Fareed Zakaria on What Just Happened, and What Comes Next

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. I’d like to invite you to come see Freakonomics Radio live — in San Francisco on January 3rd  and in Los Angeles on February 13th. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/liveshows, one word. I’m told that tickets are going fast so, you might want to do this soon. I’m also told that these tickets make an excellent holiday gift. Again, that’s freakonomics.com/liveshows. January 3rd in San Francisco, February 13th in L.A. I’ll be there — and I hope you will too. 

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On January 6th of 2025, Vice President Kamala Harris will certify this year’s election results, and officially name Donald Trump as the nation’s 47th President. She will do this in her role as outgoing Senate President — but also, of course, as the presidential candidate that Trump just beat. He is only the second president in U.S. history to lose the White House but win it back later — the other was Grover Cleveland, in the 19th century. This is one of many ways in which the 2024 election was a historic one — and a dramatic one, the kind that generates a lot of bloviating from a lot of people. So you may have had your fill of that. I was thinking you might want to hear a different kind of conversation about the election. With someone who isn’t a bloviator. Someone very smart, and thoughtful, with a wide perspective. Someone who maybe has a Ph.D. in political science and is maybe an immigrant. All of that describes our guest today: Fareed Zakaria. We had him on the show earlier this year to talk about his book The Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. Zakaria is host of a weekly CNN show called GPS, or Global Public Square, and he writes a column for the Washington Post. In the conversation you’re about to hear, we talk about the election results.

Fareed ZAKARIA: Trump is not a spasm, it’s not a one-shot thing. This is a deep, enduring change.

And what that deep, enduring change may look like:

ZAKARIA: I worry that we’re in a situation where this whole world order can unravel very quickly. 

But: if you’re someone who didn’t vote for Trump, and you’re thinking about leaving the country — Zakaria has something to say to you too.

ZAKARIA: If everybody who loses an election abandons the watchtowers, that’s not going to help democracy.

And you don’t want to hurt democracy, do you? We once ran a contest on freakonomics.com, soliciting new, six-word mottos for the United States. Here’s the one that got the most votes: “Our worst critics prefer to stay.” That was a while ago. Does that motto still hold true today?

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I spoke with Fareed Zakaria on the 8th of November, just a couple days after Donald Trump won a second term in the White House, bracketing his four years of exile. The Republicans also won firm control of the Senate, while the outcome for the House of Representatives was still up in the air. And this was before Trump had made any significant appointments in his administration other than choosing Susie Wiles as his chief of staff. But as we publish this episode, the appointments are coming thick and fast: Tom Homan, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, Lee Zeldin, probably quite a few more by the time you hear this. I asked Zakaria for his first impressions of the election.

ZAKARIA: What I’ve been struck by is the degree to which the kind of things that I talked about in my book, Age of Revolutions, have been borne out. That is, that we’re in the midst of a huge backlash to all the economic change, the technological change, the cultural change that has been roiling Western societies and really societies everywhere for the last few decades. We’ve thought that these changes get digested or maybe there’s a spasm of a backlash. But we’re in a long period of reaction to these forces. And we’re developing almost a kind of new politics around it. What you’re seeing is a major realignment of politics around the idea that we’ve gone too far. We have to rethink the entire way in which we have been approaching these massive forces of structural change, economics, globalization, information revolution, cultural change. I’m not saying that I agree with that bad reaction and backlash in every case. But it’s deep, and it’s not a spasm.

DUBNER: And it’s plainly not just here. If you look at the incumbent party getting tossed out, it’s example after example after example, right? Austria, Japan, probably Canada next year. Do you see that as further proof that we’re living through, as you put it in the book of yours, “the most revolutionary period in recent history?” 

ZAKARIA: This is the first year in which every major country that has held an election has seen the incumbent party tossed out or substantially weakened. In some cases like France, Macron is still president, but his party was decimated. So, we’re clearly at a moment of enormous backlash and reaction. Now, sometimes it takes on a weird form. In Britain, it became a backlash to the Tories because the Tories were seen as the incumbents who had presided over the period of turmoil and inflation. But for the most part, it is a backlash against what I call the policy of openness. Open trade, open information, open migration, even open politics in the sense of people doubting very much whether democracy can deliver. 

DUBNER: Let’s press a little bit further on what constitutes openness. I want to read you a couple of things I’ve read this past week. One is from Newt Gingrich, former House speaker and an informal adviser to Trump, said, “The elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country.” There’s a professor of communications and journalism at Stony Brook University named Musa al-Gharbi, who wrote, “The rise of populism, tensions over identity politics, and the crisis of expertise are all facets of a deeper struggle between knowledge-economy professionals and the growing number of Americans who feel alienated from the social order we” — those professionals — “preside over.” So that’s a bit of an indictment of you, me, a lot of people you and I both know. What’s your feeling about that? 

ZAKARIA: I think it’s broadly correct. Now, how you solve it is the bigger problem. The post-industrial nature of modern economies, the move from, first of all, a manufacturing sector to a service sector, which is happening in every advanced industrial country, and the further effect of the information revolution, has been to privilege knowledge workers, to privilege people whom Robert Reich once described as “symbolic analysts.” Meaning, if you manipulate symbols, code, images, language for a living — and then think of every profession we get — you know, lawyers, accountants, software programmers —

DUBNER: You’ve just described our entire audience, by the way.

ZAKARIA: Right. You’re going to be doing well in that economy, you’re going to be rewarded, and you have pricing power over your labor. If you manipulate physical things for a living, you do not have pricing power. And that reality has become more and more intense And it’s been an easy sort, basically people who are college-educated versus people who are non-college educated, people who live in urban city centers versus people who don’t. And so, these divides stack upon each other so you end up really with two countries. One, urban, educated, secular, multicultural, and the other one rural, less educated, more white, more religious. And that creates a much greater chasm than we have ever had. If you go back 50 years, what you notice is the steelworker made more than the accountant or even sometimes the junior lawyer. There were lots of blue collar professions and lots of blue collar towns which were thriving. Detroit was one of the richest cities in America. That world has gone away. That’s the fundamental structural push which is creating this alienation. I very much dispute the idea that the elites are looking down on this great unwashed. I think that’s a nice way to indict them. But look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden as president has done more for blue collar workers, for manufacturing, for rural counties than any president really in history. I mean, you could say Lyndon Johnson, but the attempt to target the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, the IRA, all towards what were really red counties was extraordinary. It didn’t help him politically at all, because the issues causing this divide are as much cultural as they are economic. 

DUBNER: I’m curious to know how surprised you were by the outcomes. Did you predict a Trump landslide and a red wave? Because other than some of the betting markets, I haven’t heard from many people who did. 

ZAKARIA: I thought he would win. I didn’t say anything publicly about it because I’ve always thought it was close enough that it was almost a guessing game. I would have preferred if Kamala Harris had won, but I thought Trump would win. But it’s not as much of a landslide as people are making it out to be. You know, 175,000 votes in those three blue wall states and the Electoral College would have flipped, and Kamala Harris would be president. She would have won like Trump did in 2016. He would have won the popular vote, but she would have won the Electoral College. The striking feature of it is how you saw movement toward him among pretty much every group. The most significant ones were Hispanics. But everywhere you saw some movement. And I tend to think that is part of this larger realignment that I’m talking about. The country’s coalescing into two groups. The party that wants more openness at some level and the party that wants more closed borders, closed trade, closed technology. You know, it’s a big divide. And you’re seeing these new alignments where Hispanic working-class people are voting more like working class people than like Hispanics. So, ethnicity is giving way to social and economic class. 

DUBNER: Mollie Hemingway, who’s a conservative pundit, writes for The Federalist, said, “This is the absolute end of the old Republican Party. New GOP is more durable, more working class, with a brighter future.” Your thoughts on that? 

ZAKARIA: I think she’s dead right. I think that the old Republican Party — the party of the Chamber of Commerce, of the upper class, of the affluent white professionals — that party is gone, the party of Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. What Trump figured out was that that party was a minority party. It had not been able to win the popular vote for 25 years, almost, with one exception. What he has found his way to is a new coalition, which is almost the inverse. The base of the party is working-class. It is a more durable majority, or at least a larger coalition. For the Democrats, the challenge is that if the great dividing line is college education, you’ve got 40 percent versus their 60 percent. Because college educated people only make up about 40 percent. So you have to supplement it with something. The Democrats’ old answer was, we’re going to supplement it with minorities — and Blacks are still very reliably voting Democratic. Jews, actually, interestingly, are still very reliably voting Democratic. 

DUBNER: Right, the exit polls, which aren’t totally reliable, showed that Harris won a bigger share of the Jewish vote than any Democrat in 24 years.

ZAKARIA: Correct. Again, what that tells you is that their socioeconomic class, by which I mean college education, trumped religion and ethnicity. There is an old Democratic Party itch, which is that we’ve got to be a working class party as well. You hear that in Bernie Sanders. The problem is, no matter what policies they pursue — and as I say, Biden has been the most pro-working-class president in decades — the working class is abandoning them. They don’t see the Democrats as part of their world. They see the Democrats as this affluent, elite, urban, cosmopolitan world. Tony Blair said this to me, “When people feel deeply insecure, they don’t move left economically. They move right culturally.” Because your instinct is not to say, “Oh my goodness I feel like my world is being upended, I need this government program.” No, their impulse is to say, “I need a return to the world I knew.” That’s why the politics of nostalgia are so powerful. It’s a return to something comfortable. That feeling trumps economics. If you think about gender issues, you’re seeing on the one side a lot of women feeling like they need to have their rights protected. But you’re also seeing a lot of men who feel like politics has gotten too feminized, that they are being forgotten and that in a post-industrial world, women do better than men. There is a kind of male backlash. “Just take me back to before all this was happening. Take me back to that world where a man was able to be a man and was the dominant player in the family and in society.” I find that whenever working class people do this, liberals get so frustrated and they say, “I can’t believe these people are voting against their interests,” meaning they’re voting for a party that isn’t going to do something for them economically. And yet, these same upper class liberal professionals are voting against their interests. They are voting against the party that is going to give them tax cuts. And they’re voting for the party that is going to tax them more. Why? Because even for upper class liberals, it turns out that cultural and social issues can often trump economics. 

DUBNER: Although their argument would be, “Well, I’ve got mine, I’m comfortable, and therefore I’m looking out for people who don’t,” right?

ZAKARIA: They would say that. But I would argue that what’s going on is that in their world, it would be seen as so offensive to be voting for Trump. And what makes it so offensive? It’s all these cultural issues. It’s not that people in our world think it’s massively offensive to give a 3 percent cut in taxes. No, it’s about abortion and it’s about deportation. It’s about all those issues. 

DUBNER: So the main story being told now is pretty simple, that the Harris campaign focused primarily on Trump as a villain. Voters, however, were primarily focused on two things: inflation and immigration — which, by the way, were two major Trump talking points. And that resounded much more, apparently, than the “Trump the villain” story. Does that narrative sit about right with you, or do you think it’s more complicated than that?

ZAKARIA: I think that’s about right. And I would add, you can’t do that much about global inflation because A, it was global. Secondly, it had already come down, but people were living with the effects of it. I think part of what’s going on is that there is a lagging indicator, and that people feel the pain of inflation more than they feel the benefits of these very powerful positive indicators that the U.S. has by far the best large economy in the world. One variable that you could do something about was immigration. Immigration is the rocket fuel that is feeding right-wing populism. Because in a way, it is the visible manifestation of all these revolutionary changes that are upending society. How do you see or perceive or feel massive movements of capital around the world? You don’t. Even trade is an abstraction. Information revolution. These are all abstractions. But what’s real is that you see these people on TV and they look different, and they sound different, and they’re changing the visual character of your country, the sense you have of what it means to be an American. All your anxieties get latched onto immigration. And so not realizing that this is a seismic issue was a big mistake. 

DUBNER: One element that the Trump campaign seemed to be incredibly successful with was getting even first-generation Americans and immigrants to also turn against especially illegal immigration. Can you just talk about how the campaign did in organizing its real collage of constituencies. 

ZAKARIA: The main issue was the reality on the ground, and they understood it better. Look, I’m an immigrant and I have very, very mixed feelings about all this — crisis at the border, the breakdown of asylum. It took me 10 years of very patient legal steps to become an American citizen. To see people come to the border and essentially game the system by saying the magic words, “I have a credible fear of persecution,” which then gets you in, gets you to court hearings, gets you to stay for seven years, you disappear into the system, and you can work illegally. All of that offends people at two levels. One, it’s the sense of this is a violation of rule of law. This is not what a country should be. But the other is, “I waited my turn, I stood in line, I did all these things, I jumped through all these hoops or my parents did. And you guys are getting in for free.” So, I think that they understood that the breakdown in immigration, particularly around asylum, was a very different thing. They realized that there was a real collapse at the border. 

DUBNER: The Democrats will say “Well, we had this legislation teed up, ready to go, bipartisan-supported. And then Trump spiked it by persuading sitting Republicans to not move forward on it so that he could come in and fix it.” That seems to be not a very disputed story. Even those on the Trump side seem to admit that he is the one that’s ready to come in and march with it. Is that unfair to the Democrats? Did they propose a proper solution and it was scotched? Or should they have found a different way to do that? 

ZAKARIA: It is the correct solution for the Democrats politically. The problem is it’s not completely true, substantively. What really happened is Biden comes in, he reverses everything Trump did on immigration. Some of those things were terrible. He was making it more difficult for legal immigration. He was making it more difficult for even business visitors. But they also overturned all the asylum stuff. They then get an inflow — part of it was post-Covid — and they didn’t do anything about it. And it’s only three years later that they do what you were describing. 

DUBNER: So it’s disingenuous for them to claim that their solution was timely. 

ZAKARIA: It’s disingenuous because they do it three years later. They’re doing it after they see that the problem has spiraled totally out of control and that they’re paying a political price for it. But politically, even then, they should have been making that case that, look, we were waiting for a bipartisan congressional solution, and then Trump vetoed it. 

DUBNER: So let’s say that you are sitting around a table this morning with a bunch of Democratic Party leaders, and you look at your standard-bearers of the past bunch of years, and they’re really, really old. They’re not a little old. They’re really old. And then you’ve got Kamala Harris, who just lost an election. How do you think about the next couple of years if you’re the Democratic Party? 

ZAKARIA: I think that it would be a mistake to overinterpret some of these things. The Democratic Party did reasonably well in a year that was profoundly anti-incumbency. Kamala Harris ran a reasonable campaign. There are a few lessons that should be taken that are not about this larger political realignment. For example, the media environment has completely changed. And you have to have candidates who are very comfortable in the new media environment. Kamala Harris, in some ways is a very old-school candidate. She’s very good at the stuff that works on network TV, the teleprompter. Clearly, we are in an age where people want long-form podcasts. They want authenticity. So, somebody like Pete Buttigieg works really well in this new format. He could go for three hours, he could go for five hours with Joe Rogan or you. Because what people are trying to get a sense of is, who is the real person? And I think what they love about Trump is he is authentic. You can tell when he’s up there. He actually hates the teleprompters. He can’t wait to get off them. Even that moment when he starts to play his Spotify playlist. I think what people loved about it is, it was authentic. He was tired, he was bored. And he said, “Guys, let’s just take a break and hear some music.” Democrats are still a little too form-bound by an older world. When somebody asks you a question which involves an awkward reality, you don’t answer it. So that became her word salad. And instead of that you need a real answer on something like, “Would you do something different than Joe Biden?” would be, “Look, in retrospect, we should have shut down the border much faster, much sooner. And I’ll tell you what was going on. We didn’t want to be as cruel as we thought Donald Trump had been. And we were trying to solve it in a bipartisan way, because really, legislation is the only way that you can durably solve this. But we probably waited too late. And in retrospect, I would have shut it down fast and hard. It was a mistake.” Now, in conventional political terms, that’s seen as the wrong answer, because you just said you made a mistake. You said something bad about Biden. I think it would have actually worked, because what people are looking for is, look, we all know that this ended up spiraling out of control. Why can’t you just be a human being and admit it? 

DUBNER: Do you think Joe Biden, in his heart of hearts, thinks it was a mistake to step aside? Do you think he thinks he could have won? 

ZAKARIA: Of course. Every person is a hero in his own movie. For better or worse, I happen to know a lot of people in their 80s who are very rich, billionaires who run companies. I have not noticed any one of them thinking I’m too old to be doing this. Warren Buffett doesn’t think he’s too old to be running Berkshire Hathaway. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t think he’s too old. So it isn’t that surprising that a politician who is at the top of his game, holding the most powerful job in the world, one he’s wanted since he’s been in his 20s, thinks he could keep doing it. Almost certainly Biden is looking at this and thinking, “I should never have stepped down. I could have made it happen.” I don’t think that’s true. The problem for Biden was he looked and felt and sounded old. In the world of politics, that all matters.

Coming up: Donald Trump is going to the White House this time with more experience, and more leverage. Fareed Zakaria tells us what that may look like.

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One of Trump’s biggest victories in his first term was appointing three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, which led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In this election, voters chose to protect abortion access in 7 of the 10 states where it was on the ballot. But on many other ballot measures, progressive causes failed. California voters rejected rent control measures and minimum wage increases, and they voted in favor of harsher penalties for theft and drug offenses. Marijuana legalization failed in all three states where it was on the ballot, and in Massachusetts, a ballot measure to allow the legalization of some psychedelic drugs was defeated. Another big loser was ranked-choice voting. Even though many Americans express frustration with the two-party system, ballot initiatives on ranked-choice voting and/or open primaries failed in seven states — although they did pass in Washington, D.C., and in some other cities. I asked Fareed Zakaria what he thinks about this rejection of ranked-choice voting.

ZAKARIA: I think our two bitterly divided parties agree on one thing, which is to maintain the two-party duopoly, and to do everything they can to avoid any challenges to it. Ranked choice voting makes a lot of sense — it just translates voters’ preferences more efficiently and intelligently into the political system. But until you get one of the parties to see an advantage to doing it, and having one of the charismatic politicians explain it, you’re not going to get there. 

DUBNER: So besides Donald Trump himself, who do you see as the biggest winners in this election — whether it’s individuals, constituencies, industries, countries, ideas? Who comes out winning?

ZAKARIA: The biggest winner in a sense is the idea of a new ideology focused on the closed agenda. Because it becomes clear that Trump is not a spasm, it’s not a one-shot thing, that this is a deep, enduring change. The Republican Party is now completely remade. In personal terms, J.D. Vance comes out of this the best because while a lot of politicians went along with Trump because of his success, Vance is one of the very small number who is genuinely ideologically a believer in this kind of closed agenda. Now, he has a slightly different version of it than Trump. Vance in some ways represents the ideological underpinnings of MAGA. And so, I suspect that Vance will take this opportunity to really lay out that idea, and to purge the Republican Party of the remaining libertarian elements. People look at him and say, “Well, he worked at a hedge fund, so he must be pro-markets.” He’s certainly a capitalist. But he’s a very particular kind of capitalist. He really is in favor of massive industrial policy. He’s in favor of much less trade and much more targeted trade. He’s in favor of Lina Khan, the Biden administration official who is basically anti-big tech, anti-mergers. 

DUBNER: The second Trump term looks like it will be quite different from the first Trump term in a number of ways, including probably a much quicker and smoother transition. He’s used to the way things work. He’s also laid down more of a wish list that might be more concrete this time around. So how do you see the Republicans planning their legislative priorities for the first year? There’s plainly too much to take on all at once. So if you look at the broader menu — tax cuts, immigration reform, perhaps repealing the Inflation Reduction Act or the CHIPS Act — what do you see as the first moves? 

ZAKARIA: There’s one whole basket of things which is about reducing the power of the deep state. There’s a much deeper anti-establishment impulse that these last few elections have shown that I think they understand, and they’re going to act on. If you think about it, over the last 20 years, the politics of the era has been dominated by two outsiders: Donald Trump and Barack Obama. That’s not an accident. I think that’s all a legacy of ‘08 and the Iraq war. Then you get to the core promises that were made. The economic agenda is really the most difficult because Trump has said he’s going to extend his tax cuts. He’s got a bunch of new promises, the central one of which is no taxation of Social Security income. Now if you take the first one, the extension of the Trump tax cut, that’s $2.5 trillion.

DUBNER: When you say extension, this is the 2017 — it would just remove the sunsetting. It would continue, not necessarily amplify, correct?

ZAKARIA: Correct. But in budgetary terms, the assumption has been that it sunsets. So, if you think about budget projections, that is an additional $2.5 trillion of lost revenue. Then you have no taxing of Social Security, which is an additional $2.5 trillion of lost revenue. You’re adding $5 trillion to the debt. Those two things alone are just so big in budgetary terms that the question will be, will Senate Republicans go along with that? How would the markets react if they were to do something like that?

DUBNER: And you haven’t even brought up tariffs yet, which most economic-minded people think will not accomplish what it’s meant to accomplish. 

ZAKARIA: I agree, though I don’t think it produces a short-term crisis. Look, I’m very much a free trader. I think it’s a bad idea. And I think it takes the world down a bad path of mercantilism and protectionism. But it’s not going to produce a huge crisis. Look, 85 percent of the American economy is a domestic economy. We are one of the countries in the world that could survive a higher-tariff world. Europe gets really screwed. Ironically, U.S. and China probably can survive this kind of a world.

DUBNER: A lot of people — although they’re mostly academics and good-government watchdogs — they’ve been concerned for years about what they call government capture — industries and firms and lobbyists having too much leverage over government. Even the regulatory bodies of government — I mean, if you look at private equity, the government’s rules have essentially been written by the industry, thanks to the revolving door between industry and government. Now we’ve got Elon Musk, who helped Trump win the election, and plainly has his ear, and Musk has a whole lot of business that could benefit from looser regulations — with Tesla, SpaceX, even X, the former Twitter. So how do you see the relationship between government and commerce in this upcoming Trump administration? 

ZAKARIA: You can see it in what happened a day after the election results became clear. You got a flurry of tweets from every major C.E.O. in America — every major tech C.E.O., every bank C.E.O. — fawning over Trump, congratulating him and telling him how much they wanted to work well with him. I think that this is a very sad development that’s happened. It’s not entirely because of Trump. But we have politicized the economy in America. All this industrial policy, these tariffs, these bans. What that does is it suddenly makes Washington a very crucial arbiter to the success of business. You add to it Trump, who personally loves the idea of fining Caterpillar for doing this and Harley Davidson for doing that and Chase for doing — he views it as his job as president to literally dole out rewards and punishments to companies, depending on whether they do what he regards as the right thing or the wrong thing. It’s deeply saddening to me as somebody who grew up in India, where this is business as usual. Every business had to slavishly pander to whoever the prime minister at the time was. And you see it in Musk. Tesla stock, in the two days after Trump won, was up 20 percent or something like that, adding tens of billions of dollars to Elon Musk’s net worth. Nothing fundamental in the economics had changed for Tesla. There was just an expectation, now that he was a friend of Trump’s, that he was going to somehow be showered with federal largesse. You know, there’s a guy in India called Adani who’s Modi’s best friend, and his stocks trade at multiples 10 times that of every other Indian company. Because everyone assumes that at the end of the day, being Modi’s best friend is worth $100 billion or something like that.

DUBNER: That’s probably a pretty safe assumption.

ZAKARIA: It’s a safe assumption in India. What’s tragic is it might even be a safe assumption in America. But it’s not what the American economy was supposed to be about. And I think it’s a very sad trend.

DUBNER: What do you think immigration itself and immigration policy looks like in the next year or two?

ZAKARIA: I think you’re going to see a very severe crackdown on immigration in every form. I think you’re going to see a shutdown of the asylum policy. I think Trump might even invoke national security so that it gets through the courts, and they’ll just shut the border. Some kind of massive immigration reform I think is unlikely. It’s a very complicated issue in which everybody has different objections to different problems. Trump doesn’t seem to enjoy doing big compromise legislation. It’s politically unsatisfying. So, what he’s going to end up just trying to do is the border stuff and shut it down. The deportations are the most interesting issues. His people, like Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, have even said we are going to deport 24 million people. If you start to try to do that, the scale of it is so breathtaking. The abuse of police power you would need is so large and the economic effects would be so negative that you wonder whether Trump will do it, because he doesn’t like bad headlines. All his Wall Street friends, whom he still talks to and admires, are going to tell him this is bad. This is one of the tightest labor markets in 50 years. Even deporting two or three million people would probably spike inflation. It would probably cause enormous economic dislocation. To me, that’s going to be the bright line. He has promised — and this is not Vance, this is not Ramaswamy — he has promised the largest deportation in American history. He’s going to have to do something big.

DUBNER: One could imagine that he could pick a place, let’s say it’s New York or California, places that voted against him and say, “Okay, let’s start, New York City and let’s send in the military and let’s deport everyone that’s not here legally.” How would you see that playing out? Let’s say that armed forces are sent to New York City. What options would the mayor have? What options would the governor have?

ZAKARIA: We haven’t been in this situation since the late ‘50s and the early ‘60s, when governors like George Wallace would talk about interposition and nullification, essentially saying that the states had the ability or the authority to resist federal police power. I think it would be very hard to resist federal authority on this. The civil rights era settled that issue. The federal government does trump the states. The challenge remains — it is hugely economically disruptive. So even if you pick New York and California — remember, these are the two most vibrant economic centers of the country, and it’s going to have a spillover economically. 

DUBNER: Tell me what you think the second Trump administration looks like. It strikes me that there is a totally different vibe around the incoming administration than there was in 2016. The shock was much greater back then. One of the biggest complaints was that the administration was just not professionally run, that Trump didn’t act like a president, which maybe some of his supporters liked, but most of his staff did not like. It was just chaotic, and there was all kinds of infighting and firings and just a lack of ability to move the machinery in Washington. I wonder if you think it’ll be substantially different this time. 

ZAKARIA: The first term was unusual in that, first, he didn’t expect to win. They’d come to it very quickly without a lot of planning. He makes two or three decisions. One is to go along with the Republican establishment in many ways. So, the legislative priorities were largely those that were outlined by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. 

DUBNER: And what were those?

ZAKARIA: That was to prioritize tax cuts and repeal Obamacare over things like infrastructure, which Trump had been more in favor of. The second is to use the Republican establishment to staff the administration. If you remember, his first chief of staff was Reince Priebus, the chairman of the RNC, who he barely knew. Then finally, you notice he loved generals and so he appointed lots of generals. So I suspect all three of those things are not going to happen anymore. The priorities are going to be determined by Trump and his hardcore group of advisors. They are not going to rely on the Republican establishment very much. And he doesn’t like generals anymore because he realizes that the generals, push came to shove, were more loyal to the Constitution than to him personally. And for Trump, nothing is worse than disloyalty. So, I think what you’re going to see is a much more intense ideological vetting and personal loyalty test. 

DUBNER: Do you see this being in some ways a more typical administration, or do you see Trump, believing he has a mandate to do exactly what Trump wants to do, will be even more unorthodox? 

ZAKARIA: I suspect it will run better. A lot of the tension came from Trump giving orders that people would try to undermine because they disagreed with them. My guess is he’s going to have people around him who agree with him more, who will willingly carry out those orders. I mean, he’s always running a small mom-and-pop real-estate operation, and he approaches everything like that so that he can change his mind and he can go off-script. I don’t think that’s going to change that much.

Donald Trump, especially when he’s campaigning, says a lot of things that he later says he didn’t really mean; this is part of what he calls his “weave” — part insult comedy, part braggadocio, part old-fashioned sloganeering. It all adds up to a highly unpredictable mode of communication. So how will this kind of communication go over on the global stage, in Donald Trump’s second term?

ZAKARIA: If the U.S. walks away and disengages from the world, we will quite possibly return to a world of realpolitik and the law of the jungle.

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So far, we’ve been speaking with Fareed Zakaria mostly about the election outcomes and what a second Trump term might mean domestically. But Zakaria’s deepest expertise is geopolitics. In a recent Washington Post column, he argued that the world is facing, quote, “the most dangerous moment since the Cold War.” “As tensions spiral in the Middle East,” he writes, “keep in mind that this is only one of three arenas in the world where revisionists are trying to upend the international order. In Europe, a war continues to rage. And in Asia, a perilous new dynamic is at work.” So I asked Zakaria why he sees so much danger in this moment, and how Donald Trump may intersect with that danger.

ZAKARIA: If you step back, the world we’ve lived in for the last 75 years is a world system that was largely created by the United States after 1945. And it has as the institutional architecture of it the U.N. and the World Bank and the I.M.F., but what really is is a kind of open world economy, rules-based system. Some concern to norms like no acquisition of territory by force. And largely speaking, these norms have held. There aren’t a lot of cases of aggression in which land was acquired, absorbed into a new country, and it was ratified by international law. If you look before 1945, that happened every year. So, it’s a world that is distinctly different from the one we’ve lived in for many, many centuries. It’s largely the creation of the United States. It’s one that has produced peace and prosperity on a scale unimaginable, I think. And it is now threatened because of, in some sense, waning American power and waning American willingness to be the underwriter of this world. And so you see Russia mounting a classic military aggression in Europe. You see Iran in its own way, trying through asymmetrical means, using all these militia groups, to upend the security system there that is largely American-created with the moderate Arabs and Israel playing the role of regional policeman. And in Asia, China slowly but steadily trying to replace the United States as the dominant power. Now, Trump will react to each one of them in an ad hoc manner. In some ways, perfectly fine. In other ways, probably not. But what I worry about is that he doesn’t understand the larger picture, which is that the United States really has created a new world, that that world has been largely beneficial to the United States and enormously beneficial to the rest of the world. And that there are huge stakes here, that if the U.S. walks away and disengages from the world and retreats to isolationism, nobody can fill that role. And that this world is not natural and self-sustaining, and that we will quite possibly return to a kind of 19th-century world of realpolitik and the law of the jungle. That’s not in America’s interests and that’s not in the world’s interests. I don’t think Trump hears the music on that, because from his first full-page ad in The New York Times, when he was a real-estate developer, he was just berating the Japanese for taking advantages economically, berating the Europeans for free-riding on American security. He’s always looked at that world and said, All our allies are ripping us off. So, if he brings to it that mentality, I worry that we’re in a situation where this whole world order can unravel very quickly. 

DUBNER: Let’s go through some countries one, at a time. Let’s start with Russia. A big one, a problematic one, one in a war right now with Ukraine. We’ve learned about Trump having several private phone calls with Putin since leaving office. It’s also been reported in The Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk, a Trump ally, has also been in regular contact with Putin. How do you see the shape of the U.S.-Russia relationship moving in the next year or two? 

ZAKARIA: Clearly, Trump has a soft spot for Putin. I think it’s probably just, he likes strongmen. He admires what Putin has done. And what worries me about that is not that he’ll try to do a deal on the Ukraine war. I think there’s a deal to be had. I think it is time to find a way to end the hostilities. The problem is, the easiest way to do that would be to force Ukraine to accept Russia’s terms, and therefore effectively lose its independence. And so, Trump could easily go to Zelensky and say, “Look here, here are my terms, which are not that different from Putin’s terms. You accept these or we stop sending you weapons.” It’s very difficult to see how Zelensky can resist American pressure. And so, what you end up then is a morally bankrupt peace, which is really just a Ukrainian and Western surrender to Russia. Putin is able to be victorious. That norm of no-aggression is destroyed. But more importantly, it still leaves Europe deeply unstable, because all the countries around Ukraine are going to be scared and nervous and insecure. And Ukraine itself will largely implode, because unless you have a security guarantee that comes along with the end of the war, the Russians are just going to wait. And even if they don’t come back in, they will be able to exercise leverage by wielding that threat. So, Ukraine becomes a basket case. Eastern Europe becomes insecure. It’s a terrible idea. And the most worrying part about it is J.D. Vance outlined a version of a peace deal, and it was essentially Putin’s peace deal. It was, in fact, a version of the deal Putin has put on the table in quote-unquote “peace negotiations” in Turkey.

DUBNER: Let’s move to the site of a couple other wars. Israel is still fighting a war in Gaza. Fighting kind of a war in southern Lebanon. How does a Trump election change those wars, but especially the relationship with Bibi Netanyahu and Israel generally?

ZAKARIA: The truth is, the Biden administration has been so supportive of Israel and so supportive, broadly speaking, of Bibi Netanyahu that there isn’t going to be that much difference. There isn’t that much more that Trump could do. The Biden people tried to restrain Netanyahu in the manner in which he conducted the war in Gaza. You know, don’t go into certain civilian areas, make sure you have provided for humanitarian assistance and tents when you displace people. But those were things kind of on the margins of the fundamental issues. People say Trump will give a green light, but what would that mean? 

DUBNER: Well, Trump has said he wants to make rescuing the Israeli hostages a priority, for instance. So theoretically, that could lead to a different phase of the war in Gaza. 

ZAKARIA: Ironically, the big obstacle to that has been Bibi Netanyahu. All the people I’ve talked to who’ve been involved in these negotiations, including the Qataris who have been brokering them, say that the big obstacle initially was Hamas, but then Hamas came to agree to certain terms. And then Bibi Netanyahu didn’t want to agree to those terms because those terms would have probably enraged the two members of his government who are on the far right, and his government might have had to collapse. 

DUBNER: And everything I read is that Netanyahu is prosecuting the war in this direction mostly out of self-preservation. Do you buy that?

ZAKARIA: I think I bought it initially. I think he has maneuvered so well and gotten lucky in Lebanon. At this point, his poll numbers look very good. He’s probably in a situation where he could actually even go to the polls and win. Donald Trump will certainly give Bibi Netanyahu a green light to do whatever he wants to do in Gaza. But honestly, there isn’t that much more to do. Seventy-five percent of Gaza has been destroyed. Hamas leaders have been killed. Hamas’s infrastructure has been decimated. The interesting continuity you’re going to see — which I think is one that Biden and Trump have both been comfortable with — is what Israel is doing in the north. The war against Hezbollah, and the attacks on Iran. And there I think the Israelis have very shrewdly and effectively re-established deterrence. They were in a circumstance where Hezbollah was launching rockets at them. Israeli citizens had to flee northern Israel. They worried about Iran unleashing its missiles. And what the Israelis decided to do was to take this moment, and really push back. And what they found was, Hezbollah was a paper tiger. Iran was a paper tiger, that Israel is much, much more powerful than both of them. I think it’s actually been a force for stability. The Biden administration has supported it. The Trump administration will support it. So I think what’s going on in the north is very different from the issue of Gaza, which is more about what Israel does with the occupied territories. Is there any possibility Palestinians get political rights? That’s almost a separate issue. But in the north, just from a regional stability point of view, I actually think what Israel has done has been remarkably effective.

DUBNER: Last time we spoke, I remember you talking about Iran maybe not necessarily as a paper tiger per se, but as certainly less wealthy, less influential than it likes to present itself as. On the other hand, in the last few months I’ve been reading about how much money Iran has been making by selling oil to China, for instance, and other ways. So it seems like they are at least very well dug in to sustain the status quo for a long time unless there’s unrest from within or from outside. So Trump says that he’d like to exert what he calls maximum pressure on Iran. I also have read that Iranian agents reportedly tried to assassinate Trump. And given how any of us might respond to that, you can imagine there’s a little bit of personal thinking going on there. So how aggressive do you think Trump is willing to be with both Iran as a potential nuclear power itself, Iran as a spreader of terrorism through all these proxy groups that you’ve been naming and some others, militias in Syria and Iraq, and so on?

ZAKARIA: So, Trump talks about a maximum pressure campaign on Iran. But the truth is, the United States has had a maximum pressure campaign on Iran for 35 years. Iran is under crippling sanctions. You can tell how badly Iran is doing when you notice that a year ago, the president of Iran and the foreign minister died in a helicopter crash because they were flying in a 1979 American Bell helicopter for which they didn’t have spare parts or maintenance. That is the military hardware being used by the president of the country. Imagine what the average soldier has. Iran’s formal budget, which I believe is inflated because they want to puff their chests up — I think the Israeli defense budget is three times the size of Iran’s budget. Yes, Iran is an oil-exporting country and as we learned with Russia, they’re never going to go bankrupt, because the world needs oil. But they are massively dysfunctional, corrupt. If you look at their armed forces, they have been unable to achieve anything of any significance. So I think that Iran is very much on the defensive. And these latest Israeli strikes have rendered them completely defenseless, literally, because what Israel did was they took out all their air defenses. Iran’s in a very weak position. The question that Trump will face, I think if he was to think about this seriously, is: do you want regime change in Iran? Do you want to push for some kind of internal revolt and revolution?

DUBNER: And we’ve tried that before. 

ZAKARIA: We’ve tried that before. We also know that regime change in the Middle East does not end well. You think of Iraq, think of Libya, think of Syria. These things are massively disruptive, chaotic, bloody, and often end up with results that are worse than what you started with. So I would caution against trying to do something like that. Partly because Iran is an oil-rich country, the regime has plenty of means of repression to stay in power. If you don’t want to do that, to me, the intelligent way to think about Iran is, keep the pressure on, but also think about what incentives are you giving them for changes in behavior? If you put a country in a box, where the four walls are so tight and there’s no door out, it has no incentive to change its behavior. I’m not saying Iran would, but I’m saying any serious strategy has to have lots of sticks, but also a few carrots. And at this point, I don’t see where Iran is supposed to go.

DUBNER: Let’s move to China. What should we expect now with Trump as president, especially given the pretty interesting relationship he had with Xi in his first term? 

ZAKARIA: Trump will almost certainly try to do something with China on tariffs. He’s always viewed it as an economic predator state that takes advantage of America. Some of what he says is true. China would probably be more than happy to work out some deal. He and Xi were able to have those kind of conversations. The Chinese like managed trade. They like the idea that they can cut some kind of bilateral deal, in which they reduce some of their obstacles in return. It’s difficult to tell with Trump how ideologically committed he is to a tough stance on China. I suspect that you’re going to see a more workable relationship with China than people imagine just listening to his ideology. That’s because he’s practical, he listens to businessmen, and don’t forget the central role of Elon Musk here. Musk has really become such a central figure in the Trump world. And Elon Musk needs the Chinese market for Tesla to succeed in becoming the most important car company in the world. The way things stand now, there are all kinds of restrictions on what Tesla can do in China. My guess is Musk is going to try to be a kind of intermediary between the U.S. and China. And who knows, he might succeed. With Trump, these things are so transactional. There’s so much personality involved. It is possible to imagine that U.S.-China relations under Trump are actually less hostile than they were under Joe Biden.

DUBNER: So let me ask you, there are a lot of people who voted Democrat this time around and are very frustrated. Some of them are frightened. A lot bitter. I’ve read reports about how many people are planning or hoping to leave the U.S. for Canada and other places. Of course, you read that same story every time there’s an election, especially when there’s a conservative Republican elected. If you could take a step back, for people who didn’t vote for Trump, who don’t like a Republican consensus in Washington, what do you say to that population? How do you see the next few years playing out? 

ZAKARIA: I think when you have a high-stakes election where you have somebody who is very much out of the traditional mainstream getting elected, it’s understandable that there is a kind of reaction — it’s almost like a flight from reality. It’s a desire to just avoid all that. To watch an old movie, to get away from it all, to seek solace in your private life. And I understand that reaction. I think, first of all, it’s not going to be as bad as people think, in the sense that this is a country with a lot of checks and balances. You have three branches of government. I understand they’re all under Republican control. But, you know, Mitch McConnell is not the same as Donald Trump. Secondly, you have institutions. You have bureaucracies, you have laws, you have rules. These can’t all just be willy-nilly dispensed with. You have courts. You have states, many of them Democratic states. And by the way, even some Republican states that are not going to easily accept everything and anything. And most of the things that you live with on a day-to-day basis are determined at the state level. So Robert Kennedy might advise states to get rid of the fluoride in their water systems. He can’t force New York City to take the fluoride out of its water system. There are many, many more layers and checks and balances, and there will be a back and forth. But the biggest thing is you can’t take the attitude that you’re going to abandon the country every time things don’t go your way. Like Biden said, “You can’t love your country only when you win.” But it’s more than that. You have to be willing to stay and participate and engage in civic terms and fight the good fight for the things you believe in and oppose the things you don’t believe in, because that’s what makes democracy work. In a sense, loving your country and believing in it and wanting all these good things for it mean that even more so when things haven’t gone your way in one election, you have to stay to try to help keep the things you believe in alive. I certainly have never — 

DUBNER: You’re not moving to Canada.

ZAKARIA: I’ve never entertained those kind of fantasies. First of all, I’m an immigrant. I made my choice. Secondly, with all its flaws, with all the problems, the United States is the most amazing country in the world. I mean, it’s economically the most dynamic. It’s socially the most open. It’s an amazing place. You’re not going to keep it amazing and you’re not going to allow it to continue to maintain this kind of exceptional quality it has if you leave or even if you retreat into private life. You have to stay engaged. 

That was Fareed Zakaria. You can find him on CNN; his show is called GPS. His most recent book is The Age of Revolutions, and I’d like to thank him for this conversation. It’s hard to think of any topic that’s gotten more coverage than this year’s election, but I still walked away having learned a lot from Fareed. If you feel the same way — or if you didn’t — let us know. Our email is radio@freakonomics.com, and we love feedback. Also, a reminder to come see Freakonomics Radio live — in San Francisco on January 3rd and in Los Angeles on February 13th. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/liveshows.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Theo Jacobs. Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jason Gambrell, Jeremy Johnston, Jon Schnaars, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilley, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.