The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: A consequential election and serious warnings about Donald Trump

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus. As we enter into the final stretch of one of the most consequential presidential elections in US history, Janice and Rudyard disregard the often inaccurate polls to make their own predictions about who will win on November 5th. Regardless of the revelations about his personal character, the state of inflation, immigration, and the economy is fueling his resilience in this race. How will the conflicts in Ukraine, Israel, and China - currently stalled due to the upcoming election - start heating up again post November 5th? And how will the winner - Harris or Trump - affect these geopolitical conflicts and the global economy? To wrap up today's show Rudyard and Janice discuss the revelations being made by Trump's former high ranking officials John Kelley and Mark Milley about his embrace of fascism and why voters should take their warnings seriously. To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by the Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website in just a few. few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast. Rudyard Griffiths here, the chair of the mug Debates.

I'm joined by Janice Gross-Dine. Today, the 25th of October. Janice were creeping up into the kind of 10-day mark to the U.S. election on November 5th. This vote will go down probably is one of the more consequential elections in recent history. What's your gut telling you as you kind of sift through not just the polls, but the kind of atmospherics around these two campaigns as they hit this final stretch of what has been a multi-billion dollar marathon of political haymaking this this past year and by the way the spending is only accelerating so somebody's doing very well out of the selection reddard i'm glad you asked me the question that way redyard what's my gut because the data don't really help us here and we are in too close looking at everything my gut is that

Trump will win this election. Why do I say that? And again, it's gut. And let's distinguish between gut science. And this is just gut. If you look at the average of the polls, of the polls, of the polls, you see a much-water gap between the two candidates,

six weeks ago, eight weeks ago. The gap has narrowed between the two of them. So she has lost. Harris has lost. the lead that she had. And the issues, I think, that are driving this election. I think that's the biggest reason. The issues that are driving this election in the United States work in favor of Trump.

I think one little tidbit that's worth noting, because, again, you can't go by the polls here, listeners. As we've discussed before, it's like, you know, having the wrong. device to try to see something it's like using you know a magnifying glass to try to look at particles the the resolution especially on these national polls is nowhere near enough to tell you what's going to happen in these five battlegrounds with 70 to 90,000 voters who likely will be the determining factor for what I agree with you Janice looks increasingly like a likelihood of a Trump victory what

was concerning i saw in the last you know 48 72 hours was i this is so strange in the united states that you register as a republican or a democrat so you register with with your your state i don't know what the body is but someone knows what you are you can be an independent too but you register so when these early polls have opened up and they don't know how people vote but they do know and they are reporting on are they registered Republicans or Democrats? And in 2020, in some of these key states like Arizona and Nevada, the Democrats had a not insignificant, roughly 10 point plus edge in early voter turnout for these advanced polls, which suggested again some momentum for the Biden campaign and that, you know, followed through to Biden's win over Trump. This time around,

in in Arizona the last few days, there's been a surge of almost 40% in favor of early Republican versus Democrat turnout. And this suggests some momentum, doesn't it, Janice, beneath the surface? And a fundamental problem with this polling, I was amazed to get this little tidbit out of a pretty respected American pollster Rasmussen that less than one in ten Republicans. Republicans, it's self-identified Republicans, will participate in a survey. Democrats are much more likely to respond. And what's happening, this pollster walks this through on another podcast. It's fascinating.

They're having to do all kinds of really weird things like weight the survey results for educational attainment to try to amplify those portions of their sample, which are woefully underrepresented. So I put this all together, Janice. I see this early voting surge for Republicans. I see polling that's probably under, generally under representing the Republican vote because Republicans simply don't want to participate in polls. And many of Trump's voters are kind of low incident, low information voters anyway. These are not people that generally like the government. And I don't think they like pollsters phoning them up at dinner time much either. And I put that together and I think we would have needed to see Harris right now with a two to three point

lead over Trump to assume that she could close this out and as you say your critical insight she's fallen back to level and level is not good enough yeah I mean I find I noticed the same story rather and it's funny the things we that kind of emerge out of the noise as an indicator of something we should pay attention to so I did. And I was struck by two things. This tells you something about the level of commitment of voters when they vote early because they don't want to miss the opportunity to vote.

So it looks like from these early identifications of voters, Trump has a committed group of voters there because they did not do that in 2020. they are doing it now. And secondly, let's look at the rhetoric around early voting. That was one of the biggest issues that those early voters, the vote wasn't secure

in Trump's challenge last time. But this is his own folks now who are doing this. So I thought, oh, wow, if more Republicans or are voting early in some states than Democrats. That says something about the level of mobilization here.

And, you know, as we discussed previously, I think the challenge for the terrorist campaign in these last few weeks, the fact for the entire campaign is that, you know, life is never fair. And the issue set of this election has just, you know, inherently benefited Trump. And again, we can talk a little. little bit about this. You know, it might seem irrational to people that why, you know, a lot of

American voters feel Trump is the better candidate for the American economy or the better candidate on immigration, two of the hot button issues. But that's how they feel. You know, there's the world as we want it and the world as it is. The world as it is is that people think that the Trump years were terrific. Yes, they were terrific. I mean, he ran up something like $8 trillion in in deficits, that kind of makes things terrific when you're spending that much, that much public and government funds. But that's how Americans feel. And on immigration, you know, I think lurking behind all of this is this amazing surge of inflation, which has destabilized lower blue-collar working class voters in the United States financially. Eggs are four times the cost now.

they were in 2020. Gasoline is up 30 percent. Car insurance is up 50 percent. These are things that matter to average people who don't own NVIDIA stock and are not, you know, capital holders. These are people living paycheck to paycheck. And those paychecks, while they've seen wage gains, they have not kept up to the price of inflation and some of these key, you know, consumer items, which are, again, part of their daily reality. So I think, in, inflation plus immigration, plus the economy is fueling this resiliency of the Trump campaign, regardless of the bizarre things that he says, the condemnations now for people like Kelly, his former chief of staff, a senior military figure, not unimportant, Millie, the joint chiefs

of staff. I mean, these are, should be bombshells in any other campaign, possibly mortally wounding to a candidacy, but Trump brushes it off again, because I think the issue. said has fundamentally broken his way. You know, I think no over-emphasizing the importance of what you just said. And it's hard sometimes for the chattering classes. So let me just stop over this one a minute because I think it's so important. If you think about inflation, which really spiraled for two years of the Biden presidency. And it was a struggle to get it under control and it's only coming under control now after a real spike in interest rates.

So if you're paying four times more for X under a Biden presidency than you are under Trump presidency, and you have a tight budget and you are living paycheck to paycheck, you're going to cut back. You have to cut back on some of the food you're buying. that is the dominant i mean inflation destroys the lower middle class and working class it just destroys them because they're so vulnerable over and over and over what you hear in exit interviews from those voters who are trump voters i have less money in my pocket than i had four years ago that's true that is not hallucinatory that is true i can have afford to buy less food for my family now, for my kids than I could.

My rent has gone up. My rent has gone. Many of these people are renters. They're not owners. This is the difference. There's an ownership society that's primarily, you know, the 10% and the 1% and the 0.001%. And then there's the 50 odd percent of Americans who own no stocks.

They own no house. They live on credit. They're paycheck to paycheck. And I'm sorry. but the Democrats kind of blew it with this constituency. There was a lot of like happy talk and we're going to get this right during the Biden years. But what they did, and again, I think it was a real own goal is they allowed and they ran the stock market up to record highs in the United States. And it did nothing for that, you know, 50% of Americans that aren't part of the 1% who own 50% of all assets in the United States.

they kind of fundamentally, you know, I don't know, either ignored or under. They just didn't hear it. They don't hear it. God, Janice. But why would you do that? Why would you assume that, yeah, we're going to roar the stock market? We're going to flood the zone with government money and stimulus. We're going to, you know, use the treasury to suppress borrowing costs because we're going

to borrow all the money on the short end as opposed to the long end, which again, just has fueled this exceptional, partly it fueled this exceptional stock rally. And it doesn't matter to the cohort of voters that they're reaching because they're not participating in the type of American economy, which has been built up over the last generation, which is oligarchical, plutocratic, deeply unequal. And guess what? The chickens have come home to roost. And it just, I don't know, it's gobsmacking the Democrats over 20 years since Bill Clinton, 20, years have seemingly never figured out that that running a country, you know, on these kind of plutocratic, unequal, unfair foundations leads to a lot of political unrest and dissatisfaction amongst

large voting cohorts who turn out to vote for a guy who's going to blow everything up because they want to blow everything up. Well, you know, I think there's two big issues here. The the issues have for the Democrats just different. Okay. And it's lost its working class roots. The Democratic Party is no longer a party of the working class. And that's, in a sense, the most stunning turn in American politics. So what did the Biden administration really focus on?

It focused on the pandemic, rightly so. And that cost money. it focused on the strategic, the pacing threat created by China. And so you got the Inflation Reduction Act and investment in high-tech sectors and advanced manufacturing, which America really needs, Rudyard. Yes, but if you have a blue-collar, you know, high school education, you're not going to work for Intel in a new plant that Joe Biden's building in Texas. No. And abortion, which is a big,

issue in this election. That's the only issue that is in that issue set for this election. That is a democratic issue. But it's not enough to overcome the feeling that I could feed my family more meat during a week during the Trump administration than I can. Now, I'm poorer. And I think the big mess, I'm not so sure that Biden, had an option set at the beginning of his presidency. There was stuff he really had to get done. There's investment, some of the fundamentals for America, which don't benefit this group.

But Harris had a chance. When she was nominated, she was in a tough spot because she was part of this administration. But she had to break out with a set of policies that addressed exactly this group of voters. had to be about groceries. It had to be about lowering the cost of living. It had to be about all of that.

And she had to make a sharper break with the past than she did. She just didn't do it, Richard. So look, just in the remaining moments of this session, there's so many, you know, things to contemplate from a Trump victory. But in leaving Canada, the effects on Canada, the consequences out. If he is the winner and, you know, there's some indications that, this might even be a somewhat decisive victory. And we may know election night or shortly thereafter just based on, you know,

the electoral college and how votes are awarded. We watch Georgia. We watch Arizona and we watch Nevada. We may get some results there. What do you think the big result would be of a Trump win immediately? Because I think we've all sensed, Janice, over the course this year, that the world is like a series of tectonic plates that have been grinding up against each other and stuck between those plates is a big wedge called the U.S. presidential election that's not allowing in a sense that

the natural kind of geopolitical process to unfold. It's stalled it. So as soon as that wedge is removed, Janice, you know whether it's the Middle East, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Europe versus the U.S. on trade. There's a whole series of issues that are suddenly going to go from stalled and hypothetical to active tectonic movement, pressure, and probably rupture. Yeah. So this is a disruptive event, Richard, if he went. This is a disruptive event. It's a disruptive event on the big conflicts that are reaching because both in the Israel-Gaase conflict and in the Russia-Ukraine, leaders have made bets, frankly. They've rolled the dice on who's going to win this one.

It is consequential. It will be consequential for Gaza and it will be consequential for Ukraine if Trump wins. There's no question about it. That's why everything is stalled waiting for the selection. It will be hugely consequential for the global economy because there will be tariffs. There will be tariffs as bargaining chips. There will be tariffs because Trump believes in tariffs. Who knows all of that remains to be unpacked.

But there will be tariffs. And we know that protectionism is not healthy for the global economy over the long term. And it is potentially very, very, very destabilizing. As economies all over the world adjust, They will have to adjust to a new – because America exports adjustment. That's what it does. It's so powerful. You know, what is the European Union going to do, which is such an important trading partner of the United States?

If they resort to tariffs, which, again, there are rumors that that's what they're getting ready to do, we can have a very bumpy, bumpy period in the global economy, which I think you and I would say, more fragile, less institutionalized than it was last time around. Yeah, so I think the tariff thing is very important because as we discussed in the show last week, you know, tariffs are no longer a kind of luxury belief that, you know, Trump likes to use as a negotiating tactic on other issues with countries. They literally become a way to fund what will be, you know, a fire sale of tax cuts, corporate giveaways, capital gains reductions, a whole kind of series of tax expenditures that he's going to have to raise hundreds of billions of dollars for.

So I think tariffs, unfortunately, this time, are going to be a necessity and that this will be inflationary. And I think what we have to understand is that, you know, connect some dots here. Inflationary means that central banks around the world, and we'll see what happens with the U.S. Fed, because Trump has had a testy and contested relationship with Jerome Powell in the past. but we're already seeing the bond market as the penny has dropped and people are getting a sense that Trump is going to win. Yields are heading back up. So inflation expectations lead yields higher. So borrowing costs for everybody in a tariff-based world will be higher, not lower.

And that includes Canada. even look at the five-year Canadian bond, which we price our mortgage, our fixed mortgage rates off, that is up significantly over the last 30 days. Yields across the world in all types of borrowing from car loans to mortgages in debt to sovereign debt will increase in reaction to the threat and then probably the reality of some kind of American-led tariff regime that, as you said, Janice, causes a counterreaction from other large economic blocks like Europe. So this, I think, people have to start thinking through because it, there is no free lunch in economics and tariffs will be inflationary and they will elicit

the response that let's hope that, you know, these independent central banks still have some independence and they will respond if they see higher inflation inflation's not coming down rates will not be cut by central banks you know Richard just I can't have I'm sorry to you know for interrupting you but I'm just struck by the irony as we're talking that the driver of a trump victory if there is one the driver will have been inflation because it's so corrosive and the voters who are voting because they feel poor to bring this down to the ground what we've just been talking about. That is partly a function of inflation. But if Trump wins and he does resort to tariffs, and I agree with you.

I don't think it's an if, Janice. I agree. I agree. And it's just a question of scale. Is it this ridiculous 50% on China, 10% on the rest of the world? I think the 10% of the rest of the world, again, because he has to pay for no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, no taxes on income. He was musing this week about abolishing income taxes in America.

But just imagine the implication for those voters who voted for them. Just imagine the consequences for those lower middle class and working class voters who voted for. It will be corrosive again. So that's the circle, right, that strikes me in this big story. of this whole election is that the policies that Trump is advocating are in fact, will in fact have absolutely awful consequences for the voters who are voting for him as an alternative to an administration which they feel did not hear, and with some justification, did not hear their voices. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year

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