This episode examines the factors which led to Donald Trump's decisive victory in the recent U.S. election. Did the Harris campaign’s insistence on issues of identity, rights, and democracy overshadow people's everyday struggles with economic issues? What role did patriarchal bias and demographics of a shifting landscape of political preferences play in this election? And finally, will the bark of Trump’s campaign promises be worse than the actual bite of the coming presidency?
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Glossary
Dobbs v. Jackson
(24:03 or p.7 in the transcript)
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, legal decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned two historic Supreme Court rulings, Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), which had respectively established and affirmed a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Specifically, Roe v. Wade had recognized a constitutional right to obtain an abortion before approximately the end of the second trimester of pregnancy (which the Court understood as the usual point of fetal viability). Caseyhad affirmed the “essential holding” of Roe, which it had described in part as “a recognition of the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the State.” As Caseyexplained, a state unduly interferes in the right to pre-viability abortion if its restrictions “impose…an undue burden on a woman’s ability to make this decision” or present “a substantial obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.” Notwithstanding Roe and Casey and other Supreme Court rulings reaffirming a constitutional right to pre-viability abortion, Mississippi, the state appellant in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, claimed that laws banning pre-viability abortion are not necessarily unconstitutional. States may “prohibit elective abortions before viability,” the state argued, “because nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion.” Dobbs drew national attention because it overturned nearly 50 years of judicial precedent and effectively enabled states to impose drastic restrictions on the availability of abortion and even to ban it completely. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
This is the ninth episode of season nine of Democracy in Question. It's a real pleasure to welcome today Stephen Walt, who is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he also served as academic dean between 2002 and 2006.
Stephen Walt has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for almost two decades. He received the International Studies Association's Distinguished Scholar Award in 2014, and among his many other affiliations, let me just mention the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the Brookings Institution, and he's currently in Vienna as a special guest at the Institute of Human Sciences.
He's been a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, co-chair of the editorial board. of the journal International Security and has also co-edited the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs book series. A prominent representative of the realist school and in international relations, he's authored several highly acclaimed books, among them “The Origins of Alliances”[i], “Taming of American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy”[ii], “The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy”[iii] and coauthored with John Mearsheimer “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”[iv].
When at the beginning of this year, Steve published a provocative article arguing that a second Trump presidency should not be envisioned as a truly radical break in terms of American foreign policy, he gave it the following subtitle. “The world's fears are mostly exaggerated”. While dejected Democrat voters and even many concerned citizens all over the world may find it rather hard probably to take comfort in those words, I hope that my conversation with him today provides a lot of answers to some uncomfortable questions we're asking ourselves about what happened on the 5th of November in the United States and its far reaching implications for liberal democracy all around the world in the early 21st century.
When Joe Biden defeated the incumbent Donald Trump in the presidential race four years ago, many were too eager to dismiss the latter's first term as an aberration. Four years on, with the Democrats having suffered a historic loss, one might ask whether the Biden era could in fact have been an anomaly, a temporary detour from a trend marked by the resurgence of illiberal authoritarian rulers all around the world.
What were the key mistakes of the Democrats and of the Harris campaign that led to Trump's decisive victory? Has their insistence on issues of identity, rights, and democracy in general overshadowed people's everyday struggles with economic problems? Is American society still plagued by a strong patriarchal bias which resonates all too well with the toxic masculinity and the misogyny emanating from the Trump campaign?
What role did the racial divide or the demographics of a shifting landscape of political preferences play in this election? Has the question of immigration and of refugees become one of the most polarizing, dividing lines, not only in Europe, but also in the U.S.A., as we have just seen? Today, we'll be seeking answers to these questions with my guest, Stephen Walt.
A very warm welcome, Steve, to the podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you here as my guest today and thank you so much for making the time for joining me.
Stephen Walt (SW): It’s wonderful to be here.
SR: In view of the exceptionally close race that this American presidential election was predicted to be, I was concerned that we would be sitting here, the two of us, with only a provisional, partial set of results today, results that could be contested and probably would be followed by weeks of litigation. Donald Trump scored a decisive victory. He swept all battleground states, and he won the overall popular vote as well. The U.S. appears to be moving decisively to the right with the political map being redrawn as we speak. So let me start by asking you if this was a stunning comeback by Trump, or a devastating loss by Harris.
Was the momentum behind the campaign by Kamala Harris a mirage, or was America simply not ready yet to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color? The historian Stephen Kotkin wrote an interesting article in which he said Trump is, and I quote him, “quintessentially American, not an alien, but somebody that the American people voted for, who reflects something deep and abiding about American culture.” Do a majority of Americans want what Trump is selling, so that they are willing to overlook the criminal convictions, the vindictive agenda, which explicitly aims to dismantle the very foundations of some of the United States’ democratic institutions?
SW: So, there's a lot there. And the first thing I would say, and I think everyone should bear this in mind, is that a lot of the conventional wisdom about American electoral politics was upended by this election. Pollsters got it wrong again, as they have repeatedly now. Remember they underestimated how well Democrats would do say in the 2022 midterms, they missed how well Trump was going to do in 2016.
So, there's something wrong with the way we're tapping into public opinion, also some familiar nostrums that the ground game really matters. Your “get out the vote” effort at the local level is really important, that money is really critical. Harris had much more money than Trump did as well. All of those things didn't forecast the election. There's even a long tradition in American electoral politics saying it's the state of the economy that matters and the state of the economy is measured by levels of unemployment, levels of growth, things like that. And the American economy by those measures was doing quite well under Biden. So, everyone who thought they were an expert and were predicting this close nail-biting election that, as you said, might not be resolved for weeks. They just got this wrong. And of course, what we've seen in the past week is all of these people who got it wrong now confidently stating that they know what happened.
So, I'm now going to do the same thing. I'll give you my sense of some of the things that happened and why Harris lost as badly as she did. I mean, first of all, it was not a landslide in the sense of, say, Nixon beating McGovern in ‘72 or Johnson beating Goldwater in 1964. It was a clear win, but it was not like Trump got 60 percent of the vote or 70 percent of the vote. He got slightly more than 50 percent and she got slightly under. Second, the Harris campaign was, I think badly damaged by the way in which the Democrats went about picking their candidate.
The fact that Biden clung to the position that he was going to run for so long meant several things. One, there was no primary season and that's important because what the primary season does is it first of all allows the party to figure out which candidate actually is resonating with the voters. And that's how Biden got the nomination in 2020. Everybody counted him out at the beginning. But he did very well in the primaries and people suddenly began to realize he might be the guy who could beat Trump. The second thing you do in a primary is you start to figure out where the voters are. All the candidates who are competing spend a lot of time out in the states, listening to people, figuring out what's going on, and the Democrats didn't have any of that.
Suddenly Kamala Harris is the nominee. She has to put together a campaign and a platform and a program on the fly. And I think Democrats were fooled into thinking that was a great advantage. She'd surprised the Trump people. They hadn't been expecting to run against her. But the problem is she didn't have a clear set of positions that were clearly associated with her, so that's problem number one. Second, the 2022 election, the midterms, where the Democrats did much better than people expected. Traditionally, the incumbent party does badly in the midterms. They did okay. And that means they didn't get a message that maybe their positions weren't as popular as they thought.
They weren't able to do the kind of mid-course correction that Barack Obama did in 2010. When Barack Obama was president, he'd been president for two years, the Democrats take a real drubbing in 2010, and he begins to shift his positions and wins reelection in 2012. And the Democrats misread what happened in 2022.
Second, you mentioned, is America still not ready to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color? I think it's clear in retrospect that Kamala Harris was, in some respects, the Trump movement's worst nightmare. Biden was a conventional, traditional, old white male, very comfortable with people who weren't comfortable necessarily with the United States not being so overwhelmingly white country.
Kamala Harris is female. She's a lawyer. She is a woman of color. She is from a liberal state. She is wealthy, married to a rich person as well, no children, et cetera. And absolutely everything that MAGA America thinks is a threat. These are people who want to sort of impose their values on all of us.
So, this is just almost allergic to a segment of the American populace. She got almost 50 percent of the votes, but that I think was something that alienated people as well. And the final part, I guess I'll say is that what, what I think people have failed to appreciate in the Democratic Party is first of all, that economic issues really did matter, and it wasn't just these macroeconomic indicators like unemployment or growth rates.
It was, how was this translating down to the lived experience of many Americans? A lived experience where housing was too expensive, where people were having trouble paying off loans, where inflation was a problem for a while, and the Biden team did not do a good job of explaining how well they had done in tackling and dealing with it.
And finally, Donald Trump has had one, I think, great advantage that it took me a long time to understand, and you referred to it. What generated this extraordinary loyalty of his supporters and the people willing to overlook an extraordinary number of personal flaws? That he's a convicted felon, that he's been guilty of multiple frauds and bankruptcies, that he's a sexual predator, all of this stuff and this really bizarre behavior.
Why do they look past all of that? And I finally have concluded that what Donald Trump had was a deep resentment. of elites and in particular liberal elites that had been in charge of the country for a long time. Including, by the way, people like the Bush family, right, on the Republican side.
And he's not faking that. His hatred of the American elite is just as powerful and just as sincere as people out there in, rural areas who also don't like the American elite. That comes across authentically and people who've, you know, written about Trump, says he, has always felt spurned, the New York society didn't welcome him. They thought he was from Queens, you know, déclassé and he took that personally. So, when he gets up in these rallies and gives these rants, this really resonates in ways with a level of sincerity that neither Harris nor previously Hillary Clinton could generate. And so, people are willing to forgive him for all of that because, you know, as he said in one of his speeches when he said, “I am your justice”. That's what they were willing to vote for as well.
SR: So let me pick up that last point and say that the Democrats seem to have ignored, as you said, widespread popular perceptions and also the lived experience of economic hardship, the reality of the cost of living and housing crisis because they were focused on the macroeconomic indicators. Inflation, job creation, et cetera. Some people have even argued that the economic program that Kamala Harris put forward was less welfare-oriented and less socially attuned swing back to the left neoliberal mainstream. Bernie Sanders put it quite pithily when he said, “Why are they surprised? If the Democrats abandoned the working class, the working class abandoned the Democratic Party.” Do you think there is some truth in understanding American politics as based in a certain kind of class structure?
SW: Yeah and, and I think with hindsight, it's clear that Bernie Sanders in 2016 had the right formula and was shut out by the Democratic Party leadership and his formula was first, that the U.S. government has to do a lot more for ordinary Americans in a whole variety of ways economically also dealing with, you know, the opioid crisis, dealing with the hollowing out of rural areas in, in a variety of ways and had to pay attention to those people and listen to them. And that's why Bernie resonated so well.
This crotchety old socialist from Vermont resonated with young people, right, who were looking out at their economic prospects and it didn't look wonderful. And so, he resonated. The second part of Bernie's program, of course, was a much-reduced defense budget, much reduced foreign policy interventionism, stop trying to run around the world solving all those problems.
That's how you afford the things we need to do at home. Of course, Trump has bought that second part, not the first part. He's bought the second part, and that resonated as well. I think it's an open question whether Sanders actually could have won a general election given his sort of other qualities as well.
The point is, his formula never got embraced by the Democratic Party. Biden made some gestures in that. The Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, are efforts to try and bring back manufacturing, but they were relatively modest things as well, and didn't alter the basic perception that they weren't interested in what ordinary Americans were going through.
The other part of this, though, that shouldn't be forgotten is also the migration or immigration question which has been a thorny problem, not just in the United States. I mean, here in Austria everywhere else, it's been big. It's been probably the single most important issue that has driven populism in the U.K. with Brexit, in France, in Germany, in Hungary obviously, and, of course, in the United States as well.
And the Biden people had worked on the problem with some success, but not nearly enough. And that gets to the, maybe the final thing I would say is even where they were fairly successful. Illegal immigration was way down and things like that. They never really sold it very well. They did not alter the public perception.
And I believe that a lot of that was because of Biden's age and inability to put him out on the road. He could not go out. Presidents, wherever they go, get enormous attention. And he was pretty much stuck in Washington, and he was being very heavily protected from too much public exposure, so the person who should be the loudest, most visible voice for what the administration is doing and what it's achieved was largely silent. Again, a lot of the blame I think falls is on Joe Biden himself.
SR: So, where do you think the Democratic Party is headed from here? Does it represent the widely resented establishment, as you just pointed out among Trump's supporters for sure, and is probably out of touch with the everyday concerns of ordinary American citizens? So, I was reading an interview with President Obama's former Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, where he said the Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions, the establishment, quote unquote, that most Americans distrust and thus misjudge the anger people felt at the government. This may be true, but the question is, if that is the case, why is Trump's government, the Republican establishment, going to come away better?
SW: Well, in part because the Trump team, I guess, is not really of the establishment. That remains to be seen. I mean, let's go back a little bit. The first term, Trump basically had to appoint people who were acceptable members of the establishment because he had no team. He didn't expect to win in 2016. He had never assembled a transition team of any consequence. They didn't have a list of names to put into key positions, so they ended up relying on lots of people. Some outsiders, but lots of people who were very respectable mainstream folks. And they came in and to a large extent held Trump back, restrained him, tried to curb his worst instincts as well.
And I think he learned from that experience. And of course, they've now had four years to prepare and figure out who should get key jobs. Who are we not going to appoint? And we're going to appoint people who are loyal, who are solidly behind what we want to do, are not going to get in our way. Now, there are divisions within those groups.
They don't agree on anything. But in political terms, Elon Musk is not a member of the establishment. He's never been in politics before. His views on political questions, to the extent we even understand them, are not part of having been in Washington for a long time. That's true of the rest of the tech bros who are reportedly influential.
And I believe some of the other folks in the Trump umbrella, if you want to call it that, also don't like key elements of the current establishment. They don't like the administrative state, which the Supreme Court, now stocked with Republican and Trump appointees has already started to weaken and dismantle.
So, there's going to be more of a push for institutional change. We're still going to debate how much of the Trump agenda is, you know, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. Is that really the blueprint or is that just a set of ideas? Trump was very coy about that during the campaign because he understood some of those ideas. It just sounded very scary. But you know, when you don't have a plan and there's a plan on the shelf, it's tempting to reach for the plan that exists and the people that exist and there will undoubtedly be some pressure to bring those people in. You started all of a sudden by asking, what about the Democratic Party?
And I think, you know, right now it's a circular firing squad. Everyone is trying to figure out who to blame. And that'll go on for some time. And so, none of us quite know how that's going to shake itself out. Some of it will depend on what Trump's able to do and how well it works and then what happens in the midterm elections in 2026.
So, if the sort of conventional wisdom prevails, or, you know, usual patterns prevail. He overreaches. There's a wave of support for Democrats in 2026 in the local races, Congress and Senate, which again is the usual pattern. They regained the House; they regained the Senate. You could imagine the Democratic Party saying, okay, that was an aberration.
We don't have to change very much. If that doesn't happen, then you might get much more of a soul searching, and I want to suggest the following historical analogy, which come to pass again. So, George McGovern loses terribly in 1972 to Richard Nixon. Terrible defeat. Nixon, of course, then, emulates over Watergate, has to resign.
Gerald Ford is the president who takes over. But who gets the democratic nominee in 1976? A peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter, who is an outsider. is not part of the democratic establishment and runs what we would now call essentially an insurgent campaign. He goes up against Teddy Kennedy, goes up against a bunch of real stalwarts of the Democratic Party and he wins and with a very different message because he looks like a different kind of politician.
It doesn't look like a traditional democrat in a lot of different ways. He's just new, he's different and he's obviously not at all like Nixon. So, I think there's a chance that, you know, if we fast forward four years and ask what's going to go on in the Democratic Party. This is a moment which is ripe for the democratic version of an insurgent campaign, not unlike Trump was in 2016, who comes in maybe from the outside, maybe from outside politics, or maybe from inside, but from a different position than any of the people we've seen in recent years and pulls off a kind of upset. The other analogy might be you know, Barack Obama. Who would have thought a junior senator who had barely been in Washington, who had been a state senator for a hot second in Illinois, who would have thought in 2002 that he was going to be president in 2008? And yet he was. So, we'll see.
SR: I do want to come back to the question I asked you about whether you think gender played a role because I think it's for the second time in 10 years that a woman presidential candidate has proved to be unelectable in the U.S. Which speaks to me volumes about deeply ingrained patriarchal mindset, which Trump certainly didn't create, but the kind of misogyny and sexism which was explicit in so much of his rhetoric resonated on that structure, which was latent, I think.
And the past decades so unprecedented and unimaginable attack on the rights of women and on sexual minorities. Now, of course, the 2022 Dobbs decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned half a century of Roe v. Wade decision triggering a series of bans on abortion in numerous states of the United States did have an effect on the midterm election results, mobilized a lot of women, including Republican women to vote for a more progressive women's politics.
Harris made this, in a way, the heart of her campaign and hoped, I suppose that this would rally women en masse behind her. The women did not vote as a homogenous group, as we saw. And if we look at some of the demographic breakdown from the exit polls, the picture is quite complicated with more than 50 percent of white women, for instance, backing Trump nevertheless.
And according to the CBS poll, which I saw, the Democratic Party's vote share among women overall actually fell to a mere 54 percent. So, do you think the gender gap in a way was something which was misread that it would play out, that it didn't turn out to be the key dividing line to the extent that it was expected?
SW: Yeah, I think there's no question that it was misread, that the effects that people were very confident about did not come to pass. And another case where the pre-election polling was misleading, there were various polls beforehand suggesting that this was really going to be decisive in a number of [cases]. I also agree completely that there is something very entrenched in the United States that, yes, we're willing to elect female politicians, but there is, I think, still a significant hurdle.
It's an uphill fight at all levels. And it's especially true when it comes to the presidency and one can talk about, well, what if we had a slightly different candidate. Kamala Harris has some resemblances to Hillary Clinton, but it's also very different in a variety of other ways.
And it didn't have quite the same negatives that Hillary had with her all along it seems to me I do think Harris made one big mistake. And then I'll get on to the other things that I think are going on here. The one big mistake is that she did not distance herself more decisively and clearly from Joe Biden.
And she needed to do that for a couple of reasons. One, she needed to distance herself from Biden's handling of the economy, because, as we've already talked about, that message was not resonating. And she needed to come forth saying, I'm now going to do some things with the economy that are different and to address the concerns that are out there. And I don't agree with Joe on this. I respect him, et cetera. And second, Gaza, it seems to me. And the reason that that would have helped her is it would have shown independent leadership. It would have shown that she wasn't an empty suit just going along with the administration's program.
So, if she had said in July or August when I am president, we're going to have a different approach to this problem. You know, I, I'm serving the president for now, but my foreign policy is going to be different. And let me tell you in some detail how. This would have shown, I stand on my own two feet.
I'm an independent leader. I can be commander in chief. I'm not just, again, sort of empty platitudes. And I think that was a missed opportunity. Would it have done enough? I have no idea, but it would have helped. Now, I think there are two other things to bear in mind in the misogynistic and anti-minority rights part of the Republican program.
First of all, Dobbs was a couple of years ago. Now, it didn't resonate as powerfully as it did in 2022. And, very importantly, a number of state governments have taken action. There have been resolutions in a number of states. Governors, not just in blue states, have instituted policies to try and attenuate some of the effects of Dobbs for the people in their states.
So, women who were really alarmed back in 2021, when the decision came down, were not as alarmed, not as many of them, okay, you know, didn't like the decision, still upset about it, but it's going to, we're going to be okay here. I think that may be short sighted, depending on what happens, but I can see why it may not have been, you know, the number one issue that it had been two years earlier.
And then the second issue is this, the whole question of, you know, say, gay and especially trans rights. And this was like the perfect example of a potent Republican Party culture issue to scare people about. The number of people we are talking about here, the actual number of trans individuals in the United States, is minuscule, is vanishingly small.
So, we're talking about a very small but it's an issue that also is easy to weaponize, easy to scare people. Because they're uncomfortable with a lot of these things and the Republicans have done a great job. It was not the hill that the Democratic Party wanted to die on. Trying to defend transgender bathrooms or allowing biological males to compete in the high school track team. Whatever one thinks about the ethics of that right and there's a whole series of issues here that are more complicated like treatment for adolescence and things like that, but the point is it's easy to demonize this issue and the number of people actually affected is so small that even if you lose every single one of them, it doesn't matter very much if you've scared a very large number of people and the Republicans, aided by Fox News, aided by the sort of right wing media machinery, had done a great job of scaring people that if you elect Kamala Harris, first of all, lots of people from other countries are going to move onto your street, and gay and transgender activists are going to be in your kid's school, saying it's perfectly okay, and if you need help, we'll help you transition. This was all nonsense, but I have no trouble with understanding how it resonated the way it did.
SR: That's interesting that you say that whatever the ethics of the issue, it just wasn't politic to make such a minority issue into a major campaign.
SW: Well, and to be fair, she tried to downplay this. Reproductive rights were something she did lean into and had been throughout her career and certainly her time as vice president. But they were not putting this issue front and center as part of their campaign platform. They knew that, but they couldn't escape the labeling.
They weren't going to walk away from it publicly, and they didn't have a message, a sufficiently clear and vivid message on all the other issues that we've already talked about, like the economy, like foreign policy, et cetera, that gave her a clear identity. So, people would be talking about that and not talking about the other stuff.
You know, if you don't define yourself, the other side gets to define you. And unfortunately, I think that's what happened this time around.
SR: So, did race and ethnicity play out in the same way? She tried very much not to define herself as a woman of color as a black woman. She didn't put it center stage.
And yet it did seem to play a role in a very interesting way which is the surprising trend of the very large increase in the support for Trump among the Hispanic community, especially Latino men, a demographic shift which could have implications long term for the kinds of voter base which the Democratic Party will need to win back. And what do you think, how will this pandering to a white supremacist alt right agenda play out in Trump's presidency?
SW: Well, if they pander to that agenda, then they'll lose some of the people who are going to be excluded by that. And some of this, you know, gets into things that I'm not expert on but these categories are fluid in the sense that, you know, for example, what we define as white can evolve over time. So, you know, a century ago many Americans didn't think of Italians as white. They weren't Northern European Anglo-Saxon Protestant types. They were different. They were darker, et cetera.
And now we think of Italian Americans as white Americans like everybody else. So, what is included in sort of the majoritarian label is subject to change and I can easily see for some Latinos saying, you know, we're part of the white world and everyone Catholic, et cetera. And, by the way, in Latin America, as you undoubtedly know, increasingly protestant evangelical even so that we're all we're all here united against whoever we've decided to find the other as, as well. I also think within large chunks of the Latino community, it's an entrepreneurial group very business oriented to a large extent. And Trump is perceived as pro-business. We'll get rid of regulation. We'll make it easier for you to do things.
And I think it's a mistake to assume that every person who may have come to the United States from a Hispanic country or from Latin America or from wherever. As soon as they get here, they want to bring as many people as possible from their country. There is a well-established phenomenon of people that once they're in, they want to slam the door.
So, the Democrats should not assume that that group, to the extent that it is, you know, sort of a unified group at all is reliably on their side if they don't have policy to present that appeals to that group’s interests. Not just as a particular ethnic group, but its other interests, whether they are economic or others.
SR: Steve, you've mentioned immigration a number of times, and it did play a very, very large role in Trump's campaign. Given now that there seems to be a bipartisan consensus emerging on the question of immigration, do you think Trump will really make good on his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
SW: I don't know. I am inclined to think no. You know, he ran in 2016 promising to build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it. And we barely built a wall and Mexico didn't pay for a single brick. So, you know, what he said in the campaign, what he actually did, two different things.
Let me set a couple of points. One is the costs of doing this measure in the tens of billions of dollars. And there's going to be lots of pressure on the budget for all sorts of reasons as well. It is antithetical to try to deport lots of people and to say you also want to shrink the administrative state and not let government bureaucrats do it because you need a big coercive administrative apparatus to handle that. Operation as well. So those are fundamentally contradictory as well. And then finally, the American economy, to some degree, depends on those workers. And if you're worried about inflation kicking out, you know, 10 million people or more who are actually working jobs, particularly jobs that lots of other people don't necessarily want to work, is not something that businesses want to hear.
So some of the Republican business leaders who may have supported Trump as well as soon as they're told that they're going to lose, you know, 20 percent of their workforce, and they're going to have to pay whoever they replace them with a lot more money, right, to get them to actually do the jobs. It's not a message that those people want to hear. So, I think the attempt to do that is one of the places where the bark will have been worse than the bite. We'll see.
SR: Thank you so much for this really insightful and also very wide-ranging conversation, it has been a great pleasure.
SW: Thanks very much for the opportunity.
SR: Steve has argued that the huge electoral upset that Donald Trump's decisive victory represents should not necessarily be mistaken for a dramatic historical landslide, even though Kamala Harris lost both the popular vote as well as the swing states. One key factor behind Harris's defeat may have been the disconnect between the priorities and concerns of the electorate on the one hand, and the Democratic Party's positions, which were not tested in the primaries this time.
A big handicap, as we can now see in retrospect. Thus, for example, solid macroeconomic indicators, like numbers of jobs created or inflation figures didn't really translate into the lived experience of ordinary Americans. In addition to that, a large number of voters are so resentful of liberal elites that they are more than willing to forgive all the personal flaws of someone like Donald Trump who has surrounded himself by antiestablishment figures.
As long as he embodies and also cleverly manipulates the resentment and outrage that many people feel at having been left behind in ways that are perceived to be authentic. Public perceptions or misperceptions, as Steve has repeatedly pointed out today, are of crucial importance. This is why the threat of illegal mass trafficking, immigration could be so effectively weaponized, for instance, even though the Biden administration managed to reduce the number of immigrants entering the U.S. without, however, efficiently communicating its achievements in this regard. A recurrent theme in a lot of what Steve Walt said today is that the Democrats and even the pre-election polls misread a lot of things that the public considered to be important. They also assumed, wrongly, as we can now see, that Hispanics, for example, would continue to vote for the Democratic Party, even though many of them have conservative, religious, and pro-business views, with which the message of the Republicans resonates much better.
As Steve has also explained, the biases and aversions of a substantial part of the American electorate have also worked very strongly against the election of a woman, let alone a woman of color whose entire public persona defies the stereotypical expectations of many people about gender conformism, about racial privileges, et cetera.
The issue of abortion, nevertheless, turned out to have much less mobilizing potential than expected by the Democrats. One reason could be that state level legislation, meanwhile, in the last two years, has by now offered a solution to it for many women. Still, as Steve has mentioned, the conservative cultural backlash of the Republicans could easily latch on to even such relatively minor issues as transgender rights by manipulating and distorting popular perceptions.
If there's a glimmer of hope in the rather grim, if excellent, analysis my guest has provided today, it is in his pragmatic optimism regarding Trump's probable inability to make good on several of his promises, for example, on tariffs or on mass deportations. Given the insurmountable structural obstacles Steve has listed to this otherwise truly frightening prospect, we can only hope that he's right, and the bark of campaign promises will have been worse than the actual bite of the coming presidency.
This was the ninth episode of season nine. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks for the final episode of this season when I'll continue this fascinating conversation with Stephen Walt on the 2024 U.S. elections and what the results may mean for all of us around the world. We focus in a fortnight, then on the foreign policy implications of Trump's victory. Please go back and listen to any episode that you might have missed. And of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
[i] Walt, S. M. (2013). The origins of alliances. Cornell University Press.
[ii] Walt, S. M. (2005). Taming American power: The global response to U.S. primacy. W.W. Norton & Company.
[iii] Walt, S. M. (2019). The hell of good intentions: America’s foreign policy elite and the decline of U.S. primacy. Picador.
[iv] Mearsheimer, J. J., Walt, S. M., & Culp, J. (2009). The Israel Lobby: And U.S. foreign policy. BBC Audiobooks America.