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Podcast: (Un)packing the Supreme Court with Yale Law's Emily Bazelon
Listen: The Supreme Court, one of the three branches of government that makes up this country's democratic system of checks and balances, doesn't have a military. As a result, when its justices make a ruling, they are counting on a strong sense of public trust to ensure their decisions are carried out. Not all countries on this planet can count on that public trust, and with popular support for the Court plummeting to record lows, some experts fear that the United States may soon be unable to as well.
So as SCOTUS gears up for what is sure to be a blockbuster June of Court rulings, a flurry of ethical questions surrounding the bench--as well as its hard-right turn under a conservative supermajority--have made the prospect of a potential Constitutional crisis more plausible than ever before. And then comes the 2024 election. On the podcast this week, Yale Law legal expert and co-host of Slate's Political Gabfest joins Ian Bremmer to discuss the Court's many headwinds ahead, as well as the specific cases slated to be decided in the coming weeks.
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Quick Take: The election is serious, but don't panic
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody, Ian Bremmer here. It's Monday and a quick take for you right before the election. That's right. Don't panic. All of you remembering Douglas Adams, the great Douglas Adams, for those people that back in high school, this is the kind of book that you knew people that read the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. You said, "That's probably a normal human being a little dorky, but isn't going to kill me," where the people that were all about Atlas shrugged and the Fountainhead, those were people that were problematic later in life. That's just my own personal view. Maybe a little Tolkien. That was also fine. A little Hobbit. I'm friendly that way, but this is the message I really want people to keep in mind in the next 24, 48, 72 hours, the next week, two, three weeks.
It's going to be tough out there. People are going nuts. They're going crazy. The media is making it worse. The social media is making it worse, and it's going to be a tough time for the United States. But to be clear, we are not on the brink of becoming an authoritarian state. We are not about to be a Banana Republic. We are not on the verge of collapse. Instead, we are very divided. A lot of people are hurting. A lot of people are angry, and we have a whole bunch of people in very different information bubbles. They don't talk to each other, engage with each other, and that is a problem. That makes the country feel so much less purposeful, mission-oriented, communal, civic, all the things that we want. If you've got a flag, if you want to be united under that flag, you have to care about all the people in the country, not just the ones that agree with you politically.
Look, this election matters. It matters a lot. It matters more than usual. I'm the one that usually says, "American elections, whoever the president is ultimately doesn't impact your life that much." This time, it does, and it does largely because there is such a big crisis right now. If you get Biden and if you get a majority Democrat in Senate, you're going to have $3 trillion of stimulus come February or March. That's massive for a new American president. If it's a divided Congress or if Trump wins, it's going to be a lot less. So, there is a very big, a significant gap. The markets are responding too. It's going to matter a lot to the people, to the States, the municipalities, right? That does really matter.
Also, if there's a majority democratic Senate, you will end the filibuster... Heck, Washington DC will probably become the 51st state. You will have the Voter Rights Act. You'll probably redo the census again because it was cut short. These are significant impacts for a long time in the United States, not just measured in years, but decades of impact and trajectory.
So, I absolutely think Biden versus Trump is very meaningful. If Biden comes in, my taxes are going up a lot. Certainly, to Obama levels, but probably much more than that, and that's going to affect a lot of wealthy Americans. The regulatory environment's going to change a lot, and if you're in a corporate that's affected by that, that's very significant. So I don't want to say that Biden versus Trump doesn't matter. It's just the idea that Biden versus Trump is somehow this end of the world for the United States is not the case.
Now, what do we think is going to happen in this election? Well, the polls are telling you very clearly Biden is ahead by a lot. He's been ahead consistently by a lot for a long time. It's been very stable. There's been no closing of that gap the way there was between Hillary and Trump. So that means whether you look at FiveThirtyEight or you look at RealClearPolitics... I personally, we've got to deal with Ipsos and we do a blend of all of the different swing state polls, we look at the national polls. It's very clear that it's 85, 90% likely looking at the polls that Trump is going to lose.
But that doesn't mean that Trump is going to lose. That means that if you have seven, eight, nine, 10 elections, one of those elections at least Trump is going to win. That is an expected outcome of a multiple series. I just wish that more people don't think that the polls are wrong when you have an outcome that's unlikely. It just means that you only have a one shot at something that you'd like a larger number for.
Well, not that we wouldn't want that from a personal perspective, because it would drive everyone truly batshit, but personally, that's what it means. So there is a real potential that Trump is the President in a legitimate election, a legitimately counted election, one that Biden would need to concede for, and Trump would lead for four more years. If that happens, we'll be okay. We'll get through it, right? Again, it's going to drive some people insane, but the reality is that the United States will continue to persist as a damaged, but nonetheless, robust country, economy, even representative democracy.
On the other hand, it's much more likely... it's vastly more likely that Biden wins. What is very unusual about this election is that even in a significant Biden win, the amount of contestation is going to be very high. The willingness of Trump to say that he has won, if he has not, is pretty significant. If he decides to do that and say it's rigged and call his supporters out onto the streets, angry that the democratic establishment is trying steal his rightfully won election, I think you're going to see a lot of violence.
We've already seen some of that with lots of convoys of Trump supporters in trucks and cars. I haven't seen that they've been armed significantly, though you saw some of that in Portland, but easily plausible going forward. I've seen a lot of them obscuring license plates, because if you're shutting down traffic or shutting down a bridge, doing something illegal, they're trying to avoid responsibility for that illegality. That's not exactly conscientious objectionism. But if Trump were to directly call for his supporters to go out in the streets because they're going to take the election from him, I think that's going to be a level of demonstrations and violence in the country that will certainly rival anything we've seen since '68, in other words, anything in my lifetime. That's a problem.
That's why you see so many cities with streets and having all the storefronts getting boarded up, and that's being true in big urban areas all over the place, including right downstairs on Fifth Avenue from my office right now. Of course, when that happens, a lot of people opportunistically just come out to engage in looting and in violence and rioting. So, I think that's real. I think there's a very good chance that's going to happen, but I also think that it's not forever.
In fact, it's not even for a long time. Then eventually, we get to a new president and the ability of Trump to contest, to obscure, to create chaos is reasonably high. The ability to actually subvert the outcome is a very different story. Then it would have to be very close indeed, and even then for him to steal the presidency, no. For him to contest the presidency and create a constitutional crisis that would be like 1876 where you need a political outcome, that is indeed feasible if it's really close. That, we will have a good sense of whether that could happen or not in just over 30... say 30 hours plus.
So we'll get there. Don't panic stick with us. GZERO Media will be talking to you all the way through this. Be good, everybody. I'll talk to you soon.
Quick Take: One week until the US election
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. This is the last week before elections, have only lasted for two years, cost billions of dollars. We're sick of it. We're ready. We're ready to get past this. What do we think is going to happen?
Well, let's be clear. Biden is way ahead, and it's hard for incumbents to lose. They tended to win in the United States. They need to be unpopular and unlucky to lose, but Trump does seem to be checking both of those boxes. He's never been enormously popular. He has a pretty narrow base that is very strongly supportive of him, some 38 to 42% back and forth, but a narrow band, which has been pretty consistent for most of them the last four years, but he's also been massively unlucky. Unlucky, how?
Well, the timing of the election, compared to coronavirus. I mean, it's getting colder, and people are going back inside, and the second wave of coronavirus, including a White House superspreader event and the vice president's aides testing positive in reasonable number, all of that happening right before the election, weeks before the election. Trump still does well on the economy. In fact, in general polls, he's been ahead of Biden pretty consistently, though narrowly, on who would handle the economy better. He does reasonably well on law and order issues, certainly amongst Republicans and some independents. He does reasonably even in a bunch of foreign policy issues like on trade, the new NAFTA, the U.S.-South Korea deal, the Middle East plans and agreements diplomacy, the breakthroughs that have happened, a bunch of China technology stuff, getting the allies on board.
But the big crisis, the largest crisis of my lifetime, of our lifetimes is coronavirus. 225,000 Americans dead, millions and millions having gotten the disease, largest number of cases on record right now, one week before the election. Hospitalization's going up, and even mortality. The rates overall have been going down, but the numbers of people dying is going up again and will almost certainly continue to right through election day. Trump wants us to be talking about anything but coronavirus because that's the issue that he polls the worst on, and it's what we're all talking about. The ability of Trump to actually win this election is a hell of a lot lower than it normally would have been, and 2020 is not like 2016.
A couple of additional things. First, getting through the vote itself. If you think about polling error, it is certainly possible that Trump can win. If there's polling error that's largely in his favor in swing states, it's a lot closer than the national polls are, about 5.6 points. It did look like Biden was ahead in Texas. Now it looks like Trump's ahead two, three, maybe even four points there. We've seen that in some of the southern swing states too.
If there's a decent amount of polling error in Trump's favor, he can win narrowly. If he wins narrowly or if it is close in Biden's favor, then it's pretty clear that this is going to be a process, a long process where both sides contest it. I mean, Trump is going to say he wins almost irrespective of what happens, and if it's close, and Biden actually has a larger number of electoral votes, but Trump says, "No, I'm contesting it. This was rigged," you could end up with a constitutional crisis.
It's very important to understand that the willingness of GOP members to go along with President Trump just as they did in the impeachment, only Romney voting to convict every other Republican Senator supporting Trump on what was a fairly open-and-shut case that he was using the power of the presidency to get the Ukrainian president to open an investigation against Joe Biden and his son Hunter, it was pretty clear they had him to rights on that, but the GOP was not going to respond to it. It was a political decision. It was not based on a view of how American rule of law is supposed to be handled.
I can easily see the same thing happening if it is close in this election, even if it's close and legitimately it looks like Biden actually won. The potential for constitutional crisis, if it's narrow, is real. I think under any surface, Trump says, "I won, and that was rigged, and it's not reasonable," if it's close. Certainly, the media, his supporters on social media and the GOP in Congress likely to pull out every stop to attempt to effectively contest that.
Now, what about if it's a landslide for Biden, which is certainly plausible, a little bit of polling error in Biden's favor, and he wins really big, and then Trump can say whatever he wants, it doesn't matter. The Republicans aren't with them. They throw them under the bus. They say, "That's it. We move on." McConnell already gotten his 6-3 Supreme Court, and from his perspective, that's a big legacy win. He's not going anywhere. They lick their wounds. They move longer-term.
But if Biden does win by a landslide, we should remember how we got here. Trump won the 2016 election. He won it legitimately. He is the president. He is our president. He is my president, despite the fact that he is clearly one of the least fit-for-office people to ever seek that position, and even after 225,000 people have died of coronavirus, even after he has governed for four years and shown that he is incapable of actually not only not unifying the country, but incapable of responding effectively to the worst crisis of our lifetimes, this is something that would sink almost anyone that you can imagine, he still gets roughly 40% approval.
That's because people don't think America works for them. That's because the working class, and particularly, the white working class in the United States, has been treated like cannon fodder for decades, whether it's the result of trade policies that have depleted their ranks and not found ways for them to experience upward mobility and the American dream, whether it's immigration with lots of others coming into the United States to have their land of opportunity, but no one's taken care of the Americans already here, whether it's wars that have been fought on the back of the poorest Americans for decades and we've lost those wars and taking care of those and their families that have given all? Now, under Obama and Biden as vice-president, you had eight years of focus on progressive social policy, which, I mean, there's lots of good things that come out of that, but if you are a white member of the working class rural area in the United States, you view that nobody cares about you anymore.
I mean, there is structural racism in the United States. Blacks absolutely have the worst situation in the country, and they have the least amount of wealth, but at least, from their perspective, there is more opportunity. The absolute situation is the worst, but their trajectory has been improving. The white working class, undereducated, has a lousy... I mean, they're doing better overall than blacks and Hispanics in the U.S., but they're not doing well. They've been stagnant for decades, and the trajectory is actually getting worse. Indeed, life expectancy is going down. Suicide rates are going up. Opioid addiction is going up. I mean, these are people who are not just angry because they're all racist, they're angry because everyone's been lying to them.
There's no question. There is an enormous amount of racism in the United States, not just structural racism in the system, but individual racism that exists in many of these communities to a great and disturbing degree, just as it exists in other communities in the United States, but I will tell you that everyone in my feed that hates Trump, almost everyone I see in social media are also saying that these people are all racist and that it's unacceptable to vote for him.
I will not say that. I think it's pretty clear that when you're talking about 40% of the population voting for Trump back in 2016 and just about that in 2020, it is not just about them. It's about us. It's about how we could get to the place where so many Americans would feel that the system was indeed so rigged against them, and they're right. Trump is not fixing it for them, but you understand how angry they are.
I look at Borat and this movie that is out now, Sacha Baron Cohen, and I see how it does well in part because it's fine to laugh at the idiots in the middle of the country, the flyover states, the uneducated. We're responsible for that. I don't think it's okay to punch down. I think you have to reach out and help your fellow Americans, and when they're hurting and when they're angry and even when they say and do things that are unacceptable, realizing that those of us that are in a vastly better position and have done so little to help them, it is unacceptable for us to say it's their fault.
I know so many people in the United States on the left who strongly oppose stereotyping of blacks, of Hispanics, of Muslims, but they would think nothing of mocking rural working class whites, of laughing at them. This must end because if we don't learn those lessons, if we don't understand that's how we got Trump after a massive Biden win, then populism in the United States and racism in the United States and extremism in the United States is going to get much, much worse. These people are going to suffer so much worse in 2021 and 2022 unless we get our act together on the back of coronavirus with digital transformation, the knowledge economy doing fine, and so many of the jobs remaining for these people just going away. If that happens, the next time they vote someone in, it's not going to be someone as incompetent as Trump, and that's going to be much more dangerous to the American system that I hope we all still believe in.
Thanks a lot for listening. I'll talk to you all real soon.