Morning Joe - Morning Joe 12/8/22

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Republicans point finger at Trump for Georgia loss

Trump's legal team announced that they have completed a search of two of Trump's properties. They searched his properties and did not find any more classified documents. His team did find at least two classified documents in a storage locker he keeps in Palm Beach. According to a source, they found the documents alongside suits, swords and wrestling belts. You know, it's a sad day when you realize your former president's storage unit and your five-year-old son's Christmas list are exactly the same. Good morning and welcome to Morning Joe. It's Thursday, December 8th. A lot to cover this morning. Donald Trump's legal team hands over more classified documents to the FBI. This time, the items were reportedly found inside a storage unit. And was that Jimmy Kimmel?

He was not joking when he said they were alongside swords, wrestling belts and other things like that. The Washington Post's Jackie Alimani is here to help break down the new reporting on that. Plus, Republicans try to figure out where to place the blame after the latest Senate loss in Georgia. Some, but not all of it, has landed on Donald Trump. We'll have the latest on that and new reporting that the January 6th committee plans to vote on criminal referrals when it releases its final report on the Capitol attack. And this morning, we have a date for that. We'll tell you exactly

when to expect that vote along with Joe, Willie and me. We have former chief of staff to the DCCC, Adrian Elrod, White House editor for Politico, Sam Stein, and the host of Way Too Early. He just keeps going. The White House bureau chief at Politico, Jonathan Lemire. And Joe, it's so good to have you back. Glad you're feeling better. See you soon. A lot, though, has been happening in politics. Georgia, the Republicans, Donald Trump just has had the worst month ever. And baseball. Aaron Judge, Zander to San Diego. I teed him up. No, it's it's I mean, it's just congratulations. What a great guy. Aaron Judge is such a great guy.

And congratulations to him for us lowly Red Sox fans. You know, the mountain just keeps getting harder to climb. Xander to San Diego. He apparently was insulted by the three coupons for all you can eat buffet in Pensacola, Florida at Barn Hills Country Buffet. Did not think he thought he deserved a little more than that. And so so there goes Zander, just like everybody else. I'm telling you, it's a good buffet. If you're ever driving through Pensacola on I-10, take a right, go to Barn Hills. It's really good, but not enough, obviously, to hold Xander. I guess he doesn't get down to Pensacola that much.

But Willie, you know, I've got to say, we're all, everybody's focusing on Donald Trump right now. And the fact that he's a historic loser politically, he's causing just historic losses. And a lot of Republicans are figuring that out. But, you know, there's another story sort of below the surface that I really am fascinated by. And that's Ronna McDaniel, the head of the RNC. She's running again for re-election. She's run every year since 2017. And she's lost every year. Like she lost in 2017. She lost in 2018. She lost in 2019. She lost in 2020. She lost in 2022. Now in Washington, where winning matters and losing is punished. You know, somebody like her would have survived one one term, two terms.

They said, you've lost. You're out. But but what's so fascinating is these these Trump is they came in and they were talking about the swamp and it being too clubby. Stuff like this did not happen in clubby Washington. If you lost six years in a row when you were running a party, you what you you never get that chance. You were out. I find it remarkable that these Trumpists are also clubby. It reminds me of dead series. The University of Alabama before Nick Saban came in, he had a bunch of old players, a bunch of rich alumni. They had their little organization.

You were either on the inside or the outside. Bear Bryant either had touched you in passing or he hadn't. And Alabama just kept losing. And finally, they said, we're going to get a guy who knows how to win. And all that matters is that he knows. And they got Saban. And all of these other people were pushed to the side. All the nonsense was pushed to the side. And Saban focused on what happened on the field. What I find remarkable with these swampy, and they are the swampiest of swamp creatures, and the clubbiest of club creatures is they're so swampy and they're so clubby that they don't even notice that they've lost in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022,

that they allowed Joe Biden to do something that no president had done since FDR. And they're still doing nothing about it. Like they're still not really speaking out. Lindsey still won't speak out on Donald Trump. I haven't heard Mitch using by name saying Trump can't be the person. There's a lot of generalities. And the thing is, he just keeps losing. And at this point, again, Republicans have to understand Democrats want this guy to win the nomination in 24. They're praying that this guy wins the Republican nomination in 24 because he is the literally literally he is the biggest loser in American political history. Worse than Herbert Hoover at this point now. And yet,

isn't it fascinating? These people that cursed the swamp, that cursed the club, the clubbiness of Washington, they've become the swampiest creatures, the clubbiest creatures I've ever seen in a Washington in my life. Yeah, remember, Ronna McDaniel got the job as RNC chair in 2017 because of the allegiance she had pledged to Donald Trump. So he installed her. She's who we want to be. That's where her allegiance still lies. So now you're chaining yourself in Ronna McDaniel to someone who is going to stay with Donald Trump because what he prizes is loyalty. And she knows that's why she has the job. And you've had some talk of challengers. Yes, Lee Zeldin talked about it for a while, who ran a really good race here in the state of New York

and almost pulled off an upset in the governor's race. He has now bowed out of that. There was even talk of the pillow guy. Mr. Pillow was going to be the head of my pillow. RNC doesn't look like that's going to happen. Busy holiday season with all the shipments of the pillows and slippers. So you can understand that. But yes, this is someone who's sitting there. And you could say the same thing about Rick Scott, who pulled the impossible, handed the Senate to Democrats in a year where there's eight percent inflation, all the historical challenges that we've talked about with the incumbent party in off year elections and somehow gave a seat to Democrats. So it was a terrible midterm election right up to the end with Herschel Walker for the Republican Party, who claims now to be doing soul searching.

But is it really if they won't unchain themselves from all of Trump's candidates, except for J.D. Vance, lost. Well, and what's so fascinating, Mika, is Gerard Baker yesterday in The Wall Street Journal said, OK, now we're so afraid to tell the truth about Donald Trump. We're going to say that Joe Biden is the greatest political genius of all time. We are now saying that he has the genius of Eisenhower, the genius of Reagan, the genius of FDR. And we won't talk about the elephant that is in the room. And that is a guy that is absolute political poison to our party. They won't do it. It's amazing how you just again, it's breathtaking. He loses for the party in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022 in Georgia. Two left of center senators who would never, and I mean ever, get elected in red state Georgia.

They're elected. They were elected two years ago and now senator warnock's going to be there for six years and so much of it is a reaction again to donald trump they can't quit him and democrats right now are praying they don't quit him because. Yeah. Keep on keeping on. He's done more to destroy the Republican Party than anybody since FDR. We're going to have more on the blame game in just a moment. And boy, is it a blame game. Two more documents, though, with classified markings were discovered at a Florida storage facility not far from Trump's Mar-a-Lago home and club

following a search carried out at the direction of Trump's attorneys. That's according to two people familiar with the documents who spoke to NBC News. They say the documents were turned over to the FBI, confirming a report first published in the Washington Post. But the nature of the documents was not revealed. The discovery comes nearly four months after FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago and found more than 100 documents with classified markings, including some that were labeled top secret. The storage unit where the new documents were found is in West Palm Beach and is run by the General Services Administration. One of the sources said Trump had never been inside that storage facility himself. The New York Times reports the discovery came after Trump's lawyers hired an outside firm to conduct a series of wider searches that were completed around Thanksgiving at Trump properties.

Those properties include Trump's golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump Tower in New York, and a storage closet at Mar-a-Lago. The discovery of the new documents is further evidence that Trump and his team did not fully comply with the grand jury subpoena issued in May, seeking all documents marked classified still in their possession. The FBI declined to comment. The Justice Department has been conducting what it has described as an active criminal investigation into whether the White House documents found at Mar-a-Lago were mishandled as well as possible obstruction of justice. It seems like the government, the DOJ, the FBI are doing their best

to give them a chance to hand over the documents. I mean, this is really quite, quite remarkable. They've been very patient, starting with the National Archives asking for a year and a half. Just politely. Could we get the documents? Could we get the documents? And then when they went and seized the documents, the government said, are you sure there aren't more?

Right. Keep looking. Now we get the documents? And then when they went and seized the documents, the government said, are you sure there aren't more? Right. Keep looking. Now we have the story. Let's bring in congressional investigations reporter for The Washington Post, Jackie Alimany. She is an MSNBC contributor. Jackie, good morning. What more can you tell us about this story? This was, as Mika pointed out, this came from within Trump's circle of lawyers saying, let's hire a firm to go and see if there's more stuff. Let's look at Mar-a-Lago. Let's look at Trump Tower in New York. And yes, let's go check out this storage unit. Right, Willie. That's exactly right. But it also came at the behest of the D.C. Circuit Judge Beryl Howell. And after multiple concerns were expressed by counterintelligence head Jay Brat. Basically, prosecutors, the DOJ, the FBI continuously expressed concern that Trump and his folks had yet to fully comply with that original grand jury subpoena that was issued in May that requested and demanded that all classified documents, all documents with classified markings on them,

be turned back to the FBI and the DOJ. That included documents not just in Mar-a-Lago, but at other locations, hence why you're now seeing, after the judge instructed his lawyers to continue to search for these documents at all other Trump properties. So, you know, most recently we had former president had at the White House and then transferred to Florida after he left the White House. Prior to that, during the week of Thanksgiving, there was a search of Trump Tower, where this outside team and the lawyers attested that they didn't find any classified documents. And then previously, Bedminster. But at the life storage unit, they did find two documents or two items, rather, with classified markings, which I think really underscore not just sort of the breakdown of distrust between prosecutors and the Trump legal team here, but also the fact that the former president was not taking care of these classified documents, that he didn't not just improperly take them back to Mar-a-Lago, but that he had, in some instances,

had completely lost track of where these were and that they were not in any sort of proper storage unit. Hey, Jackie, Sam Stein here. I actually want to pick up on that, the negligence element of it. I'm not a lawyer. I'm married to one, but not in this particular field of law. But what kind of liability do you have for negligence in keeping these documents and storing them and not keeping track of them? And then, more broadly, the other question I had is, you know, we have seen the appointment of a special counsel. It's not necessarily for this case, but it could be. I'm wondering how all these legal issues bleed together, or if they are just separate,

on separate tracks, and what kind of vulnerability that means for Trump? Yeah, a lot of good questions, Sam. They are actually all on parallel tracks technically under Jack Smith, the special counsel's purview. And actually, the documents investigation is moving at a bit of a more rapid clip than the January 6th investigation. And there is some speculation that if the special counsel were to ultimately land on an indictment, that that would come first with the classified documents instance. As for the liability for the former president in really not caring and mishandling and inappropriately taking these documents and the liability he has

for that, that's exactly what prosecutors are trying to discern right now. I mean, people have gone to jail for far less. Sandy Berger and many others. Just go look at the National Archives website. They've got a very long laundry list of people who have inappropriately taken classified information or presidential records throughout the years and, again, have faced criminal charges. But, you know, prosecutors want to get a rock solid case down. We've talked a lot about the Espionage Act and where this sort of falls on the sliding scale of severity on the Espionage Act.

And as my colleagues Devlin Barrett and Josh Dossi have previously reported, right now, prosecutors are viewing Trump's motive as more or less trying to sell state secrets and more motivated in the fact that he wanted to keep these documents. It was ego driven. He felt like these these items, the letters from Kim Jong-un and other high profile presidential items were his. Regardless of that, though, you know, he still could face some of some very similar criminal charges. Washington Post, Jackie Alimany, digging deep on this story. Jackie, thanks so much. We appreciate it. With the midterm elections officially now in the rearview mirror after the result in Georgia on Tuesday night,

a number of Republican lawmakers yesterday directly blamed former President Donald Trump for their party's shortcomings. President Trump lost again. And I know a lot of people in our party love the president, former president. But he said, if you will, the kiss of death for somebody who wants to win a general election. I think his obsession with the 2020 election became an albatross and a reliability for people who are running, especially in some states. I think he's less relevant all the time. Again, even if you capture all of the Trump voters, you may be able to win a primary, but you're not necessarily going to win a general election. Those candidates most closely associated with President, former President Trump,

underperformed. That is objective. And those who had a little bit more distance tended to do a little bit better. Collection of Republicans there blaming Donald Trump, but not all of them were ready to go all there, blaming Trump for the losses. Some pointed to the party's inability to earn more mail-in and early votes while ignoring the fact that Donald Trump has spent years dissuading Republicans. Exactly. From using early and mail-in votes. Is former President Trump's endorsement the kiss of death, as another Republican senator said today? One thing Democrats have done a good job.

They got their mail-in, they did a better job with early votes, mail-in and early voting. I think people vote based on what they think is important to them. They don't vote because one of us tells them they should vote that way. I don't think this is any referendum on President Trump. I think this is a referendum on us learning the cycle of how to run an election. We as Republicans have to learn about getting people out to vote. Cat's out of the bag with early voting.

Donald Trump's presence was so significant here. Republicans are ready to embrace him in 2024. It's their standard there. I don't quite see it that way. The Trump factor helps some and it hurts some depending where you're at. Biden's not overly popular, but they won because I think their financing system is so much better than ours. Yeah, I wonder when Lindsey's going to actually step away like he did after January the 6th.

Lindsey, buddy, I've known you for a long time. Just want to give you a hint here. Just want to give you a tip. When your hero is sitting down with somebody who says they like Hitler, when he's sitting down with white nationalists, who he claims he doesn't know who he is, but you know he's lying, just like he said he didn't know who David Duke was. Just like he said, you know, at some point you got to walk away from him. This just doesn't get better.

It keeps getting worse when he says he wants to terminate the United States Constitution just because he goes on Truth Social the next day and goes, no, I didn't say that. Lindsay, the voters obviously showed you in 2017, 2018, 2019, said, well, the cat's out of the bag in early voting. I guess we got to figure that out. Adrian, I don't know. See, and here's the thing. OK, I'm such a patient man. But the stuff I've been saying about Donald Trump being bad for Republicans, I've been saying for six years. I've been telling Republicans for six years. I've been talking about this early vote thing forever. How many times have you heard me say on this show that we Republicans used to own early voting. Absentee ballots. We owned it.

If I didn't get 85 percent of absentee ballots, I was pissed off on election night and I would do everything to work those people. I would call people overseas that were in the military. I would say we're sending you an absentee ballot. We worked it. The election was over by the time the polls closed in Florida because I would be pulling down a huge number of absentee ballots. Everybody said, how's the election going to go? I said, I don't know. I think I'm going to go over to Applebee's and get some riblets because I've won this election.

It's over. He's feeling it's all over. But the riblets and they're acting. That was in 1994. And well, I ate a lot of riblets from 94 to 2001. But that was a long time ago. And they're acting like this is something new. Like they act like again, they're like little babies. You play peekaboo. They cover their eyes and they think that if they cover their eyes because they can't see anybody, nobody can see them. We can see them. They're acting really stupid and they're pretending that the realities of modern politics still don't apply to them. They're just going to keep losing, aren't they?

They are, Joe. And look, I mean, to the point that you made, both Democrats and Republicans have been running early vote programs for as long as I can possibly remember, certainly as long as I've been working in politics. And so what I could not understand, Joe, this cycle in particular, was this, you know, lack of ability to motivate their own voters to vote early or saying, oh, if you vote early, if you vote absentee, it's fraudulent. I mean, they're doing this to themselves. It's only hurting themselves when they are saying to their voters, when candidates are saying, don't vote early, vote on Election Day.

Case in point, Georgia, it was raining in most parts of Georgia this past Tuesday, which I'm sure obviously hurt a lot of turnout among Republicans who waited because that's what, you know, their candidates told them to do. Wait, don't vote until Election Day. They didn't like the early voting. They didn't like the early voting. Democrats, we've been running strong early vote campaigns for a long time. It's a tale as old as time. So I, there's a lot of reasons, Joe, that I can't understand the Republican Party, but this is one that really bewilders me because it's a tactic that they're criticizing, which both Democrats and Republicans have utilized for a long time. If you vote early, you can track your

voters more easily. You can track, you know, where the progress is, where you need to spend a little bit more money. You can sort of tweak your campaign strategy around it. So this one is just as much as it baffles you. Well, you know, longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove also weighed in on Georgia Senate runoff, and he argues that Republicans lost because of poor candidate quality at the hands of former President Trump. In an interview with Fox News Digital, Rove said, quote, we had a terrible candidate who was well-meaning but plagued with a lot of scandal and was not particularly good on the campaign trail. He added, quote, we ought to realize that Trump's endorsement is not an inducement to support that candidate,

but a warning to beware. And Jonathan Lemire, I mean, we're seeing Republicans on different versions of Fox News, Fox Business come around on this going, what's going on with Donald Trump? Yeah, Trump put out a ridiculous statement yesterday in which he took credit for his endorsement being the key to a lot of Republican victories. And by the numbers, yeah, he endorsed a lot of winners because those are winners who were not facing competitive races, who were in deep red districts, who would have won anyway. In the swing, there's an analysis of his endorsement on the most competitive races, the swing races, and you're seeing it here. Most of his picks for governor lost. Most of his picks for tough House seats lost. And in the Senate, only one, J.D. Vance, won. His other five choices, including Hershel Walker the other day,

they all lost. And the balanced control of the Senate went to the Democrats, largely in part because the Republicans fielded bad candidates, bad candidates who were handpicked by Donald Trump. So we are hearing some grumblings among Republican analysts like Karl Rove, like some Senate leaders sort of saying, look, maybe this is a moment to pull away from Donald Trump. We'll see if the rest of the party is ready to do that. We've been here before. Republicans have had a handful of moments, Access Hollywood, January 6th, Chief Among Them, where they could have stepped away from Trump. They haven't. Right now, though, it's not just that he's politically toxic. He seems to be a political loser. Could that change their thinking? We'll have to find that out in the weeks ahead. You know, but Willie, when I talk to certain people in the Republican base, they say everybody around me still likes Trump.

Everybody's still supporting Donald Trump. I mean, there may be some Washington senators saying one thing. But the question is, at what point at what point do the rank and file Republicans get tired of losing all the time? I guess. I don't know. I mean, my mama always taught me to grow up and hate losing, to hate it, to just loathe it, to just I can't do it. I I I am not confident enough to lose and be cool with that. Right. Driven by self-hatred since 1963, baby. When it comes to winning and losing therapy. So the question is, no, I don't want to do therapy.

I want to win. OK, so this is what I don't understand about Republicans. The same people that grew up their whole life. I went, my kids, they get participation trophies. Oh, nobody's a loser. No. The feminization of sports. Like these same people are now going like, oh, there's a war on masculinity. It's so bad.

Oh. It's so bad. Oh, and they still. They don't care that they keep losing. How do you wake up in the morning and go lost again? That's cool. I know. At least I got Donald Trump to follow on truth social. Who thinks that way? Okay.

It's all right. He got hit in the steroid. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I need Reverend Al with a James Brown coat to wrap over me and carry me off the stage. I'm laughing. Please. This is my tribe, Willie. They didn't used to be okay with losing. They lose a lot.

But now they're, now they lose all the time and they're really cool with it. We got it. I'm only laughing because while you're talking, Mika is whispering a diagnosis to me about what, what I'm seeing behind the scenes. His ears have been on fire, steroids, poor guy. No, but I'm roided out, baby. I'm roided out. Believe me, I could tell yesterday. Maybe they should get roided out. Again, I'm not cool with people being all right with losing. I think they're also being embarrassed by Trump, like personally embarrassed, and they're okay with it. That's what I don't get. And it's the serious point, Joe, and it's something we were talking about yesterday, the morning after the election,

which is the rationale for staying with Donald Trump is power. If we stay close to him, we get power. We keep his voters close by. We win elections. So we put up with hideous stuff going back to a Muslim ban. Let's not forget about that. A banning of religious group from coming into the country all the way up to what we've seen terminate the Constitution, having dinner, inviting into his estate, Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, all of the things we know about him. But the deal was the bargain was, but we get to keep power if we just look the other way. Well, if you're losing all the elections and you're not getting power out of the deal, what's the point of the deal? That's the question. Where's John McCain? I mean, and speaking of John McCain.

How crazy, Mika, that in Arizona. Yes. People actually thought attacking the father of the modern Republican Party in Arizona and saying, we don't want any of your people here. Get out. OK. Yes, it was cruel. Cruelty that that's what they do. OK. But I'm saying it was also cool to do that. Also. OK. But it's stupid. Again, how many times do I have to say it? My God. Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. When you insult people, you subtract from your vote total. Right. When you go around going, I want to own the libs. I want to own everybody that doesn't agree with me 100 percent of the time.

Oh, and by the way, there's a war on masculinity. I'm really upset. Missouri won't stand for it. I'm really upset. Missouri won't stand for it. When you do that, you lose voters. And again, this is about, I can't believe I'm having to say this. It's about winning voters. This is about making people want to vote for you and why in in december of 2022 after six years of losing don't the republican party understand that by now oh yeah that's a good question i'm going to go to break now still ahead on morning joe uh the head of the senate are you worried about are you worried about me mika and just you know i thought if we didn't go to break, you might start talking about, I don't know. You know what? We're going to go to break now.

The head of the Senate Democrats campaign, Senator Gary Peters, will weigh in on his party's success in Georgia and what it could mean ahead of 2024. Plus, Russian President Vladimir Putin warns that the war in Ukraine could go on for a long time. What that could mean for continued aid to Ukraine from the U.S. and other allies. He also talks the potential for nuclear. Plus, a highly anticipated Netflix documentary from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was released overnight. And we're going to explain why some of the footage in it is not what it claims to be. You're watching Morning Joe. We'll be right back. Welcome back. It's 35 past the hour. The UK's daily star put it this way, quote,

publicity shy couples share most intimate secrets with eight billion people. NBC News chief international correspondent Keir Simmons has more on the highly anticipated Netflix documentary series from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle that was released overnight. Are you putting money before family? Duke and Duchess Harry and Meghan in New York ahead of their multi-million dollar docu-series release receiving an award for fighting racism. The couple relaxed and joking. All of you, thank you for coming. Thank you for bringing me on this very special date night. You're welcome. Netflix will stream the first three episodes. There's a hierarchy of the family.

The rest of the royal family have only seen two one-minute trailers. It's a dirty game. The pain and suffering of women marrying into this institution. Even supporters anxious. I don't want Harry and Meghan to get to a point of no return, where they say things that perhaps the royal family takes such exception to, the relationships can't be repaired. Doesn't it make more sense to hear our story from us?

And already the trailers have caused questions. This image depicting Hungry Paparazzi is actually from a Harry Potter premiere. There's been so much analysis and already so much outrage just about the trailer. All right, that's NBC's Keir Simmons with the report. Let's bring Financial Times' Ed Luce. He's our royal watcher. Of course, that has been for a long Tina Brown for years. So, Ed, I mean, I went through a couple of our BBC article popped up. There are like five or six instances where they said, oh, the paparazzi were all after us.

And it was an especially terrible time. And then they have then they go to a clip of a Harry Potter premiere from 2011. Then there's another part where you're supposed to feel bad for them because people are spying on them and taking photos from above. Then you find out that it was a staged picture from inside. I think it was Windsor or somewhere else where they had picked the pool reporters to take the pictures one after another, after another. And all of this from a woman who claims she had no idea she had never read what she was getting into and how shocking it is. And we just want our privacy and just want to be left left alone and ching, ching, ching, I mean, cashing in. And apparently right after the queen passes, going against absolutely everything the queen

stood for in her 96 years. Yeah, I mean, I would say I am I've I was going to come on and talk about the American working class. So the royal question, what would the British royal family will do as a substitute? But and it's an interesting question. Yeah, they're very good at monetizing this. I don't have any special insights into Meghan and Harry's motives beyond that or what they went through. I can understand, given, you know, Harry's mother at the end of Diana, I can understand why he's pretty paranoid about the fate of women who marry into the family and why, you know, why they might have left the family. I think, though, the fact that they invited Oprah Winfrey to their wedding,

having never met her, does suggest that there was a larger ambition, branding ambition, even before it went wrong. But as I say, my royal watching is pretty limited. Well, that was pretty good. I don't think you're going to get deep insights from me. Yeah, pretty good. Well, let's go to Willie. So, Willie.

Sure. Deep insights, please. Again, again, this whole thing is like, oh, we can't stand the glare. Oprah, would you come to our wedding? We can't stand the glare. Please don't look at us. Let's do a long interview where we're going to drop some bombshells and not really prove those bombshells. And Harry's going to come out and look, as Caitlin Flanagan said, look as if he was shot out of a cannon, stunned by where the interview was going.

And then they're so shocked and scared of the Klieg lights at what do they do? They go to Santa Barbara and then they rush straight toward the Klieg lights with this massive, you know, Netflix deal where, you know, maybe they're taking down their family. I also invited Oprah to my wedding without having met her. It was a polite pass, which was very, yeah. Yeah. I think I'm again, I'm not an expert on this. I'm more interested in Aaron Judge and Xander Bogarts than Megan and Harry. But the idea that they finally get to tell their story, didn't they just do that in the Oprah interview? And when you hear Megan say, don't you want to hear the story from us? I think we did. We heard a lot of the story in great detail. So, look, they signed a huge deal with Netflix when they moved to L.A. a couple of years ago. They had to produce something for Netflix to justify all that money, Mika.

And I guess this is it, a retelling of their story. And, Joe, to your point, I think what we're going to find in this, just from what we've heard so far about this, and it's out now, but a lot of the editing is a little bit less than honest, you know, talking about not having any privacy, but potentially showing shots that were set up from inside the palace. I mean, where, you know, you know, you're walking into. So it's going to be a lot about how they put it together and what they said and why. And also, we don't want to we don't like the invasion of privacy. Could you please bring the 500 cameras in our living room and get that picture of me crying on the couch? I'm crying. Hold on. Hold on. How's the lighting? OK, I'm crying now. I know. I know. So, Adeluce, let's talk about the American working class. It's apparently tough out there from Santa Barbara to the Hollywood offices of Netflix to working America.

Tell us your story that's not about the royals. There's a piece in the Financial Times. I promise. We really care about it. Go. I'm enjoying this sort of roller coaster ride through different demographics. Well, what I've been writing about is the concern, notwithstanding the fact that this was a good midterm election for Democrats, that even then, the shift of blue-collar votes of all races—we're not just talking about white working class, we're talking about

Hispanics, 40 percent of whom voted Republican. The shift of the blue-collar vote to the Republican Party is a flashing red warning sign for the Democrats that has been a pattern now over the last three cycles. And the question is why this is happening and what they can do to stop it. The results last month were overwhelmingly powered by female graduate voters, by white college voters who, you know, the Democrats are a party increasingly of higher education. They're of higher education and they're of ethnic minorities. But if the ethnic minorities, even African-Americans, one in five now voting for African-American men voting for Republicans, if they're shifting to the Republican Party away from what what should be their natural home, the Democratic Party, that is a worrying signal that the party needs to do more to address. And it's I don't think it's being debated enough, frankly, much as I love talking about Harry and Meghan.

Yeah, the piece is entitled America's Shipwrecked Working Class. And you write in part this ad. It's been a bumpy 50 years for blue collar America. Not only has Labour's share of U.S. national income steadily dropped, barring a few brief patches, chiefly in the 1990s Internet boom, but its life expectancy has also been falling. Having secured the country's first avowedly pro-union president since Lyndon Johnson, a turning of the corner ought to be in sight. The fact that it is not is less a reflection on how Joe Biden, on the biases of the system he heads his party, is nevertheless on the hook

for its failure to deliver by 2024. Democrats will have controlled the White House for 20 out of 32 years. Yet the federal minimum wage is stuck at $7.25 an hour. Democratic rhetoric is strongly pro-working class. The party's actions are another matter. Working classes of all colors have been steadily drifting toward the Republicans. More Americans with household income below $50,000 voted Republican than Democratic last month. The pattern has become clearer in each of the past three elections. It spans all racial groups, including African-Americans. And that is a weak spot for Democrats, Joe. Well, it is. And back in 94, when I first ran, I remember we were all shocked that white working class voters making under $30,000 at the time voted overwhelmingly for us.

And that was something new. That was something people were trying to figure out. had a lot of discussions about concerns inside the Biden camp that especially among men, especially among black men and Hispanic men, that there were working class voters, people of color who were normally Democrats that were starting to break toward the Republican Party. Now, of course, on the other side, you have suburban women, suburban men, educated voters that are breaking strongly toward the Democratic Party that have been Republican their whole life. So if people want to know, that's the offset. But there's no rule in American politics that you can't have both. So how do Democrats hold on to these suburban voters who think a lot of Republicans views are retrograde on on social policy issues? And at the same time, keep working class voters voting Democratic with policies. Yeah, Joe, I mean, I think it really comes down to messaging. And, you know, the thing that always drives me a little crazy about being a Democrat is that we are the ones who are passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which put more money in the pockets of middle class families. We are the ones who, you know,

led the effort to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill. You know, we're the ones who are delivering for middle class, working class families. But for some reason, there's a disconnect. I think a lot of it does have to do with some of the culture wars that, you know, Trump elevated. Can I ask you about that, Adrian? Can I ask you about that really quickly? Wherever I go across the country, I hear people saying I don't want I don't want everybody's head to explode. I know you hear it, too, Adrian. But I have people saying, you know, that the saddest guy. I don't know what he's like, but I agree with him on that. That don't say gay bill. I don't want my second grader to be taught whatever. And then they all have a story about about what's going on in college.

They're all of these social issues where it seems to me the five percent of the Democratic Party that's very progressive, their views have somehow been seen as balanced out and dominant in the entire Democratic Party. That is a real concern for working class voters. Sure, absolutely. And I think, you know, to an extent, what we saw in this midterm election is that, you know, voters told us they want effective, you know, moderate governance in many respects. And, you know, they don't want to talk about the woke culture. They don't want, you know, to feel, you know, that, you know, they're going to be criticized for saying something that might be a little off or that they didn't mean to, you know, intentionally say is, you know, not being

a productive part of the conversation. And I think, again, that's what we saw in this last election. We, you know, obviously a lot of the Trump endorsed candidates lost, but also, you know, some of those hyper progressive candidates in primaries on the Democratic side also lost. So I think it's something we've got to work on as a work in progress. Want to make more than $7.25 an hour. And they want a bigger minimum wage. Exactly. Let's bring into the conversation the president and CEO of the National Urban League, Mark Morial. Good morning.

Good to see you, sir. How are you? Great to be back in the studio. You just pulled up a chair. You've been listening to our conversation. You just showed up here. And Ed's piece about working class Americans, white, black, Latino, perhaps in some places toward the Republican. Interesting perspective. But what were the results of the election?

The results count. No. On a national basis, the Democrats managed to do something they've not been able to do in a long time, which is to some extent not lose ground in a midterm election in a significant fashion. This election cycle was a win for Chuck Schumer, a win for Joe Biden. Notwithstanding all of that, I also think the other message in the election is that the Democrats managed to turn their vote out when turning out the vote in the midterm has historically been a systemic issue. Back to Clinton, to Obama, even in the Bush years, difficult to get the vote out in the midterm election. As to working class voters, I think you've got to acknowledge a few things. The white working class is a shrinking component of the electorate. Number two, to suggest that black men in large numbers voted

for Republicans is just not borne out by the facts. Yes, blacks, like any other group of folk, varied in their political views, have different positions. Here's what I think this election shows for Democrats or for Republicans. You've got to build a coalition. You can't simply be ideologically in one place. And candidates that have the ability to do that are ultimately going to be the ones who are going to be successful. So let's talk specifically, Mr. Mayor, about what happened in Georgia a couple of days ago. The operation that Democrats built there over several years, the campaign that Senator Warnock ran there, not just focused on Atlanta, not just focused on the suburbs where he cleaned up, but to your point, going into rural communities and talking about peanut farmers and all the rest of it.

A remarkable candidate, Raphael Warnock, a measured, disciplined candidate who said, I'll talk to all voters, a candidate, a U.S. senator who said, you know what? I'll sponsor legislation with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Yet I'm going to maintain my basic values. So, you know, an interesting model and maybe a pathway forward for candidates. And I think in Georgia, what you had, guys, is something which is an on the ground grassroots self-propelled operation, which wasn't tied right to the candidate or to the party, just people really fighting to save democracy who wanted to vote to send a message. And that is what happened. And it is incredible. And we can stay on that. But I think Ed's piece in the Financial Times, Joe, really nails it because it looks at what

Democrats can work for in the next for the next election, where the weak spots were. When you have all Democrat, all demographics making under 50K voting predominantly Republican, that's that's a sign that there's work that needs to be done. Well, right. And in the words of voting predominantly Republican. Right. In the words of W.D. Childers, the bandy roosters, I want all the money. I want all the votes. And so if you're trying to figure out how to nail that, Mr. Mayor, you are right. This is a remarkable coalition, right? Not just in Georgia, but across America, where you have former Republicans, you have Democratic moderates, you have the progressive base that's getting out there and pushing and charging so much.

You've got swing voters. You've got independents. You've got all of the trend lines moving in the right direction. I do want to ask you, though, are you concerned about working class Americans? It just doesn't make any sense economically that they're going to the party of billionaires, that they're going to the party that gives the biggest tax cut in the history of of country, and more money to billionaires and multinational corporations, and less money for Medicaid, less money for Medicare. They're promising to cut Social Security and Medicare.

They're promising to make poor and middle class people pay higher taxes. Isn't this something the Democratic Party should be able to jump on and bring those working class voters home? Absolutely right, Joe. And with those voters, you've got to demonstrate that you're fighting for them every day. You're fighting for the minimum wage, for the child tax credit. You're fighting for them every day. And you're pointing out that things like child tax credit and minimum wage couldn't get through the Congress because of the Senate filibuster and Mitch McConnell's Republican caucus. So I think you're right. You've got to demonstrate that you're working and fighting. You've got to connect. You've got to go into those communities. You've got to go into those neighborhoods. You've got to talk to voters. The idea that you only talk to those who you consider to be your supporters or base

is not what American democracy is about. I think people have to talk to your base. But we are learning now, back to an earlier message, you've got to build a coalition to win in American politics. The country is too dynamic, too varied, too, if you will, diverse in many, many ways that just fealty to a base or to a specific ideology is not going to win on a national basis. Jonathan. Hey, Ed, your piece obviously lays out the economic concerns of the working class and suggests how Democrats can better address them. But what about some of the cultural issues that the white working class seems to have rallied around and are amplified by Donald Trump, but also in the conservative media in places like Fox News?

There's clearly a racial component to Trumpism and to the white working class's shift, which has been more pronounced than other demographics to the Republican Party. And there's no disputing that. But the—and I don't disagree with Mark or Adrienne or Joe or any of what's been said that the Republican Party economically offers nothing more than trickle-down economics to blue-collar America, which amounts to really nothing in practice. But if you go around America, and whatever I do, and all of you know this better than me, you find that blue-collar Americans are economically populist. They would like higher minimum wages. They would like better health care. They would like parental

and sick leave. They would like all the kinds of things the Democratic Party tries to get for them, but often fails to get for them. But culturally, they're fairly moderate. They're not campus in their outlook. Appeals to them on that basis tend to rebound, tend to boomerang back on them. I think we underestimate the degree to which public safety and security on the streets is a concern of all groups, including African-Americans. And the polls back this up strongly. African-Americans want to see police on the streets. They want to see police abuse dealt with, but they want to feel safe in their neighborhoods. And so the idea that if we talk about crime, it's some kind of a racial dog whistle. We've got to get over that. You know, not everything is Fox News.

U.S. national editor of the Financial Times and also our royal watcher, Ed Luce, and president and CEO of the National Urban League, Mark Morial. Thank you both very much for being on this morning. Great to see you.