Jon Meacham, it's a little early for the long lens
of history.
I understand this race was called for Donald Trump less
than two hours ago.
But what are your thoughts this morning?
Well, you can't be for democracy only when your side
wins.
And I think the the values and the principles that
so many people have articulated over the past eight years
and particularly since the post 2020.
Have to practice what has been preached.
And I think what you see certainly the feeling early
on in the country is that the folks who are
worried about democratic institutions, lowercase D are acting in accordance
with those principles.
We've had 59 presidential elections in American history and only
15 of them have unfolded in the electorate that voted
yesterday.
So more than 2/3 of our elections under unfolded at
a time when either women couldn't vote or black folks
couldn't vote.
Immigration was even more restrictive.
So this is a long story and what I would
say and, and, and Joe and Willie, we've talked about
this a lot.
And Mike, the question now is all our Republican friends
who said, and I wish I had 1/4 for every
time someone said this over the last 12 months or
so is, yeah, I don't like the way Trump acts,
but I liked his policies.
You guys.
Second point, which I also want 1/4 for.
You guys exaggerate this whole guardrails thing.
Well, now we'll find out.
And if they were right, and I pray they were,
and I I don't say that lightly, I genuinely want
to have been wrong that the constitutional order was that
this election result put it too much at risk.
But now it's on those whom the country has entrusted
power to prove that we were wrong.
And look, the success of an incumbent Congress, the success
of an incumbent White House is also the country's success.
And so I think we take a deep breath.
I think citizenship itself is about the hard work, as
Saint Paul said and President Kennedy used in his the
coda to his inaugural address, being patient and tribulation.
And there are a lot of people this morning who
are waking up who feel that the world is ending.
There are a lot of people waking up who think,
OK, we're back on the right track.
The point of America is that we should all be
able to have those different views but move forward together.
And I'm not, I'm not trying to preach here, but
that's what democracy is.
It's disagreeing and dissenting within a common vernacular.
And the country's made it just a very clear decision.
And now we'll find out if, in fact, the folks
who have been entrusted with power are worthy of that
power.
Donald Trump wins overwhelmingly.
It's looking like he's on track to win all seven
of those battleground states.
We've also been talking about Republicans taking control of the
Senate.
And we have another call to make.
Now, NBC News can project that Jon Tester of Montana
has lost his Senate seat to Tim Sheehy, the Republican
in the state of Montana, adding another Republican, Joe, in
the Senate column as well.
And we still have three that are being contested in
the upper Midwest, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
We'll be following those tallies.
Those are going to be very close right now.
But Republicans already have the majority.
And the United States Senate obviously allows them to appoint
justices, also get Donald Trump's elections for cabinet officials through
without much resistance at all.
I do want to go back to Jon Meacham and
just add one more point.
Jon.
You know, I, I'm, I'm with you.
I, I, you know, when over the course of this
campaign, when Donald Trump said he was going to use
the military to arrest Democrats, he was going to shut
down CBS because he didn't like how they edited 60
Minutes piece when his lawyer said he could use SEAL
Team 6 to assassinate his political opponents.
And everybody said, oh, he didn't say that.
And then you'd show them the clip and they go,
well, he doesn't mean it.
I'm with you.
I if, if he doesn't mean it, if that was
just strong talk during the campaign, then you are right,
We are all much better for it.
If he does mean even half of that, being a
dictator on day one or all the other things he
said, then yes, Madisonian democracy actually takes a tumble.
So I think I'm with you.
I'm hoping that Donald Trump didn't mean what he said
on the campaign trail.
And I hope all of those that told you and
me that, oh, please, you all are just getting taken
up in memes and and you just need to relax.
Let's hope they're right.
Yeah.
It's on them now.
It's on us to be, you know, the old phrase
from the revolutionary era, eternal vigilance is the price of
liberty.
And everybody who found this election to be existential, you
don't set those concerns aside.
But what you do do is you have to watch
carefully.
You participate in in the arena and the people, the
remarkable number of our neighbors and friends who made a
different decision now face a test themselves.
Good time to bring in the former secretary of Homeland
Security, Jeh Johnson.
You've been following this closely.
And there has been a lot that has been said
and there is a lot that's been done in Donald
Trump's first presidency that could lead one to believe that
this was not just tough talk.
I agree.
And I agree with what Claire said earlier.
Actually, fear and anger won.
He played to fear and anger, and that prevailed.
I once heard Jon Meacham say that George Wallace's 19%
in 1968 has now become the majority in this in
this country and in.
On a very personal level, I'm trying to figure out
the words of encouragement that I give to my daughter
this morning who just 24 hours ago allowed herself to
believe that a woman of color could be elected president.
I don't know quite what to tell her.
And the story of this election is what is what
Julian was talking about earlier.
You know, we've, we've come to believe over generations that
different demographic groups vote as a block because for so
often, for so long, the black vote in this country
voted in a block, 90% for Democrats from Johnson all
the way to Obama.
And that's just not true anymore.
As different demographic groups become further integrated into our society,
they start caring about all the issues everybody else does,
whether it's the economy, whether it's crime, whether it's border
security.
And political scientists will study this for years and years.
I'm fascinated with the fact that in this city, Trump
did better in every single borough.
He went from 16% in the Bronx in 2020 to
27% in the Bronx in 2024.
How did that happen?
It's because of his message.
It resonated with a diverse group of people in a
place like Bronx, Brooklyn.
And so for us in the Democratic Party side, we
need to re evaluate how we approach Americans in general
and learn to talk not just to two or three
issues, to one demographic group or another.
It's tough.
Very well said.
And to that point, Secretary Castro, picking up on what
Secretary Johnson said there, the issue of immigration, you touched
on it a minute ago.
For a long time, there's been this almost patronizing view
among Democratic leadership that they would get Latino voters based
on the issue of immigration.
Well, that blew up last night.
I think it's fair to say you're from the state
of Texas.
You understand that people who live on the border, whether
they're black, white or Latino, believe a strong border is
in their best interest.
So what can you say about the issue of immigration
and how it played into what happened last night?
Well, I mean, yeah, the polling showed that it was
clear that in the Latino community there was also a
concern, like there was, as you say, for any Americans
about the border.
I mean, that was piped into everybody's social media feed,
you know, television news coverage, newspaper coverage.
People had that concern, right?
And I don't think that over the last three years
that the administration necessarily handled pushing back on that narrative
very well.
And so Kamala Harris really was playing catch up during
these last three months.
And at the same time, there was no real push
on the other end of it that might have appealed
to some Latinos, which was the comprehensive immigration part of
it, reform part of it.
Yes, President Biden submitted something at the very beginning on
his first day in office, but that was never part
of the conversation.
I think that pushing that part of it may have
improved the odds of winning in places like Arizona and
Nevada.
Those are still out.
So we don't know what's going to happen there, but
also could have resonated with some of those families in
places like Pennsylvania, in Texas.
Mr.
Secretary, you were just talking about trying to figure out
what you're going to tell your daughter in a land
where you think, and rightly so, that the campaign just
concluded.
It was filled with fear and anxiety.
And yet the person who filled the campaign with fear
and anxiety is going to be the president of the
United States.
And I would think because we're all Americans and we
hope the best for this country, obviously we would hope
that he would do well in office.
Now, he may not.
But your daughter is the specific purpose of my question.
What do you tell your daughter as an American father
who has served his country well?
What do you tell her to give her a sense
of optimism or hope about the immediate future?
I guess I say what Franklin Roosevelt said in his
last inaugural address.
The trajectory of our nation is forever upward.
There are setbacks.
It sometimes feels like peaks and valleys, but the trajectory
is always upward.