Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Danny Postel, Amie Ferris-Rotman and Kareem Shaheen
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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President-elect Donald Trump’s seismic win in the 2024 American presidential election appears fundamentally different from his first victory. “It felt like a fluke in 2016,” Danny Postel, New Lines’ politics editor, tells The Lede host Faisal Al Yafai. This latest win is “a totally different feeling,” Postel continues. “It’s paradoxical because in a way it’s less shocking, because we experienced it once before in 2016, but it’s actually more sobering in the sense that it wasn’t a fluke. It was the opposite of a fluke. This is a statement about what the majority of what the American people wanted.”
Postel notes that the warnings of Trump’s potential authoritarian ambitions have some merit. “Trumpism 2.0 is a different animal from the first go around,” he says. “If Trump’s 2024 campaign is any indication, this sequel is darker. It’s more authoritarian.”
“Trumpism 2.0 is a different animal from the first go around. If Trump’s 2024 campaign is any indication, this sequel is darker.”
Middle East editor Kareem Shaheen suggests that the Democrats failed to back their warnings about Trump’s threat to democracy with meaningful policies that the electorate could get behind. “They did not care enough about the fact that democracy was at stake to shift policy positions, to reconsider who was going to be running on the ticket, in advance of the elections and in advance of the primaries,” he says.
One of the first groups that might feel the impact of the second Trump administration’s policies will be women, says global politics editor Amie Ferris-Rotman. “All of the political indicators show that we can expect to see a national abortion ban,” she notes. “It won’t be called a national abortion ban, but it’ll be couched in euphemisms and different language, such as a ‘minimum national standard.’”
Looking further afield, “There is not really a fear of the collapse of democracy, but there’s certainly a real fear that the global world order can be completely upended,” Ferris-Rotman adds.
The Democrats’ failure to offer consistent political messaging at home and abroad hurt their campaign, suggests Shaheen. While the Democrats tout progressive ideals at home, voters notice the “contrast … between American public statements on Russian crimes in Ukraine, and when the same things happen in Gaza, whether that’s the bombing of hospitals or the deaths of civilians. It’s become almost a meme.”
Despite Trump’s often outwardly racist rhetoric, many countries in the Middle East and North Africa could be eyeing potential opportunities following his recent election. “A lot of these countries see a way forward with Trump, because he’s transactional,” says Shaheen. “You can deal with that in a way you couldn’t deal with Democratic presidents who had big talk about democratic rights and freedoms and so on, and yet managed to reconcile that approach with supporting the war in Gaza, for example.”
Further reading: The Threat Trump Poses Is Real, but Democrats Must Learn Through Defeat