237. Election Eve: Trump Seizes on Michigan

0:00Welcome to the Rest is Politics US with Anthony and me live from actually London, where we're going to be doing the show later. We are, of course, in the final days of the election campaign, all eyes today on Michigan after the Democratic Congresswoman Haley Stevens shook, shocked the world by endorsing her Republican, the Republican candidate Mike Rogers. Big news up there in Michigan. Meanwhile, Trump has continued his racist attacks against the Democratic nominee who Stevens lost to, Abdel El-Sayed. It is all really heating up and getting kind of nasty up there in Michigan, but also around the country, Anthony. We are going to jump into all of that and take your questions. Please post those. Thank you for joining us from all over the world, people from

0:53Morocco, from Germany, from Northern Ireland, from Belgium, Manchester, where it's gloomy, yep, gloomy here in London too. Geneva, Saudi Arabia. It's great. Thank you. We're going global. The midterms are going global. We, of course, also want to invite all of you to a very special midterms live stream on Wednesday morning. Anthony and I are going to be live from London, 12 to 3 AM Eastern. That is 5 AM to 8 AM for those of you from the UK to break down the results as they come in. We're going to be joined in the studio by two good friends of both of ours, Ed Elson, who is co-host of the Prof G Markets podcast, and Amanda Renteria, she's a democratic strategist. We're going to have lots of great guests. So we're going to be calling in through the night.

1:39We've got a senator, we've got congresspeople who are going to tell us what all of this means. You can join us, make sure that you're subscribed to this channel. And for more from us, of course, sign up to therestispolitics.com to become a founding member. We will see you there. This episode is brought to you by eToro. A tariff, a spending plan, a regulatory change. It can all start just as the first line of a speech, but it sets in motion things that can reach far beyond Washington and unfold for years to come. That's right, Katty. Markets move on expectations, not just events. Investors are constantly weighing what a decision could mean for company sectors and the wider economy. So eToro is an investing platform where you can access a wide range of

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4:00To really understand what's going on, you need to know the why. You get it all in the FT. It's a very objective paper and it's lots of fun to read and it makes you smarter. I also loved Janine Ganesh's opinion piece on why must a socialist always be woke. And he's making the point that the socialists in America have compelling economic policies, but cultural policies that many people in the country hate. Is there a lane for somebody who is a more culturally moderate socialist? I love the FT weekend. My very favorite thing to read on a Saturday morning. No, I love the FT. I'm just thrilled that they're a sponsor. For the Y, Financial Times. Listeners of The Rest Is Politics US can save over 40%

4:41on an annual digital subscription to the Financial Times by visiting ft.com slash tripus. That's ft.com slash tripus, T-R-I-P-U-S, subject to terms and conditions. Offer expires October 28th. Okay. In the meantime, wow, I can't believe we're actually here, Anthony. It is Monday, November the 2nd. Election day is tomorrow. I can't believe we're actually here, Anthony. It is Monday, November the second election day is tomorrow. I always love election day. Even though I don't vote in American elections, I always go along with my family. It's a great day. What do you love about election day? I love the excitement of it. I like the process of people turning out to exercise their democratic right to vote. I grew up in many countries in the Middle East which were not democratic. I've lived in countries in Africa which were not democratic.

5:29So it's always rather magical that that day when people are given a choice and then you have to wait and then the waiting. You don't like election day? No, I mean, I don't mind election day. I mean, I used to like it as a kid because I used to get the day off from school because they used to close our school for the polling. So that's where the votes were. I don't mind Election Day. I guess I'm still traumatized from Election Day on 2016. You got too much PTSD. You know, I never told this story, but I'm going to tell this story. When Trump won, I stood up to tell Deirdre that he had won, and I stepped on a campaign banner and I went up in the air at a 90-degree angle and I landed on my back.

6:17Okay? That probably should have been the message, right? That should have told you. That probably should have been the message, of course. You've just slipped on a banana skin. Of course, she mocked me thereafter for about an hour and a half. That's funny. It was literally like a Charlie Chaplin incident. But listen, what would it take for you to be on somebody's team and to have that team help get you elected to the Congress? What would it take for you on the day before? It's like your GPS telling you where you're going to go, but you already know where you're going to go. So she's like the human GPS now. She's endorsing Rogers at the last minute, but it's probably already too late. So what would it take you to do that?

7:02That's a great question. And then secondarily, did it have any impact? So the story that Anthony is referring to is the fact of Haley Stevens having said she was a Democrat even though she lost to Abdel El-Sayed in the primary, but she only lost by 15,000 votes. On Sunday, shocked everybody by saying she was endorsing the Republican opponent. I actually, in all of my years of covering midterms and election campaigns, I can't remember this happening, Anthony. I mean, I can remember candidates switching sides. I can remember elected officials switching sides, but I can't remember somebody saying, okay, I can't support this guy. And indeed, I'm going to support his opponent. I mean, there's lots of

7:45speculation and you've heard members of Congress and other people who are up in Michigan say she has this fiance who had already come out in support of Mike Rogers and he has a lot of influence over her. Maybe. Seems a bit of an odd reason to me for somebody who's been a member of Congress and is clearly a kind of forceful woman in her own right that she would just listen to her boyfriend and he says, okay, you've got to come out and support Mike Rogers. And that's the way it goes. It seems weird. But this whole situation is pretty weird. I mean, this is, okay, here's the equivalent in my household. I was talking to Tom about this. My husband, Tom, has been a Man City supporter since he was seven years old. This is like on the eve of a Man City, Man United match,

8:26Tom suddenly coming out saying, actually, no, I support Man United. I mean, that's what this is, right? It's like switching sports teams on the eve of the big match. So I think that's an amazing analogy. But the reason why I think this is so much worse is like if the sports team paid you money to be a part of them. I mean, literally, the infrastructure around- You think that's what's going on? The Democratic Congressional Committee gave her money to win that seat. Oh, you're not suggesting that Mike Rogers' team has given her money to join the Republicans? No, no. I don't know. I mean, anything's possible in American politics. That may be true. I don't know. But what I do know to be a fact is that Democratic donors, Democratic traditional national donors

9:12came into her district, gave her the money to run for that seat. And to pay them back, she switched allegiances at the last minute. I don't know if you caught Chuck Schumer's tweet, but that's the most animated I've seen Chuck Schumer since his birth, I think. I mean, the guy finally came out of the crypt and was pissed off about something. Bumpy 518, by the way, is asking us, did Stevens get paid to endorse Rogers? I'm sure there will be conspiracy theorists and speculation, and we are living in a world where there's so much corruption and money in politics in DC, in Washington, and in America, that that's going to come up in the conversation. I have heard no implication of that. I have not heard that that

9:53is why she did it. As to your question, though, does it have an impact? So I reached out to somebody I know in Michigan who covers American politics, who is a democratic strategist, but is super well plugged in. His initial reaction when I heard the news was, no, she doesn't have a very big following. This won't make any difference. People don't really, you know, she doesn't command that much of a following to change votes. But then he texted me this morning as I was landing here in London and said there's two options here that he is hearing about. One is that Haley gives permission to people who have been sitting on the fence, particularly perhaps a section of Jewish American voters who are not happy with Abdul El-Sayed and

10:36did like Haley Stevens' closer relationship with Israel and with Jewish groups, and that this gives them permission to vote against Abdel El-Sayed and vote with Mike Rogers. Or alternative scenario, this energizes Democrats and particularly kind of anti-establishment Democrats, those Democrats who have driven a lot of the leftward swing in the Democratic Party, this energizes them to get out and vote. And there are some reports from some of the Democratic offices around Michigan saying they had huge numbers of people come in asking for yard signs after Haley Stevens switched sides. So it could go either way. I would have thought those anti-establishment voters were already motivated, but young voters have a history of not standing up to vote.

11:25If they see this as an issue about Israel, as a fight over America's support for Israel, particularly military support for Israel, that could energize some young voters on the campuses of places like University of Michigan to actually make sure they get to the polls on Tuesday. Do you think it makes much difference at this stage? I don't think it makes much difference at this stage? I don't think it makes any difference. But then again, maybe I don't know Michigan as well as I know Pennsylvania or New York, but I'm just saying why do it? To me, she's claiming that he said she's no longer welcome in his campaign. She was never really welcome in his campaign. They were arch rivals. She said she would support the Democrat.

12:07Obama supported her. Let's make sure everybody remembers that. She lost the primary to El-Sayed. And so Obama had a, think about Obama as a team player. He is dissing El-Sayed. He's endorsing her. He's going on the stump speech in the primaries to endorse her. She loses. El-Sayed said some mean, nasty things about Obama. He ate crow and went and campaigned for him in the state of Michigan. As you have correctly pointed out, tried to sell the notion of his candidacy on African American voters in Michigan, right? So he wasn't quote unquote welcome in his campaign in the beginning. But if you're in the rough and tumble of politics, this is the whole point you said on stage once, Democrats, what do they do, Katty? They fall in love and what do the Republicans do?

13:03They fall in line. That what do the Republicans do? They fall in line. Okay. So that's traditionally been the case. But just think about what she did, you know, because a Republican- She certainly didn't fall in line. A Republican would be like, I hate the guy's guts. I'm going to keep my mouth shut. I'm going to bite a bullet. You know what I mean? Pass me the scotch. Okay. And that's what she was saying. That's what she was saying. That's what she was saying up until Sunday. And there was a lot of reporting about why she suddenly changed her mind, having told people like AOC that she was sticking with Abdel El-Sayed. I mean, she had all of the Democratic grandees. El-Sayed was calling, I mean, AOC was calling her, other Democrats were calling

13:41her to check that she was not about to do this. And then suddenly she did it anyway. So something happened. I mean, I think the problem, however, this shakes down and we may or may not know the findings from the exit polls, specifically of the people who decided late because of this incident. It does give us an inclination, Anthony, I think, of what is going to happen after Tuesday. Because this election, guys, is only the beginning of a new process. The moment polls close on Tuesday night, it is the start of the 2028 race. And Democrats, this incident aside, have done a pretty good job of papering over some pretty seismic cracks in the party ideologically. I think what we are seeing up in Michigan is the beginning of what is going to be one heck

14:34of a fight between the center of the party and the progressives in the party on a whole range of issues, Israel included, over the course of the next two years, right? Right. A hundred percent. But let's have a trivia session for one second. Okay. I know we got to switch topics. Trivia's like, who said the following? She's a radical left communist and now she is a courageous hero. Who said this? That wouldn't be the man who's about to go and give his closing argument speech of the midterm campaign in front of the reflecting pool in Washington, is it? Well, it's not a pool anymore. As you know, it's the reflecting tarp. It's the non-reflecting tarp that you and I sat outside of before the live show.

15:24I bet they've suddenly made it reflect. Yeah, they've probably filled it with water and made it reflect further. Yes, DJT. This is the genius of Trump. He doesn't care. One minute he's at dinner with Bill Maher, the next minute he's a loser with low ratings. He'll be at dinner with him again. That's what he does. This woman was a radical left communist. If Al Syed switched over to the Republican Party right now, he would fire out tweets about him. This is the genius of Trump, fully transactional, completely non-ideological, and will go wherever the wind goes. But Cady, one thing he had to do, because I know him and Graydon Carter said this actually, and I said, he's 100% right. He only wants to go into

16:12the campaigns where he knows they're going to win. Then when they win, he's going to take credit for them, which is why he canceled those other events. He looked at the polls and he said, I'm not doing this. They may lose and I don't want to get blamed for that. And then he got pilloried and embarrassed. So then he had to re-put them back on his schedule. That's Donald Trump. So Daniel 1456 is asking, has Haley Stevens' endorsement of the Republican candidate actually made Abdul El-Sayed's victory tomorrow more likely? And what does this bizarre move from Stevens mean for her political future? Daniel, I think it means her political future is probably over unless she becomes a Republican, which she could do. I mean, look, John Fetterman may be

16:56about to do the same thing if the Democrats win the Senate. Who knows? People do switch parties. She hasn't got a future, I don't think, in the Democratic Party. She's being seen as traitor number one, right? She could be on that reality TV show, Traitors, because that is how she's being seen right now, and they would be happy to kick her off the island. Do you think it hurts his chances? What's your gut on this one, Anthony? Because you and I have both been saying Michigan's tighter than we think. Yeah, mildly hurts his chances, mildly. Mildly. I think your point- It doesn't help. About, yeah, your point about giving license to people who were with her, who don't like some of the anti-Semitism to switch over to Rogers, it could mildly help him, meaning

17:43Rogers, and it could hurt Al-Sayed. But again, I love the banter here with these different questions. Trump, this is from Werner and hopefully Sherman, I think it is. Keen to hear your views on Trump losing, should he lose both houses and attack Iran as he keeps threatening? So, Katty, what do you make of that? He's going to start bombing Iran the minute that the election's over? I mean, Tucker Carlson, as you know, we're going to talk about that in a second, but you think that's going to happen? No, I mean, let's talk about that now, because I think that's the other big storyline of the day. Here we are, one day out. There are two big storylines, it seems to me. One is the Michigan storyline, the other big story, and it is Tucker Carlson, but it's Tucker Carlson saying that he's

18:34spoken to people and that it's not impossible that Donald Trump- Not to interrupt, but I'm interrupting. Step one, do you believe Tucker Carlson that he spoke to people? Well, let's just say what he said. What do you think he's made? Okay. Let's say what he said. Say what he said. He said that he's spoken to people around Trump and that it's not impossible that the president decides after the midterms, at some point after the midterms, to use a nuclear weapon against Iran. Now, I think Tucker's been kind of frozen out certainly by Trump recently, but you know what Trump's like. He's mercurial. That doesn't mean Tucker isn't talking to anyone around Trump. Do they actually know? And does Trump know? Why put this out today?

19:21That's my question. Is this just Tucker trying to scare Democrats and get them to the polls? It feels to me like a get out the vote move to put this out on the eve of the election. I don't know. What do you make of it? Well, listen, he's very good at getting ratings. He's very good at getting attention. And this is going to get way more attention today and tomorrow than it would the day after the election. This is sort of the buildup, right? And so, I get that. I guess the real question I have is though, do you believe him, or is he throwing that out there? Has he talked to Marjorie Taylor Greene who 100% believes that? And is he now speculating that? And then who in the White House would tell him that?

20:11Okay. And then the question is, he's still tight with J.D. Vance. So is that coming from J.D. Vance's staff? Does that come from somebody on J.D. Vance's staff who thinks that this is ratcheting up, whether it's a nuclear weapon or we've seen the buildup, we've spoken about this on the podcast, of the naval assets being moved back into the region and that JD doesn't like this. You know this because you've had calls from people in JD's world before when things were not going well around Iran and when they were very keen to put it out there that JD didn't approve of the war right at the very beginning. And this feels a little, is Tucker doing that for JD? That's what this could be. And then again, we can think of Trump as being addled. And Tucker has his own position on this,

20:55we should all remember, by the way. Yes. Yeah, he's got his own position, but just remember, if I'm Trump, I'm thinking this is coming. If it is happening, it's coming from Vance or Vance's team. And even if it isn't coming from Vance or Vance's team, the fact that Vance hasn't disavowed Tucker after I put out on Twitter what a big loser he is and how much I dislike Tucker, I'm pissed at Vance. There were a number of different tells this weekend, stuff that you and I always talk about. Rubio was on stage with him. Trump said, you're getting a little bit too popular. Any more popular, I'm going to fire you. That's not a joke, by the way, because that's exactly what he does. Then the other thing is Vance, he has more or less sidelined him on a lot of these things.

21:45I can guarantee you if they're going to bomb Iran again, Vance is not has more or less sidelined him on a lot of these things. I can guarantee you, if they're going to bomb Iran again, Vance is not involved in the decision making. Yeah. And also, by the way, he's also criticizing Vance for getting small crowd sizes. We're going to take a quick break and then take more of your questions. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Anthony, we are heading into the holidays and there are a whole load of jobs that need to be done. So we are hiring for an elf. What do you think? All right. Well, I'm sure we could find somebody like that on ZipRecruiter. I personally would like a professional cookie decorator.

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25:41we can debate whether we were justified in using those weapons in 1945. I don't think anybody has really condemned the United States for that given the magnitude of the war and the casualty count that Truman was trying to save. Revising history, I know people are very sore about that. But if we use a nuke today, that would be it. But I think Trump wants to use a nuke, by the way, because- Well, we know- He wants to put a hurt on the rest of us. For some reason, he's such a repressed, angry guy that he wants to take all of that out on the global society. So we got two years, three months, I'm super worried about Trump using a nuke. Let me push this back to you for a second and say, do you think the chances of Trump

26:27and Hegseth using a nuke are zero? No. 0.0%. Okay. We know from the first term that Donald- So that's disgusting, Cady. That's disgusting. I mean, it's terrifying. We know from the first term that Donald Trump asked Mark Milley several times why he couldn't use a nuclear weapon, that he was interested back then in using a nuclear weapon. And that is when he had people around him in the Defense Department and in the White House who were corralling his instincts. This time around, those people are gone. Pete Hegseth is on a full religious warrior crusade in the Middle East. And this is a question from Stephen Pettit to this. Were Trump to give that nuclear order, what are the chances of the military ignoring

27:19the order? Well, what do you think? Okay. Play that out, Anthony. Role play that one. It goes from the Oval Office to the Commander in Chief. What happens? Well, Trump being the Commander in Chief, you mean going to Milley- I'm sorry, it goes from the Commander in Chief, from the Oval Office and the Commander in Chief to the generals. I don't think Kane executes it. What about Hegseth? Because I know Milley wouldn't. Oh, Hegseth would. Yeah, sure. Hegseth will do anything that Trump wants, and he's got all those tattoos on him. And Hegseth is capable. Remember, when you're Harry Truman, you're dropping the nuke. You're actually thinking like a human being. I've got to say potentially 2 million Americans

28:05that are going to hit the shore in Japan. Okay. But in this case, you're dehumanizing people. And so the question is, can Trump or a Hegsas detach themselves from people and disfigure and dehumanize them? And the answer is yes. Mark Milley would have never been able to do it. I don't think General able to do it. I don't think General Cain could do it. And so yes, I do think that they defy the order. And then the other weird thing you could say is Trump will of course say, well, I'm only saying this because I want to get a better deal and it's a negotiating ploy and things like that. But you know this because I've told you this, in 2017 in the situation room, he talked about nuking Iran. Somebody looked at him and said, well, ground zero of that bomb,

28:56there would be four and a half million people. There's nine or 10 million people in the greater region around Tehran. This would be an unmitigated nightmare. Trump looked nonplussed. I wasn't in that room. So this is me getting it from three or four different sources where Trump was like, yeah, not a big deal. We should teach them a lesson. They've been pain in the ass to the world for the last 50 years since Ted Koppel was reporting on them during the hostage crisis, and he's capable of doing it. And so I asked you that question and you said it wasn't zero. But would it be zero for Barack Obama? Yes. Okay. So you and I both agree on that. I think it would be zero for George W. Bush. Zero. Of course it would be.

29:42Okay. So we've now selected a leader in the United States. Zero for Joe Biden. Zero for Bill Clinton. Zero for Joe Biden. Zero for Bill Clinton. Zero for George Herbert Walker Bush. And by the way, we learned more about Reagan and his writings. We would probably not have said zero when he said, we'll begin bombing in five minutes. You and I both famously remember that quip that he made on the radio, but he wasn't going to do it either, but this guy could do it. And this is the thing that I'm very worried about for us. What would stop him? Okay. And hopefully General Kane. I mean, there's a question here about the military code of ethics and would the military, a lot of you are asking, would the military obey such an order? Would such

30:27an order be illegal? My understanding, Anthony, correct me if I'm wrong, is that the order would not, if it comes from the commander in chief, he has an enormous amount of latitude here, and that the order would not be illegal. Democrats have already done this during the course of this term because it's come up with Democrats and former veterans saying to members of the US military, remember, you promised to obey the constitution, not just the president. You promised to obey the law of the land. Would there be questions about legality in this case? I think there would have to be. And again- And how would that then manifest? I mean, how would that be discussed? So here you go, I have no doubt Trump will order a nuclear strike on an Iranian city, but I'm hoping the military

31:15will follow the uniform code of justice. This is from Kiskelew, unlike when Trump ordered the initial Iran attacks. Yeah. So let's say they don't follow through, but even him ordering the nuclear strike, he's probably going to The Hague as a war criminal because he doesn't have the congressional support for the war. Because he never went to Congress for this war. This is not technically a war. Right. So it's not technically a war. You remember they're not paying certain death benefits to people because it's not technically a war, You remember, they're not paying certain death benefits to people because it's not technically a war, right? We both know that, right? So I guess what I'm getting at, what I'm very worried about is that nobody stops him and Kaine says he's not going to do it.

32:02And then you have another constitutional crisis on your hands, and then you have this impotent Congress. Now, maybe the Democrats could get in. Hopefully, if they win the Senate, they could shove him hard. But there's not 10 or 12 Republicans that are going to cross the aisle and help the Democrats remove him from office. It's not going to happen. So you're stuck with this guy two years and three months. But I know you have to go, I want to go to Mary Lee Dillon. Can we do that before you leave? Yeah. Yeah. Do you think it's a bad sign that Trump said, I feel good, I feel good about the midterms? I think it's a good sign that he has some big cheat lined up. What do you think? We've spoken about this.

32:43Do you worry about that? lined up. We've spoken about this, of course, because we've all went through 2020 and January the 6th and the whole, you know, stop the steal movement. It's harder with a, we've spoken about this on the show before. It is harder with a midterm election because you'd have to interfere in each single congressional election and each single Senate race. It's not just about the presidency and the vice presidency being on the ballot and not having those two people certified. This would be trying to somehow orchestrate the decertification of potentially dozens of House races and a dozen Senate races, up to a dozen Senate races. And those races are all run by the state, so it would be a very complicated process. I think the fact that he's saying he feels

33:32good about it, there's quite a lot of bluster there. The fact that he's going to the reflecting pool. Donald Trump's closing argument is, look at my home decorations in Washington, DC. And on his Truth Social feed, hey, look at this. It's a day before the Republicans might suffer a historic wipeout in the House and possibly the Senate, but didn't you realize I look like Elvis? I mean, he's putting out these AI slop photos of him, half Elvis, half Trump. And that's where he is right now. That's where, I mean, maybe he's checking out, maybe this is all bravado. He's seen the numbers. We haven't quickly run through the latest New York Times Siena poll, but that poll is terrible for a Republican. So he can't really believe that he feels good. I think this is bluster.

34:26Yeah. I mean, listen, I have grown more confident for the Democrats based on these polls because also the anger is palpable. You could walk into any area of the country now, including MAGA Red, Nassau County, where I live, and people are angry. They're upset with the corruption. They're upset with the indifference. And they want to send a message of repudiation. So we'll see. I know we're going to be back on again tomorrow. I mean, basically there are three trends, right, that define midterm elections. Every single one. It's pretty simple. One is right track, wrong track. Is the country on the right track, wrong track? The second is the president's approval ratings. And the third is how do you feel about the economy? Well, if that's it, they haven't got much on any of those

35:17because all of those numbers are bad. So I think it's going to be very hard for them, even though the reflecting pool will be made to look beautiful in Washington, D.C. this evening. I'm absolutely sure. Not quite so much of a parking lot as when we were there a couple of weeks ago. What do you reckon? He's put water in there, Anthony. He's put water in a great big mirror to make sure that it really reflects him in all his eve of midterm glory. We're going to be back tomorrow. We're going to be back tomorrow. We are going to be back tomorrow, 6pm UK time, 1pm Eastern time. That's Tuesday, election day. So we'll give you a little take on, we have seen these extraordinary record early voting numbers.

36:01We'll see what the lines are looking like tomorrow. So we'll have a quick update tomorrow for you. And then on Wednesday morning, live from midnight to 3am Eastern time, that's 5am to 8am UK time, just in time for your breakfast as the results come in. Make sure that you subscribe to this channel to join the stream. And we will see you all there. Happy Election Eve, everybody. Looking forward to it. See you guys. See you guys tomorrow. Now for a quick message from Anthropic, the team behind Claude, the AI built for businesses. Every business wants to move faster. Few can afford to be wrong. That's why nine Fortune 10 companies count on Claude for the work they want to get right. Safety and accuracy aren't just boxes to check off for the research team at Anthropic.

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