The NPR Politics Podcast - Roundup: What Is The Future Of The Cases Against Trump?

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Almost the whole country shifted right since 2020, but the degree to which different groups changed says a lot about how the race was decided. And what is the future of the cases against President-elect Trump?This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, and national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. A quick word before the show. The 2024 election is over, and as a new administration prepares to assume power, it's our job across the entire NPR network to report on what they do with that power.

And that's why we're here, because information is power, too. Your support makes it possible for us to break down big stories, to fact check, and to make sure you understand what's going on. When you donate, you make a difference in our ability to do this work tomorrow. And if you're already a supporter, we're taking this moment to say thank you. And if you're not, go to donate.mpr.org to give. Donate.mpr.org. Okay, here's the show. Hello, this is Silas from Colorado. I am about to go to my wind ensemble practice at the Greater Boulder Youth Orchestra. This podcast was recorded at 1243pm on Friday, November 8.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will hopefully still be enjoying the French horn. Enjoy the show. I was hoping it was going to be the bassoon or something. Are you with the bassoon? I was going to guess oboe for some reason. Oboe and bassoon are very close. Are they really? Yeah, they look very similar.

You have to have a very keen eye to notice the difference. What? One is gargantuan and one is not. Go see a symphony sometime. Hey there, it's the MPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Danielle Kurtz-Levin.

I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And former President Trump won the Electoral College and for the first time in his three runs for president, he's on track to win the popular vote. And if Republicans hold on to their House majority, which they appear on track to be, his party will have full control of the levers of power in Washington. Domenico, it was a huge victory for the Republican Party and it was a victory that was in large part powered by men. Yeah, you know I found it really interesting, you know, when you look at the numbers overall, I mean, you know, 71% of the electorate were white voters and that's the first time

that's gone up since 1992 because we are in a society where whites as a share of the population are on decline and have been on decline since 1992, pretty significantly. So the fact that that went up, the fact that Republicans do so well with white voters generally, that obviously helped Trump. But when you dig in a little deeper, you see some real trends where men sort of outpaced others that did shift. I mean, when you look at Latinos, for example, Trump won a record share for a Republican,

46% of Latinos. He won 55% of Latino men. Harris won about 60% of Latinos. That's still down from what Joe Biden did, for example, but the swing with Latino men is just really a big piece of what fueled that difference with Latinos overall. And when it came to younger voters, 18 to 29, Trump narrowly won younger men, 49, 47. Women about 61 percent, 18 to 29, went for Harris.

And Democrats usually have to be at about 60 percent with voters 18 to 29 to win. And obviously they weren't this time. And a lot of that was because of men. I mean, Danielle, none of this is by accident. We've talked so much over the course of this campaign about how much gender mattered but the Trump campaign made a very clear overture to male voters almost in a way the same way that Kamala Harris's campaign was making overtures to women. Very much but I really want to make sure we get this right because yes men swung

further toward Trump than they did in 2020, but women also did. This was a shift that spanned both men and women. If we're trusting the exit polls from 2020 and 2024, and again, those can be slippery, but let's just go off those numbers. Men in 2020 chose Trump by eight points. This year they chose him by 13 points.

All right. Women in 2020 chose Biden by 15 points and Harris by eight points. This year they chose him by 13 points. All right. Women in 2020 chose Biden by 15 points and Harris by 8 points. So women slid 7 points and men slid 5 points. So there are certainly subgroups of men that really swung, especially like Domenico said, Latino men and young men. But there was some real movement among certain groups of women as well. Yeah, I think it's interesting because Harris obviously targeted the suburbs pretty heavily. I think she thought that she was going to be able to win by bigger margins with white women in the suburbs and wound up losing white women in the suburbs by seven points.

She lost white men in the suburbs by 27 points, so much wider. And there were certainly some kitchen table disputes, obviously, but certainly not big enough for Harris to win. And there was also, obviously, this divide by education. Women without college degrees went for Trump by huge margins, while women with college degrees actually went for Harris by wider margin and turned out at a higher rate than they did in 2020, but obviously weren't enough to help Harris overcome the losses with all those other groups. Yeah.

To me, the gender story, at least for now, is in the candidate's messaging and to what degree that messaging worked or did not. As you alluded to, Sue, Trump did go on a lot of these podcasts that have largely men and especially young men listeners in an effort to try to turn those men out and Swing them to his side and to some degree that seems as if it worked The broader story of that seems to be that the candidates were working to see what media ecosystems They could work within to boost their turnout to boost their voters and it seems that it worked for Trump. Now on the flip side, Kamala Harris really pinned her hopes to abortion.

And that fired up a lot of women, but just not enough. And it did not resonate with as many men as she hoped. Can we get to the bigger question, which is what's the why? I mean, I think the gender gap, as we talked about a lot, was in the context of abortion rights, and that it would make sense that women were more driving towards the party that was seen as in support of abortion rights. It seems like a lot of this gender divide too was just about maybe a broader cultural divide.

Like, the male vote to me doesn't seem like it was driven by clear policies as much as a sense that the Republican Party was just a place that was more welcoming for them. Yes, I think that is absolutely correct. But also, I mean, it wasn't just positive messaging to the men. Trump had a lot of negative messaging to women. That is a party that is talking about a gender hierarchy and is putting men at the top of it.

Yeah, I mean, what we hear a lot anecdotally is that there's a lot of young men who feel aggrieved. You hear from parents, you hear it from the younger men themselves, that they feel like all these other groups society puts above them makes it harder for them to get jobs, they feel like they're targeted, and it's about like what type of country they wanna be in or if they feel included in.

But I also think that it starts with the issues. I mean, when the views of the economy are as bleak as they are, rightly or wrongly, it makes it really, really difficult for somebody who is associated as closely as Kamala Harris is, obviously, with the Biden administration. I mean, in the exit polls, we saw 2 thirds of people had a negative view of the economy.

3 quarters said that inflation caused them some degree of hardship. And only a quarter of people said that their financial situation now is better than four years ago. When you have those kinds of things, it makes it really difficult for the sitting vice president to be able to distance herself, to be able to say that she can make the needed change. We've talked a lot about how Trump defies political expectations and realities. And one thing when we're talking about young men that I think is interesting is that historically we tend to think of young voters that like 18 to 30

crew as just leaning more liberal. And it is interesting to me whether this is an aberration this election or is this or if this is an indication of younger Americans just moving in a more conservative direction than we might have anticipated. I think this is about information ecosystems. And if every TikTok feed that you're getting or every podcast you're listening to is playing to your confirmation bias and telling you what you want to hear, then I think that for Democrats,

they're gonna need to get into those places where people are listening to be able to change what they're thinking about. Because I think probably 10 years ago, maybe we would have said 18 to 29 year old voters were concerned about climate change and they were moving more liberally socially than their parents were and that's not what this generation seems to be at least when it comes to young men. These generational generalizations are really

hard to do in the moment but hey I going to take a stab at it anyway. If you look at millennials, for example, millennials have remained a bit more liberal as they have aged than the generations that are older than them. One thing that you can read into all of this about millennials getting more liberal and Gen Z perhaps being a bit more conservative, millennials came of age during the Iraq War, a very unpopular war, during the Great Recession when they entered a job market that had cratered. Millennials had difficulty finding houses for quite a while

and on and on and on. Gen Z meanwhile, a lot of them were in school or college during a pandemic when a, you know, a government or the powers that be around them had, you know, stay at home orders, wanted people to stay home from class, etc. I mean, they grew up in a very different environment and very different things that they were distrustful of, aka perhaps authority, and that they were angry about. I think that in the coming years we are going to be unspooling just how much that affected Gen Z's politics.

All right. Danielle Kurtzleben, thanks so much. Thank you. We're going to take a quick break and when we get back, what happens to the dozens of federal criminal charges against Donald Trump? This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com, T's and C's apply.

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tell different stories on that theme. All right, I'm just gonna stop right there. You're listening to an NPR podcast, chances are you know our show. So instead, I'm gonna tell you, we've just been on a run of really good shows lately. Some big epic emotional stories, some weird funny stuff too.

Download us, This American Life. And we're back with NPR's Carrie Johnson. Hey Carrie. Hey there. Obviously we've been wanting to talk about this all week, but it's time to talk about what happens to the legal cases against the former and now incoming president. Let's just start with the federal cases.

You know, we just had some news come in right before I came into the studio. Oh, lay it on me. You know, we just had some news come in right before I came in. Lay it on me. Jack Smith, the special counsel who's in charge of these two federal cases against Donald Trump, just asked the judge in Washington, D.C. for a delay until early December. We have an unprecedented circumstance, and that is that the former president, Donald Trump, is a criminal defendant fighting charges that accuse him of breaking the law to cling to power in 2020, but he's also now the president-elect and the Justice

Department needs a little time to figure that out. It seems like by December 2nd, Jack Smith says, he'll have a way forward. I have to tell you, there's really no way forward here. That's because there's a long-standing Justice Department view that's been in place for many decades, adhered to by Republican and Democratic administrations, that you cannot prosecute or try a sitting president of the United States. It's just too destructive to the executive branch. The president is different. He needs to focus on his constitutional duties, and he can't be bothered, the view is, with this criminal process. So that case is gonna go away probably in early December, if not earlier.

And is that also true for the classified documents case? Also a federal case, also can prosecute a sitting president for any past crime? You know what? That policy is certainly true. There's a complication with that documents case and the complication is that Donald Trump was charged alongside two other people, the guy who was the property manager at Mar-a-Lago the resort and his longtime valet, Walt Notta. And so the Justice Department is gonna have to think about whether it wants the case to go away as to all three of those men or just Trump. Danielle Pletka Oh, that's interesting.

Danielle Pletka I mean, cut and run at this point, it would seem. And then the second complication there is that Judge Eileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, dismissed that prosecution on the first day of the Republican convention in July. And the reasoning that she used could implicate the way other special counsels are appointed and also other people appointed in the government who don't get Senate confirmation. And the Justice Department's very concerned about that. So, you know, they're pretty deliberative men and women over there. They're thinking about what to do. But a lawyer who used to work there told me he thinks that Judge Cannon's ruling is not binding precedent. So it's probably okay to leave that case alone

too and just let it go away. Aaron Ross Powell It's kind of amazing that we're talking about a president-elect who was convicted of various things related to business fraud and civil cases related to sexual misconduct and had all these other cases that were even more serious against him. And they're just gonna be basically dropped, you know, essentially because of the complication of, you know, being able to try somebody who is a president because it's never happened and the Supreme Court's only given him more power. Danielle Pletka You can make a political argument that these

issues were just litigated in an election and the American public had all this information and they voted to reelect him and that might supersede the legal process at this point. Danielle Pletka Funny enough, that's what former Attorney General Bill Barr had to say this week, and also what Steve Scalise, who the House Majority Leader, one of your people, had to say as well. He said this lawfare against Trump must end. And it's hard to imagine that people have not heard about any of these four big cases. Of course, we've just been talking about the federal ones, but as Domenico referenced, there are these cases in Georgia, in New York, too, and I expect those to go by the wayside as well. The New York one's a little more complicated, remember, because Trump was actually

tried and convicted by a jury in New York. And awaiting sentencing. Awaiting sentencing for Thanksgiving week. It's likely that his lawyers are gonna seek to make that case go away before he's even sentenced on the same ground that, I mean, it was hard to imagine for some people that the former president would ever get a custodial prison sentence anyway. But now it's even more impossible to imagine. And, you know, if the New York courts don't go Trump's way and give him an out, it's likely Trump's lawyers will appeal across the New York court system and eventually up to the US Supreme Court. I think it's pretty easy to predict what they'll

do with that kind of question. There is one big outstanding question here, at least with respect to the federal cases, and that's that under the regulations that Jack Smith operates under the special counsel, those people are obliged to write a written report about what they did and why. And so there are now a couple of months, two and a half months left. It's possible that Jack Smith could get some kind of report done. And we know the current Attorney General Merrick Garland has pledged to make much if not all of that public if he can. So it's a little bit of a race against the clock.

If Jack Smith wants to, we may get a little more information about what exactly he was up to both in DC and in Florida. And we have to also note Georgia. I mean, a state case, but it seems like all these same rules prevail that at a minimum it just goes on a back burner and maybe just comes moot. There are a bunch of things going on with Georgia, not the least of which is the district attorney Fonny Willis's problems with respect to the personal relationship she had with the guy she hired to prosecute and investigate, as well as some statements she made at a Martin Luther King Day appearance this year that

defense lawyers have cried foul about. So the appeals court in Georgia was going to consider all of that in early December. Not clear if that's going to go ahead, even if they determine that Fonny Willis can stay on the case. So it's not clear to me how much of the evidence that she's amassed, that she's actually going to be able to use, because a lot of that evidence comes from actions and people in the Trump White House and the Supreme Court seems to say, that's not kosher. You can't build a case like that against a president. Danielle Pletka Also would just note, Fannie Willis was also reelected this week.

Carrie, on a separate but somewhat related topic, I think one big question we're all looking for now is when it comes to the power of presidential pardons. Donald Trump campaigned very openly that he would consider pardons for any number of people who were convicted in relation to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. That also includes some prominent far-right militia members who are currently sitting in prison and plan to not be the president to be pardoned. Absolutely. You know, something like 1,500 people have been charged in connection with January 6, 2021. Some of them are people who just showed up that day and entered the Capitol and then left. Others beat up police officers with flagpoles and

bear spray and horrible stuff like that. And still others were considered to be leaders of extremist movements. I'm talking here about Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers. Both of those men and their Confederates were charged with seditious conspiracy, a very rarely used charge. I covered those trials. Tariel got 22 years, Stuart Rhodes got 18 years. The judge in the Stuart Rhodes case, who's a very even-keeled guy, actually said to Stuart Rhodes during the sentencing that he presents an ongoing threat and peril to the country and to the very fabric of democracy.

Yesterday, Stuart Rhodes' lawyer, Lee Bright, told me he was gonna personally appeal to President-elect Trump to do the right thing and release Stuart Rhodes from prison. And Tarrio's lawyers signaled the same, that they're gonna make a pitch to the President-elect as well. I mean, Domenico, polling would suggest

that pardoning these people is very opposed by the American public, but we're gonna find out soon enough whether that matters at all to Donald Trump. Yeah. And I mean, I don't think there's been like a lot of deep polling on this. And I think that it's the kind of thing that Trump is happy to message on. I mean, we'll see what decision he winds up making. But the fact is, Donald Trump doesn't have politics to worry about anymore, to be totally

honest. He's not running for reelection. He's not running for reelection. He's not running for reelection. So that's an interesting thing when you can take a person who has been under scrutiny, spotlight, is happy to do controversial things, doesn't have to run and be held accountable for whatever might go wrong or right in another election. And when you have a Supreme Court that has taken away a lot of the guardrails where he can essentially do what he wants as long as it's within his official capacity. All right. Let's take another quick break. And when we get back, can't let it go. And

we're back and it's time to end the week like we always do with Can't Let It Go, where we talk about the things we just can't stop thinking about politics or otherwise. I'm going to go first. The thing I couldn't let go that I've thought about a lot this week is something spectacular that happened in Pennsylvania. And it might not be what you were thinking on election week, but in the Sunday before the election, in the Eagles game at Lincoln Financial Field, a spectacular, spectacular football play happened by Saquon Barkley, a running back for the Eagles. I don't know if you saw this. It was amazing.

He did like a 180 spin and then jumped, did a reverse hurdle over a player trying to tackle him. And a move that I think at least how people are framing it is one of the most sort of famous moves in NFL history. No one's ever done this before. It's almost physically impossible to do. And one of the things that was amazing about it is when it happened was watching the players on the sidelines lose their minds, because it's like when people know how hard it is. But he's got a ton of attention impressed about it.

But one of the things I also thought was funny is he was being interviewed, and they were like, oh, do people want to name it? What do you want to call it? Is it going to be like Michael Jordan dunking the basketball? And he was like, No, no, I don't want any of that. He's like, I don't ever want to do that again. You could hurt yourself. He's like, I don't think that was a good idea. Like, that's not a move I want to try and replicate. But it was a pretty spectacular thing to see.

I did not play football because I didn't want to get hit. And I understand that Saquon Barkley doesn't want to do that again. But he did it because he didn't want to get hit. And he jumped and got away however he could. Kari, what about you? My mind turns to Italy often these days. And I don't want to be that person talking about the Roman Empire. And yet there is new information about the city of Pompeii, if you've ever been there. No, I have.

A terrible volcano erupted and killed people. And for many decades or hundreds of years, people have been making hunches about who exactly was found and their relationships to each other. And new science, new DNA of some of these people who were basically like encased, you know, in the ashes in the volcano. They're figuring out that in one particular location, what they thought was like a nuclear family turned out to be people who were not even related to each other and may have tried to comfort each other as this tragedy was occurring.

And it just, A, I want to be in Pompeii right now and having a really good dinner after in Italy. And B, it just goes to show so many of the things we think we know we may not know at all. Also that you can still be finding out information about what seems like primordial events. Exactly. New facts. From 79 AD.

Justin. Dominic, what about you? Monkeys. Go on. 43 monkeys escaped from a research facility in South Carolina. And people are being told to lock their doors, stay inside, do not approach the monkeys if you see them.

Apparently, a caretaker forgot to secure a lock. One of them got out, and they said it was like, follow the leader. There's a book about this. It's called Good Night Gorilla. Yeah, I'm just saying. The zookeeper forgets to. Well there's that yeah but there's also movies about it like playing of the apes. It's a little bit different situation with those monkeys and they said some of these guys though are

sticking around and playing games essentially with the caretakers because they're jumping up into trees and then they jump down take food when they turn their backs and jump back into the tree. So they're just like really irritated with being in this research facility and who can blame them right? I'm sort of rooting for the monkeys here. Well I just don't go near the monkeys. Have they gotten any of the monkeys back or the monkeys just living free now? I don't know but I was really fascinated to hear how they're trying to track them down.

They've set baits, they've set traps, trying to check and find them. Oh yeah. I bet they're harder to find than other lab animals. You see all that stuff where the monkeys will steal your money and take your food? The baboons and yes, they'll steal your bananas and stuff. Forty-three monkeys together might be able to outsmart one human. Their thoughts are in their favor. Evolution is a thing, right? All right right that is a wrap for us this week. Our

executive producer is Bethony Mottori. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Jung Yoon Han, Casey Morrell, and Kelly Wessingert. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Kerry Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.