The path ahead for President-elect Trump and Congressional Republicans

Republicans dominated the election — with Donald Trump taking back the White House, flipping the Senate and likely keeping control of the House.

Today, On Point: How the Republican Party did it, and the policies and priorities it will have in Congress and the White House.

Evan McMorris-Santoro, national political reporter for NOTUS, a Washington publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.

Paul Kane, senior congressional correspondent and columnist with the Washington Post. He’s been covering Congress since 2000.

Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University. Author of several books, including "On Tyranny," On Freedom" and "The Road to Unfreedom."

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris did what Donald Trump did not do in 2020. She called her opponent to concede the election, and then spoke to her supporters about what lies ahead for her following her bruising defeat.

KAMALA HARRIS: While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign. (CHEERS)

The fight for freedom. For opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people. A fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation. The ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.

CHAKRABARTI: Meanwhile, now President-elect Donald Trump in his victory speech said it's full steam ahead for his agenda.

DONALD TRUMP: Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason. (AUDIENCE CHEERS)

And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness. And now we are going to fulfill that mission together. We're going to fulfill that mission.

CHAKRABARTI: Senator, and now Vice President-elect, JD Vance, also looked forward to enacting the Trump agenda.

JD VANCE: And I think that we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America. (AUDIENCE CHEERS)

And under President Trump's leadership, we're never going to stop fighting for you, for your dreams, for the future of your children, and after the greatest political comeback in American history, we're going to lead the greatest economic comeback in American history under Donald Trump's leadership.

CHAKRABARTI: Trump promised during the campaign to launch a mass deportation plan, impose an across the board tariff on imports into the U.S., prosecute his adversaries, cut taxes, and completely reform the federal civil service in multiple ways, including placing loyalists at every level possible, and gutting the Department of Education.

TRUMP: We're going to turn it around. It's got to be turned around. It's got to be turned around fast. And we're going to turn it around. We're going to do it in every way. So many ways, but we're going to do it in every way. This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country. (CHEERS)

CHAKRABARTI: Enacting a presidential agenda gets easier with congressional cooperation, and often presidents don't have that, if Congress ends up in the hands of the opposing party. But Republicans scored sweeping victories this week, including regaining control of the Senate. And as of today, the balance of power in the House is yet to be determined.

But here's Republican Leader Senator Mitch McConnell yesterday.

MITCH McCONNELL: Certainly a happy day for the GOP. And let me start by congratulating President Trump, what he's accomplished has not been done ... since Grover Cleveland.

CHAKRABARTI: McConnell is referring there to President Grover Cleveland's 1892 presidential win, Cleveland had already been president once, then lost re-election, then won it again four years after that.

Today we're looking at the path ahead for the next Trump administration and congressional Republicans. And we're joined by Paul Kane. He's a senior congressional correspondent and columnist at the Washington Post. He's been covering Congress verging on a quarter century now, since 2000 and he joins us from Washington.

Paul, it's great to have you. Welcome.

PAUL KANE: Thank you, Meghna. Boy, I feel old.

CHAKRABARTI: Call it wisdom of experience and perspective. I also want to welcome Evan McMorris-Santoro to the conversation. He's a national political reporter for NOTUS, a Washington publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute, and he's also in Washington.

Evan, welcome to you.

EVAN McMORRIS-SANTORO: Hi, Meghna, how are you? I'm quite young and virile, so that's very important for the listeners to know.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) Good. We have wisdom and energy. I'm not saying who's got what, though. But Paul, actually, seriously, given your long analysis of Congress. How would you categorize this week's elections across the board, both in the Senate and what we know thus far in the House?

KANE: I think the overriding thing that comes across in a really broad base, before you get into the numbers, is the Trump effect and the Harris effect down ballot. You had Trump almost everywhere did better than the Republicans down ballot behind him, and Harris, almost everywhere, underperformed what the Democrats did down ballot.

One of our data people crunched the numbers in comparing the presidential and the Senate races in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and forgive me, I think it's Wisconsin, and in 97% of the counties in those four states, Trump did better than the Senate Republican candidate.

And so he was able to carry people across the finish line who probably couldn't get there on their own. And Harris had the opposite effect, and helped drag down some people who might have otherwise won on their own. The two most obvious examples are in Northeastern Pennsylvania, two House Democrats, Matt Cartwright and Susan Wild, who won some really tough races before.

But that was an area of Pennsylvania where Trump and his campaign really devoted a lot of time. And they had candidates who were pretty C plus candidates, as Republicans go, but they ended up winning narrowly, over Cartwright and Wild. And so that was where you could really see the effect.

Trump helped carry them across the finish line. And that happened in a number of Senate races. There's going to be a guy, Bernie Moreno from Ohio, who's a Senator for at least six years and he underperformed Trump by five, five or six points in Ohio. He edged out Sherrod Brown by about 3.5% statewide.

And without Trump at the top of the ticket, he probably does not win.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. We're going to talk about some of those key Senate races in more detail in just a second, but Evan, pick up where Paul left off, but let's take a look at the other side of that coin. And because Paul pointed out that Harris basically had the opposite effect of Trump and Democratic candidates did worse than they much would have liked to do, talk about your analysis of that.

McMORRIS-SANTORO: It's interesting, because as we get farther and farther away from Election Day, we get more and more of these results and we see these numbers in a deeper way, the story starts to change. What Paul is talking about is about, some of those challenges that Republicans have faced for a long time with candidate quality and things like that, that they still have to figure out maybe.

Democrats on the other side, on the other hand, we'll still be digging through their numbers to define their own sort of takeaways from this. But at the basic level right now, where we sit today, Democrats feel like their brand is really dead. It doesn't have much purchase across the country.

In areas that they thought they were going to do fine, right? Like urban areas, they didn't do very well. Suburban areas, they didn't do very well. Rural areas, they did very badly. And as we're going to dig in, and we'll see more some of the detail here, but this is a party that the people I've been talking to over the past few days, that just have their hands in the air at this point.

They're like, I don't, we don't really know what we have done wrong, how we're going to talk about, we're going to figure it out, but they really feel like their brand, it just doesn't have any trust anymore.

CHAKRABARTI: Could they define to you what they thought their brand was?

McMORRIS-SANTORO: I think it's interesting because when you started the show, you had Kamala Harris with her sort of forward thinking message about the future of the country, and Trump's victory message, which was one of, we're gonna get this thing back on track, things are really bad.

I spoke with a person who studies undecided voters, has been studying them for a very long time, her name is Diane Hessan, she wrote a an interesting story about what happened with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and I was talking to her about undecided voters near the end of the election. And, she said if you want to find out who an undecided voter is going to vote for, about the future of the country, how they feel about it.

If they say they're optimistic, they're going to be a Harris voter. If they say they're pessimistic, they're going to be a Trump voter. She says that works right across the board. And so you have the Democratic party talking in this sort of optimistic way about the future, about options, the things that they want to see happen, change The society getting better and different.

All those things we've talked about in American democracy for so long, where the Republicans and Trump talked a lot about maybe our best days are behind us, and we can get back to those days. We need to go backwards. We need to think about how things used to be. That is a very different conversation than the Democrats have been having.

I don't know how much of this is going to impact how they're going to talk in the future, but those, I think, are two very clear distinctions. That this Democratic idea of we're turning the page, we're the future, we're the next thing. The public was like, we're not really interested in the next thing.

We don't like what you're doing now. We want to go back to the thing that we had before, man. We want it in a big way.

CHAKRABARTI: Let's listen to a little bit of more from Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, because he also talked about the way the Senate leadership fund spent its money in assisting some of these GOP candidates, because the fund was able to raise $425 million to put into key Senate races.

And here's McConnell's breakdown of how that money was spent.

McCONNELL: 60 million in Montana, $3.3 million in Nebraska, $12.8 million in Nevada, $133 million in Ohio, $82.7 million in Pennsylvania, $30 million in Wisconsin and $3 million in West Virginia. So clearly what they were doing over there is focusing on the places where we had the best chance to win. And I think the results pretty much prove they made a lot of wise decisions.

CHAKRABARTI: Paul, we've just got about 30 seconds before we have to take our first break.

Do you think that the money made the difference, or is it more what you were talking about earlier, the Trump effect?

KANE: The money did make a huge difference in at least two key races, Montana and Ohio. What McConnell left out is that with SLF, the Senate leadership Fund did this time around was they played a much more narrow playing field.

They focused relentlessly on Montana and Ohio, and only late in the game did they see the Trump effect and say, Hey, we should jump into those other races. But they've actually come up short so far in Wisconsin, Michigan and probably Nevada. Pennsylvania might be the only really extra win that they get out of that.

Part II

We're talking about the path ahead, not just for the Trump administration, the incoming Trump administration as of January of 2025, but for congressional Republicans as well. And here's some of what newly elected GOP senators have been saying in the past 24 hours. In West Virginia, Jim Justice won that state's open Senate seat.

It's a flip for Republicans, but not an unexpected one, at all. Justice takes the seat over from longtime Senator Joe Manchin, who of course, for years was West Virginia's only congressional Democrat, before announcing he was registering as an independent this year. Justice himself, by the way, switched his own registration from being a Democrat to a Republican back in 2017.

And here's part of what he told reporters on Tuesday.

JIM JUSTICE: We've got to have an energy strategy in America. That's all there is to it. They want rid of us. Do you realize that if we don't have a majority in the Senate, they want rid of us as far as coal miners, gas workers, whatever it may be. Literally, we can't possibly. It is so frivolous. It's unbelievable, to think that we can do without fossil fuels today. I'm the guy that's all encompassing, all the alternatives, I've embraced. But with all that being said, it's decades away, decades and decades away, before we can do without fossil fuels. If then, why blow our own legs off and hand our legs to China and India?

I don't get it.

CHAKRABARTI: Senator-elect Jim Justice of West Virginia over in Ohio, longtime Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown lost his Senate seat on Tuesday to Republican Bernie Moreno, and in his acceptance speech, Moreno said, talked, excuse me. He talked also about energy and said it would be a priority of his to reduce the U.S.'s reliance on foreign energy.

BERNIE MORENO: We're going to make this country an energy dominant nation so that my kids do not grow up in a country where we ever rely on a foreign nation for energy ever again. (CHEERS) And we have that energy right here in Ohio. That means coal, that means natural gas, it means oil, and it means nuclear. And in terms of EV mandates, They need to be gone first thing in January. (CHEERS)

And we're going to make certain that we tell California, you don't get to dictate to the whole country what our emission standards are. We're going to dictate that at the federal level, and we're going to allow consumers to pick the kind of car they want.

CHAKRABARTI: So that is now Senator-elect Republican Bernie Moreno.

And by the way, in terms of the U.S.'s reliance on foreign oil, yes, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2023, crude oil imports into this country averaged about 6.5 million barrels per day. But U.S. crude oil production in this country was verging on 13 million barrels of crude oil per day.

Now Paul, what I wanted to get from you is, when we're talking about Sherrod Brown, when we're talking about Joe Manchin, and a couple of other senators who will no longer be in the Senate as of January of next year, these were people who really shaped the functioning and sort of the temperament of the Senate.

Is that body itself going to change, Paul?

KANE: You're looking at a several year shift in what's gone on. At this point, four years ago, there were a group of Senate centrists, both Republican and Democrat, who got together and said, we're going to get one last big bipartisan pandemic relief bill. And they set the budget framework and it's $900 billion or so.

And everybody then went along with it. And that same sort of group in the next two years was able to do a couple more things, like an infrastructure bill. The Electoral Count Act, which sought to make sure that you could not have the same type of stuff, has happened January 6, 2021.

Most of that group have been gutted.

They have either retired or lost their seats, or retired because they knew they were going to lose their seats. That group included people like Rob Portman of Ohio, who has been replaced by JD Vance, who will be replaced by someone else like JD Vance, presumably. You have people like Mitt Romney who are retiring, Kyrsten Sinema, who are retiring.

That middle has really been just gutted. And we spent two years, the first two years of the Biden administration, chasing around Manchin and Sinema to see where they would go and what they would approve. Because they became the 49th and 50th votes for anything the Democrats wanted to do, with Kamala Harris being the tie breaking 51st vote.

And so it put power in the center of the place, but it required people in that center to have a willingness to embrace that power and use it and put themselves in the spotlight. And right now, that has shrunk a lot. And if the Republicans get up to 53 seats in the Senate, that is going to shrink the power of the last remaining moderate Republicans, which is basically just Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.

53 minus two equals 51. And, there goes a lot of their leverage on things.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. This is really interesting. Evan, I'm going to turn to you in a second, but we have another clip here from Senator McConnell. It's specifically about the filibuster, because he was asked if the filibuster would be preserved in a Republican led Senate.

And here's what McConnell said.

McCONNELL: The filibuster will stand. There won't be any new states admitted. That give a partisan advantage to the other side, and we'll quit beating up the Supreme Court every time we don't like a decision to make. So I think this shifting to a Republican Senate majority helps control the guardrails to keep people who want to change the rules in order to achieve something they think is worthwhile, is not successful.

And so I think the filibuster is very secure.

CHAKRABARTI: Senator Mitch McConnell yesterday of course, President Joe Biden was also not partial to eliminating the filibuster, given his long experience in the Senate. But Evan, given what Paul Kane said about the shrinking center of centrist GOP senators. What I wanted to pick up on was what McConnell said about the Senate majority, the Republican Senate majority, helping to control the guardrails, to keep people who want to change the rules in order to achieve something they think is worthwhile.

Of course, a lot of Democrats would look at McConnell as the chief rule changer when it serves him, right? Of course, the most famous example of that is holding off any hearings or even meetings with Merrick Garland when he was nominated by President Obama for the Supreme Court, doing so for a full year.

So I wonder if this idea of a robust, centrist GOP group of senators, if they've actually been losing their power for a long time, and this is just the logical next step in that.

McMORRIS-SANTORO: Absolutely they have. This is the most interesting thing about what's going to happen now. When you talk about some of that centrism that was going on before, there was a lot of Republicans in Congress, elected officials across the country, who were very wary of this MAGA movement.

'Cause it didn't look like it was that politically helpful to them. It was like toxic to a lot of people. It was very, turned off a lot of voters. It won in by really big numbers all across the country this time. I don't think, you already saw a lot of Republicans having difficulty, be very careful about crossing the MAGA movement, and Trump specifically.

I think that the political options for doing that are much smaller now. But there is this interesting part. This is when you look forward as to what's going to happen next, this is where it always becomes the divide. Because you have this thing inside this new political movement where there are guys like McConnell and there are plenty of senators who don't want to get rid of the filibuster, who want to do things in a normal, what they perceive as a normal order.

Normal way, they want politics to sound the way it has always sounded. They want this comedy. They want people to work together. And then there are a lot of folks in the MAGA movement who don't want that. And so we're going to see a lot of conversations about those two sides pushing against each other, right?

You talk about that Moreno clip you played, which is a perfect example of this. So he comes out and he says a very standard Republican thing, which is, we're going to drill. We're going to drill for oil and that's what we're going to do. And then he adds in this thing about, we're going to get in this esoteric thing, where there's a rule in America that the California Air Resources Board can set emissions standards that are then like required the rest of the countries would have followed.

And if they are like different from the EPA ones, this kind of thing, that like If they get rid of that the idea is essentially like we could sell cars that pollute a lot more than cars pollute now, right?

It is unclear if Republicans want to mandate to sell cars that pollute more. But there is this push and pull of these two sides of politics right now where you think about what's going forward with Trump taking over. Some people voted for him because they think he's going to be a businessman style Republican, right?

He's going to cut a bunch of taxes on corporations. Cut taxes on people, to recharge the economy that way. But then comes the conversation about the idea of tariffs or the idea of RFK, Jr. Are we going to have access to vaccines like we used to have? It is unclear how much the American people want that aspect.

And when you have this sort of new power base inside the GOP, which really is, Trump, is like now really the power base ... all this conversation about how much are you going to be a McConnell style kind of Republican, who is definitely a guy that's pushed things to the right, or how much you're going to be a Trump style, where RFK, Jr. is maybe in the medical conversation. We don't really know that yet. And that could be, that I think could be a real tension point for this next period of time in America.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, that's a good point. So that brings us to where, if at all, we have clarity on what the legislative ambitions of congressional Republicans might be.

Here's House Speaker Mike Johnson. He won re-election in Louisiana's fourth district this week, and in his victory speech, he said, big changes are coming when Republicans gain, regain control in Washington. Just to note right now, the balance in the House is not yet determined. When Speaker Johnson spoke, he also spoke about his confidence that the GOP would maintain control of the House.

MIKE JOHNSON: Everywhere I've been around the country, and I've told you how many cities and places and events I've done, everybody's fed up and fired up. They're fed up about the cost of living and the rising crime rates and the wide-open border and the weakness on the world stage. But we have the solutions to all that.

And when Republicans regain control, which we pray tonight that's what's going to happen, we're going to have the most aggressive first hundred days agenda that anybody's seen in the modern era. And we've got to fix everything. Everything.

CHAKRABARTI: House Speaker Mike Johnson a little earlier this week, and once again, as of this broadcast, which is Thursday, in the 10 a.m. Eastern time hour the balance in the House is not yet determined. But Paul, when the Speaker says, we have solutions to all of that, what is specifically he's referring to, what have congressional Republicans said they would like to advance under a Trump administration?

KANE: Okay, so if they had a script in football, famously, 40 years ago, a great coach named Bill Walsh talked about scripting the first 20 plays of every game for his San Francisco 49ers offense.

They have this idea. That in the first 100 days, they're going to come out. They're going to use this parliamentary thing called budget reconciliation. Democrats use it successfully, and they're going to roll through a major tax cut that extends some of the Trump tax cuts from 2017 and has a whole bunch of other things that will probably cost upwards of $7 trillion.

That's like the first 100-day plan. Now, reality, the House, the biggest guardrail in terms of what Trump can do legislatively against him is the rank incompetence of House Republicans. These are people that don't know how to turn the lights on and turn the lights off. They are awful at their jobs.

There is not, that is not, that is a just pure stated fact. They have, they started two years ago.

CHAKRABARTI: Paul, you're killing me. (LAUGHS)

KANE: No, I'm like --

McMORRIS-SANTORO: It's hot take.

KANE: They say it themselves. They say it themselves. Chip Roy screamed multiple times on the floor. Tell me one thing that we can actually say we got done. So they started with 222 Republicans two years ago in the 118th Congress in the House of Representatives.

And as of right now, I have a cheat sheet in front of me with like 21 races that Republicans need to win. Eight to get to the majority. This is what somebody came up with. I count 12 in which they have a lead. Which means they would be at like 222 or 223, but they're probably going to lose at least three of those in California.

They're going to be sitting at about 219 or 220 votes, meaning any two or three people who are complaining about something can block anything from getting done. Democrats are not going to be working with Trump Republicans to pass massive corporate tax cuts. It's not going to happen. The guys from Jersey and New York, they are screaming for this.

SALT. This is the the state local income tax giveaway to wealthy people in suburban districts. They're demanding that. The rest of the Republican caucus doesn't want to do that. They don't want to give away tax breaks to North Jersey and Westchester County residents who they don't.

McMORRIS-SANTORO: They did SALT in the first place, as part of an effort to like put pressure on those high taxes in those. Yeah.

KANE: Yeah. Yeah. They used it as a, they use that, give that curbing that tax credit in order to help defer the cost of their other tax cuts, because those voters are predominantly Democrats in blue states.

So this is setting up to be an epic fight within the Republican party. Region versus region, and it's not going to go as smoothly as they think, assuming that they do hold on and get to 219, 220 seats.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, that is really interesting. And now that you mentioned it, to your point, we saw in this past Congress, how various caucuses were more than willing to throw bombs into their own parties' plans just to get what they want. We had all sorts of fights, but Evan, we've got a minute left here. Just pick up on that, do you also agree that a GOP ambition may not be supported by lawmaking competence in the house?

McMORRIS-SANTORO: I'll never disagree with Paul on matters of Congress.

Okay. This is like the person to talk to about Congress. I will say that, it is a different situation with Trump at the top and Trump in the White House. I feel like some of this competition could be somewhat different. They also have a memory of how this was a bumpy ride when Trump was in the White House the last time.

This is the kind of thing, we go back to some of these conversations about how much thinking about being in power. The Republicans did after Trump was out of power. They felt like their run at the White House, their run in that time did not go very well. That's Project 2025 and all those things.

They've been thinking on this a lot. And I know there are a lot of folks who want this thing to go smoothly, and they now have this mouthpiece of Trump who says, this is what we're going to do and when he says this is what we're going to do, he can get a lot of people to call into their Congresspeople and say this is what we want you to do.

It doesn't mean it clears things up over things. Like SALT, like that tension that we were talking about, but it is a different situation with Trump at the top.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: We're going to switch gears just a little bit now and talk about not only what was at stake during the campaign, but what's at stake with the next Trump administration, because this is an issue that we on this show have focused on a lot. And that is the health and strength of American democracy.

So in order to talk about that, let's just go back quickly to some of the things that Vice President Kamala Harris said yesterday in her concession speech at Howard University.

HARRIS: Now I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it. (LAUGHS) But we must accept the results of this election.

Earlier today, I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition. And that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power. (CHEERS)

CHAKRABARTI: Once again, none of those things did Donald Trump do in 2020. But in her concession speech, Harris also made it clear that in her mind, her fight for U.S. democracy is not over. And she reiterated one of her campaign slogans, which was, When we fight, we win.

HARRIS: And so to everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.

This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice. And the future that we all know we can build together.

CHAKRABARTI: Vice President Kamala Harris in her concession speech yesterday afternoon. Yesterday morning, as President-elect Donald Trump concluded his victory speech, he sounded a message of unity.

TRUMP: It's time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It's time to unite, and we're gonna try. We're gonna try. We have to try, and it's gonna happen. Success will bring us together. I've seen that. I've seen that. I saw that in the first term, when we became more and more successful, people started coming together.

Success is going to bring us together, and we are going to start by all putting America first. We have to put our country first, for at least a period of time. We have to fix it, because together we can truly make America great again for all Americans.

CHAKRABARTI: President-elect Donald Trump yesterday in his victory speech.

Joining us now is Timothy Snyder. He's professor of history at Yale University and author of many books, including "On Tyranny" and "The Road to Unfreedom." Professor Snyder, welcome back to On Point.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Glad to be with you.

CHAKRABARTI: So we've discussed on this show many times, including with you, Professor Snyder, that Donald Trump meets the textbook definition of authoritarian leadership.

And yet he won an overwhelming victory in the Electoral College this week. What does that tell you about Americans view of their own democracy?

SNYDER: Yeah, the first point to make is that obviously, just because you win an election doesn't mean you're not an authoritarian. Plenty of authoritarians and worse have won plenty of elections.

In fact, it's a pretty normal path to power to win an election and then change the system from within and then to stay in power. That is, as to use your word, that's absolutely textbook. As far as what it says about us, I think it says a couple of things. One is that I think many of us lack the imagination of what it would be like to not be able to vote again, and lack the imagination of what it would be like to see our freedoms taken away.

And I think another thing that it says, which is a bit darker, is that I think quite a few of us would be happy not to have these kinds of choices to make again. Mr. Trump, I think, has established a new kind of politics in the U.S., which is a sort of leader cult. And then, for the people who voted against, I think we both, it says that we didn't spend enough time in the last four years resolving certain root problems.

And that we have an information environment where it's hard to get across the successes of the last four years.

CHAKRABARTI: I think, is there something to be gleaned here from evidence of a, like you said, a sort of disengagement by Americans from a belief in their role in our democracy? Because I note that, Trump didn't actually win in terms of absolute number of votes, any more than he earned in, than he got in 2020.

So it's not as if there's an overwhelming number of voters who have added their vote to supporting Donald Trump. It's something else.

SNYDER: Yeah, that's the thing. All the analyses about how we've shifted to the right or there's been some kind of change there. He has a basically static number of votes.

The difference was that there were fewer votes on the other side. So you can't really talk about some kind of shift or some kind of increase. What you can talk about would be, to put your question a slightly different way, the inability to mobilize around protecting the institutions. I think what Mr. Trump has succeeded in doing is putting the Democrats in general, and the vice president in particular, in this position where she simultaneously has to be the person who defends the status quo, who says the institutions are good, and we have to protect them. And to be the person who says, we're going to use the institutions to change the world, to make a brighter future.

And it's hard to do those two messages at the same time. That is his political skill. That is something that he's managed to achieve. Along with getting his followers to believe that somehow he can magically make things change without the institutions.

CHAKRABARTI: Do you really believe that Donald Trump, and the future Trump administration will behave in an authoritarian, even fascist manner?

You talked about people having their votes taken away, never getting a chance to vote again. And the reason why I'm asking you this now, Professor Snyder, is in the past several weeks, I've spoken to a lot of voters who just say, I don't actually believe he's going to do all that stuff that he said to get elected.

But when he actually does get elected, he's going to buckle down and work on things like taxes.

SNYDER: Yeah, it's really easy with Mr. Trump. Because it's not, we have this sort of game we play. Where we say, Oh, you can't criticize him. You can't compare him to authoritarians. You can't compare him to the fascists or whatever, but it's not a comparison.

It's just a description or even a repetition of the things that Mr. Trump himself says when he says that we have an enemy within, and he has to use the military against them, or that he wants to be  like Hitler, in the sense of having Hitler's generals, or when he calls his opponents vermin, or when he tells people, you only have to vote for me once.

These are just the things that he says, and it strikes me as a little curious to imagine that he's going to tell people he's going to take their vote away, in order to get elected again. That really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I think that he, I think he's a very, I think he's very intelligent and talented.

It's just a kind of intelligence and talent, which is unfamiliar to a lot of us. He gets people to think two things at once, right? He gets them both to love the idea that he's a special anointed leader in the fascist sense, who can do anything, and that there will be no negative consequences when our institutions are transformed from within.

And yes, I do. I do really believe that he means to transform the institutions from within. He's not, his kind of politics is not consistent with a sort of constitutional republic that we have now.

CHAKRABARTI: And that brings us to the Republican Party, right? And their role in whatever the agenda of the next Trump administration would be. Because, I come back to Project 2025, which was never secret, right?

The Heritage Foundation and the  authors that it solicited to contribute ideas to Project 2025 has been out there in its entirety. In public. And that includes a sort of remaking in a Trumpist image, the civil service of the United States. Does that, do you think that now that action will actually be taken?

SNYDER: Referring back to the first part of the conversation and referring to Republicans, it's not clear to me how important legislation is really going to be in all of this. Republicans are not really good at passing laws, they haven't been for a while. And insofar as they did manage to pass laws in the last few years, it was with the help of Democrats, which they're not going to have.

What I would foresee is that the kinds of things that are going to happen very quickly, if they are going to happen, are going to come out of the executive branch. And the easiest things to do will be, or at least to attempt, will be the eliminations. Like you say, firing the people who are in the civil service and know how to do their jobs, and replacing them with loyalists.

The thing about that is that that won't magically get things done. What it will do is it will make it very hard to get things done, because all the loyalists. Although they might be able to achieve a few specific things, they're not going to be able to carry out the everyday business of government very well. And so what you're going to generate is a kind of not just incompetence, but a kind of deliberate, roiling chaos and then try to govern out of that. And then when people don't like the chaos Mr. Trump steps forth and says well, as you know, as the president I need to have greater powers than I had before.

CHAKRABARTI: Can an authoritarian rise if there is a persuasive and effective opposition party in that country?

SNYDER: Effective assumes that you have a way to be effective. If you're somebody who cares about the constitutional future of the U.S., you really have to be thinking about the next round of elections in two years. Because four years from, between now and four years from now, a lot of things can change in unimaginable, unpredictable directions.

And we've just seen how Mr. Trump himself is quite popular. There was a Trump effect for Congress and Senate this time around. There won't be that in two years. So in the congressional elections of two years from now, the Democrats basically have to win, big, everything, in order to be something which could look like it's effective.

Whether they'll be able to pass any legislation beyond Trump's veto is another question. But I think that's an existential test for them. And probably an existential test for American democracy. Because between now and then, it's not clear how Democrats on a national level can be effective, on the state level, at the level of cities.

It's very important to show that Democrats can get things done. That has to be their message. We can bring people together. We can actually pass legislation. We can make our cities and our states look better than the federal government.

CHAKRABARTI: See, the reason why I ask this, Professor Snyder, is that I am leaning on your expertise as a historian here. Because in the United States, we've heard a lot of people say I'm voting for Trump. Democracy, whatever, but the democracy as we have it right now has not been serving me adequately. That is a genuine feeling amongst a lot of Americans. And at the same time, the messaging from the Democratic Party, from Vice President Harris on Trump's threat to democracy. It obviously didn't land, because a lot of people were saying if he's a threat to the democracy as it is right now, fine, so be it.

And so I'm just wondering if, did the Democrats miss in their messaging there, or simply that, like you said, they haven't shown adequate success in legislation that people can feel had an impact on them?

SNYDER: Yeah. Lots of layers here. One which I just have to make clear. Is that in my view, I believe that Trump is, Trump and the people around him, because one thing which is important is that it's not just Trump. It's Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Putin.

It's a group of people who are either billionaires or in Trump's case, want to be billionaires, right? It's not just him. It's a cluster of people who are going to be an executive branch. And that's important to keep in mind. I think a lot of the politics in the next 4 years is actually going to be like intra-billionaire quarreling rather than the thing that we're used to.

So the second point, though, is that when people in America say they're afraid for the future of democracy, that's not necessarily a Democratic point. Republicans, in politics, as opposed to reality, because Republicans think that Kamala Harris is a communist, and she's going to overthrow the regime.

And so when you say like, when you get these big numbers for fear for democracy, it's roughly half Republicans. So it's not so much that the point doesn't land. It's that people see it in different ways. What the Democrats have to be able to do is to make the connection between voting rights, more democracy, and people having access to things that matter in their lives.

And that's been a push, right? The Biden administration passed some really important things, which did get us out of recession, which did get us out of a pandemic. And that mattered a lot, but I think Harris needed to do more on the everyday things. But also, we have to accept that there are a lot of folks who are in information environments where they are told that even when things are black, they're white. Even when the economy's going well, it's going badly. And that has a lot to do with this as well.

CHAKRABARTI: So finally, Professor Snyder, I wonder if it seems that there's this sort of global rejection of incumbency.

There's been some writing about that in the past 48 hours. And we've also on this show, in fact, talked about the discontent with democracy in many nations, which has given the rise to these strong men in various countries. But is there also then evidence of any pushback to authoritarianism that we can look to anywhere in the world right now?

SNYDER: Yeah. The first is that we need to remember that America is a big, complex, interesting country. And even inside this, even during this election, as the vice president emphasized in her concession speech, there are all kinds of positive examples of people learning to work together and to organize.

And it's not that resistance doesn't come from nowhere. Resistance comes from the pattern of trying to do positive things together. And yes, of course, there are examples all around the world of resistance to autocracy. Ukraine resisting Putin's wish to autocratically rule their country comes to mind. Poland pulled back from what was very close to an authoritarian transition in their last election.

There are positive examples. Moldova just had a presidential election in which a female candidate defeated the Russian backed candidate and will move her country towards Europe. Most likely. Yes, there are positive examples all over the world. I think Trump had an incumbency advantage, which is specific to our two party system. And also, to our short memory. Where, when people are dissatisfied, then he's able to present himself as the alternative to the status quo, even though he was the status quo himself.

Not so very long ago.