The Comeback: The NYT's Bret Stephens And The GoodFellows Recap The ’24 Election

>> Donald Trump: Well, I want to thank you all very much, this is great, these are our friends. We have thousands of friends on this incredible movement. This was a movement like nobody's ever seen before. And frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There's ever been anything like this in this country and maybe beyond.

>> Bill Whalen: It's Thursday, November 7, 2024, and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow, and I'll be your moderator today. I'm pleased to report that I'm joined by our full complement of Goodfellows, as we jokingly refer to them.

That would include the historian Sir Niall Ferguson, the economist John Cochrane, and former presidential national security advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. And we're also joined today by New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens. Bret, thanks for coming on the show.

>> Bret Stephens: Thanks for having me back.

>> Bill Whalen: First, let's talk about the election in America as we record the show on Thursday morning.

Donald Trump has collected 312 electoral votes. That's the most by a Republican since George H.W Bush in 1988. He won a majority of the popular vote, the first time that's happened since 2004 for a Republican. He has the Senate in his pocket. He's on a path to get the House under Republican control.

And consider this, Trump having won the popular vote, having both branches of Congress, we think Republicans having a majority of state legislatures around America and a majority of Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump and George W Bush. The last president in America to have this situation when it came into office was Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.

So we could say that Trump has a rather advantageous situation. Bret, I want you to begin and I want you to explain a column that you wrote for the New York Times. The headline a Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a humiliating Defeat. Who are the prigs and pontificators?

>> Bret Stephens: Well, it's the establishment of the Democratic Party. This election was an extraordinary personal vindication for President Trump, but it was also a stinging, stunning, decisive repudiation of what the Democratic Party under this administration. And really since Barack Obama's time has become, which is a party of a kind of incessant moralizing, a dismissal of the everyday concerns of the American people, including or particularly working class Americans.

A party that increasingly bends or adheres to a bizarre set of cultural norms that strike Americans wrong. A party that insists on a new kind of language, terminology in everyday life that to many of us just sounds Orwellian, a party that is more interested in dividing the country into different identity groups rather than uniting it or overcoming those separate identities.

And Kamala Harris, for a variety of reasons, I think, was the embodiment of that version of the Democratic Party. And Americans turned against it in exceptional numbers. So this is one of those moments when not only do you have to take stock of what Donald Trump and the Republican Party was able to achieve, but I think liberals in some of the precincts I inhabit need to really re examine how it is that they conduct politics.

Because as it is, the only word for it is insufferable. That's why I talked about pomposity and priggishness. And I guess I should have added for the sake of alliteration, piety, which is a big part of the new liberal dispensation.

>> Bill Whalen: Niall, you wrote a column for the Free Press in which you talk about, and I quote, the resurrection of Donald J Trump, what is the resurrection?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I actually wrote it's the only comeback. It's not bigger than is the resurrection. So the headline slightly went further than I wanted to. It's very hard to think of a political comeback to match this in American history, and I don't know.

>> Bill Whalen: More than Nixon.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, yes, because Nixon was faced with impeachment and destroyed at the end.

Well, in the middle, really, of his second term. They tried to destroy Donald Trump during and after his first term, and they tried to destroy him every which way. Let's not forget the assassination attempts, one of which very nearly killed him. Four criminal cases in one of which he was convicted, two impeachments during his first term, and so many different lawsuits that when I tried to count them up, I really lost count.

>> H.R. McMaster: And hey, Naill, I would just add the deliberate effort by the media to take him down as, as you mentioned, like the, you know, the, the NPR revelations, all that stuff, you know.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, Nixon, of course, had that. And, and the two presidents have much in common, which is why Donald Trump was something of a fanboy of Nixon as a young man.

But, compared with what was thrown at Nixon, what was thrown at Trump was a great deal worse. And I think we thought when we were talking about Trump back in January of 2021, there was no possible way back for him. I remember saying that, and not only is he back, but he didn't just scrape home, he crushed Kamala Harris in a far more decisive outcome than almost anybody predicted.

And this is the critical point that gets to Bret's point. He destroyed The Obama vision of a kind of rainbow coalition of identity politics that the Republicans could never beat. Donald Trump didn't just win a majority of white male voters. He won a majority of Hispanic male voters, he doubled his share of black male votes.

And so, he has not just scraped home as he did in 2016. He's won decisively and looks like he's led a Republican sweep. I can't think of a political comeback in American history to match this. And it's hard to think of any pundit who saw this coming. Only the poly market prediction market got it right.

Every pollster massively understated the margin of victory. And it's weird that we, we were taken in by that since they understated his performance in the last two elections. So I don't know why we didn't expect them to do it again. I went through a period of anxiety about the election thing.

He is not gonna be decisive, it's gonna be another version of 2020 or maybe even 2000. But that was just because I was paying attention to pollsters instead of just focusing on the poly market and preparing for the Trump comeback, the resurrection.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, thank God it was decisive.

We've spent a year or two here on Goodfellows worrying about what was gonna happen after a close election and how it would tear the country apart to the point that to say something nice about Kamala Harris, I heard her speech., And she conceded the election, no, Russia stole it, no voter suppression, no, it was all racist.

No, we lost and said a little too pointedly peaceful transfer of power and we will help. That's sort of normal verbiage in American elections, but to hear return to normalcy is kind of nice. I want to echo that it was in many ways a vote against, not quite as much as a vote for a vote against what the current Democratic Party, not the person of the incarn incumbent has come to mean.

And it was a vibes election, not a detailed policy plan election. Much as you know, within the white halls of Hoover, we love to debate detailed policy plans, there weren't any and I don't think anybody cared about them anyway. There was sort of an expectation of what's going to come, but not what the President said the vibes were important.

What are we voting against and for? I think for, is not so much the person of Donald Trump, he embodies a vision, but vibes of we believe in our country and we want spaceships to Mars. Bringing Elon Musk along was a very forward looking sign, it's not just tariffs to bring back the 1950s, it's opportunity.

We're voting against the permit office as much as anything else. A big vote against lawfare. Maybe I'm guilty of projecting my own annoyances, but the use of the justice system, the regulatory state censorship to go after political opponents I found appalling and I think many of my fellow Americans did too.

Donald Trump should have been retired to Mar a Lago about February, after the last election and the Democrats brought him back. Because when you go after him with such obviously trumped up charges, Americans go, my country is not Pakistan, my country is not Tunisia. Yeah, when you lose an election, you don't lose your job, your business, your life, your freedom.

So, such transparent misuse of the justice system for political aims that that never happened in this country before. For example, spiking the hunter laptop story of all the many, that's another one as well. Censorship, I think we saw the pervasive censorship. For example during COVID people got really annoyed by that, which led them to see incompetence and I think inflation.

Of course, I'm an economist, inflation is big, but that really rang in America. Everyday Americans who maybe don't read all the stories about various lawfare escapades, but setting off a 9 to 10% inflation cumulative about 20% over the period, that just speaks of complete incompetence of your economic policy.

Whether it is or not, I'll leave to my fellow monetary economists to debate. But in the eyes of everyday Americans, what started in the financial crisis goes on to the retreat from Afghanistan, goes on to one catastrophe after obviously not knowing what they're doing with COVID protections and then 10% inflation.

They're voting against incompetence. And in academia, we're voting against the DEI office.

>> Niall Ferguson: John, I need to interrupt you. This list is too long, you know why you're an economist, but you've forgotten that it's the economy, I won't say stupid.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, I don't think it's just because objectively.

>> Niall Ferguson: No, no, no, hear me out, hear me out, very simple point, very simple point. Let's get Occam's razor out here. If you look at median household income adjusted for inflation, for every president since Richard Nixon, Donald Trump's first term was by far the best presidential run. 2.09% compound annual growth, Biden 0.44% Obama 0.45, Bush Jr minus 0.22, and I could go on.

How about a real simple explanation? The Trump economy rocked by comparison, the Biden Harris economy sucked, as you said, because of inflation. And all this other stuff you're adding is superfluous, that we don't need to know it.

>> John H. Cochrane: I think it's important, I think a sense that the basic institutions of our country are hollowed out was important.

Okay, one last point, not close, because you asked about the political comeback. That was remarkable. Partly it's due to the Democrats who by going after him, brought him back, partly it's because of the talents of Donald Trump as a politician. And here I'll credit the New York Times, they had a hit piece on Trump, how terrible it is that he's spending four years going after going at every congressman and insisting that that congressman support him.

That's what politicians do. And bringing the Republican Party, which should have sort of moved on to a new face under his wing was, like it or not, a remarkable political achievement. Okay, sorry, my list did get too long.

>> Bill Whalen: Can I, throw one element in here? That Trump ran just a more nimble, more creative campaign than she did.

She ran a very old school Democratic campaign, running around with celebrities. He took advantage of new media, this was the campaign of free press, this was the campaign of Joe Rogan podcast. The Democrats, meanwhile, obsessed over not getting endorsements from the LA Times and the Washington Post. Bret, do you think we've turned a corner here on media in terms of the importance it plays in elections and where candidates are gonna go.

>> John H. Cochrane: I just want to add to that and not just the carefully scripted word salad that came out of Kamala, the I think he won the election when he went to McDonald's and served fries. What a brilliant item, but please, Brad, I'm sorry for interrupting.

>> Bret Stephens: No, I mean, I agree, and I think that without getting too specific, mainstream media did not acquit itself particularly well.

I thought it was hilarious that at the Washington Post they were gnashing their teeth at the lack of an endorsement, which number one just exhibited. If there was any doubt that the paper was stuffed with left wing partisans masquerading as journalists, but also because it was impossible to read the Washington Post without noticing that every article was essentially an advertisement for Kamala Harris.

They were reporting on an America that exists in an acela corridor, but nowhere else. Everyone else, in their view, as I was reading accounts, sounded like or was treated as a person in an Amazonian tribe that had recently been discovered by the anthropologists of the mainstream media. Who, were studying them for clues about their system of taboos and shamans and so forth and so on.

Whereas, the rest of America understands that as regular America. And I really am hoping that this is a sorry for the cliche, a come to Jesus moment for a lot of mainstream media outlets that I don't think fully appreciate, the extent to which they put their biases on display, in what should be straight up news reporting that their understanding of America is inhibited by their own background.

It would be nice, I would say, if they sort of more fully internalize the point of DEI seminars, which tell them to. Check their biases at the door and examine the sort of systemic worldviews that they have in order to do something about the. Bias is not even the wrong, it's not even the right word.

It's an entire Weltanschauung. There's a word for Niall, a whole worldview that cannot see past its own parapets. And I agree that this is now gonna be an occasion for a lot of the sort of newer and more intriguing, different idiosyncratic media voices to expand, diversify what they're doing.

Encroach in traditional areas of coverage that mainstream outlets have more or less dominated even foreign news reporting, not just the cultural stuff, that actually makes it an exciting and pregnant time. I mean, look, I think people know that I voted for Kamala. I made that public, I describe myself as the world's most reluctant Kamala voter, and I can go into that.

But this is one of those singular moments of creative destruction in American life which actually goes far to explain the resilience and adaptability of American institutions, not their weakness or vulnerability.

>> Niall Ferguson: Can I suggest something about this and then HR you must come in. But this is really a question for you, Brad.

It strikes me what's interesting about the Trump campaign is that it combined the traditional, I mean, the hamburger stunt was old school politics. The rallies are almost a 19th century style of campaigning with the novel, in particular the memes. I was impressed at how fast the Trump campaign was able to get the memes out, particularly towards the end when things were getting kind of funny after the Madison Square Garden event, the rally, when a comedian made a joke about Puerto Rico a as a garbage island.

Within just hours, Trump was in a garbage truck in Wisconsin and delivered an entire speech in the garbage man's vest.

>> H.R. McMaster: And he got an assist from President Biden with that, though, too, who.

>> Niall Ferguson: Completely significant arrow, yeah. And can we just spare a moment to think of Peter?

>> Bret Stephens: Look, this is not data, it's anecdote. But I was partly informed in this election, I'm not on TikTok. I'm actually, I'm for banning TikTok, but that's another story. But the number of memes I got from my younger children, by the way, whose politics move in various directions, was really stacked.

I wouldn't have known kind of half of what was going on were it not for these things constantly being forward to me, either by my kids who are older teenagers, or by their friends. There was just an entire world of discourse, usually mockery, mocking, funny, ironic, and often very, very smart.

That was completely missed by the sort of boring earnestness that described most mainstream commentary. The nation is on the line, etc. It was, I mean, one of the things about Kamala's campaign and the entire liberal establishment behind her, just how boring it was. You just kind of went, God, yes, I'm gonna eat my broccoli again.

And people don't like broccoli.

>> Niall Ferguson: But, Bret, weren't you energized by what can be, unburdened by what has been? Wasn't that.

>> Bret Stephens: Well, that's exactly, I saw people playing it, like doing tunes on the piano. It just gleeful mockery of the unburned. And by the way, just one point here.

We have to stop and consider and marvel at what a spectacularly incompetent candidate Kamala Harris was. And this was should not have been a surprise to anyone. I wrote a column back in July. She's a terrible manager. She had a dreadful office as vice president. She ran one of the most hilariously incompetent campaigns in 2019.

She communicated a certain sense of unearned entitlement. And this is the person that the Democrats instantly anointed as their preferred candidate, and people are surprised she lost, I don't know why.

>> John H. Cochrane: But the party line switched overnight, including your newspaper, about how wonderful she was all of a sudden.

>> Bret Stephens: Well, I would say it was like that scene seen in 1984. We've always been at war against East Asia. I mean, Euro Asia, whatever.

>> John H. Cochrane: What was hilarious is hers was the campaign of joy, remember? The most sanctimonious joy I've ever seen. You have to remember the old joke, how many progressives does it take to change a light bulb?

That kind of humor really isn't appropriate in this situation you know.

>> Niall Ferguson: Okay, HR I go. HR, I'm sorry, we're having.

>> H.R. McMaster: That's okay, this isn't really my thing. It's okay, it's all right.

>> Niall Ferguson: But it really is.

>> H.R. McMaster: This sort of thing ain't my.

>> Niall Ferguson: No, no, no, wait, wait, I've got a great question.

>> Niall Ferguson: Please, I wanna ask this question. So an important part of the Harris strategy was to get people who had been in the first Trump administration and parade them in front of the media denouncing Donald Trump. And I don't think that's ever been, it's never been done on that scale before because it could probably never have been done on that scale before, and this too, failed.

Now HR You've not been uncritical of President Trump in your most recent book, but you weren't part of the circus of denunciation. Just give us your thoughts about why that failed so completely to move voters. If anything, it seems to have backfired. I mean, Liz Cheney, who knew that Liz Cheney would not mobilize Democratic voters?

Something funny there?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, you know, I think the American people saw what John kind of chronicled and we've all been talking about were the various avenues of attack against Donald Trump. And of course, this is what they say he's going to do, right? He's going to engage in lawfare and he doesn't help his own case because he talks about retribution and all that sort of thing.

But I think people just kind of rejected it because they saw the hypocrisy in casting him as a fascist or the analogies to Hitler, really. I mean, so I just think that it failed because they jumped the shark kind of on it in terms of the vitriol and the apoplectic warnings.

But then also I just think it's bad practice, Niall. I mean, it's one of the reasons why I wrote the book the way I did is because I wanted to tell the story, but nobody needs like washed up generals telling them how to vote. And, and I think that this effort to drag the military into partisan politics with like the lists of maybe all the national security officials, it really was, who was signed on to that letter or to get retired generals and so forth to endorse really in the capacity of a retired general.

It's not a new practice, but I think it's particularly dangerous these days because of how. Polarized we've been and the need for the military to transcend the partisan politics.

>> Donald Trump: To maintain the confidence of the American people across the political spectrum because depending on what the politics of particular households are, we need the best young Americans to serve in our armed forces.

Maybe today more than any time in recent history. So I was concerned about that trend and have talked extensively about this in the last month or so that we have to keep the military out of the kind of the vortex that is pulling so many Americans apart within other institutions.

And yeah, I hope we've hit the apogee of it. And as Bret and all of you know, I mean, this is not new. I remember Bill Clinton amassing kind of the list of flag officers generals and admirals to endorse him when he first ran for president. But I think it's just bad practice.

>> Bill Whalen: HR you're the only one in this call who has been hired by Donald Trump. So why don't we spend a couple minutes talking about who Trump is gonna hire the next few weeks. I'd like to get the panel's thoughts on who his most important pick is. Who you'd like to see in say the State Department or the Defense Department.

Then I also wanna get your thoughts on how he's gonna keep this team of, shall we say, very large personalities together. Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy, Vivek Ramaswamy and so forth. So, anybody wanna go on the picks for Defense and Secretary of State?

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, well, I'll just start here.

I just think it's the overall team and how well that team can work together. And by the team, I mean the defense diplomatic and economic teams. Because today's competitions are so intertwined and demand the integration of all elements of national power with efforts of like minded partners internationally.

And so I think he's got some great people to pick from. If you think about could it be Tom Cotton in Defense paired with Bill Hagerty in State or in treasury. And I think that Lighthizer is like minded with them in terms of countering Chinese economic aggression, for example.

 

I mean, John, I think would not probably agree with a lot of his policies, but I think that's probably coming. And then of course you have to be, I think maybe a bit more concerned with the unconfirmed positions. I think especially national security advisor. That is such a critical job, because you don't want someone in that job who misunderstands his or her role as a person to advocate for kind of their preferred policies.

You need somebody who's going to guard Donald Trump's independence of judgment and present him fairly with the views of all the cabinet officials. And others who can help him revise his assessment and make the best possible decisions among multiple courses of action that are presented to him. So, hey, I think it's worth watching very closely, obviously, who comes into these positions, because I think it'll be indicative of whether or not they're going to help Donald Trump make the best possible decisions.

Or they're either gonna be at war with themselves, which should be try. They try to avoid or bring people in who are pursuing their own agendas.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, Tom Cotton says he's not doing it, so he's out. I'm not sure what your expectation is, Bret, but let me offer a hypothesis about the national security team that there are two possible Trump administrations we could guess.

There's one that's kind of Reaganite and pretty hawkish, that might include Robert O'Brien, it might include Mike Pompeo. And that would be a national security team who would recommend exerting greater military pressure on Russia to try to end the war. That would certainly support Israel in its efforts to degrade Iran's nuclear program and would probably be quite hawkish on Taiwan.

But there's another scenario in which Trump doesn't pick those people, but goes with people who are closer to J.D Vance's thinking. Elon Musk's thinking on Ukraine don't really want there to be a strong independent Ukraine and probably don't really want a showdown in the Middle East or in China either.

So I think it'll be really interesting to see which Trump administration emerges, one that's Reaganite or one that's actually more isolationist. Bret, do you have any thoughts on this?

>> Bret Stephens: No, I think, look, the answer this is maybe the most decisive question about the Trump administration. I think one of the reasons why people, when they think about the first Trump administration, feel fairly good about it is that the rhetoric was often wild, but the policy was pretty good.

I mean, people said, or excuse me, Trump was Putin's poodle. But in fact, the administration did more to oppose Russia than either Obama had before it or certainly Biden did, at least until the invasion of Ukraine. But that, I think, had a lot to do with the fact that he was surrounded by advisors like HR or his secret, his Mike Pompeo and so on.

What you hear from the new kind of Trump dispensation are people who are much more isolationist in their leanings, kind of see Russia as a potential future ally in a chessboard to contain. The Chinese see Russia's, in a sense, like almost the opposite of China in the early 1970s, as a piece that can be pried away from the Chinese orbit.

Elbridge Colby represents this view, and I think he's gonna play some significant role in a second Trump term. So we'll find out very quickly where Trump intends to go and just how much influence JD has in those deliberations. I also, knowing JD slightly and at least watching his trajectory, I wonder whether he has any fixed convictions at all in this respect, beyond his immediate political ambitions.

So we'll find out.

>> Bill Whalen: John economics.

>> John H. Cochrane: Hello, I can't resist opining on things that aren't in my wheelhouse. I think you guys are right. There is a question when you get empowered, rhetoric reads reality. So they're certainly not going to cut and run like Biden did in Afghanistan.

I think that lesson is pretty clear. Don't do like that in Ukraine. Trump is also a good negotiator and he understands you get a better deal when the other side feels under pressure than following Biden when you announce. All we want to do is negotiate and get the hell out of here.

So it's not obvious that when you face reality, the right thing to do with Ukraine is sit down and say, let's negotiate now, while Putin feels he has the other hand. And I do think even channeling J.D Vance, his people fought these wars and they were not very success.

But the lesson, I still like the Powell Doctrine, you either fight it to win or you don't fight it at all. So fight it to win, especially in Israel, might be what comes out. We'll see what comes out there. So economics.

>> Bret Stephens: So very briefly.

>> John H. Cochrane: Please try.

>> Bret Stephens: Look, I think the psychology of being seen as the winner, matters a lot to Trump. Simple as that is, he does not wanna look like a loser. And I think if there's one lesson in Afghanistan, which in many ways was his brainchild, that departure is America looked weak and he does not wanna look weak.

So a kind of a cut and run from Ukraine that leads to the same sort of debacle in Kiev that we saw in Kabul three years ago is not gonna be something. He is not gonna be a prospect he is going to savor.

>> John H. Cochrane: Exactly, so let me turn to economics.

This is an interesting one and cuz I think there is gonna be a tension, there's a lot of people in the wings and in the Trump orbit who are very good, free market, free trade, deregulation, economists. And I think the vibe with Elon Musk is a vibe not that what we need to do is erect huge protective barriers and bring back a museum of 1950s manufacturing.

But we need spaceships to Mars, we need to stop being a country where, as Musk says, it takes longer to get the permits to launch a rocket than it does to design, build and light the damn rocket. And I think that that kind of thing happens under the radar screen that's where good stuff happens outside of rhetoric.

So there may be, we'll see who wins, there's, of course the protectionists throw up the trade barriers view, and there's gonna be an interesting debate. HR's book, wonderful book, brought some of the elements of that debate from the first time around, which side I hope prevails. One can do things that look good in public without doing a lot of damage in private.

So you can have sort of show tariffs that don't really matter that much to the economy but where I'm hopeful, of course, is that the team deregulate wins and really gets the US Economy going.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, there's obviously a Wall Street element to this story, which is very important because some of your fellow economists, John, have been running around warning that Trump will add even more to the deficit and therefore the federal debt, and therefore the bond market is just waiting to pounce.

And so it kind of matters who the treasury secretary is under these circumstances and we hear names of eminent Wall Street figures like Scott Besant mentioned. I see the transition involves Cantor Fitzgerald's, Howard Lutnick, never forget that Wall Street is something Trump cares a lot about. He'll be consulting Wall Street people and he won't want economic measures that cause the stock market to swoon, never mind the bond market.

So I think that's important to remember when you're trying to figure out the direction of economic policy. The recollection people have of the Trump economy in the first term was good and with good reason. And part of, I think what will happen here is that the protectionist elements will have to coexist with the Wall Street folks, and the protectionists won't be allowed to do stuff that is gonna scare the markets.

As HR knows from personal experience, transitions a kind of extraordinary time and an administration's a huge thing. I don't think us ordinary folk who've never been in the government can fully comprehend the sheer scale of it, the sheer size of the federal executive branch, and the kind of insanity of trying to staff it in the aftermath of an election campaign.

That's the thing that always makes my head spin a bit, that there are not just hundreds but thousands of positions to be filled. And, of course, the people in the transition team are currently under siege from all those many people who fancy themselves the next HR McMaster, bombarding them with, I don't know, strategy documents, memoranda explaining how they, and they alone can bring China to its knees.

So it's hard to convey on a show like Goodfellas just how completely crazy it is, right, HR?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, well, of course, I came in after the initial transition, which I heard was very chaotic, but a lot of good work got done in that transition with some people who have been working with the transition teams.

They put together these landing teams that go into each of the departments and agencies who assess, really, based on what they believe that the president's priorities are, the current state of affairs and make recommendations about the transition that's gonna be happening very soon. I think the campaign is much better organized than it was in 2016, which may have been a low bar, but a lot of good work got done because they brought in people like Matt Pottinger.

>> H.R. McMaster: Who actually laid the foundation for a fundamental shift in Trump administration, policy and approach to North Korea, as well as China. And on the China shift, I think it was the most significant shift in US foreign policy since the end of the cold war. So I do think they are getting deluged, as you mentioned, Niall, but I guess hopefully they're adept at separating the wheat from the chaff and getting the most important ideas in front of the president elect before he gets sworn in in January.

>> John H. Cochrane: I'm still a little worried that we're missing the big story, which is not Trump gets elected. He's acknowledged the president, he appoints his people, the Senate confirms them, we implement policy with interagency memos. And this is Bret has a bigger finger on the pulse, you're in that bubble.

Are the Democrats just going to sit back quietly, or is this gonna be the resistance, Russia collusion? If they get the House, are they going to say, no, we're not certifying the election and inside the agencies, is it gonna be the same kind of we refuse to go along.

Just how much complete chaos do you see coming out of the Democrats in the weeks after the inauguration?

>> Bret Stephens: Well, it's a wonderful question, and I have been urging, as I did in my column yesterday, that the Democrats understand how utterly counterproductive resistance politics is. I mean, this is actually the oxygen off of which a political figure like Donald Trump and his movement feed, because, after all, what is their brand?

We are up against an entrenched, secretive, manipulative, dishonest, and disgusting deep state that is trying to stop us at every turn. And then Democrats helpfully oblige them by behaving like a dishonest, disgusting, deceitful, manipulative deep state, right? So, Democrats need to find a way to conduct normal politics against Trump in the way that opposition parties do without attempting those kind of extra legal or dubious maneuvers that have typified the way they've treated Trump since almost the very beginning.

The problem is, they're the scorpion that can't help but sting the frog, there's something there that is gonna be very resistant to learning the lesson of their serial defeats. I think the default position of much of the media is Trump is a mortal threat to our Republican experiment.

He must be stopped everything he does is presumptively criminal or gross or apocalyptic. They have a hard time thinking outside of those terms, it's a function of the sort of their milieu, their education. And so I suspect, even though it's against their own best interest and should be against their lived experience, as they like to say, that they're gonna conduct exactly the same kind of warfare against this administration than they did the last one.

Maybe this time the grace period will be three days rather than two.

>> Bill Whalen: Bret, have you met Gavin Newsom, have you met our new senator?

>> Bret Stephens: Adam Schiff.

>> Bill Whalen: Who led impeachment, does California need to secede?

>> Bret Stephens: How soon can it secede is my question but I say it not because I think.

It would be a mutually good thing for all of North America let a socialist republic in California take root, and the rest of us will live a slightly more contented life.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, well, I mentioned Newsom because if you go to the betting markets right now, he is at the top of the betting markets right now.

And Bret, everything that you laid out in that really good column in which you offered advice to the winner of the election, that's the anti-Newsom in terms of showing humility, not coming over the big ideas, going for modest solutions. That's all the stuff that Gavin Newsom does not do.

>> Bret Stephens: Well, I mean, and again, it would not surprise me if he ends up being the nominee. But parties, l think of the Democratic Party between 1980 and 1992. I mean, they were so convinced they were right. And it took the Democratic Leadership Council, it took a figure like Bill Clinton, and it took three stinging, landslide defeats before they started to think that they needed to reorder their priorities.

The salvation for the Democratic Party, I think, in the end is gonna come from someone like Andy Beshear, some centrist southern governor who talks the language of normal Americans and understands just how toxic the current culture of liberal life is to Democratic fortunes.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Neil Friedman, 28, or Josh Shapiro, 28?

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, well, I don't wanna think about 2028 for at least a year. I'd like a holiday from American electoral politics, can you just take a leaf out of the old country's book? Multi-week long campaigns, get the election done in a day, and then get back to the serious business of football and beer.

I think America suffers from too much politics. I've come to the conclusion that it's actually got out of control and you've developed what might be the first addiction to politics that has been seen in the annals of history. Because politics shouldn't be this compelling, it shouldn't be this engaging.

When they invented the Internet, I don't think anybody foresaw that its principal use after, of course, pornography, would be the consumption of news that doom scrolling through election results. I wonder what happened in Pennsylvania. I mean, it's just not normal, can we just not talk about politics for a bit?

I actually genuinely don't care who's running in 2028, I don't want to have to think about it until about 2027.

>> John H. Cochrane: I agree with you, let's not talk about personalities and not talk about which team is up and which team is down. I do wanna ask all of you guys, let's look at the bigger picture, this is a stunning rebuke for Democrats.

Is it finally the turning of the tide of this great movement that started maybe in the French Revolution, picked up some steam with Marx, and currently is paternalistic, authoritarian, aristocratic? And it's quite authoritarian, we must rule in the name of the little people. There's this word salad of propaganda which I can't tell whether they cynically don't believe it anymore, the first sign of failing, or whether they actually believe the craziness that comes out of the party line every week.

I was very amused that HR told us that his predecessors called him to tell him that the number one strategic challenge of the United States was climate change. And sounded like they actually, sorry for the digression, viewing ever larger government, ever larger running of things, we're just so close to nirvana.

All we need is $30,000 home buyer credit and forgive your college loans. And one more little tax exemption for this, that, and the other thing, five more pages on the environmental assessment report, and ready to go. Now Europe has figured out they're starting to realize this killed our growth and we need to do something about it.

Is America finally figuring out that this descent into now it's identity politics, but whatever is, that this great movement of the ever larger government of the left is over and some new thing is happening? There's Giorgia Meloni in Italy, there's Milei in Argentina. Apparently, the Labor government in the UK has managed to screw itself up in about three weeks flat.

Or is it back to normal, the same fight we've been having for the last-

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, John, I don't think this election saw a decisive vote for the kind of economics that you believe in. There's not much there, particularly on the fiscal side, that I can find. Unless you believe the kinda last minute idea that Elon Musk is going to set up the doge and cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.

Now that came in pretty late in the day, and I'm not sure how many voters paid attention to it. But it's worth thinking about because up until this point in his career, Donald Trump has not been notable for taking our fiscal problems seriously. I think the entry of Elon Musk into American politics is the single most significant thing that happened in this election because it's a phenomenal game changer.

When the owner of one of the major social media platforms and the single most important entrepreneur in America comes down unequivocally on one side politically and then campaigns with President Trump and spends election night sitting with Trump, obviously talking about what they do next. But what I can't tell is how much Elon we're really going to get.

If we're getting $2 trillion off the federal budget, that is Javier Milei territory, that is Argentina. But I just don't know if we're gonna get it, be interesting.

>> John H. Cochrane: But it was particularly interesting cuz he had to do it. He recognized the federal agencies out to get him for his political views, and if he wanted to keep his business, he needed to have Trump win.

The same way Trump needed to run because otherwise they were gonna throw him in jail. So it's quite significant. I think he brings a voice and a persona to a movement that was already quite well underway in the little technocratic bubbles of Republican economic politics. But, yeah, but that is something that's happening.

And this was not a policy election, this was a vibes election, I don't think we're gonna cut taxes on tips. There wasn't policy proposals, but there was a vibe of, we like America, we reject the 1619 project, we want growth, we want entrepreneurship. That vibe can take its expression in policy when time comes.

There were no detailed 15 points Trump policy plans to look at, and let's hope the vibe wins.

>> Bill Whalen: HR, a question for you, can you tell us how this election is being perceived in the governments in Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, I think what they're gonna try to do is to take advantage of the continuing divisions in the country.

And a lot of it will have to do with whether or not Democrats heed Bret's advice, or if they go back into the opposition and resistance mode. Because that's a gift, it's a gift to our adversaries who wanna perpetuate the divisions that reduce our confidence in who we are as a people and our democratic principles, institutions, and processes.

As we mentioned at the outset, the best thing that could have happened was this kind of a decisive victory. Because, really, what Russia, in particular, wanted is large numbers of Americans to doubt the legitimacy of the result. And they're not gonna get that, at least. So I think what's really important is how we behave.

Because the Russians, the Chinese, others, they don't create divisions in our society. They take the existing divisions and try to broaden them further in an effort to reduce our will to contest really what is their mutual effort to tear down the existing rules of international discourse. And replace them with a new set of rules that are sympathetic to their authoritarian forms of government and in China's case, especially, their status mercantilist economic model.

So a lot of it, we have agency over the United States, and I'm hoping that the two speeches we heard, President Trump's speech, as he won the election, and Kamala Harris's speech, will be the kind of tone going forward, but we probably all ought to be skeptical about that, right?

And maybe do our part in making the case. If we're coming together around an agenda we can agree on, we're talking about a lot of divisions or differences and within maybe a Trump administration. But I'm sure this is gonna be profoundly positive for all Americans. I mean, how about deregulation, right?

Regardless of how much you can cut out of the budget and try get back to a sensible approach to spending, there's gonna be a heck of a lot of deregulation. Which can get to what we all, I think would agree is the best way or the easiest way maybe to reduce the deficit and begin to address the debt issues, which is economic growth.

>> Bret Stephens: And compensate for ruinous trade policy with sky high tariffs on core trade partners.

>> H.R. McMaster: Right, and then also energy security, Bret. I mean, what other areas do you feel optimistic about regardless of what debates occur within the Trump administration or what resistance there is to Trump?

>> Bret Stephens: Look, I mean, an administration that fundamentally understands what it is like to conduct business in America is something the country sorely needs.

I've been saying for a long time that there are essentially two economies in America, there's an economy of words which I inhabit. That's the economy of lawyers, academics, rules makers in the bureaucracies, publishers and so on, and there is an economy of things. Real estate guys, truckers, big manufacturers and so on, and the economy of words, which increasingly is the governing class in America has no clue what it's to be in the economy of things.

Because when I decide where a semicolon should go, there isn't a government bureaucrat asking me to justify the semicolon in a seven-page document so that it can meet with his approval in Washington. But if you're running even a mid-sized company in America, not even a mid-sized company in America, the land of regulation that you inhabit is fearsome.

And I like the fact that Trump knows in his bones from having live this in New York, what it means to build a hotel in and get the permitting that you need for the kind of televisions that you're gonna get. What it means to deal with a $5 increase in the minimum wage which cuts into razor thin margins.

I mean, all these sort of questions Trump kind of gets in his kish kiss, so to speak. And that I think is gonna be a general positive in the way that Trump approaches his decision-making. I think he has some economic ideas which are terrible and dangerous, I mentioned his own-

>> H.R. McMaster: 60% tariffs on China, 10%.

>> Bret Stephens: Mercantilism and so on, but on the other hand, the other thing that I look forward to is look, Trump does understand negotiation. And I don't think we would have seen Europe even move fraction in the direction of higher defense budgets if it hadn't been accompanied by that threat.

We're gonna get ourselves out of NATO, the stick has to be visible. And under Democratic administrations, it's never visible because Joe Biden has literally, except for when he was raking in money from speeches for four years during his sabbatical from government, has never had a job as far as I know in the private sector.

Kamala Harris has never had a job in the private sector. Most Democrats I know have never had one and they certainly haven't had jobs in the things economy. Which is what makes America, traditionally, what made America great, and it's what appealed to people about capitalism, so to speak, the feeling like Elon Musk makes stuff, and that stuff by the way is kinda cool.

>> John H. Cochrane: But I think there's hope here, the Democrats are also finding out that regulation is a problem. They found it out when they wanted to connect windmills and solar panels to the grid and figured out it's gonna take ten years to get the permit, and that's when the climate catastrophe hits.

They figured out finally that housing, the problem with house prices is it takes too long to get the permits to build up housing, so I think there is this will even from the left to do something about that. I wanna pivot just a little to another optimistic note which I wanna tee up for discussion.

What's gonna happen politically? Trump will either go after his enemies using, he'll say, look at all these wonderful tools of lawfare, handy for me to use them. If that happens, I am optimistic it will turn the Democrats into sudden come to Jesus civil libertarians. Wait a minute, the Supreme Court's protections that you can't prosecute a former president for think things he did in office, that was a wonderful thing.

We need to, yeah, free speech all of a sudden, the First Amendment, that's really important when Trump tries to use censorship. Alternatively, Trump could, as you mentioned, pardon Biden, stop prosecuting the Hunter Biden case, although that one actually has some legal basis, unlike the previous ones. But when do we put the lawfare aside and say no, we're not gonna bring guns to the next fist fight?

Either of the two seems a optimist way that eventually we put this thing back in the closet. What do you guys think?

>> Bret Stephens: Look, I mean, I think the lesson of the first Trump administration is Trump has one enemy that's even bigger than the deep state or the Democratic media complex.

That enemy is himself. Right. This is a man who just can't help but step on his own dick, to use an old expression. And so the instincts for retribution, vengeance for the kind of personal paranoia that he seems to display, that's just an irrepressible side of his character.

Which is why one of the reasons I had deep misgivings about him even in this second run, because there's a current of darkness there, I mean, there's just no getting around it. And I think that came out when you saw so many of the people who had been in his inner circle describe the sort of shambolic ways in which he ran his shop.

So we'll find out, but my experience of septuagenarian men is that they are who they are.

>> Niall Ferguson: Can I just add one structural rather than ad hominem point, it's a second term? And second terms are different from first terms. And we should think a bit more about that because it feels to me as if Democrats are so used to hyperventilating about his being Hitler or Mussolini or whatever it is.

That they omit the sort of base case, which is that it will have the same qualities that all second terms, even Reagan's second term had. Second terms are often quite disastrous. Of course, Nixon's was the supremely disastrous second term. Win a landslide and then descend into the maelstrom of Watergate and resignation.

But it's hard to think of a really terrific second term. If you go through the list, think back to George W Bush's second term, which ended in the maelstrom of the global financial crisis. So I offer that.

>> Bret Stephens: Reagan had a very good second term, even despite Iran Contra.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I was gonna say Iran congregate wasn't exact exactly great fun. And so it feels to me as if the base case is just that, it's a second term. And although there's glad confident morning in Trump land that I confess to indulging in some of that myself because I just couldn't abide the idea of Kamala Harris as president.

I do not know how you could bring yourself to vote for Kamala Harris as president. I have enjoyed the defeat of the woke progressive wing of the Democratic Party hugely. But glad confident morning in politics tends not to last terribly long. And it'll be a second term, and by the midterms, it'll kind of feel like we're in the lame duck phase.

So give me a sense of how can this avoid just being another of those second terms which sort of goes off the mill.

>> Bret Stephens: And it isn't a second term, it's a second term in the sense that he's constitutionally prohibited from running again, although he has in the choice of J.D. Vance, clearly an heir apparent.

And who knows if Don Jr Will be part of the 2028 ticket. I don't think that's out of the question. But because he's coming in for the first time with an unmistakable mandate, there's no question this is not a fluke of know which counties voted where that got him into the, into office the first term.

And because there's a certain kind of like, there's a sense that this is like the age of Trump in the way that we had the age of Reagan or the age of FDR, that there's gonna be more energy and initiative this time around. I mean, one of the reasons second terms often fail is because the team is exhausted by the time they kind of slink into their fifth year.

This does not seem to me the case right now at all. They seem very energetic. They have a very clear idea of what it is that they want to accomplish. They have, it seems like the legislative wherewithal to accomplish those things. So it's not I acknowledge I have not read much about Grover Cleveland's second term to know what that was like, but I just don't think you can so easily compare it to Obama or George W Bush's second term.

>> Bill Whalen: I recommend Troy Sinek's really excellent biography on Cleveland, which is just great reading about the non consecutive terms. HR Thomas, up here. Why don't you take us out on a decidedly optimistic note?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, I think what we've been talking about is the effectiveness of a second Trump administration, and I think that will depend in large measure on what Epictetus observed, this is what is most important to understand.

Well, the role assigned you. Will the president and the people he hires understand what their roles are under the Constitution? And it will also depend, I think, on the three disciplines that the stoic philosopher has identified. Will President Trump have the discipline of perception? Will he be able to understand the complex challenges we're facing, take in a broad range of views and multiple options and make effective decisions?

I write in my book that he's capable of doing that, but of course that depends on people around him understanding their roles and serving him well. The second is, does he have discipline of action? Will he have the organizational leadership capabilities to be able to drive the effect of change in the organization?

He's not one really to get into the details of who's responsible for what and so forth. But will the chief of staff, will the national security adviser, will the national economic the NEC? Will these people help him be effective in the discipline of action, getting things done? And then the third, and Bret mentioned this in particular.

Will he have the discipline of will? Will he be able to ignore the noise? Will he be able to take Aristotle's advice and focus on what he can control so that he can get as much done as he can and stop becoming the antagonist in his own story?

So these are all, I think, aspects of this transition in the Trump presidency to observe and assess and evaluate. And as we all mentioned here, one of the early indicators of the degree of which the president will be able to exhibit these disciplines will be the people he appoints to some critical positions.

>> Bill Whalen: And we'll leave it there. Bret Stephens, thanks for joining us, good luck writing in the weeks ahead. Plenty of there for you to write about.

>> Bret Stephens: Thanks a lot, thanks for having me, guys.

>> Bill Whalen: Since we went on way past our scheduled time with our block, we're not gonna do a B block and we're not gonna do lightning rounds.

So this is it. But a viewing note, we will be back with the show shortly before the American Thanksgiving and our guest is gonna be former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. So I imagine we're gonna talk about the transition and hire. So you don't wanna miss that. And in December, I think we're gonna do a mailbag show.

So if you have questions for the good fellows, send them in. And you do that by going to the following address. That is Hoover.org/AskGoodFellows, once again, Hoover.org/AskGoodfellows on behalf of the GoodFellows, Sir Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, H.R. McMaster. Our guest today, Bret Stephens, we hope you enjoyed the conversation.

We appreciate your viewership. Look forward to seeing you again soon. Till then, take care, thanks for watching.

>> Presenter: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring H.R. McMaster, watch Battlegrounds also available at hoover.org.