TWNW Special: Why the World Next Week Matters

Gabrielle SIERRA: Guys, this is the crossover everyone has been begging for, asking for, pleading for. 

Robert MCMAHON: Wow.

Carla Anne ROBBINS: But there are no cookies.

SIERRA: We’re gonna have to do it all over again with snacks. So here on Why It Matters, we spend our time focusing on why something far away matters to us at home. But today, a little more than a week after the election, we are faced with a very different question and that's how did the results of the U.S. election affect the rest of the world? What should we be expecting in the weeks and months to come as President-elect Donald Trump takes office. So today I am sitting down with the fabulous hosts of our sister podcast, The World Next Week, Robert McMahon and Carla Ann Robbins because who better to ask what we can expect in the world next week than two people who focus on it every show. So we're going to call it Why The World Next Week Matters. That's my working title for it unless you guys have a better...

ROBBINS: I just want to get to the world next week...

SIERRA: Yeah, step one, get to the world next week. So let's kick it off. President Biden has just under seventy days left in office. That does not sound like a lot of time. So I'm just sort of curious overall, what sort of things does a president usually do during their last few months in office.

ROBBINS: Well, presidents spend a lot of time, worrying, hoping, building their legacy. And for President Biden, who of course was a foreign policy president, this is the culmination of an extraordinarily long career of thinking about national security—a man born in the Cold War and who actually did an extraordinary thing rallied Europe and the world to fight for Ukraine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqXJaJbbk1M

Joe Biden: So is the message I want people to hear today. America is Back. America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.

ROBBINS: And, you know, he's watching it sort of unravel in front of his eyes. And I had expected that he was going to make an enormous push in these last few weeks to—you can't Trump-proof the alliance, but certainly he could be pushing out a lot more support for Ukraine. So I'm still sitting here hoping, wondering why he is not doing a lot more. I mean we saw Tony Blinken getting on a plane and he’s going to Europe right now to potentially rally the NATO alliance to be doing more, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a push there and I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a push on the Middle East. They don't have a lot more time and things are going to change mightily once Trump comes back.

MCMAHON: Yes. In fact, we're seeing at least the media narrative firmly focused on the Trump moves to staff up and various announcements that keep on coming, and I know we're going to talk about a lot more of this to come in this podcast, but that's getting more attention than what Biden is doing. And he's got a lot of things on his agenda. I mean one of them I guess we could note is, in the world next week will be a Group of Twenty summit that Biden will be going on one of his last global stage appearances. And it's not insignificant. It's an important moment to talk to allies and competitors, shall we say, and other countries that are not necessarily on the side of the U.S. in terms of backing Ukraine but are not adversaries either. And so I think there are these events that are on the calendar that are important in this period. To answer your question or to respond to your question, Gabrielle. Now you have a transition happening where there's supposed to be some handoff, some sort of organized rational handoff at a time when it feels like there's a real sea change. The only thing I'll add to that is that it is a little bit odd that these two men, Trump and Biden, are roughly contemporaries in age, but very different in the way they look at the sort of traditional U.S. role in foreign policy. And that's the real difference, that you have Biden who kind of swung back the pendulum on the U.S. approach to allies and international affairs is now looking to brace its allies and its international partners for a Trump administration that's less interested in that and more interested in really changing the status quo.

ROBBINS: It almost feels as if, and listen, maybe they'll surprise us, maybe they'll surprise us tomorrow, today, in the next few hours. But it almost feels as if they've lost their mojo because Biden came in and said, “We're back,” coming after Trump. And I suspect he'll go around the G20 meeting saying to people, “We haven't left yet.” But the Biden administration gave Israel a deadline of Tuesday, November 12th, saying “Get your act together, get a lot more aid, Gaza is starving.” And the rule is you're only supposed to have one president at a time. This was a very clear deadline that the State Department and the defense department had given to the Netanyahu government. Eight aid agencies, independent aid agencies, said that they had made absolutely no progress at all, that people are desperately, desperately hungry in Gaza. And the State Department admitted that this situation was dire there, but they also said that they weren't going to do anything to pressure or punish the Israelis for not making progress. It's almost as if they threw their hands up and said, “Well, the Trump administration's going to come in and Netanyahu government's not going to listen to us.” This is almost as if they've ceded the space. But as I said, they could surprise us. But this was an important moment, an important test of how they were going to seize this time—the question you asked—and they didn't seize it.

SIERRA: I guess my question is can Biden take action in Gaza as this sort of lame duck president. I mean not to sound cold, but as you said, people really seem to have moved on and are focusing on the next administration. Should President Biden still matter to us and does he still matter to the rest of the world?

ROBBINS: I don't know about Gaza. Certainly strong moral statements could be made, but certainly for Ukraine, when the Europeans are desperate to have the United States supporting them with the Ukrainians are desperate for it. And there's a lot that they could be pushing out right now. There's a lot of military aid that they could be pushing out and that very critical question about whether the Ukrainians could have their hands untied so they could be striking inside of Russian territory. And particularly at this moment in which everyone's warning that the Russians, with North Korean troops, are about to launch an attack on this Kursk region and the Americans have been one of the main opponents to allowing the Ukrainians to use these missiles to hit inside of Russian territories. Biden could say, “Okay, I’m going to untie their hands, I'm going to lift my objections to this.” And there's a lot of things they can't do to Trump-proof the policy. But that's one thing he could be doing and he could be doing it right now.

MCMAHON: Yeah, I agree. I think Ukraine in some ways offers more opportunity for a little bit of traction than the Middle East where, at least from so far, the signals from the incoming Trump administration are people who are coming in with a mindset and a firmness of views on Israel that don't seem to leave a lot of daylight for a major change in U.S. policy on let's say the humanitarian situation there. Ukraine, however, you have a situation where there are some people close to Trump who also very much want to continue to support Ukraine even while there are also others, including Trump himself, that have indicated it's time to wind down the U.S. support and come up with a deal that would include some sort of Russian retention of territory it has seized. But there could be some things that Biden does that find favor with senior Republicans in the U.S. that would carry over to a Trump administration that could be done now. And the Ukraine circumstance is quite different than previous historical analogies that I could think of. But one that comes to mind occurred during the changeover from the Carter to the Reagan administrations where you had this painstaking effort by the Carter administration to free the American hostages in Iran. That was the abiding story. It was something that really afflicted the Carter administration, but they continued to try and had efforts going on—as we learned later, sort of background efforts—going on vigorously through the course of that transition, the late days of the Carter administration such that the hostages were released in fact, and they were released on the day Reagan was inaugurated. So, I still recall the headlines from the New York Times “444 days later hostages released as Reagan is sworn in.” That was a nice sort of early victory lap for the Reagan administration that it was not really involved in, but there was a sense that their looming hard talk on Iran was something that was delivering dividends perhaps.

ROBBINS: Well, the Iranians were determined to deny Carter any win.

MCMAHON: And there is that aspect as well. Will Russia be of a similar mind in terms of any policies it has vis-a-vis Ukraine and Trump? It's really tough. The question is, what is Biden willing to do at this point, at a time when Russia seems like it's tasting a chance to really change facts on the ground further. And we had talked a week ago about the situation involving a potential Trump-Putin discussion about the situation on the ground. It's interesting that there was or was not a call between Trump and Putin in which Trump laid out some markers about not going on the offensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqyQ5nzPYYY  

Donald Trump: A lot of people. The number of people dying in the Ukraine-Russia war is a far greater number than anybody knows and Biden has done nothing about it. He hasn’t even spoken with Putin in a year, know nothing about it. This is a war that has to end and we’re going to get that war ended. I’m going to try and I think I can get it ended as president-elect, in other words, before I even take over the White House. Got to stop people from dying.

MCMAHON: The Russians deny that ever happened and in denying it have also ramped up their plans for an offensive. So this is going to be a really interesting front to watch and there's a ton at stake as Carla said.

SIERRA: Next week, as you mentioned Bob, Biden is set to head to Brazil for the G20 summit. So I want to dive in more. First of all, what the heck is it, and why is this one particularly important to Biden? What can we expect? What should we be looking for?

MCMAHON: The summit is going to be in Brazil. This is the fourth year in a row that the summit is going to be in a country that’s a developing nation. It's actually a summit that's gained more and more relevancy as the years have gone on. And the G7, even though they still represent nominally seven leading industrial democracies in the world,have receded in influence. G20 is all the major players—counting for something like eighty-five percent of global economic output for starters—and it's not just democracies: it's China, it's Russia. It won't be Russia's leader because Vladimir Putin is under arrest warrant for war crimes in Ukraine. And President Lula, while himself saying Putin could attend Rio, could not assure that he would not be seized and brought up on charges in other courts in Brazil. So Putin is not going. Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister, is going just like—I believe Lavrov was the one who attended last year's, last couple of big summits that have occurred since this warrant came down for Putin. So it's a place where the players are and it's part of a flurry of year end summitry that's really important. There's also an APEC summit coming up. There was just a BRICS summit that Russia itself hosted. It got a lot of attention as this alternative to Western-led international organizations, although it still hasn't come up with—

ROBBINS: Financial organizations, yeah...

MCMAHON: Certainly financial organizations, although it still hasn't come up with any sort of firm structure or financial plan, but it is a challenge and G20 will continue this messaging about ‘the world dominated by the World Bank and the IMF and the WTO needs to change and we need to offer alternatives.’ What's interesting, and I noted earlier, that it's the fourth time in a row it's going to be a country from the so-called Global South hosting it and India and Brazil have asserted themselves, as the previous and current host, as agenda setters and they're very much sending the agenda about ending poverty and inequality. One of this year's big themes is food security and hunger elimination, a reminder that it's not just America's being upset over food inflation. There's parts of the world that are really worried about the availability of food, let alone the cost of it. We're seeing this problem and both war induced, climate induced and other things as adding to food insecurity around the world. And so the G20 nations could actually play a role in this in terms of taking steps. India set in motion a whole series of types of efforts to try to bolster global organizations and scientific research into fertilizers, into market transparency and global supply chains—all the nuts and bolts that lead to the availability of food. So maybe G20 could be a practical source for dealing with something like that. So it is a venue of importance. You have a major attendee being a lame duck president. It's going to be very interesting to see how he's regarded, what kind of conversations he has on the sidelines, who he ends up talking with more than others. All of this is going to be on display in Brazil, which itself is about to host a number of important meetings. It'll host the next COP meeting on climate. By the way, the COP on climate in Azerbaijan is continuing to play out, a little bit of crossover in two major global events and it's not as well attended as the G20 will be with leaders. Brazil's also going to host the next BRICS meeting. So it's important to look at hosts, it's important to look at who's showing up—and then to the extent to which they regard the current U.S. administration—and, what is the talk of the incoming Trump administration.

ROBBINS: The G20 is a particularly interesting phenomenon because when you think about the G7, which was one more “We're the big kids.” I mean, when you think of all the institutions that were created in the wake of World War II, they were victors’ clubs and they were basically colonialist clubs. And they made sense to a certain extent in the mid-1940s, but the world changed and the world economies changed and the G20 came along and the recognition—I think to a great extent with the Obama administration, I think I'm right Bob–to say, and to a great extent with the financial crisis, you weren't going to dig back out without the participation of these other economies.

MCMAHON: No, it's, in fact, it's important to note that period that the G20 really kind of emerged because there was a declaration at the G20 that they were going to work against protectionism. And it was an important signal that really, I think you saw it palpably affect the way the world reacted and markets reacted.

ROBBINS: And Obama got it in a pretty fundamental way. At the same time, they didn't really fundamentally change the voting structure. They haven't changed the voting structure of the UN Security Council. They didn't change the voting structure significantly at the IMF, at the World Bank. They still have these rules here in which the IMF is still always run by a European, the World Bank is still always run by an American. There's a lot of reasons for why these emerging, big economies, whether it's Indonesia or whether it's Brazil or it's South Africa, these players that come along say, India, why don't we have a seat here? So the G20 is important and I think it's really important right now because what we've seen with the war in Ukraine, these countries should see Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a palpable threat to them as well. But they don't, at least they don't describe it that way. And there's a lot of whataboutism there, there's a lot: How come you got to invade Iraq and now why are you complaining about Russia? There's a lot of work that needs to be done. And the expectation, I think, is that a continuation of a Biden administration—a Harris administration—to deal with, which is a pretty fundamental problem, which is this alienation of countries that are not necessarily in Russia's camp, but that have sat on the sidelines with the Ukraine war. I don't think you're going to see that with the Trump administration. So this is a serious challenge to what is referred to as “the rules-based world order.” And I think we ignore that at our peril. And, President Biden I think gets it, but I don't think they had the time and the space to deal with it. I don't think they've dealt with it nearly enough.

SIERRA: Going back to the days after the election—I guess we could say going back to the world last week—we saw many world leaders, and I'm sure you guys have discussed this at length, but from Bibi to Putin, call up President-Elect Trump and congratulate him on his win. It feels like all of this happened really fast. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just feels really fast. It's already reported that he had talks with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. Trump has also told Netanyahu that he wants the war in Gaza over before he's sworn in January. Is it unusual for Trump to be acting like a sitting president?

ROBBINS: Those phone calls are normal. Keep in mind, President Trump has already been president. So that adds a different quality to it. He knows all these people and if they're treating him like a president, he's already been president! And I think that does change the interaction to a certain extent. And President Trump said he wanted things settled or that he was going to settle things on day one or before he came in. We still don't have plans on that, so I don't consider any of that, but that does also go back to this…you can't have two presidents at the same time, I don't think the White House is asserting itself, all the things that we were talking about before. The thing that has happened incredibly quickly is this naming of people to his cabinet. I've never seen anything happen this quickly. It's extraordinary. It is to use a cliché, head spinning.

SIERRA: So I'm curious, Bob, what can Trump’s first Presidency tell us about a second Trump administration?

MCMAHON: It's an interesting question. It's one that you can't really answer properly with someone like Trump because he will change on a dime his position depending on all sorts of factors. And then added to that, you have this fairly long transition period between election day and inauguration day. Trump was ready to come out of the gates with proposals, which differed from his first presidency. I think we're fully expecting changes, but we also are also waiting to see what else could be guiding Trump. What will ultimately be his goal in Ukraine? Is it ending the war there? Is it being able to walk away being able to say that he ended it quickly or is he going to come up with a new set of parameters for defining success in Ukraine as in the Middle East? I don't know. He did seem to talk about wars quite a lot on the campaign trail and again on his victory speech on election night. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92LeyD4fUbw 

Donald Trump: We want a strong and powerful military and, ideally, we don’t have to use it. You know, we had no wars, four years, we had no wars except we defeated ISIS. We defeated ISIS in record time, but we had no wars. They said, ‘He will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars, but this is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom.

MCMAHON: So one thinks that he might be able to move forward with that rather quickly. Those are some of the announcements he's already made would affect that. There certainly seems to be a wave of tariffs coming. Trump talked about it repeatedly. Whether it ends up focusing more on China than any other country is not clear yet, but he seems especially enamored of tariffs and he's lining up people who support those views.

SIERRA: Carla, who has been nominated to be in Trump’s cabinet so far and who should we be keeping an eye on you think? 

ROBBINS: Well, there seems to be a significant difference between the people, as Bob said, he chose on the first term, and now. And certainly this was telegraphed for a long time. I mean the first term he chose people with clear expertise and people who were willing on more than one occasion to slap his hand away and to check his impulses. I mean, when you think about his defense secretary, I mean retired general James Mattis, you think about—he had quite few national security advisors—but Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, John Bolton is a national security advisor, and these were people with significant expertise and judging from the things they wrote afterwards, these were people who were alternately trying to train him and alternately trying to frustrate him. This time when we're looking at the people he's announced, the people we expect him to announce, there's less experience. And while some of them come from a more traditional Reagan/NeoCon background, they seem to have become serious converts to Trumpism and their loyalty is to Trump and to at least what they say, the MAGA worldview. 

The one who has yet to be announced, what everyone expects, is the Secretary of State, is Florida Senator Marco Rubio. He's probably the person who has the most background. He serves on the foreign relations committee ranking on the intelligence committee. He ran against Trump before being converted to the cause. And, at the time, he was vowing that he was very much a traditional Reagan internationalist. And interestingly, he co-sponsored this legislation last year even after he'd become a Trump ally that requires congressional approval for withdrawal from NATO. And there's no question that that legislation was clearly aimed at then former, and now future, President Trump. 

He was also a really strong supporter for Ukraine aid when Russia first invaded, although he voted against the latest package, saying that the U.S. needed to spend more money on securing the U.S. border. So whether he is secretly a Ukraine supporter, he's certainly fiercely anti-China, anti-Iran. And so when you consider this sort of axis of disruptors who were supporting the Russians in Ukraine, it's sort of hard to imagine that you're anti-China and you're pro giving Russia a big part of Ukraine and we'll have to see about that. Interestingly, if confirmed, Rubio would be the first secretary of state under Beijing sanctions and banned from traveling to China, so he's you know—which is sort of an interesting thing. He sponsored this bipartisan Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which puts sanctions on Chinese, which the Chinese didn't like. 

And then there's Mike Waltz who Trump has chosen to be a national security advisor. He's certainly a less well-known quantity, but he brings some knowledge. He's a former Green Beret, he's a current Florida congressman, serves on armed services, foreign affairs and intelligence. He also was an early supporter of Ukraine and he also says, “No, no, no. Now it's all about China.” He's a big China hawk as well. 

And the big puzzle for me, and I'm sure for Bob and for everyone else, is Pete Hegseth who was just announced. He's a Fox News host. He served in the army in Afghanistan and Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. He's an utterly fierce Trump loyalist. He has none of the experience in strategy or in management that one would expect from a defense chief. I mean, there are a lot of people he's going to have to be managing there and lots of billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars that they've got to worry about. And if you want to compete seriously against the Russians and the Chinese, this is a massive industry you have to deal with here. And as the New York Times put it delicately, “It was a choice outside the norm.” Hegseth is best known outside his Fox gig—including he is the host for their New Year's Eve coverage—he lobbied vocally for this Navy seal, Edward Gallagher, who was accused of war crimes in Iraq. Gallagher was acquitted after Hegseth pushed his case on Fox. Trump stepped in and reversed his demotion, which was a punishment he got for posing with a corpse and also fired the Navy secretary who was involved in the case. And Hegseth is also known for being fiercely opposed to what he and Trump call ‘woke’ generals. And I saw this quote in the Washington Post, which really blew me away, asked in a podcast interview that was published last week, Hegseth said quote:

https://x.com/Breaking911/status/1856511070099083632

Pete Hegseth/Shawn Ryan Show: Well first of all you gotta fire the chairman of the joint chiefs and obviously you got to bring in a new secretary of defense, but any general that was involved, general admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI, woke s**t, has got to go. You gotta get DEI and CRT out...

MCMAHON: It is also worth noting that Hegseth is a former decorated veteran—I believe served in both Afghanistan and Iraq—and has made a big point of being against deployments of U.S. forces abroad while still speaking toughly about U.S. national security and defense writ large. That one in particular is going to be worth watching very closely as it proceeds through the approval process. And the two things in particular to watch are this attempt to crack down on the leadership. And if we're looking at anything close to a purge of military leadership, that would be stunning for all sorts of reasons. Something you don't see outside of authoritarian states usually. As well as there have been a lot of reports about Trump wanting to have some sort of a loyalty test with a swearing of military leadership to loyalty to him. It's not farfetched that that could emerge from this. He had in his first administration wanted to be able to deploy military domestically to put down protests. These types of things happen. These are not just outside the norm, they are norm busting and alarming. And there were reasons why there are rules governing those put into place. So we're looking at a real change in structure and mission that could be earth shattering, to say the least, for someone who’s gained a great deal of attention because he can articulate policies that Trump very much embraces and has done so repeatedly on Fox News, but has not shown the capacity to run an organization like the Pentagon. And again, this is an election about changing the status quo, but I'm not sure this is the type of change that is going to be sought after.

ROBBINS: I mean, there's some other interesting choices. I mean, Representative Elise Stefanik from New York is ambassador to the UN. She doesn't have foreign policy experience, but she's got a very strong voice. So we'll see. She was known for confronting these Ivy League presidents and antisemitism on campus, got a lot of attention. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has incredibly close ties with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he's also—he's going to feed the far right in Israel, he said he personally believed Israel had the right to annex parts of the West Bank. 

MCMAHON: And he's been nominated for Ambassador to Israel, right? 

ROBBINS: Yeah, he said for that, you know, 2008 and a presidential run, he said there's “really no such thing as a Palestinian.” I mean those sorts of things are going to come up and not play well as you might imagine. And then his borders are, which is obviously an absolutely central with tariffs, the other big, big Trump policy and would claim that he's going to deport millions and millions of undocumented. He was the acting director of ICE and he oversaw the family separation policy. And while we can see that it's solely a domestic policy, but that has huge international implications as well. And then you've got Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who is also going to be the head of Homeland Security. She sent National Guard to the border, which is how she made her bones for that job. But two things, I mean, Homeland Security is a lot more than just immigration. It's counterterrorism, it’s cybersecurity, it's FEMA, it's Coast Guard, it's Secret Service. It's a very, very big job. I suppose as a governor, she's run things, but it's not an easy job. Trump had six heads of Homeland Security in his first term, so that's a big job. So we'll see how she does it.

SIERRA: Looking globally, this past year was dubbed the year of elections. So as we look back, I'm curious, are there any elections that we saw happen that carry as much importance globally as ours?

MACMAHON: It's hard to compare it to the U.S. because everybody was waiting for this one, and now that it's arrived, it is, as expected, having quite a bit of impact and will be for many months now. But I think we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that there were important elections. Just looking at Europe alone, there were important elections in France where it looks like it was a shockwave election, which the right advanced but not enough to formally step into power. So you have Macron kind of clinging to a sort of power there, but he could suffer another defeat in the next round of elections when his term comes up and Marine Le Pen is poised to take over. So we're not clear whether the U.S. elections will continue to have effect into places like Europe and beyond, but France was an interesting time in which the country cast the protest vote, but not enough of one to totally, totally turn the tables. UK was a countertrend vote where you have the Labour getting power after Tories mucked things up for a number of years. 

But then I think it's interesting to look at places like India where Narendra Modi, it was seemingly poised to continue to cement his Hindu nationalist agenda and seizes control of further levers of Indian society, and in fact took a bit of a loss there and has to rule in coalition. He still is in a position of power and influence, but it was a bit of a step back for him that was not expected. It kind of caught people by surprise. And then you have places like Japan, which had a big protest vote as well, which is not necessarily a defeat for democracy, it may be a sign of strength of democracy where you had the post-war ruling party, the LDP, has to step down or find some sort of way of ruling in an unprecedented coalition to stay in power because of the way the vote went there. And it was definitely a protest vote taking place there and also for really domestic oriented reasons, but still kind of worth watching. So I think it's going to be a mixed picture globally. Certainly it was a year of populism by all accounts, but there were some interesting other plot lines to look at.

SIERRA: Yeah, I was going to say, what trends have really stood out to you guys as you look at all these results?

ROBBINS: I think all of these, and listening to what Bob's description of this is that this was basically throw the you-know-whats out every place and Labor came in in the UK, the right nearly came in in France, South Africa ruling and coalition for the ANC, and we're seeing enormous analysis here in the United States. Was it too much identity politics? Have the Democrats lost touch completely with working class, with Hispanics, with this, with that? Maybe? Or maybe is this really what's happened everywhere, which is after the pandemic, after inflation for the first time in a really long time, people just wanted to change, which doesn't mean that the Democratic Party and other parties don't have to take a really hard look at what they're selling and what they're not listening to out there. But if there's one trend I think after this year of elections is that people just wanted change. Just anybody who was in basically got pushed out or nearly pushed out, and so people didn't like what their governments were giving them, and I think inflation was a big part of it. 

MCMAHON: I think that's true. I think that's maybe the leading trend line to take note of. I would also say that populace, mostly from the ripe but not exclusively, were particularly good at using social media platforms to make their case and to advance them. And that traditional media are in many places, certainly the U.S., are not holding the sway that they have in past cycles. And so this is something that definitely needs to be watched now. Candidates for national office need to be aware of where people are getting their information from down to local levels, down to regional levels, and not just assuming that the well-known media names, brands, are the ones to go to just because they've always been the ones to go to. You got to look further and it's a lot of work and the populace have worked harder in some—a number of places—and have been able to repeat certain lines so often, even lines that are patently not true or patently false, that they continue to be repeated by people who vote and who came out of the voting booth saying why they voted the way they did. So, I think that combination of elements was really compelling this year.

SIERRA: So you produce a special at the end of every year called “the world next year.” So I don't want to give away the good stuff, but are there a few things you think we will be seeing early next year that directly reflect who we are electing as president?

MCMAHON: I think the year will kick off, obviously with the inauguration in the third week or so of January of President Trump and the tone and the whole sort of atmospherics around that will be really important. Again, with the pace that we've discussed of him naming people to important high level posts already being set, that is going to give him a chance to hit the ground running and then we will see what that means in terms of drastic moves like, let's say, setting really high tariff walls or deporting millions of people in a fell swoop. Is it really going to happen in that way? Is it going to be more slowly walked out? Is there going to be rhetoric ahead of any action? Those are things I'm going to be looking for because they have huge effect—tariffs worldwide certainly—but also deportation certainly within this hemisphere are going to be something that countries are watching and that sets a tone. And the president-elect made no bones about what his priorities were. He was clearly, he harped on them on the campaign trail repeatedly. He was elected with a wave he's going to control. His party is going to control the Senate and likely the house. And so he's coming into office with seemingly a mandate of sorts. But it is a, by all accounts, the demographics of the support for Trump don't necessarily seem like they would support some of these sweeping moves. But that will be worth watching too. In terms of the U.S. domestic response, which isn't always in lockstep.

ROBBINS: I'm going to be watching to see how much the new administration goes about dismantling democratic norms. As much as President Trump said he never read the Project 2025, we're hearing from a lot of people around them this notion of are they really going to go after the civil service, after the “deep state?” I thought it was really intriguing in this race for the Senate majority leader that President Trump insisted that they all agree that he could make appointments in theory without Senate confirmation. That is fundamentally not the way it's done in our democracy. And this notion that the Senate would willingly go into recess for recess appointments is giving up its right for advice and consent is a pretty extraordinary thing. And then you saw willy-nilly the three contenders go, “Yes, okay, we'll do it for the sake of having this job if we see this process.” Normally you'd see a new administration would come in and then you'd have this long debate about whether these people who they're nominating are really up to the job and are going to serve the people well. And you'd have hearings and policies would be debated in the hearings and Congress is the people's voice. They're supposed to be inserting themselves in a debate over policy itself. The notion that somehow a new president would come in and cut the people's voice out of this and as an act of complete loyalty to fealty to a president. That to me is an example of are we going to really forgo not just norms, but the basic balance of power checks and balances? That's one of the things I'm going to be watching, not just in the confirmation process, but across the entire new administration.

SIERRA: Well, thank you guys for running through all of this with me. I know there's a lot ahead and I very much appreciate it.

ROBBINS: Thanks for inviting us there. 

MCMAHON: Thanks for having us.

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Why It Matters is a production of the Council on Foreign Relations. The opinions expressed on the show are solely that of the guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

This episode was produced by Molly McAnany, Ester Fang, and me, Gabrielle Sierra. Our sound designer is Markus Zakaria. Our interns this semester are Colette Yamashita Holcomb and Emily Hu. Robert McMahon is our Managing Editor. Our theme music is composed by Ceiri Torjussen.

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