- [Announcer] Support for Overheard with Evan Smith comes from: HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claire and Carl Stuart.

Christine and Philip Dial.

And the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication.

ellergroup.com.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's one of the preeminent political strategists and commentators of our day, and a bestselling author, and first-rate podcaster to boot.

He's David Axelrod, this is Overheard.

(light music) A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

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This is Overheard.

(audience clapping) All right.

David, welcome.

- Thank you, great to be back.

- Good to see you.

Thank you so much for being back.

So here we are, sitting today, seven days into Trump 2.0.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Feels longer, doesn't it?

- Does it?

Well.

(audience laughs) Here's what I want to know: Is it going better than you thought, worse than you thought, or pretty much as expected?

- Well, I think it is, probably, what I expected, but times, you know, five.

I expected that, you know, he, one thing about Trump is he is about as subtle as a screen door on a submarine.

So he told us, you know, what he was going to do.

- Right.

- Now, some of the things were muted.

You know, he tried to divorce himself from Project 2025, which seems to be the handbook from which he's working now.

He said that his main focus was bringing down costs, and immigration, which he is acting on quickly.

- Right.

- But, you know, there were other things that, you know, and he also did promise retribution, and he's well on his way on that one.

- Sure.

- I was surprised, though, the main reason that Donald Trump got elected and the main promise that he made was that he was going to bring down the costs that people were experiencing in their lives, and he would do it quickly.

And very little of what he's done in the first week relates to that.

- Right.

- He doesn't talk about it very much.

He hasn't done very much about it.

You know, he's tickled the funny bone of the MAGA group with some of these executive orders.

He's definitely cleaning out the agencies and trying to seize control of the government.

But he pardoned all of the January 6th insurrectionists, and that is clearly something people did not elect him to do.

- Well, I mean, look, I would've thought, David, that the last thing in the world that Trump supporters, who are very supportive of the police generally, would tolerate is pardoning people who beat the crap out of cops with flagpoles.

- You would think that.

But, you know, one of the things that I always try and remind myself, and I said, actually, in some ways it was very honorable that he pardoned them all because they were, after all, there because he told them a lie that they believed.

The president of the United States told those people that the election had been stolen and that something untoward was going on in that Congress that would codify a fraudulent election.

And they believed him.

And they stormed the Capitol on his word.

Many of the people who were convicted said that.

"The president told me that this was going on, and I felt like it was my patriotic duty to do it."

The idea, though, that people who violently and brutally assaulted police officers should be not just pardoned but lionized.

I mean, the head of the Oath Keepers was literally on the podium behind the president at his rally on Saturday night.

What message does that send?

And by the way, I just saw a story on the way over here, I forget from which state, but one of the January 6th insurrectionists, who was pardoned by the president, was shot and killed tonight by a sheriff's deputy for resisting arrest.

He had a weapon in his car.

And there's going to be more.

I hope not, but I fear there's going to be more of that.

But my great concern, Evan, is, we have elections, we can have differences on policy, sometimes big differences on policy.

- And we're going to have differences.

- And we can talk about those differences.

That is all within the parameters of what democracy is all about.

But what I worry about is the kind of wanton sundering of rules and laws and norms and institutions.

- Yeah.

- And, you know, I mean, I quibble with the president's economic policy because I think he wants to take us back to the 19th century, with tariffs and all that.

I quibble with his foreign policy because I think he wants to take us back to the pre-World War II era where, you know, there were no rules of the road in the world and we had two world wars.

But I'm very concerned that he's also taking us back to the pre-Watergate era.

- Right.

Well, the first two of those are legitimate disagreements in the sense that, you know, okay, it's policy.

- Policy.

- But this obliteration of norms thing is a thing, and yet there are some people who think that, "Oh, aren't you cute?

Isn't it so quaint that you're concerned about..." - No one's ever said that to me.

(audience laughs) - "That you're concerned about norms, and you're concerned about traditions?

What we need to do is blow everything up."

- And I am well aware, and I think this is a problem for the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party has, in some ways, become too much seen by too many Americans as the party of elites and institutions that have failed them.

And if you think about the last 40 years, when you think about the impacts of globalization, automation, of wars, one of which lasted for 20 years, that were fought by basically 1% of the population, an economic crisis that leveled the middle class in this country and destroyed communities, a financial crisis, I should say, for which, and I was, you know, I was around for that.

So I was a witness to it, I participated in it.

But there was really very little price paid by the people who were most responsible for that crisis.

The financiers who were most responsible for that crisis.

And then you had the pandemic.

- Right.

- In which many of us here were comfortably sitting at home doing our work in front of a computer.

And then there were people who had to go out and work.

- [Evan] Right.

- And then, most of the work they were doing, we called them essential workers.

They were caring for us, they were protecting us.

They were making things and growing things, and shipping things that we needed.

They were making our country go.

And we honored them, and then they sort of fade into the background again.

And they are more among the people who haven't prospered in the last 40 years.

They're struggling in this economy with daycare and with housing costs.

- So you're sympathetic to the argument that was made during this campaign?

- I'm sympathetic.

Yes, I am.

- On the economy.

- I am sympathetic to the idea that we have big structural issues in our country that go to inequality.

And it's not just our country, you see these same things happening elsewhere in the world as well.

And I tell all my friends in the financial world and so on, you need to be aware that you can kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

If people lose faith in capitalism, lose faith in democracy, as large numbers of people have, you create the conditions for a little of what we're seeing right now.

- And not just here, but in other places.

- Yes.

- Other leaders who are of a similar mind.

I mean, this is interesting to me because all that we heard during the campaign was, "This is about democracy," a very gauzy word, by the way, that is heard differently by different people in different places.

Or this was going to be an election about the post-Dobbs world.

Like we heard all these things that the election was going to be about, but in the end, the price of eggs trumped all of that stuff.

- Yeah, which is still going up, by the way.

- Which is still going up.

But you understand, this was the "But the price of eggs" election.

- Yeah.

I mean, look, I said throughout that, I mean, I care, I am as passionate about democracy as anyone.

My father was a refugee from Eastern Europe.

I feel lucky every day to live in a democracy, and I want to fight for that democracy.

Having said that, if you were talking about democracy over the dinner table, you probably didn't have to worry about the cost of the food on that table.

- Right.

- If you had to worry about the cost of the food on your table, you're probably talking about that.

- Right.

- And so, I worry that the party of working people, the self-styled party of working people is perceived by working people as elite.

- Is not for them.

- Disdainful and removed from their experience.

- This was the Bernie Sanders argument after the election, of course, that somehow the Democrats are no longer the party of working people.

And in fact, I think the Democrats did the worst with working people as a voting block this election in decades.

- Yes.

- And did better with rich people.

- Yes.

Lost voters who made under $100,000 a year.

- Who is to blame for this?

On whose watch did this happen?

- Well, I think on, like I said, this is a 40-year trend.

I mean, we were, you know, we were champions of globalization in the 90s.

And the promise was that the communities that were ill, that were badly affected by it, and a lot of them in the Midwest where I come from, would be made whole in other ways, and that people would get trade-adjusted assistance and they'd be trained for other jobs.

None of that really happened.

And so people felt burned by that.

Truth is a lot more jobs have been lost to automation, which is only going to get worse.

And that's something we ought to be thinking about.

And then, as I said, you know, you think about the financial crisis in that.

- Right.

But 40 years, David, the reality is this was an election conducted over just a handful of months.

- Well, this election, I mean, if you want the sort of simple analysis of this election.

If you had given me a paper and there were three numbers on it, one number was 28, which was the percentage of people who thought the country was on the right path, 40, which was the president's approval rating, and I think 67 or 70, which was the number of people who thought the economy was fair or poor, I would say: I don't know who the incumbent party is, but they're going to lose the election.

- They're going to lose on that basis.

- Yes.

I mean, I think in some ways it's that simple.

- And it wouldn't have mattered if it was Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro or anybody.

- I don't know about the others.

The problem for Kamala, I mean, we can analyze the Kamala Harris situation, but she was, in fact, the number two person in the outfit they wanted to fight.

- She was effectively the incumbent.

Status quo election.

- And she exacerbated that because she, maybe to her credit, she wanted to show loyalty and she did not try and create any distance between any of the president's policies.

- So that time she was on The View, and she was asked, "What would you have done differently?"

And she said, basically, "Nothing I could think of."

A lot of people say that was the moment that the election was lost.

- I got a text from a prominent Democrat in the Midwest who I respect, that said, instantly, "I think she just lost the election."

- On the basis of that.

- Yeah.

And there were a million ways to answer that question without being disrespectful to Biden, but.

- She was in a tough spot, in fairness to her.

- Yeah.

I mean, I think part of running for president, you have to, you know, you can speechify well, but you have to be able to do both the sheet music and the improvisation.

And that's even more important now than ever.

I think you need to be able to go on these podcasts and be unscripted and carry your message, and do it comfortably, and not in talking points, you know.

And that is a requirement of the presidency.

I think it's been true for some time that, maybe forever, but authenticity is the coin of the realm, and the way you show authenticity is to be unscripted.

- Well, your old boss was pretty good at that.

- He was.

And that's one of the reasons he was successful.

- I'm referring to President Obama, and of course, I'll tell you that of all the things in the Obama years that was the best illustration of that point, it's when he started singing Amazing Grace.

- Which he, by the way, decided to do on the plane down to that memorial service.

And he turned to the people, and all he said was, "I think I may sing."

And they're like, "What?"

They said, "Wait, where are you going?"

And that was one of the most moving moments I can recall.

- He had a feel for that kind of thing, that improvisation, the moment.

- Yes.

He was a rare talent and a great communicator, and he was completely connected to the words he was speaking.

So, when he went and when he was, you know, going improvisational, he was improvising off of a very strong foundation.

He knew who he was, he knew what he thought, he thought deeply about things, and he felt comfortable speaking.

And he was a very contemporary communicator in that regard.

- Let me come back to Vice President Harris for one second, and then I want to go somewhere adjacent.

Will history be kind to her in terms of how she ran this campaign, given the structural impediments to winning?

- I will be kind to her.

I don't know about history.

I will be kind to her because I think that, thrown into the situation she was thrown into, basically she was thrown into the deep end of the pool with weights on her.

And I think she did better than a lot of people expected that she would.

And as I said, I think the barriers for her may have been kind of insuperable barriers, but I do think that there were things that probably she could have done better and they could have done better.

But the nature of this business is, when you lose, you can always point to the things you should have done better.

I think someone who was not as connected to the administration, someone who ran from the outside, might have, you know, Donald Trump was not a hugely popular president.

And one of the things that he should be reminded of, because I know he is a regular viewer of your show.

- The show.

Right, hello.

(audience laughs) - Is that winning 49.8% of the vote is not a mandate to do whatever the hell you want.

- In fact, it's the third closest election in the modern era behind JFK and Richard Nixon.

It's an enormously close election.

- Yes.

But, you know, one of the things about Trump that I always knew, but it's so, you have to acknowledge it now, he is the greatest marketer, brander, salesman in American political history to have done the things that he did.

I mean, I think about the way he left Washington four years ago, and how he came back, literally, as a conqueror, in his mind at least.

- And also as a victim.

- Yes.

Well, part of how he came back was to portray himself as a victim.

And some of the events, some of these indictments, and so on, allowed him the opportunity to do that.

I mean, he wants to prosecute the prosecutor in New York, Alvin Bragg.

He should send him a bottle of champagne.

Because that indictment probably.

- Helped him.

- It turbocharged him in his Republican primary contest.

- All right.

So I asked you about Vice President Harris.

Will history be kind to Joe Biden?

- Not in the short run, no.

And look, I think Joe Biden accomplished some extraordinary things in his first couple of years in office, and did them, oftentimes, working with Republicans.

Past this infrastructure bill that'll pay.

- Very narrow majorities in Congress, right, yeah.

- Generational dividends.

The CHIPS Act about advanced manufacturing.

You know, I think that, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act and the investments in healthcare and climate change, climate action, and so on.

Just really, really important things.

But I think the last year of, you know, running, ill advisedly, how it ended.

I think, some of the things that he did in service of his interest in being a historic president, but also running, you know, Bidenomics, the whole Bidenomics thing, which is the worst marketing idea since New Coke.

(audience chuckles) And, and sort of ignoring what was obvious, which was prices were up 20% and people were hurting.

- People were hurting.

- And, you know, he was the guy who was elected in part because of his empathy.

And his empathy got overridden by his other needs.

- Right.

- And, so, you know, most presidents become more popular over time.

George W. Bush was a 28% in his last election.

- Well, speaking of Austin, Texas, Lyndon Johnson.

- Yes.

- Right?

- Yeah.

And we just said goodbye to another great American, Jimmy Carter.

- [Evan] Right.

- And, you know, partly because of his incredible achievements after the presidency, but also, you know, there's more recognition of some of the things he did before, including, by the way, implementing a lot of the post-Watergate reforms that Trump is now obliterating.

- Getting rid of.

So in the remaining time we have, I want you to put on your old strategist hat, and I want you to fix all this.

(audience laughs) - How much time do we have?

- Yeah, right.

If the Democrats institutionally come to you and they say, "Axelrod, you were pretty good the last time you did this.

How do we find our way back out of the woods?"

What do you tell them?

- Find a younger, smarter guy to ask.

(audience chuckles) Look, I think part of it is this recognition of what I said, which is the Democratic Party, and I say this with apologies to all of you, to my friends, my family, Democratic Party has become too much of a college educated, suburban, smarty-pants party.

And you can't be the party of, and you know, we approach working families with all good intentions, and we do good things, but we approach them more like, missionaries and anthropologists than peers.

And our message is, "We're here to help you become more like us."

And implied in that is that what you do is less important than what we do.

And what comes along with it is, "And when you become more like us, you'll understand some of these other things better."

Climate and... You know, the climate thing is a good example.

All you have to do is watch the news every day.

I mean, you've experienced your own climate issues down here at times in the winter.

- Well, look, the wildfires in California, the perfect evidence.

- I mean, it is unbelievably devastating.

And we all have friends out there.

But to know, yeah, this is a existential crisis, but you know what?

To the guy or gal who makes their living extracting fossil fuels from the ground and makes a good middle-class living doing that, and probably, their family before that did, generations before, losing that job is also an existential crisis.

So the question is, how do we have that conversation?

Because we need to take action, but we also need to do it with deference and respect and support for people who are going to have to sacrifice in order to make that happen.

So there is a respect element and a dignity element to this that I think we've lost, and we tend to moralize and lecture.

And so I think, for Democrats, the word I would suggest is humility.

- Yeah.

- And what I worry about is that we're going to simply say, "We're going to wait for Trump to screw up.

We're going to wait for his trespasses and excesses and outrages."

And I think, by the way, there is one that, the biggest thing that Trump has to worry about that Democrats should be ready to fight on is, his biggest priority is to renew and extend his tax cuts.

- Tax cuts.

Benefiting the most wealthy Americans.

- And to do it, and the Republicans are meeting today, and he met with them in retreat, and I hope they will be in retreat on this.

They're talking about cutting Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act.

You know, he can't repeal the Affordable Care Act because it's too popular, but he'll do what he did last time, which is to strangle it.

Because if you cut the subsidies that Joe Biden increased, you will make it very, very hard for families who have that insurance, 44 million people between Medicaid and the markets now get their healthcare through the Affordable Care Act.

And if that's how they want to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, that's a hell of a fight for Democrats.

But I still think they have to fix this attitudinal thing.

This can't just be a kind of tactical thing, "Well, we'll get them back with this."

I mean, the humility thing is really important, and I would urge that on to Democrats.

- So that's the message.

Who's the messenger?

You've got two years until Congress and a number of governors around the country are up for reelection.

Then you've got a presidential election.

I know we just finished the last one, we don't want to start talking about the next one.

- But we do.

- But it's coming.

- Yeah, we do.

That's what we do here in America.

- Okay.

So, who's the messenger?

- Especially because Donald Trump ostensibly won't be on the ballot.

- Right.

Still a lot of game left on that one, but we'll see.

- He teases that all the time.

- Who's the messenger?

Who is it?

- Well, look, I don't have, I think that more likely a governor or someone completely outside of the political structure than a member of Congress or someone who's really closely associated with Washington.

I think that is most likely.

And someone who gets what I just said.

You know, someone who.

Now, I think, you know, you can do that, you can be that.

And it also has to be someone who kind of can see the future I mentioned earlier.

One of my concerns for democracy is that democracy is designed to move very slowly when we're divided.

And I mentioned 49.8, that's pretty divided.

I mean, to 50.2.

And a lot of this is promoted by social media, the profit theory behind it is to keep people online, and the algorithms tell us the thing that keeps people online is outrage, alienation, conspiracy theory, division, anger.

- Polarization is the business model.

- It is.

And politics has come to emulate that, and Trump is a reflection of that.

So you have that.

We're divided, we're terribly divided.

And meanwhile, technology is churning faster and faster.

Change is coming at us faster and faster.

And people see this mismatch between government that seems to be gridlocked and change that is coming really rapidly, that is creating a lot of anxiety.

And so we need someone who is, also, smart enough to be of the next generation and think about that, but think about it from the standpoint of working Americans.

And so that's a tall order.

But I really, you know, America has had a genius for producing leaders, great leaders, just when they need them.

We've had crises before that really threatened the very foundations of our country, and people who we never expected.

I mean, Abraham Lincoln lost for the United States Senate in 1858.

And in 1860, he was elected president and saved this country.

So let's look for a Senate loser in 2026, (audience laughs) and we'll be all set.

- I thought you were going to go all optimistic on us at the end, and then you said.

All right, we're out of time.

David, thank you so much for being here.

David Axelrod, give him a big hand.

(audience clapping) Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

(audience clapping) (light music) - [Evan] We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- I don't want Elon Musk sitting in the White House telling the president what we should do.

Elon Musk is, in and of himself, a special interest.

And our problem is we have too much influence from special interests and not enough focus on the interests of everyday people and their lives.

- [Announcer] Support for Overheard with Evan Smith comes from: HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claire and Carl Stuart.

Christine and Phillip Dial.

and the Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication.

ellergroup.com.

(bright flute music) (no audio)