Why voters went back to Trump, with Molly Ball and Nicole Hemmer

Transcript

Listen: On the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer dives into the far-reaching consequences of Donald Trump’s return to office as he becomes the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms. With strong wins across key swing states like Pennsylvania, Trump’s decisive victory reflects widespread voter frustration over issues like inflation and immigration and signals a major shift toward populism and anti-establishment sentiment. Historian Nicole Hemmer notes, “We’re witnessing the acceleration of democratic erosion, where checks and balances may no longer hold,” pointing to the dangers of unchecked power as Trump’s administration begins to take shape.

Joined by Vanderbilt historian Hemmer and Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball, Bremmer explores how Trump’s policies and approach could reshape American governance, especially with the GOP in control of the Executive, Senate, and likely the House. Ball highlights the risks involved, saying, “The real test will be whether the barriers that once existed to curb executive power still stand—or if they’re eroded by design.” They also reflect on the Democratic Party’s internal challenges, including how it must find ways to reconnect with working-class voters and navigate its ideological divide between progressive and centrist visions.

Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.

Transcript: Why voters went back to Trump, with Molly Ball and Nicole Hemmer

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you can find extended versions of my conversations on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and this week, we are unpacking Donald Trump's decisive win in the most polarized national election in modern American history. The votes are in, the results are clear, President-elect Donald J. Trump will be the first Commander in Chief to serve non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. And after months of us hearing that this election would come down to just tens of thousands of votes in a few key swing states, definitely didn't.

Take Pennsylvania, the state that decided the election. Nearly every county there shifted toward Trump winning him a state he lost in 2020. Philadelphia gave Trump one of his biggest bumps, moving by more than five points. Though Kamala Harris still did win the city. Now Trump is poised to move back into the White House with clear wins in both the electoral college and the popular vote. He'll also enjoy the support of a GOP senate and probably a Republican House too. This is for a man who came within millimeters of death in Butler, Pennsylvania just months ago, a victory beyond his wildest MAGA-dreams.

How did changing demographic support for Trump among minority groups tilt the race in his favor? What does the result mean for America's democracy and its place in the world? And how will the second Trump term shape the fate of Ukraine and Gaza? Plenty to get into, and I'll do that with two women who understand the GOP and American media better than most. Nicole Hemmer is an historian of modern conservatism at Vanderbilt University, and Molly Ball, the senior political correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. They both joined me now.

Nicole Hemmer, Molly Ball, thanks so much for joining us on GZERO World.

Molly Ball:

Happy to be here.

Nicole Hemmer:

Thanks for having us.

Ian Bremmer:

Everyone said the polls were going to be so close. Razor close election. It was not. In fact, the popular vote actually went for Donald Trump. I know of no one among the major pollsters that thought that that was going to happen. I saw one guy in the betting markets in France that was betting on it. What did everyone get wrong here? Nicole, you start.

Nicole Hemmer:

Well, part of it is that those polls have such a wide range of margin of error that actually a Donald Trump popular vote win was within the range of many of the polls because they were so tight. But I think that nobody looking at those polls thought that it was going to end up like this. That Trump would so easily sweep all of these states, that there would be such a rightward move, even in states that we knew were going to go red or states like New York and New Jersey. So I think that what was missed was what's been missed in 2016 and 2020. These pollsters have not yet figured out how to really integrate and poll the pro-Trump vote, and this is the third presidential election in a row where they've missed it.

Ian Bremmer:

Indeed. Molly?

Molly Ball:

Yeah, I want to defend the honor of the pollsters who, as Nicole said, we're broadly showing a tied race with a margin of error, and many pollsters found that Trump could narrowly win this election, and it looks right now like that is what happened. It looks like he's got about 51% of the popular vote and she's got about 48%. That is well within the range that the polling averages broadly had when they said that this was a tied race. Was there an error that was directional? Did those polling averages mostly underestimate Trump? Yes, by a little bit. But again, they were showing a tied race in all seven of the swing states, which meant that it was quite likely that one candidate would swing all seven of those states by a narrow margin, and that appears to be what has happened.

Ian Bremmer:

Thanks for that, Molly. So the Republicans, of course, now don't just hold the executive, they have the Supreme Court. They have the Senate. They are very likely at the time of this recording to win the House. That certainly seems... I understand that the popular vote was close, and yet it is a sweep for a very different worldview, a very different set of political priorities than have been held by Biden, and that would've been held by Harris. What do you think that means for governance in the United States going forward? What should the US be doing differently on the back of that?

Molly Ball:

Well, Donald Trump was elected on the strength of his promises to solve what people viewed as the most important problems facing America, particularly inflation and immigration. In fact, both candidates campaigned on tightening the border, although I think most voters thought that Trump had more credibility in that regard. And he now, as you say, he has a governing majority. If as we believe right now, he does win the House of Representatives in addition to the Senate. So that means he will be able to implement his agenda and voters will be able to evaluate whether he kept those promises.

Many of the things he has promised he won't need Congress to do, particularly erasing the traditional independence of the Justice Department. He has promised to fire the FBI director, the special counsel. He, of course, gets to appoint his own new cabinet, including a new attorney general. We expect the legal cases against him to disappear, and if he keeps his promises, he will go after many of his political enemies and opponents in the Democratic Party.

The tariffs he has promised are largely within the President's purview. That's something he could enact on day one. Economists almost unanimously believe that those tariffs would lead to more inflation, not less and would be bad for the economy. And many of Trump's own supporters, particularly on Wall Street, don't believe he'll actually do it. They think that it's a negotiating posture on his part, but if he wants to, that's something he can do on his own authority.

Similarly, the mass deportations he has promised, those are largely possible under existing law, and we expect him to reinstate a lot of the immigration-focused executive orders that were in place when he left office four years ago with the intention of closing the border to the extent possible and expelling as many unauthorized immigrants as he can.

Ian Bremmer:

Inflation, immigration, certainly two of the biggest issues out there, Nicole. And while both are coming down, they're coming down from high levels. Is this something that in part Trump is just going to be the beneficiary of cyclical change, or do you think that leaning in is going to make a huge difference?

Nicole Hemmer:

Oh, I think he's going to be the beneficiary of cyclical change. In fact, I think his election in many ways is part of that larger global cycle that we're in right now that we've seen incumbents across democracies get turfed because there's so much discontent over those precise issues, particularly inflation. But there has also been pretty strong anti-immigration sentiment across most of Europe and here in the United States as well. So I think that he's the beneficiary of these big global changes that are happening.

A lot of the policies that Molly just outlined could make those things worse. I mean, tariffs would likely spike inflation, and so that would be a big problem, I think, for Donald Trump economically. But again, voters weren't necessarily voting for tariffs. They were voting in frustration against inflation and they wanted something different and they wanted some sort of change. And most voters don't really have a strong sense of what tariffs might do, and they were voting on this big broad range of issues. So there is potentially a disconnect between the problems that are motivating voters to throw out the Democratic Party and the policies that a Trump administration would put into place. But when you only have two choices, really, functionally, two choices when you go into the voting booth, you get the policies that you get when you vote for Trump.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, Trump has been a very strong opponent of globalization and also more hard to define globalism in the sense that he's been saying, "I'm going to end these wars. I'm going to pull the troops out." He did his best on that in Afghanistan. May not have gone very well in the ground in Afghanistan, but he got the troops home and Biden was left with the remains of that deal. Wants to end the wars in the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine wants to bring capital back to the United States, doesn't want free trade, wants tariffs in part because he wants more jobs in America, wants more money in America. He's just not interested in a lot of the values that the United States has said it has stood for over the course of the past several generations.

Now, irrespective of whether or not those policies are seen to be the most rational by economists, that does seem to resonate, right? I mean, with both just the Republican base and also frankly, Democrats have picked up a lot of that. What does that tell you about this moment in time? What do you think we should learn from that, Nicole?

Nicole Hemmer:

People are looking around at the world that they live in, at the politics that they've inherited over the past few generations, and they don't feel like it's working for them. And in many cases, they're right. It's not working for them. They're laden with student loan debt. They're being sent off to unpopular wars. There was a major financial crisis and it didn't close the gap between the rich and the poor when the recovery happened. In fact, in some ways, it accelerated it. And so people feel as though they are losing out economically. They feel as though that they're losing out on the world stage, and some of that is backed up by evidence and some of it is not. But that feeling that this order isn't working for them is a real call for change.

And it is the case that in the past, especially the 1990s, 2000s, even into the 20-teens, neither party was really good at responding to those strong underlying grievances. And the voters weren't always good at signaling their preferences. I mean, if you think about the 2004 election, which I think for many Democrats feels very familiar in the aftermath of the 2024 election, there had been this sense that George W. Bush had really screwed up in his first term, and yet he won reelection pretty handily, including in the popular vote. And then within six months, eight months, the electorate had started to turn on his policies across the board. And so, again, there's a disconnect that happens, but it is an expression of something that is real and legitimate, which is that people aren't having their material and political needs served. And politicians have not yet either found the will or the program to meet those needs.

Ian Bremmer:

Molly?

Molly Ball:

Yeah, we're in a global anti-establishment moment, and that is certainly true in the United States. I mean, Donald Trump has been very consistent on this point over the course of his three presidential campaigns. He has continued to insist that the system is rigged and that the establishment is corrupt. And Democrats have largely campaigned on protecting our institutions and holding them up as sacred and inviolable. And it turns out many people don't believe that. Many people don't agree with that. They like the idea that Trump in his wrecking ball bull in a China shop sort of way, promises to disrupt the establishment and promises to break up those corrupt institutions that aren't serving people's needs. So that has always been a big component of his platform. I think he bolstered that appeal by bringing figures like RFK Jr. into the tent this time around, fringe conspiracy theorists political actors who amplified this idea that the establishment is lying to you, that our institutions are corrupt, and that the whole thing needs to be smashed up and remade from the bottom up.

Ian Bremmer:

So Molly, you're not responsible for the editorial side at the Wall Street Journal, but certainly their coverage in discussing the candidates implied that there's not much to worry about here. That yeah, people complain that Trump is going to be undermine rule of law and he has all of these extreme advisors, but in reality, that's not his focus. He's not really that. He's not going to follow through. He's not going to execute on that. He's not really competent on that. We don't really have that much to worry about. Do you think that's accurate?

Molly Ball:

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal takes sides, takes positions. I'm a reporter, so I do not. I will say it is certainly the case that many conservatives, including the conservatives who sit on the Wall Street Journal editorial board, do think that a lot of the liberal hyperventilating about the supposed danger that Trump poses to democracy is a bit overblown, and we will see. He has already tried to overturn an election through violence once. That to me was a pretty significant blow to the constitutional order. But he also has stocked his political operation and the transition that he is assembling now is focused on making sure that he's surrounded by loyalists, not to say "yes men" who will make sure that he can do the things that he wants. So if there are not those barriers before him, what is he willing to do? What norms and traditions, not to say laws, is he willing to violate in order to pursue his goals? And will there be anyone around him to stop him if like so many of the advisors in his first term, they view the things that he wants to do as unwise or even dangerous or illegal?

So I think that is going to be a significant difference in a second Trump term is that there are many fewer people around him who feel a sense of loyalty to those traditional norms and many more people who are interested in finding ways for him to implement all the things he wants to do.

Ian Bremmer:

I'm asking in part because you had just said, well, look, I mean there's a big anti-establishment sentiment that we see around the world, but particularly in the United States right now, and Trump has really tapped into it. And yet what I see at the Wall Street Journal with Bezos overturning the editorial of the Washington Post with a lot of the CEOs around the country, the bankers and the tech companies and all these is a desire of the establishment to find a way to ensure that they're going to be just fine with Trump. Don't worry about this. Don't worry about the lack of guardrails. It's going to be okay. We're going to find a way to work with this guy irrespective of what he does. Am I accurate in that portrayal or is that unfair?

Molly Ball:

Well, I think we will have to see what Trump actually does and whether he has any interest in disturbing the priorities of people like that. Something like the tariffs that we've talked about, that many people on Wall Street think he is just using for leverage and actually at the end of the day, he's not going to impose these sweeping across the board 20% or 50% or 100% or 200% tariffs that he has explicitly promised. This is not some secret Project 2025 conspiracy theory. This is something he has said in every stump speech and made very explicit. If he actually tries to do that, I think you will see a big uprising from the business community because those policies would, according to traditional economic analysis, be quite bad for them. So is he actually willing to upset his allies in, say, the business establishment or is the only establishment that he takes aim at the liberal establishment, which I think many conservatives would be happy to see him disrupt.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, Nicole, what I'm hearing from Molly is a level of concern. I mean, certainly in terms of January 6th and what we saw in 2020 and the fact that the guardrails on Trump are more about perhaps his own restraint and the extent to which he personally decides not to take on acts that would be considered as fundamental against rule of law that we wouldn't have considered such a threat in previous presidencies. How much are you worried about that and what should we be focused on, Nicole?

Nicole Hemmer:

I'm quite worried about it. I'm not worried about corporations and billionaires like Jeff Bezos. They have the resources to protect and take care of themselves. But we've already lived through one Trump administration and women have fewer reproductive lives and they're dying because of the policies that were put in place by the judges that were put in place by Donald Trump. If there are mass deportations, people are going to die. People are going to be irreparably harmed by those policies. And so I'm certainly concerned about how his policies will affect millions of people.

And when it comes to Donald Trump, I mean, the thing is you never quite know which of the policies that he has stated or that are in Project 2025, because I do think that a lot of that is a guide for how to fill in some of the blanks in Donald Trump's agenda. But you don't know which of those are going to be put into place. Any of them could be put into place, and when they are, they could be real dangers for a lot of people. And that can take the form of real bodily and material danger, but it could also be these challenges to rule of law, which has been a big through line of the first Trump administration in these four years that he's been out of office.

I mean, it already is doing a kind of irreparable damage to a particular vision of democracy bounded by rule of law to have reelected someone who tried to overturn an election violently. And so there's not going to be any real sort of constraint in terms of accountability on Donald Trump. And so those restraints, as Molly were saying, really just work out to does he feel like doing it and is there enough resistance in the Republican Party to stop him from pursuing some agenda items? And I think that's about it as far as guardrails.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, Trump does believe that acts of a sitting president cannot be criminal. So in other words, from his perspective, as soon as he takes that office, he can act with impunity. Now, that is certainly not aligned with checks and balances and rule of law. I mean, I guess the question would be for both of you, either can go first, would be where do you think the most... See, because I don't believe, and I think most of us don't believe that we're about to experience a dictatorship in the United States. And yet there is a question of what kind of constraints, what kind of checks beyond the way that the President-elect happens to feel on a given day we should most be relying on, we should most be focused on as he takes office?

Molly Ball:

I had a version of this conversation with the now Vice President-elect, JD Vance, and one of the things that he said was, of course, the President is reigned in by the Constitution. Although I feel like one of the things we learned in Trump's first term is that there aren't any enforcement mechanisms in the Constitution. But beyond that, he said, "A President should get to do the things that he wants to do and has promised to do." And I do think that voters broadly feel that a president ought to be able to enact the things and to do the things he has promised to do, of course, within the structure of the system, which requires you to go to Congress for some things and not others. But I think a lot of people are frustrated with Washington gridlock, with the feeling that our institutions are so sort of calcified and bottlenecked that they don't allow anything to get done. We can't build things. We can't create change. We can't really get anything moving in this system because there are so many veto points that have grown, encrusted on the basic checks and balances guaranteed by the Constitution that even a sitting president can't really make things happen.

So I think there is a mandate for Trump to actually execute on his agenda. Then the question is, is there legal resource? Is there recourse? Is there constitutional recourse for anything that he's trying to do that is actually over the line? But many Republicans feel that the idea that he could be bottled up by lawsuits or as they would term it, lawfare, is just unfair.

Ian Bremmer:

Nicole?

Nicole Hemmer:

There is really no difference, I think, in Donald Trump's mind between policy and self-enrichment. And so this idea that the president is pursuing his agenda and should have free rein to pursue his agenda, I think that does have a more popular support than, I think, many liberals and proponents of rule of law would hope. That's not unusual in the United States. I think there has been a broad support for impunity for some parts of the government, and I think that Donald Trump is the beneficiary of a decades-long effort to try to prevent there from being effective tools of accountability. You see this in the 1980s with Iran-Contra, which ends in pardons and no impeachment even though it involves a number of laws being broken by people throughout the government.

You see it in the 1990s with the use of impeachment against Bill Clinton for something that Americans just didn't feel like was a crime, a high crime and a misdemeanor in any way. Something that weakened the tool of impeachment to the point when it was used against Donald Trump on two different occasions, it proved to be completely useless as a tool of accountability. And I think that those tools of accountability have been so degraded and were so degraded by the time that Donald Trump entered office the first time that he was already able to act with a level of impunity that will only have accelerated when he comes back into office in no small part because he's not just of the belief that he has impunity for official acts, but the Supreme Court has said just a few months ago that he does in Trump versus the United States.

So the idea that there are levers that can be pulled that will suddenly snap into place an accountability regime, those levers don't exist.

Ian Bremmer:

Is it fair in that environment to say that the existence of the US as a representative democracy is less functional, less effective, has significantly eroded today compared to say, 10 years ago, also compared to its peers in the G7 around the world, for example? Would you go that far, Nicole?

Nicole Hemmer:

Yes. I would say that the erosion of representative democracy rooted in rule of order has not just eroded over the past 10 years. I think the erosion has accelerated over the past 10 years, but I think it has been in decline for a lot of reasons and for a lot of good reasons in some cases, right? People lost faith in institutions in part because those institutions didn't earn their faith, that those institutions weren't serving them. And then people who weren't interested in fixing those institutions got a hold of them and are now using them in ways that aren't particularly supportive of rule of law-bound representative democracy. It's not going to look like an authoritarian dictator on January 20th. But that doesn't mean that we have a healthy, thriving, inclusive, multiracial democracy in the United States, and in fact, we're likely moving away from that.

Ian Bremmer:

Molly, do you think we're moving away from that?

Molly Ball:

I think that's not for me to judge. It's my job to observe the political realm and report on it, not to make judgments about the health of democracy. Look, we just had a free, fair, secure presidential election that delivered a clear mandate for one candidate. The other candidate has gracefully conceded and offered a ringing affirmation of the peaceful transfer of power. I think all of those things are healthy. All of those things did not happen in 2020 when Donald Trump refused to concede. But I think it is a good thing for our democracy that they have happened this time and we should go forward on that basis.

Ian Bremmer:

It certainly feels like a good thing for democracy that everyone can agree on who actually won the presidential race, even if it wouldn't have happened the other way around. Do you think that's a fair thing to say, Molly?

Molly Ball:

We can't know, obviously, but I think yes. The true test of Republican's faith in elections is going to be will they accept an election that they lose? It's easy for both sides to accept elections that they win.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, it does seem to be easier in the last couple rounds for the Democrats to accept an election that they lost, but you're right, the data still is limited.

Look, before we close, let me turn to the Democratic Party since we haven't talked about them much. It certainly seems that at least on some of their policies, they have been out of step with the population at large. I mean, you've talked, Molly, about tariffs and the fact that the establishment will snap back, but of course, the Trump tariffs that he put in place, for example on China, Biden could've rolled them back if he wanted to. He chose not to, even though they cost American consumers. So revealed preference, maybe Trump got that one right. A lot of the social policies that the Republicans are criticizing on DEI, for example, affirmative action related to it, certainly on issues around transgender rights, these are things that the Republicans have been able to run against effectively with most of the population. Do you think the Democrats... What lessons, I should say, to become more effective do you think the Democrats should be listening to what signals are most important? I'll let you go first, Molly.

Molly Ball:

Yeah. This debate is already starting to take shape within the Democratic Party. It is, of course, normal after every election for the losing party to do some introspection and some soul-searching as they try to figure out a way forward and what they got wrong, why they did not present an appealing platform to the electorate. And while there is this global anti-incumbent mood that we've been talking about, that Kamala Harris was of course a victim of, and she clearly underestimated the electorate's appetite for change or just didn't take it seriously, she really refused to differentiate herself in any substantive way from the administration that she'd been a part of. But beyond that, there is the question of particularly since Donald Trump has broadened his appeal with working class voters, that is to say, voters who don't have a four-year college degree across the map, white working class, but also black and brown voters without college degrees. And those are the voters that Democrats have always claimed to be representing and working to help.

So I think there's a lot of soul-searching in the Democratic Party about how to reach those people and how to offer them policies that appeal to them. One part of this discussion is that Harris really did not do anything to distance herself from the far left. She took more centrist positions than she'd taken in her 2020 presidential campaign, but she never explained why those positions had changed or explicitly repudiated left-wing policies such as the provision of taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery to prison inmates, which was the subject of the single most well-funded ad-

Ian Bremmer:

Ad spend, yeah.

Molly Ball:

... that Donald Trump's campaign aired.

Ian Bremmer:

Absolutely, yeah.

Molly Ball:

So I think that was an ad that was less about transgender rights than about a policy that many people simply saw as going too far. And again, her campaign never responded to that ad, never indicated whether or not she still supported that policy and didn't try to repudiate any of the left-wing voices. But then, of course, you have the left-wing of the Democratic Party arguing that in fact, her problem was the opposite, that when she was taking these centrist positions, campaigning with Liz Cheney and so forth, that what she actually should've been offering was a far more progressive platform that would've indicated far more of this anti-establishment change agenda than the one that she ended up offering. So this is going to be a very lively, not to say contentious debate within the Democratic Party in the weeks and months and potentially years to come.

Ian Bremmer:

No, your last point, certainly you hear a lot of that for the Michigan vote and Arab Americans that voted very heavily for Trump because Kamala Harris was not seen as moving left enough away from Biden on Israel-Palestine.

But Nicole, on the transgender issue, this reminded me of Clinton and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Gays in the military where, I mean, clearly there were a lot of people on the pro-integration side of that agenda that felt like that was a weenie move, that you should've just gone and done the right thing and made it possible for gays to openly serve. But Clinton at the time didn't feel like the country was ready for it, and as a consequence was more successful ultimately with the policy. I mean, have the Democrats been trying to lead the country in a place that they just don't want to go? Is that a lot of what we're seeing here?

Nicole Hemmer:

I actually don't see that as the major problem for the Democratic Party. I think the Democratic Party's major problem has been that even though we've had charismatic leaders like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one of the things that they haven't really been able to formulate, that the party as a whole hasn't been able to formulate is a vision of the future of how government works, how society works, of how the economy works, that is broadly appealing and that makes sense for people in the 21st century. I think there is too much of a reversion to the economic policies and visions of the New Deal era or the 20th century. I think it's important for the Democratic Party to support unions, but unions aren't the center of the economy anymore. And so there has to be a way of not just pursuing incrementalism, not just nibbling at the edges of the problems that people see with the economy and the global order, but really offering a new, positive, popular vision of how the economy might work for people and showing how that would work.

And I think that in pursuit of that, I don't actually think that the Democratic Party needs to sacrifice the rights of other people. I know that's not what's being suggested here, but I think that that is how the conversation can often go is that, well, you need to wait because we need to appeal to more moderate and even conservative voters. And while I do think that the Democratic Party needs to grow its base, I think that there are appeals that you can make economically and politically that don't necessarily center or don't necessarily require giving up rights for other groups of people.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay. Healthy tension between the two of you on this one, and I think an intelligent one. So hey, I want to close with something a little more simple, which is the United States may not have the best democracy in the world, but it does have the biggest election in terms of sheer scale of how long it goes on, how much is spent. The Americans are number one. And Trump, he may not be all that interested in policy, but he loves campaigning. I mean, he's really good at it, right? He's out there. He wants to do more rallies. He likes talking to the media. He likes seeing himself in headlines. I mean, how much of this at the end of the day is just that the way to get the job as president is to be really great a campaigning to be president. And it turns out that Trump is really great a campaigning to be president, right? I mean, if you made it all four years, maybe he would've won by an even bigger landslide. Is that a reasonable thing to say?

Molly Ball:

I disagree with that position for the simple reason that Donald Trump is not a popular person and never has been. More people have always disliked the "Trump show" than have liked it. And many of even his voters dislike his antics. Now, does he succeed by being a larger cultural figure, a celebrity who's able to break out of the political realm and reach people who are maybe not connected as much, who are not political junkies, or not following politics on a day-to-day basis? Perhaps, but that is, of course, something that the Democrats could try to do as well, and perhaps it's something that people have to do in this age of fragmented mass media. If you want to win an election, you do have to find ways to communicate with people, even people who don't read the newspaper. And that has always been true.

So yes, Trump loves putting on a show, and people, at least some people, do appreciate that. And it was funny to me to hear him. He got reflective over the last week of the campaign talking about, "Oh, this is the last time we'll do this, and hasn't it been special?" But last time he was president, he kept holding the rallies. So I don't see any reason to expect that he won't continue to do that. Although maybe now that he doesn't have any more campaigns to run, he won't. But look, the presidency is a symbolic position. The president is the leader of the nation. He doesn't have that much power on paper, it's Congress that makes the laws, and the president mostly conducts foreign policy and runs the executive branch, but the president is the symbolic leader of the nation. He or she is the person who is in people's living rooms and representing America abroad. And so people do have an investment in that popular figure and what it represents.

Ian Bremmer:

Nicole, Trump disagrees with Molly. He certainly thinks that he's the reason why he won and that he's constantly out there in the media and he's the most effective campaigner. It's only because his people try to constrain him and make him act differently than he is that he ends up going south. And at the end, he's going to see this as validation of everything, of course, that he's been doing. Do you agree with Trump or do you agree with Molly, Nicole?

Nicole Hemmer:

Always, in that case, I would agree with Molly, but I wouldn't put Trump's narcissism at the center of a political analysis. I think that Molly is right about the role of celebrity and how important it is to be able to navigate not just the political celebrity environment that has been growing in the United States since the 1980s and 1990s, but that something fundamental has changed about campaigning. If you looked at the metrics for a winning campaign, you would say all of those door knocks in Pennsylvania that the Harris campaign did, all of the money that they raised from small dollar donors, clearly they had the superior campaign, and yet turnout was much better for those people who voted for Donald Trump.

And so I do think that there is something about his willingness to campaign differently that has been effective in this campaign. Or that has at least shown us that going forward in the 21st century for presidential campaigns, we need to shake off a little bit of the conventional wisdom about how campaigns are won and think more broadly about this aspect of communicating values, communicating ideas, and communicating image. And that last one is something that Trump is particularly good at.

Ian Bremmer:

Nicole Hemmer, Molly Ball, thanks for joining me on GZERO World today.

Molly Ball:

Thank you.

Nicole Hemmer:

Thank you so much.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World five stars, only five stars? Otherwise don't do it, on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends.