November 8, 2024 • 16 mins
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Watch Carol and Tim LIVE every day on YouTube: http://bit.ly/3vTiACF. Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Brad Stone offers an assessment of what propelled Donald Trump to a decisive victory in the run for the US presidency.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This is Bloomberg Business
Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio Well.
Earlier today, President Joe Biden expressed hope that Americans can
quote lower the temperature and reaffirm their faith in the
(00:20):
election system after a contentious campaign that saw Republican President
elect Donald Trump secure a sweeping victory. The former president
did say that campaigns are a contest of competing visions
or the current president I should say, a country chooses
one or the other. He said, we accept the choice
the country made. And he said many times, as he
said many times, you can't love your country only when
(00:41):
you win. Well, it will take some time for the
history books to write the story of this presidential election,
but Bloomberg BusinessWeek editor Bradstone offers an assessment today of
what propelled Donald Trump to a decisive victory. Brad is
a Bloomberg BusinessWeek editor. He's also the author of four books,
including New York Times bestseller Amazon un Bound, Jeff Based
and the Invention of a Global Empire. He joins us
(01:03):
from our San Francisco bureau. Brad, you write that Trump's
decisive twenty twenty four win against Kamala Harris looks less
like the polished narrative Gemstone it will inevitably become and
more like an unwieldy clump of muddy economic explanations and
gross political blind spots. What are the muddy economic explanations?
I want to start there?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, thanks Tim Oh And first of all, great interview
with Kathy Wood. I think you very interesting stuff. Well, look,
you know, we always look back on our elections and
sort of contemplate a pithy summation of what happened. So
Trump in twenty sixteen kind of bringing Americans to reject
(01:44):
Obama's globalist optimism. You know, you can go back Obama
his message of hope after the Great Recession, and so
I was really kind of thinking about, well, what are
we going to take from this, And the most obvious explanation,
the big one that stands out, is that people were
just just dissatisfied with the current state of things economically.
I mean, you had a president deep underwater and Biden
(02:06):
his popularity is approval rating at forty one percent. Twenty
six percent of Americans dissatisfied with the direction of the company.
That's the easiest and most obvious explanation. But when I
talk about the kind of muddy factors, I mean, there's
just so much we don't know the fact that Vice
President Harris lost ground with Latino voters, non college educated,
(02:28):
female voters, young voters. I mean, there's clearly something else
going on here, and I think it will take a
while for us to really look at the data and
understand what went on.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
One thing that's really striking to me again, the data
is still continuing to sort of come out here, Brad,
and there's been a lot of hand ringing by a
lot of different groups here at this point. But turnout
just wasn't there, even on the Republican side in terms
of gross numbers compared to twenty twenty. Do you have
any idea what happened there?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I mean, it's yeah, it's I mean, maybe there's a
little bit of political exhaustion. I mean the Vice president,
you know, talked a little bit about that on the
campaign trail. You know, in twenty twenty, the election we're
comparing it to we were in the very midst of
the pandemic. You know, maybe there weren't all that many
alternatives at the time to getting engaged in the electoral
(03:19):
process and voting. You know, there might have just been
something about the options and the candidates that voters had
to turn them off. So no, I think, you know,
when when you look, particularly on the Democratic side, the
depressed voter turnout was a major factor behind the across
the board defeats Brad.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
You know what's really striking to me, And we actually
heard this from Jay Powell over and over again this afternoon.
He talked about how good of an economy it is
right now, spot firing on all cylinders, inflations coming back
to two percent, the unemployment rate is pretty in balance
with where he wants it to be. That's not the
(04:01):
that I got in terms of this election. That's not
the message that voters sent, especially in those swing states.
What's the misery index? And explain how you looked at that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah, Bloomberg had I thought a very prescient article about
a week ago that talked about how uneven that economic
recovery was and that despite the overall positive kind of
macro numbers on jobs, on inflation, on gas prices, that
you know, there are pockets of unhappiness. And we looked
at the swing states where you know, states like Wisconsin
(04:33):
or Michigan, Ohio, states that did vote for President Trump,
where the misery index, as you say to him, that
combination of inflation data unemployment data is still very high.
And so there are things like population declines in some counties,
still a stumbling recovery, high unemployment numbers that were clearly
(04:53):
fueling the dissatisfaction that may have turned the election.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
It's so interesting because it seems like the chattering class
kind of thought that presidential candidate, who has been accused
of so many different things, who has been determined by
a court to actually be a fellon thirty four different counts,
and has had so many struggles at least with the
(05:20):
law over the last few years, oversaw not really what
he would say, but no question that he was there
on January sixth, and all the comments that he's made
about that have been well documented. But that just didn't
matter at all in the end to voters.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Well, certainly not to a majority of the voters that
turned out in the selection. You know, maybe it did
propel some to stay home.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
You know.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
It may also be that people have short term memories.
I mean, my colleague Mark Million writes today in the
BusinessWeek newsletter about nostalgia. Nostalgia can be a powerful political force,
you know, make America great again. Reagan's shining City on
a hill, evoking these memories. So, you know, nostalgia as
a political force. I kind of like the idea, but
(06:11):
it also maybe suggests that specific memories aren't as powerful
as these vague memories of a greater time, and that
in talking about making America great again and all the
implicit things in that statement, you know, that Trump is
distracting people from the specifics of maybe how they felt
about his leadership during the pandemic, how they felt about
some of his you know, crimes alleged and otherwise, and
(06:35):
brought their attention more on, you know, restoring this sense,
maybe illusory, that he can help, you know, bring America
back to some previous greatness.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So so, you know, I'm wondering about sort of the lesson,
and it's not our job to sort of give a
lesson to democrats here. But as I mentioned, there's a
lot of hand ringing going on, and we've written about that.
It's it's been well documented. But the day morning or
the Wednesday morning quarterbacking there should have, would have could
have it sort of seems like, in hindsight, some of
(07:06):
it actually went back to the current president's decision to
continue running until that became untenable.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Well, look, I mean, Tim, I'm not a political analyst
by any means, but you know I would say this.
I mean, first of all, the margin of the victory,
you know, for Trump was so big that you know,
perhaps any one factor might not have even had made
a difference. And too, you know, the Democratic Party, you
know the fact that there is no longer a chance
(07:35):
or a hope of changing minds in Ohio, you know,
my home state, or Florida used to be a swing state.
The fact that the Democratic Party doesn't speak to you know,
middle class or lower class voters in states like Arkansas
or Oklahoma, you know where you know, arguably voters there
might appreciate some factors of the Democratic agenda, raising the
(07:56):
you know, the minimum wage, restoring protection for healthcare and insurance.
You know that they that the Democrats rely on, you know,
three Midwestern swing states, the so called blue Wall, or
hope to turn Arizona or Nevada or North Carolina. It
just feels like there needs to be an overhaul, you know,
a rebalancing of expectations in the Democratic Party if they
(08:20):
really hope to compete going forward.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah, you know, it's funny you mentioned blue Wall, but
I've heard people say they might need to rechange or
change the name of that given what's happened in the
last three elections, whereas Democrats only won the Blue Wall
states in one of those last three, and that was
in twenty twenty. Hey, I wanted to talk about with
you some of the other stories that you and the
team over at Bloomberg BusinessWeek have been highlighting in recent days.
(08:44):
There's been a lot of handwringing about polling and the
idea that every poll that we got, save for a
couple polls that people thought were outliers at the time,
really showed this race neck and neck a coin flip.
It's pretty remarkable to see. You're the team Chadwick Matlin
(09:04):
and Alex Tanzy argue that even though there was a
red wave, we shouldn't be blaming the polls. What's going
on here.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
I may not be so charitable as Alex and Chad
on this one. You know, there is an argument and
polsters make it that, Hey, the results were within the
margin of error. So they weren't technically wrong. And Chad
and Alex right that polsters are often more accurate than
they are precise, which to me feels a little bit
like you know, when your football team loses and they
(09:36):
still say they played a great game. You know, It's
like all these states, all the swing states. Sure they
might have been within the margin of error, they're still
very close, but they all underestimated Trump support. They were
all sort of directionally wrong in the same way. And
then you look at states like Florida or Texas, and
they really extremely underestimated Trump's support, well outside the margin
(09:59):
of error. And I think that, you know, polsters still
haven't quite figured out Donald Trump's support this time around.
They waited their results, they tried to account for communities,
like is the respondent in a rural area, or how
did they vote previously? And I just don't think they
have quite figured it out or gotten it right. And
I think you know, if you were, if you made
the mistake once again of putting your faith in the polls,
(10:22):
you were probably very disappointed last Tuesday night.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, that's a good point. In the outlier polls that
I was talking about, I mean, there have been these
you know, sort of opium polls for Democrats out there,
like the one we got Saturday night from Anne Seltzer
that showed that Vice President Harris is actually leading in
Iowa by a margin.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Of four whatch is fourteen points.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, it was wasn't even close. So it's pretty remarkable
to see that. Do you think, Brad, that we have
to as Americans have to adjust the way that we
view polling or do we have to figure out a
better way to poll because it just seems like and
Billy hous was talking about this earlier on Bloomberg Radio.
(11:04):
You know, he would speak to people wearing Trump gear
in some states and they wouldn't tell him who they
were voting for. They were even skeptical of someone like him,
despite the fact that they were signaling it to the world.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, I mean, my opinion is it's a it's a
broken science. You know, it relies on a voluntary response
from people that are now connected in all sorts of
different ways. We're all besieged by text messages and spam
and other kinds of unsolicited email, and so most people's
instinct is to kind of reject an unsolicited query, and
(11:40):
you know, and then you layer on top of that
that we live in such a polarized environment that some
people don't want to express their opinion because they might
be you know, they might they might feel judged by
their community. And so I think, you know, the polling
community needs to kind of come together and figure out
if there is a path forward. And then yet, as
voters is in the in the media, as the electorate,
(12:00):
I think that relying on polling right now is very dangerous.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Help us figure out the path forward a little bit
the best you can, not asking you to make predictions,
but you are one of the few people who has
sat down with President elect Trump in recent months. You
did that down at mar A Lago for a Bloomberg
BusinessWeek cover story that really covered pretty much every gamut
of the economic agenda of the president elect. Give us
(12:26):
an idea of how you view, if any his agenda
has shifted since then. It was before his assassination attempt,
it was before the convention, it was before his selection
of JD. Vance, and it was of course before he
won the election. Versus what you've heard from him now
and how he puts that into action in the coming
months during the transition, and what that looks like January twentieth.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I mean, Tim, I just have no idea. Look, he
might have all the branches of government. He's feeling extraordinarily empowered.
He's feeling totally vindicated. There will be no checks on
the appointees to his cabinet, to judicial postings, you know.
(13:07):
At the same time, like my impression of him when
we did go down there in July and just watching
him over these past ten years, is that, you know,
he does see himself as a man of the people.
He wants to be liked. It's extraordinarily important to him
to be liked and respected and admired. And I don't
think that impulse goes away now that arguably he's not
going to ever face election again. So when it comes
(13:29):
to some of the things that he's proposed, you know,
mass deportations or tariffs that could you know, according to economists,
raise the rate of inflation, you know, he's not going
to have any practical moderating influences. But you know, he
doesn't want to. I don't think it's in his nature
to want to do broadly unpopular things. So I do
(13:50):
wonder if that will end up being a check on
some of his instincts, although you know, the one thing
that we heard from him on Tuesday night was he said,
you know, promise is offered, promises will be fulfilled. So
I do expect him, you know, to come into office
looking to immediately put points on the board and to
fulfill some of the promises that he made on the
campaign trail.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Look, I'm not going to ask you to give up
what you're talking to new reporters about in your editorial meetings,
but you have a job that requires you to think
pretty clearly about what things will look like in the
next few months, because they're responsible for assigning stories and
understanding what people are going to be talking about in
the future. How are you thinking about covering the president elect.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
We're going to be looking very precisely at the challenges
and battles ahead for the new administration, and we have
reached out into the Bloomberg newsroom around the world to
look at, you know, what is ahead in Europe and China,
in immigration, cryptocurrencies, on wall streets, and in tech. You know,
(14:54):
we were thinking of it in terms of the battles ahead,
and it'll be interesting now because I'm not so sure
there will be battles. You know, Trump isn't going to
have a lot of political opposition if he does control
all three branches of Congress. But you know, certainly we
saw today Gavin Newsom calling a special legislative session in California,
(15:14):
a lot of the states girding to try to put
checks on what the administration will do, either legislatively or
in the courts. And so that's our approach, you know,
to cover it carefully and to try to look forward
rather than back and look at you know, what the
Trump agenda will look like and what it will mean
for business.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Well, we look forward to following the story closely and
following it at Bloomberg Business Week. Brad really appreciate you
taking the time to join us this afternoon. Bradstone is
Bloomberg Business Week Editor. He's also the author of four books,
including the New York Times bestseller Amazon Unbound, Jeff Bezos
and The Invention of a Global Empire. If you do
(15:51):
want to subscribe to Bloomberg Business Week and unlocked deep
reporting and analysis from our reporters around the world, including
unlimited access to the magazine, check out our offers right
now at Bloomberg dot com. Slash subscribe now.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This is Bloomberg Business
Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio Well.
Earlier today, President Joe Biden expressed hope that Americans can
quote lower the temperature and reaffirm their faith in the
(00:20):
election system after a contentious campaign that saw Republican President
elect Donald Trump secure a sweeping victory. The former president
did say that campaigns are a contest of competing visions
or the current president I should say, a country chooses
one or the other. He said, we accept the choice
the country made. And he said many times, as he
said many times, you can't love your country only when
(00:41):
you win. Well, it will take some time for the
history books to write the story of this presidential election,
but Bloomberg BusinessWeek editor Bradstone offers an assessment today of
what propelled Donald Trump to a decisive victory. Brad is
a Bloomberg BusinessWeek editor. He's also the author of four books,
including New York Times bestseller Amazon un Bound, Jeff Based
and the Invention of a Global Empire. He joins us
(01:03):
from our San Francisco bureau. Brad, you write that Trump's
decisive twenty twenty four win against Kamala Harris looks less
like the polished narrative Gemstone it will inevitably become and
more like an unwieldy clump of muddy economic explanations and
gross political blind spots. What are the muddy economic explanations?
I want to start there?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, thanks Tim Oh And first of all, great interview
with Kathy Wood. I think you very interesting stuff. Well, look,
you know, we always look back on our elections and
sort of contemplate a pithy summation of what happened. So
Trump in twenty sixteen kind of bringing Americans to reject
(01:44):
Obama's globalist optimism. You know, you can go back Obama
his message of hope after the Great Recession, and so
I was really kind of thinking about, well, what are
we going to take from this, And the most obvious explanation,
the big one that stands out, is that people were
just just dissatisfied with the current state of things economically.
I mean, you had a president deep underwater and Biden
(02:06):
his popularity is approval rating at forty one percent. Twenty
six percent of Americans dissatisfied with the direction of the company.
That's the easiest and most obvious explanation. But when I
talk about the kind of muddy factors, I mean, there's
just so much we don't know the fact that Vice
President Harris lost ground with Latino voters, non college educated,
(02:28):
female voters, young voters. I mean, there's clearly something else
going on here, and I think it will take a
while for us to really look at the data and
understand what went on.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
One thing that's really striking to me again, the data
is still continuing to sort of come out here, Brad,
and there's been a lot of hand ringing by a
lot of different groups here at this point. But turnout
just wasn't there, even on the Republican side in terms
of gross numbers compared to twenty twenty. Do you have
any idea what happened there?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I mean, it's yeah, it's I mean, maybe there's a
little bit of political exhaustion. I mean the Vice president,
you know, talked a little bit about that on the
campaign trail. You know, in twenty twenty, the election we're
comparing it to we were in the very midst of
the pandemic. You know, maybe there weren't all that many
alternatives at the time to getting engaged in the electoral
(03:19):
process and voting. You know, there might have just been
something about the options and the candidates that voters had
to turn them off. So no, I think, you know,
when when you look, particularly on the Democratic side, the
depressed voter turnout was a major factor behind the across
the board defeats Brad.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
You know what's really striking to me, And we actually
heard this from Jay Powell over and over again this afternoon.
He talked about how good of an economy it is
right now, spot firing on all cylinders, inflations coming back
to two percent, the unemployment rate is pretty in balance
with where he wants it to be. That's not the
(04:01):
that I got in terms of this election. That's not
the message that voters sent, especially in those swing states.
What's the misery index? And explain how you looked at that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah, Bloomberg had I thought a very prescient article about
a week ago that talked about how uneven that economic
recovery was and that despite the overall positive kind of
macro numbers on jobs, on inflation, on gas prices, that
you know, there are pockets of unhappiness. And we looked
at the swing states where you know, states like Wisconsin
(04:33):
or Michigan, Ohio, states that did vote for President Trump,
where the misery index, as you say to him, that
combination of inflation data unemployment data is still very high.
And so there are things like population declines in some counties,
still a stumbling recovery, high unemployment numbers that were clearly
(04:53):
fueling the dissatisfaction that may have turned the election.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
It's so interesting because it seems like the chattering class
kind of thought that presidential candidate, who has been accused
of so many different things, who has been determined by
a court to actually be a fellon thirty four different counts,
and has had so many struggles at least with the
(05:20):
law over the last few years, oversaw not really what
he would say, but no question that he was there
on January sixth, and all the comments that he's made
about that have been well documented. But that just didn't
matter at all in the end to voters.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Well, certainly not to a majority of the voters that
turned out in the selection. You know, maybe it did
propel some to stay home.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
You know.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
It may also be that people have short term memories.
I mean, my colleague Mark Million writes today in the
BusinessWeek newsletter about nostalgia. Nostalgia can be a powerful political force,
you know, make America great again. Reagan's shining City on
a hill, evoking these memories. So, you know, nostalgia as
a political force. I kind of like the idea, but
(06:11):
it also maybe suggests that specific memories aren't as powerful
as these vague memories of a greater time, and that
in talking about making America great again and all the
implicit things in that statement, you know, that Trump is
distracting people from the specifics of maybe how they felt
about his leadership during the pandemic, how they felt about
some of his you know, crimes alleged and otherwise, and
(06:35):
brought their attention more on, you know, restoring this sense,
maybe illusory, that he can help, you know, bring America
back to some previous greatness.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So so, you know, I'm wondering about sort of the lesson,
and it's not our job to sort of give a
lesson to democrats here. But as I mentioned, there's a
lot of hand ringing going on, and we've written about that.
It's it's been well documented. But the day morning or
the Wednesday morning quarterbacking there should have, would have could
have it sort of seems like, in hindsight, some of
(07:06):
it actually went back to the current president's decision to
continue running until that became untenable.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Well, look, I mean, Tim, I'm not a political analyst
by any means, but you know I would say this.
I mean, first of all, the margin of the victory,
you know, for Trump was so big that you know,
perhaps any one factor might not have even had made
a difference. And too, you know, the Democratic Party, you
know the fact that there is no longer a chance
(07:35):
or a hope of changing minds in Ohio, you know,
my home state, or Florida used to be a swing state.
The fact that the Democratic Party doesn't speak to you know,
middle class or lower class voters in states like Arkansas
or Oklahoma, you know where you know, arguably voters there
might appreciate some factors of the Democratic agenda, raising the
(07:56):
you know, the minimum wage, restoring protection for healthcare and insurance.
You know that they that the Democrats rely on, you know,
three Midwestern swing states, the so called blue Wall, or
hope to turn Arizona or Nevada or North Carolina. It
just feels like there needs to be an overhaul, you know,
a rebalancing of expectations in the Democratic Party if they
(08:20):
really hope to compete going forward.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah, you know, it's funny you mentioned blue Wall, but
I've heard people say they might need to rechange or
change the name of that given what's happened in the
last three elections, whereas Democrats only won the Blue Wall
states in one of those last three, and that was
in twenty twenty. Hey, I wanted to talk about with
you some of the other stories that you and the
team over at Bloomberg BusinessWeek have been highlighting in recent days.
(08:44):
There's been a lot of handwringing about polling and the
idea that every poll that we got, save for a
couple polls that people thought were outliers at the time,
really showed this race neck and neck a coin flip.
It's pretty remarkable to see. You're the team Chadwick Matlin
(09:04):
and Alex Tanzy argue that even though there was a
red wave, we shouldn't be blaming the polls. What's going
on here.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
I may not be so charitable as Alex and Chad
on this one. You know, there is an argument and
polsters make it that, Hey, the results were within the
margin of error. So they weren't technically wrong. And Chad
and Alex right that polsters are often more accurate than
they are precise, which to me feels a little bit
like you know, when your football team loses and they
(09:36):
still say they played a great game. You know, It's
like all these states, all the swing states. Sure they
might have been within the margin of error, they're still
very close, but they all underestimated Trump support. They were
all sort of directionally wrong in the same way. And
then you look at states like Florida or Texas, and
they really extremely underestimated Trump's support, well outside the margin
(09:59):
of error. And I think that, you know, polsters still
haven't quite figured out Donald Trump's support this time around.
They waited their results, they tried to account for communities,
like is the respondent in a rural area, or how
did they vote previously? And I just don't think they
have quite figured it out or gotten it right. And
I think you know, if you were, if you made
the mistake once again of putting your faith in the polls,
(10:22):
you were probably very disappointed last Tuesday night.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, that's a good point. In the outlier polls that
I was talking about, I mean, there have been these
you know, sort of opium polls for Democrats out there,
like the one we got Saturday night from Anne Seltzer
that showed that Vice President Harris is actually leading in
Iowa by a margin.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Of four whatch is fourteen points.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, it was wasn't even close. So it's pretty remarkable
to see that. Do you think, Brad, that we have
to as Americans have to adjust the way that we
view polling or do we have to figure out a
better way to poll because it just seems like and
Billy hous was talking about this earlier on Bloomberg Radio.
(11:04):
You know, he would speak to people wearing Trump gear
in some states and they wouldn't tell him who they
were voting for. They were even skeptical of someone like him,
despite the fact that they were signaling it to the world.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, I mean, my opinion is it's a it's a
broken science. You know, it relies on a voluntary response
from people that are now connected in all sorts of
different ways. We're all besieged by text messages and spam
and other kinds of unsolicited email, and so most people's
instinct is to kind of reject an unsolicited query, and
(11:40):
you know, and then you layer on top of that
that we live in such a polarized environment that some
people don't want to express their opinion because they might
be you know, they might they might feel judged by
their community. And so I think, you know, the polling
community needs to kind of come together and figure out
if there is a path forward. And then yet, as
voters is in the in the media, as the electorate,
(12:00):
I think that relying on polling right now is very dangerous.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Help us figure out the path forward a little bit
the best you can, not asking you to make predictions,
but you are one of the few people who has
sat down with President elect Trump in recent months. You
did that down at mar A Lago for a Bloomberg
BusinessWeek cover story that really covered pretty much every gamut
of the economic agenda of the president elect. Give us
(12:26):
an idea of how you view, if any his agenda
has shifted since then. It was before his assassination attempt,
it was before the convention, it was before his selection
of JD. Vance, and it was of course before he
won the election. Versus what you've heard from him now
and how he puts that into action in the coming
months during the transition, and what that looks like January twentieth.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I mean, Tim, I just have no idea. Look, he
might have all the branches of government. He's feeling extraordinarily empowered.
He's feeling totally vindicated. There will be no checks on
the appointees to his cabinet, to judicial postings, you know.
(13:07):
At the same time, like my impression of him when
we did go down there in July and just watching
him over these past ten years, is that, you know,
he does see himself as a man of the people.
He wants to be liked. It's extraordinarily important to him
to be liked and respected and admired. And I don't
think that impulse goes away now that arguably he's not
going to ever face election again. So when it comes
(13:29):
to some of the things that he's proposed, you know,
mass deportations or tariffs that could you know, according to economists,
raise the rate of inflation, you know, he's not going
to have any practical moderating influences. But you know, he
doesn't want to. I don't think it's in his nature
to want to do broadly unpopular things. So I do
(13:50):
wonder if that will end up being a check on
some of his instincts, although you know, the one thing
that we heard from him on Tuesday night was he said,
you know, promise is offered, promises will be fulfilled. So
I do expect him, you know, to come into office
looking to immediately put points on the board and to
fulfill some of the promises that he made on the
campaign trail.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Look, I'm not going to ask you to give up
what you're talking to new reporters about in your editorial meetings,
but you have a job that requires you to think
pretty clearly about what things will look like in the
next few months, because they're responsible for assigning stories and
understanding what people are going to be talking about in
the future. How are you thinking about covering the president elect.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
We're going to be looking very precisely at the challenges
and battles ahead for the new administration, and we have
reached out into the Bloomberg newsroom around the world to
look at, you know, what is ahead in Europe and China,
in immigration, cryptocurrencies, on wall streets, and in tech. You know,
(14:54):
we were thinking of it in terms of the battles ahead,
and it'll be interesting now because I'm not so sure
there will be battles. You know, Trump isn't going to
have a lot of political opposition if he does control
all three branches of Congress. But you know, certainly we
saw today Gavin Newsom calling a special legislative session in California,
(15:14):
a lot of the states girding to try to put
checks on what the administration will do, either legislatively or
in the courts. And so that's our approach, you know,
to cover it carefully and to try to look forward
rather than back and look at you know, what the
Trump agenda will look like and what it will mean
for business.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Well, we look forward to following the story closely and
following it at Bloomberg Business Week. Brad really appreciate you
taking the time to join us this afternoon. Bradstone is
Bloomberg Business Week Editor. He's also the author of four books,
including the New York Times bestseller Amazon Unbound, Jeff Bezos
and The Invention of a Global Empire. If you do
(15:51):
want to subscribe to Bloomberg Business Week and unlocked deep
reporting and analysis from our reporters around the world, including
unlimited access to the magazine, check out our offers right
now at Bloomberg dot com. Slash subscribe now.
Hosts And Creators
Tim Stenovec
Carol Massar
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