he’s no longer like any good after a certain point, I think they said.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, well they were trying to not do late events.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: But even before the debate, he had a very low approval rating.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Partly that low approval rating was a reflection of those conditions that people were upset about. Part of it was that he was not up to the task of publicly communicating. I mean, he just, even in numerical terms, he gave less interviews. He gave less press conferences. He was around less.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, if Donald Trump is a figure who is larger than life or Barack Obama was larger than life, then Joe Biden as a president was kind of smaller than life. He just did not dominate the attentional space at all. And that was, I think, largely a function of his age. I think that a 65-year-old Joe Biden or a 62-year-old Joe Biden —
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: — would’ve been just a totally different story. Not to say that that guy was like an immaculate politician. He certainly was not.
Doni Holloway: Sure.
Chris Hayes: But on this, so already you’ve got the conditions of the election are disfavorable to an incumbent. Then you’ve got an actual administration helmed by a guy who is incapable of swimming upstream in a difficult environment by strenuously making the case for his presidency.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: So then you have Harris inheriting all that, right? Now —
Doni Holloway: It’s a lot.
Chris Hayes: — she did, I thought, a pretty good job running that campaign. One of the things we know is that it wasn’t impossible for a Democratic candidate to win some of the swing states that she lost because Democrats won in those states.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: In North Carolina, the statewide gubernatorial candidate won. In Michigan, a non-incumbent Democratic Senate candidate, Elissa Slotkin won.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: In Nevada, the incumbent Democratic Senate candidate, Jacky Rosen won. In Wisconsin, the incumbent Senate Democratic candidate Tammy Baldwin won.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: In Arizona, the non-incumbent Senate candidate Ruben Gallego won these are all states Trump carried.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: These are all states where Democrats won statewide. It was possible to win statewide as a Democrat in those states. We know that’s the case. What was not possible was someone carrying the weight of the unpopularity of Joe Biden —
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: — in the environment I think to win. And the reason I think that she actually ran a good campaign is that her loss in the swing states where the campaign was focused, both in its advertising, its door knocking and appearances, the average margin there was like three points. And the nationwide swing towards Trump was about six points. Right?
Doni Holloway: Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: So if you look at states where she didn’t campaign at all, you have huge swings to the right New Jersey, California, New York, right? In the states, the Harris campaign was operating they were doing something right.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Because those margins were closer than they were in the states where they did nothing. So, I think the campaign did okay. But I think fundamentally, if I think about what’s the counterfactual solution to winning this election, I think, it’s basically Joe Biden says in 2023, I’m not going to run. And the Democrats have a primary and they nominate a candidate who is not Kamala Harris and not associated with Biden and is preferably not from Washington and can run as essentially a pure change candidate.
So that to me, is like the kind of, some of the sort of contingent things around this cycle, then you got to go one level deeper, which are the structural changes that are happening in the Trump era. Right.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: So, what are the structural changes that we saw continue to play out? Rural voters continue to move to the right, towards the Republicans.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That keeps happening. The white working class, you know, essentially moving completely into Trump’s camp. The working class voters were not white, particularly Latino and Asian, moving to the right.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So this, that structural thing where the class realignment where Democrats increasingly dependent on upper middle class, middle class, affluent —
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — college educated folks, Republicans increasingly dependent on folks without a college degree, that structural realignment is happening beneath the surface of those sort of cyclical contingent things.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: And that’s where I think the discussions about the future of the Democratic Party really matter a ton. Right.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: Because you can’t change anything about how that election shook out.
Doni Holloway: No.
Chris Hayes: But if you want to win the Senate, you’re going to have to field competitive candidates in states like Ohio and Montana, where they lost. An Independent candidate ran Nebraska and ran decently, you know, seven points I think ahead of Harris and still lost. This question of how Democrats can do that, which has been the subject of a lot of takes is vital, right?
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And there’s a few things I would say, you know, happening there.
Doni Holloway: Yeah. Right. What are some of those things?
Chris Hayes: So, one is that immigration has been the rocket fuel for right-wing populism across the world and particularly in Western democracies.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And McKay said this last week that in talking to other Europeans, there’s sort of this hope that we would be inoculated and we’re not, you know, so, immigration is a driving force when you take a huge step back and you think the colonial era, as we think of it, basically starts in 1492 and goes until the 1960s, let’s say.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: If you think of the Soviet Union as a colonial project, which it was, you could say it goes to ‘89.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, ‘91, you know, the post-colonial era, the era in which all of the fallout from these projects of dominion and domination, the globalized, the developed word in the delving world, the global north and global south, the inequities between them combined with unprecedented mobility in people, goods and capital.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: We’re in like the infancy of that.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So, when you talk about F around and find out, like, this is the find out period of a globe that is going to see more natural disaster —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — has tremendous amounts of inequality and also unprecedented mobility in people. That is producing huge flows of people going from places that are in the teeth of disaster, poor unstable places to the rich parts of the world. And that is producing huge amounts of backlash everywhere —
Doni Holloway: Definitely.
Chris Hayes: — that is upending those politics. That’s the global context here. And that’s the thing to understand about what’s happening, particularly with what happened to the border and Donald Trump.
We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Doni Holloway: When you think about that point about immigration, and you also think about prices and tariffs and taxes and the impact it’ll have on everyday Americans, you think about a lot of people who voted against their own interests. And basically, if you don’t make more than like $400,000 a year or something, you’re not going to benefit from these tax cuts for that segment of the population. And so I’ve just been thinking a lot about that, about like people voting against their own interests.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I think it’s a complicated question, right, because people have interests that aren’t material.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like everyone, like I don’t vote my material interest. I don’t. I mean, really like, but I’m allowed to have non-material interests.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Everyone’s allowed to have non-material interests. Like, people have all sorts of interests. Now, you know, some people maybe have a patchy understanding of what their material interests are and how it’ll be affected.
Doni Holloway: Sure.
Chris Hayes: A lot of this is a little undetermined.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But like if someone says, I don’t like a bunch of people coming over the border —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — even though my mom did, or I’m from a family in which people did. That’s an interest. Like, they’re, you know, that a lot of people don’t like that and voted against it. And I think, you know, we see this, immigration, it’s like the crowbar —
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — that pries open these polities and Trump wielded it and wielded it very effectively. And I think it was exacerbated by the fact that we really did have like record setting border crossings, particularly in 2023, those have abated almost entirely due to actions that both the Biden administration’s taken and actions by the administration in Mexico of Claudia Sheinbaum who the new president there.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: And I think there’s the structural thing of the class realignment —
Doni Holloway: Yep.
Chris Hayes: — there’s the policy issue of immigration. I think those are related because, again, the place that the class realignment has been happening has been around immigration. And we’ve seen that in Europe as well.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And then you get to this question of despair and alienation and distrust. So, a lot of people feel the country’s on the wrong track —
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: — feel alienated from American institution. And the question of like what the, what is the source of that? Is it really interesting what I’ve been wrestling with.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: ‘Cause at one level you could say, this is an epiphenomenon of material hardship, right? That the neoliberal trade agenda basically hollowed out a whole bunch of places. People who had jobs in manufacturing lost them, places became more abound and this sort of sense of dislocation, the kind of despair that comes from being in a dying town, basically, the influx of opioids that was brought into those places. And the question of what’s cause and effect there is a little complicated.
So I think that’s true. But when, like, if you look at the way populist right-wing politics have functioned around immigration specifically —
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — like they’ve also worked pretty well in places like Scandinavia that have extremely robust social safety nets —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So there’s this a little bit of this left idea that like, if folks had social democracy or socialism or felt protected and weren’t sort of thrown on their own, the way that American capitalism indeed does that, you wouldn’t have the raw materials for Trumpism and this and right-wing populous politics.
But I’m a little skeptical of whether that’s true, just because we’ve seen effective right-wing populous politics in all kinds of places that don’t have the same levels of inequality. They don’t have the same harshness of American capitalism.
So, something is happening to me that’s both material, like the rise of inequality, the destruction of place, the way that our version of American 21st century capitalism leaves people behind who don’t have college degrees, which I think is true.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But then there’s something deeper that seems to me a little more like endemic to contemporary life, about a sense of diminish horizons and expectations, alienation, low trust, high distrust, conspiracy thinking, feeling like things are wrong, looking for a cause for that wrongness that is happening at a non-material level. And that brings us to the question of the attentional and information environment, which I think is driving that.
Doni Holloway: Definitely. Yeah. I want to talk about the attention landscape. I know you’ve pointed, as much as we hate to maybe admit it, Trump is masterful at gathering attention, and that’s a big thing that you studied in your writing your latest book. You’ve called him a vortex of chaos.
So I mean, that’s essentially what he is. And when we think about the concerns over mass deportation, and then even going back to 2016 with the building the wall and making Mexico pay for it type rhetoric that he was saying we’ve pointed out, of course he lies so much. What do you think he’s most committed to actually doing this time around as we try to parse through the campaign rhetoric from actual plans, or maybe I should say concepts of a plan?
Chris Hayes: I think that I said this a bunch of times in a bunch of different places, but I think that it’s hard because he lies so much and everyone knows he’s lying, that everyone could pretend —
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: — to hear what they want to hear because no one believes him about anything. So, I think the mass deportation and tariffs are real and that he’s going to try to do it, how much, at what scale, but I think those are real, I think using the government to pursue vengeance and —
Doni Holloway: Against his political enemies.
Chris Hayes: Political enemies —
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — and sort of authoritarian attempts to purge political foes and harass them through governmental means, I think that’s going to happen.
After that, as McKay and I were discussing last week, I think there are a huge amount of unresolved ideological tensions that the winners of these internal fights are going to determine a lot of stuff about, do they do a huge cut to spending? Do they cut food stamps? Do they cut Medicaid? Do they do this sort of austerity agenda? They are going to deregulate. They are going to cut taxes for the rich.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: That will definitely happen. But there’s a whole bunch of other questions inside that I think are unresolved. But the big stuff that he’s obsessed with, they’re going to try to do. And, you know, I think it’s likely to be pretty bad.
Doni Holloway: Yeah, it makes me think about a lot of the stuff within Project 2025. And we’re starting to see people who are listed in these appointments who were also authors in the Project 2025, 920-page playbook. So, it makes you really worry about now that we’re actually starting to see these people who are behind a lot of the ideas within Project 2025, actually getting cabinet positions or being nominated for cabinet positions.
When I talk a bit about attention, I know that you referenced that and we’ve talked about that a bit, your book, “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” coming out on January 28th, available for pre-order now, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes, attention being so important right now and how it’s been capitalized as something that you studied.
I remember talking with you throughout the process of writing the book and sort of hearing some of the behind the scenes of that, I’m so glad that it’s finally out, or almost out, into the world. Talk a little bit about attention as such an important resource, particularly in this moment as we’re reflecting on this election.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So let me talk about it just in the narrow. I don’t want to sort of cannibalize, you know, what will be future conversations about this.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But let me talk about it narrowly in the context of this point that I was making about people’s sense of negativity and alienation.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: One of the arguments I make in the book is that the more competitive and attentional marketplaces, the more what wins will have certain tendencies. So, think about a place that is a very competitive marketplace for your attention, a casino.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Right? Bells, lights, things trying, grabbing, right. Times Square.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Times Square. The same thing.
Doni Holloway: Attention overload. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Supermarket checkout counters.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Right. The sort of checkout counter tabloid. So one of the things that happens is the more competitive a space is, the more you’re going to get essentially negativity, because you’re basically reaching in and trying to grab people’s preconscious faculties, their brain stem, the fight or flight part of them. Right.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: So if you fire a gunshot in the air in a room, at a cocktail party, everyone’s going to look at you.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Without even a volitional choice to, they will —
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: — involuntarily give their attention to you. Right. You will extract their attention against their will. The thesis of the book is that the more of us live in these relentlessly competitive attentional environments that negativity out competes anything else.
And so we are constantly in a state of essentially being like, of gunshots, of being extracted against our will towards negativity. And this experience is producing this kind of alienation, dislocation, seething resentment. And again, this is a place that you see this across the world, like right-wing populous figures coming to power in democratic publics —
Doni Holloway: Yup.
Chris Hayes: — through social media because it is the perfect vector for that. And that’s the part of the story of Trump that’s both broader in terms of the context. And also, I think, not necessarily just material like born of material hardship, I think that you can’t separate life and internet life, real life and internet life anymore. It’s all just life.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, there’s no, we used to say —
Doni Holloway: IRL.
Chris Hayes: Yes. In the early days of the internet, we’d say IRL.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: There’s no IRL.
Doni Holloway: No.
Chris Hayes: It’s all just the same thing. There’s no boundary anymore. And to the extent that you have this sort of form of attention capitalism that’s just pumping people with negativity and grabbing their brains away from their own all the time, never sort of allowing them to be present, you’re producing a populace that’s like sort of seethingly unsettled, and that is ripe for the kind of populous politics that we’ve seen excel in this era.
Doni Holloway: Yeah. So the book is so timely as we consider all of that. And Chris, I know just this week, you announced a national tour for the book. I know you’re excited about that. I saw some of the locations, and I know when we did our, “Why Is This Happening?” tour, a lot of folks on the west coast are like, what, you guys forgot about us. But you’re doing a lot of stops on the west coast, right, and a number of other cities.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. We’re going to be in New York, Philly, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Kingston in New York. We’ll be in a few events in New York as well, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Houston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego. We’re going to come to Chicago and we’re finalizing the date there. I think I’m going to be in New Orleans as well. And I think we might add other dates as well.
Doni Holloway: And we have a link in the show notes where you can find out more about the tour. Speaking of platforms and attention, how’s life over in Bluesky? Bluesky, the social platform.
Chris Hayes: Well, it’s great. I like it over in Bluesky. I think all these networks tend to have kind of life cycles.
Doni Holloway: Yep.
Chris Hayes: So we’ll see what happens, but it’s been amazing to watch the growth. And partly, I think it’s just people voting with their feet after the Trump victory. I mean, look, we really haven’t ever quite had something like what we have here, where —
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: — the richest man in the world has sort of partnered with who will be the most powerful politician in the world.
Doni Holloway: Basically co-president, it seems.
Chris Hayes: To sort of co-president and to essentially function as a kind of like private sector enforcer, you know, using his money explicitly for this political project relentlessly, you know, and I think it’s going to continue through the presidency in all sorts of ways. Now there’s precedent for this in other countries. This is the way that Orban and his kind of circle of oligarchs function in Hungary.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But I think that people moving over to Bluesky is just people expressing their disgust with this arrangement. Understandably.
Doni Holloway: And so it kind of gives vibes of like Twitter pre-2016, you’d say?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I think in some ways, or like, yeah, even earlier I would say —
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — like 2013, 2014. There’s just a lot of people like die hard posters, which is that people —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — like myself would just need to post and make dumb jokes and offer their opinions.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Is this an awesome psychological profile? No, but it is the lifeblood of a good social network.
More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Doni Holloway: So now as we look forward and also looking back to the extent that I know we’re maybe not trying to look back on, on maybe the past 10 years of covering Trump, as you say of your one precious life. You’ve mentioned that it’s kept you up a lot to like four in the morning, kind of up thinking about the last few years and maybe things that were done wrong and covering him.
I know you’re a forward thinker and striving to always do even better work. I’m curious, what are some of the things that you think can change with regards to coverage or what’s been keeping you up in that regard?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I think the sort of attentional trap of Trump is a tough one to figure out like the kind of constantly doing stuff. That’s like, oh my God, you know?
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: How you deal with that. Like, Matt Gaetz for Department of Justice. But that one felt like, yeah, it’s really important this guy not become the attorney general in the United States.
Doni Holloway: Right. That didn’t age well.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I guess I feel like I know the coverage is going to have to be different.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I don’t know how yet. I think that my north star is just I believe in what I believe in, and I am going to be honest about that. One of the things we really worked on in the first Trump term, and I think we did a decent job is modulation, which is what I always say is the volume not only goes to 10, once you turn it to 10 long enough sounds like five because our ears acclimate.
And so, I think there were a few spots that we really picked to turn the volume up to 10 in Trump’s first term, child separation, the bungling of COVID, January 6th. The question of how to modulate this time is going to be more difficult because there’s going to be more coming at us.
And also at this point, there’s a difference between what the folks watching our show know or don’t know and what the broader public knows and doesn’t know, and how to kind of deal with that gap, because there’s two sort of Rosetta Stones for this aspect of this election. One is a tweet I saw from someone saying it’s underappreciated how much Trump’s larger than life persona is just a hack —
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — for low propensity voters.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, getting low propensity voters. And this is born out in the data, Data For Progress published this data where they ranked voters by how much political news they consume, you know, across platforms. The highest, the most arting (ph) consumers of political news were like Harris plus eight, and people have said they consumed zero political news were Trump plus 15.
So there’s this sort of interesting thing happening where it’s like, right. The people that are obsessively watching our show, they’re not the group of people that —
Doni Holloway: No.
Chris Hayes: — the marginal group that swung to give Trump this win.
Doni Holloway: No.
Chris Hayes: But then there’s a question always of like how discourse works and the impossible to trace ways that it echoes around the public.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: How people know what they know about the news and politics, if they don’t consume political news and how much we contribute to that sort of atmospheric, you know, sense people have.
Doni Holloway: Yeah. When we think about the actionable steps that we can take, I remember, in the recent MSNBC premium conversation that we had with Rachel, Rachel Maddow, which if you haven’t heard that, be sure to check it out, subscribe to MSNBC premium for that conversation. You mentioned that the only thing that you really know how to do about all of this is to continue the work as a public figure in the context of a liberal democracy, in which things like persuasion and public opinion matter.
As we consider that on our air, we work tirelessly to expose the soon to be for the second time grifter-in-chief, we raised all the possible alarms about who he is, and he was still elected. I know there’s the thought about the media’s role in raising awareness and perhaps encouraging people to do things like writing to their Congress people and for people to mobilize and take action, et cetera. But I’m curious sort of about your thoughts on the power of the media in this moment when we consider how everything went down.
Chris Hayes: I mean, I think the media is a term that encompasses so much that it’s sort of impossible to say.
Doni Holloway: Sure.
Chris Hayes: I would say what we think of as the mainstream media or legacy media or —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — like professional media, corporate media.
Doni Holloway: Professional media. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Professional media.
Doni Holloway: Sure.
Chris Hayes: I mean, how about we say journalistic media?
Doni Holloway: Yes. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Media that’s self describes as journalists.
Doni Holloway: Yes. Not influencer. I mean the great, there’s great influences doing great work, but yeah. Like, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s probably at a level it’s the, it’s probably we have the least amount of power we’ve had in my lifetime.
Doni Holloway: Interesting.
Chris Hayes: And I really feel sort of at a loss about what’s next. I mean, Matt Pearson and I spoke about this a bit.
Doni Holloway: Yeah. Great. WITHpod episode, you should check out.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I don’t know. And I don’t know what it will mean going forward. I’m not quite clear. I really feel at a loss about how this is all going to work. I mean, how do people come to know about the world?
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And the people who are, whose job it is to communicate things about that, what professional ethos they have and whether that matters. So, I think it matters to believe in the ethos of journalism as an undertaking. Like, I’m opinion, have been basically my whole life. I wrote, you know, very voicey features back in the day.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: I’ve written columns, but I’m also a journalist. Like, I have to make sure the things I say are true. I fact check things. We have standards.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, when you got to go get a comment from someone, when you say something about them, or make sure you record what they say, like —
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: How much that matters, I think it matters a lot. I think having a set of people who are acculturated to a set of norms and habits and practices around attempting to deliver the truth matters to the overall democratic health of the society.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But we may just be running in an experiment where we see how much it matters. I think it does matter.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I think the decline of that is a real problem, but I’m not quite sure how you promote that ethos in the era we’re in now in which a lot of folks, it’s not a knock on them to be like, you know, I host a podcast and I’m not a journalist, like, that’s fine, you know, you don’t have to be, but increasingly, that becomes the vector for information for people.
Doni Holloway: Yes. Especially as we consider so much disinformation out there and parsing what’s real from what’s not. I know that the rule of law is something that you think about a lot as well. One because of the stuff that we cover. But of course also in large part, because of the love of your life, your wife, the incredible Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a constitutional law professor, her illustrious background goes on and on.
I’m reminded about how you jokingly said that you’re the slacker in your household. One of the many hats that Kate wears is cohosting the wildly popular Strict Scrutiny podcast, along with Melissa Murray and MSNBC contributor and Professor Leah Litman, they co-host that together. So listeners can hear their takes there.
But I’m sort of curious behind the scenes, like dinner table conversations, when we think about the Department of Justice, a lot to consider there in Trump 2.0, him saying that he’ll go after his political enemies, et cetera, cases being dropped, things like that, what is Kate most concerned about on a daily basis? And what are those dinner table conversations like now?
Chris Hayes: Well, I mean, I don’t want to speak for her.
Doni Holloway: Yeah. I know she’s a big voice of reason —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Doni Holloway: — we’ve had her on the podcast.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. She has the same concerns. I think we broadly share the concerns about —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — the gutting of the Department of Justice as an institution that is committed to the Constitution and pursuing the law without fear or favor from that institutional DOJ to essentially the kind of enforcement arm of the president’s political agenda.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that’s the real fear, right? That you get Matt Gaetz or, you know, Pam Bondi, who is the nominee to be attorney general, and they basically view the department as a tool to be wielded —
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: — against, you know, people they don’t like, whether through civil suits, whether through criminal prosecution, whether through just investigations that produce enormous amounts of legal fees and, you know, stress. And then I think the other concern that Kate has and that I share is just the last time around it was a five, four court —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — for much of it.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: And this time it’s going to be a six, three court with enormous latitude for the right, a court that’s shown itself to be really, really in some, I think, profound ways broken and also subservient to essentially partisan interests.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And what that will mean for the second time around is really unnerving to contemplate.
Doni Holloway: Yes. There being less guardrails, conservative court majority, less guardrails with the House and the Senate, but then at the same time you also think about, and we had the WITHpod episode with author and former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, love those type of episodes where we get folks who have unique insight into what it’s like to be in those conservative spaces and then they’ve sort of come around to the other side.
But one of the things that Kinzinger mentioned was that, you know, Trump will basically grin in your face. He hates confrontation. And then he’ll talk about you when you leave the room fire folks on social media, you know, stuff like that. So in a way, gifted at falling out with people and not maintaining alliances.
I wonder how much of maybe that ironically good characteristic in the sense of him not being able to maintain alliances and get stuff done, some of the truly horrible things that he said he is going to do, how much you think about that?
Chris Hayes: Oh yeah. It’s a huge point of hope —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that they’re all going to be fighting with each other and hate each other. And that will make it impossible for them to do a lot of the terrible things they want to do. I mean, I think that’s a huge factor here.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And one I think is likely. I mean, the degree to which it will damage their substantive agenda is unclear. But I generally think these are people who their natural state is to be at each other’s throats —
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — and to be back biting. And that thing Kinzinger said about Trump is so key that he’s fundamentally kind of a coward about conflict.
Doni Holloway: Yes. Yes.
Chris Hayes: That’s a really important thing to keep in mind as the kind of easy part wanes and the difficult part rears its head, which is the actual choices of governing, which are harder to kind of hand wave away than campaign rhetoric.
Doni Holloway: Sure. So to your point about not seeding too early, and just thinking that everything is going to go exactly as planned and smoothly, and they’re going to do all this stuff, that’s politics, which is very fractured, is still at play, something to keep in mind.
I know you’ve fused a lot of more adjectives to describe Trump. Is there one word that you think best to, one of my favorites you said jabroni, I mean, feckless, I think in one of the episodes someone brought up the term creepy weirdo.
Chris Hayes: I don’t know, man. I don’t know if I can I have a single word.
Doni Holloway: Yeah. All of the above, maybe.
Chris Hayes: I mean, fundamentally what he is, he’s a demagogue. And I think that the reason that word is useful is for all of the head scratching of like, how is he doing it? Actually, demagogues are one of the original problems of and threats to democracy.
Like, going back to Athens, right? The idea that if you have a democracy, one of the things that might happen in that democracy is that a charismatic demagogue comes along and kind of uses this rhetoric of us versus them to kind of whip people into a frenzy based —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — on lies and deceit. And it’s like respiratory viruses for humans.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, you know, it’s just a thing that humans have to deal with in our immune system have to deal with and part of what we’re susceptible is as people. Demagogues are a thing that the body politic of a democratic nation is going to have to fight off from time to time.
Doni Holloway: As you think about having to fight that off, I know we talked a little bit about Kate’s takes, but also on the family note too, and Chris, you can tell me if this is too personal, but I know of the many hats you wear, you’re a dad, the father of three kids, two girls, and one boy. I’m curious about your conversations with your kids, of course, at age appropriate levels for everything that’s going on. But I imagine, you know, politics is discussed a fair amount in your household to say the least.
I wonder as our listeners are pondering how to help their kids make sense of this, and as you think about your concerns, the intensifying climate crisis, which will likely be exacerbated by this incoming administration, changes to the Department of Education, a lot of things that we got a heads up about in Project 2025, when that was released, extremely deleterious changes to the way government operates and thus everyday life, you’re a pretty young guy yourself, but how do you talk and think about the future of those who are forming their worldview at such a wild time and how you have those conversations?
Chris Hayes: Well, we do talk about politics fair amount.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: We try to pitch it to different age levels of age appropriateness.
Doni Holloway: Yes. Sure.
Chris Hayes: My oldest is an incredibly sophisticated consumer of news.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And they all are for their ages, but obviously you modulate —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — the level of, you know, the vocabulary you are using and what you’re talking about, but we try to answer their questions, and not just hand wave away. So we’ve talked about Trump and we’ve talked about a whole bunch of stuff.
About the future, like, I always say the future’s unwritten, and I try not to think too much about the future.
Doni Holloway: That’s something I want to talk about too. Use the term future trip a lot.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I just, I don’t know. What I know is, you know, we got to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. We have to get to a net zero green economy. We need to do whatever we can to build a society that is stable, secure, and abundant for all different kinds of people, from all different walks of life, where we could sort of live side by side peacefully and pursue our life projects and flourish, where people are looked out for and taken care of, where the mechanisms of both public life and politics are held in a fundamental sense by the people and not some small group of connected insiders or super rich folks.
So I have a bunch of principles about the society I want to bring about, the future I want to bring about, what kind of society I want my kids to have, but I try to just operationalize that in a day to day way and not think too much about what the future will look like.
And mostly with kids, it’s about talking about like kindness and compassion.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And a sense of justice, a sense of right and wrong, a sense of people being bullies or, you know, cruel.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: And choosing kindness over cruelty, and those sort of basic moral lessons.
Doni Holloway: So I know you said that you try not to future trip too much. So when we think about that sort of in theory, and then in practice, like what does that kind of look like for you? ‘Cause I know it’s something, anxiety is something that a lot of people are dealing with, a lot of our listeners. In practice, like, is it trying to shut off the future tripping voice in your head, or, you know, doing the show, doing the podcast? Like what —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I think that producing work is one way that I stop myself from obsessing. So when I have to make something, podcast, work on the book, work on something I’m writing, work on the show, that’s like a productive way to focus my energies. And then I, you know, over two plus decades of adulthood and a fair amount of therapy, I’ve developed a set of tools to deal with anxious and obsessive loops, which is to sort of recognize they’re happening, try to interrupt them, or sometimes just let them go but also aware that my brain is just doing that. And it doesn’t mean that the thing I’m obsessing over is important.
Doni Holloway: Right.
Chris Hayes: Try to remember other times when I’ve obsessed over things. And that proved to not really matter that much. So, I think in all things, I think a really useful life tool is to have a kind of almost a sort of philosophical distance from your own head. Like, that to me is really crucial to be able to sort of take one step back from being inside the mind that is spinning —
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — to observe the mind that is spinning.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Which is the sort of crucial step, I think, of a lot of therapy and why I think it can be very effective for people —
Doni Holloway: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — and a tool I think that it’s important to teach kids actually. So that’s the big one. And then a certain amount of it’s like, there’s only so much you can do. I’m like stressed out now. I mean, you know, I’m stressed out about what’s going to happen. I’m stressed out about the state of the country, state of the world. Like, and you know, you just got to sort of accept that too, at a certain level, you can’t control what you can’t control. That’s a cliche, but it’s true.
Doni Holloway: Yeah. We can’t control what we can’t control, and we need some glimmers of hope to the extent possible. And one of the things from a hopeful standpoint, our recent episode with Anna Galland. Anna, of course, served as executive director of MoveOn Civic Action. She now works with a range of national prodemocracy organizations, coalitions and leaders. We got a lot of good feedback from the episode, which just really points to the fact that I think, yes, we all had the moment where we had to sulk and like, deal with it. And like, it’s a lot to process, but sort of how we move forward from here.
And I just want to play this bite from Anna in that recent conversation, get your reaction to it. Now, Chris, that you’ve had a little more time to think about it.
(Begin Audio Clip)
Anna Galland: I just keep thinking like we’re going to be digesting the results of that election for the next four, five, 10 years to really fully understand it. So we should have strong opinions loosely held and make some decisions on them and also not neglect the work of standing up right now to fight back. Because that actually if we get too preoccupied and navel gazing into what we just did wrong, we might actually undermine the work of confidently, powerfully standing up and resisting the very scary stuff that’s coming at us.
(End Audio Clip)
Doni Holloway: As we think about standing up and taking actionable steps, everyday people, how have you thought about that since the conversation with Anna?
Chris Hayes: Well, I think the work of civil society is crucial, as Anna was discussing in that episode, and I think even just things like calling up senators to say like, I don’t think Matt Gaetz should be the attorney general.
Doni Holloway: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I don’t think Pete Hegseth should be the secretary of defense. And there are folks who live in states who are listening to the sound of my voice who live in states with Republican senators. You can call that Republican senator and say this. I think people, you know, Indivisible has been doing stuff, MoveOn, has been doing stuff, a bunch of different groups.
Doni Holloway: Yup.
Chris Hayes: There’s all sorts of local community organizations that help and support immigrants and migrants of all kinds that are working to prepare themselves for what might happen around mass deportation. People can plug into those organizations. I think there’s going to be a lot of work that people need to do. And I think it does give people a sense of purpose and mission when you can take the anger or rage or anxiety you’re feeling and put it towards something concrete.
Doni Holloway: Yes. And some solace, like Rachel said, we won’t have to wake up to another Trump reelected sort of morning. I think that’s pretty much done.
As we wrap up this conversation, I’ve been personally leaning into the strength of my ancestors in this moment and just constantly reminding myself that if they could endure and overcome seemingly insurmountable tribulations, so can we. So that’s kind of been a north star for me when pondering this moment that we find ourselves in. And, just a reminder, I think that we’re going to be all right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. There’s a professor political philosopher at Georgetown who I’ve had on the podcast, I think, Olufemi Taiwo, right?
Doni Holloway: Yes, yes. Yeah. We had him, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Olufemi Taiwo who had this post on Bluesky that I joked about the fact I don’t have any tattoos, but if I was going to get one —
Doni Holloway: What would that be? Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and he said, “Our ancestors did more, with less, against worse. Lock in.”
Doni Holloway: Lock in.
Chris Hayes: Our ancestors did more, with less, against worse. Lock in.
Doni Holloway: That is so profound
Chris Hayes: I’ve just been thinking about that, he’s right.
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Like Jim Crow, you know, like —
Doni Holloway: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Our ancestors did more, with less, against worse. Lock in. That has been like a mantra in my head, like lock in, like, okay, this is what we have now. This is what we’re up against, so lock in.
Doni Holloway: All right. That’s a great north star. We got to lock in. Thanks so much, Chris, for joining your podcast.
Chris Hayes: It was great to join my podcast. Great job, Doni.
Doni Holloway: Thank you, Chris. This was so much fun. We talked about a lot, got into a lot.
You can be sure to email us@WITHpodgmail.com. You can get in touch with us using the hashtag WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can also follow Chris on Threads at ChrislHayes and on Bluesky as we discussed at ChrislHayes, “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by me, Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Fernando Arruda and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCnews.com/whyisthishappening.