Donald Trump’s victory on Election Day was “a rejection of a status quo that big majorities did not like” Chris Hayes said Wednesday night. Those majorities included people who voted for Kamala Harris, he added.
“Now the thing about this is Trump and Republicans have an interest, a vested interest, in interpreting this as a mandate for all of their worst governing impulses, all the Stephen Miller-style Project 2025 dark fantasies of smashing the administrative state,” Hayes explained. But, he continued, “those ideas were never popular.”
In fact, many of the more extreme Project 2025 ideas polled badly and “Trump tried to distance himself every chance he had from them, because they polled so terribly.”
“When you wrote down what they wanted to do, people didn’t like it. That was not the source of this victory. You can see it all over America and last night’s results,” Hayes said before he cited North Carolina’s results. The state elected Trump for president but Democrats for every other open post. Elsewhere in the United States, voters in Arizona, Missouri, and Montana each added the right to abortion to their state constitutions.
“Voters in deep red, Missouri and Alaska also approved raises in the minimum wage,” he continued. “They joined Nebraska in mandating paid sick leave to workers. Just to add to all that, New Jersey elected its first Asian American senator. Maryland elected its first Black and female US senator — so did Delaware. The US will have two Black female senators for the very first time in its history.”
Trump and the far right will “interpret this election as a mandate for … full MAGA,” Hayes added, and they have a “destructive plan” that can wreak havoc on democracy — “and we also know Donald Trump is an aspiring authoritarian.”
“But the most important thing to those of us who are committed to stopping them is to remember their success is not for ordained in any way,” Hayes explained. “They’re going to try, and there’re going to be a lot of people trying to stop them, and the outcome of that is, as yet undetermined.”
Trump spent a lot of his first term trying to accomplish a litany of terrible things. He followed through on some of them, but was thwarted on others “because he is completely distractible” and is a “vortex of chaos.” Trump himself has also “backed down when he found himself on the wrong side” of extreme anti-abortion positioning.
Trump is susceptible to public opinion, Hayes added. “Politics didn’t go away in America because three out of 100 people switched their presidential vote, which is to be clear, what happened last night between 2020, and 2024, and politics depends on the work of organizing and mobilizing and persuading our fellow Americans.”
“None of those tools have gone anywhere,” he continued. “In fact, all of them are even more important. This time around, we have to pick them up and we can’t let anyone pry them from our hands.”
You can watch the clip from Chris Hayes in the video above.
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