KCBS Radio In Depth

The return of President Trump: How did we get here?

Americans have voted to send Former President Donald Trump back to the White House. He defeated the Bay Area’s own Vice President Kamala Harris and will be serving a second term as President in January. KCBS Radio news anchors Margie Shafer and Eric Thomas spoke with Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and KCBS Insider Phil Matier about how Trump got re-elected. KCBS Political Reporter Doug Sovern sat down with newly-elected US Senator Adam Schiff to discuss his ascension to the Senate. This, and more, on this edition of In Depth.

Duration:: 30m
Broadcast on:: 03 Jan 2025
Audio Format:: other

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This is KCBS in-depth. This week, Americans voted to send former President Donald Trump back to the White House. He defeated the Bay Area's own Vice President Kamala Harris, and will begin serving his second term as President in January. Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and KCBS Insider Filmatier broke down just how Mr. Trump was re-elected with KCBS anchors Margie Schafer and Eric Thomas. Let's get right to it. Why do you think Donald Trump is going back to the White House? He is a better salesman than his opponent. That is frankly the foundation of his rise back from what essentially was the political dead to the ascendancy of the throne. But what was he selling? Well, I'm not sure that he defined himself for selling anything, except not against his real performance activities. He is just absolutely fabulous. He also was highly motivated to avoid jail, so he's okay. Yeah, but what resonated with voters? What was he saying? Well, everything right. Let me tell you, you got to know that the voters are more like Trump than they are like Harris, or they are like Biden. They really are just ordinary people, far more interested, by the way, in what a gallon of gas costs, or what eggs costs, or what milk costs than a whole bunch of other things. They couldn't care about the Ukraine. They couldn't care about many other things as compared. They might discuss them, but they don't discuss them around the water cooler in the garage where they work. They don't do that, period. We see it here in the Bay Area as well, given the opportunity, voters will go away unexpected. And what Donald Trump is good at, and the Democrats are not good at, is that he hears the people. The Democrats tell the people, and Donald Trump listens to the people. You might not like it, but for example, I'm going to say immigration. Can we say illegal immigration? Is that allowed, or is it undocumented immigration, or is it now migrants? But he says illegal immigration, and people register with that. Democrats would say, if you say illegal immigration, you're being racist. We won't have that conversation. And so the pressure just keeps building up on this and other topics. When the Democrats talk the economy, they roll out statistics. As the mayor said, when Trump talks the economy, he's points to the gas pump. It's much more understandable. And I would also like to note and ask you about this, is Donald Trump is this hurricane that has spun around and disrupted or destroyed a lot of things. And his acceptance speech, the one word I didn't hear, was Republican. He said, our movement, our movement, MAGA, MAGA. So there's, there's like a two-party system in the United States, Democrats, and MAGA. Well, that clearly is how he managed to get many Democrats who voted for him this time around, as if it didn't matter that he was of a different party, period. Because he's of, no party. He is of his party. Right. His party only. And his party is this fluid. It's more of an attitude than a party. He doesn't embrace a lot of the Republican ideas. He's the one that's saying, tariffs. No tax on overtime. No tax on tips. No tax on this. He's a populist. He's not a Republican. No, well, you describe him as a populist. I think he's an opportunist. They can be both. Historically, populists are opportunists. No question, but he knows when and how to sell something. And he really doesn't deny the next opportunity he switches. Right. He goes and I'm stepping directly away from where he was. Exactly. He says, I won't sign a national abortion ban. I won't do that. Willy or won'ty? We don't know because next morning he can wake up and say something different. But Harris just lost to a man that many Democrats were saying was a danger to democracy. He was a felon. The messaging that the Democrats had, it doesn't fit on a hat. MAGA. No, it did. Hitler. Well, you're laughing, but that's what they were saying. They were saying, clearly saying that. And that does fit on a hat. He's Hitler. But the thing is, if they don't believe he's Hitler, everything else you're saying goes south as well. Phil, and that is exactly the bottom line. The believability in the Democratic message was without a doubt, not there. Nobody really believed all the things they said about what's going to happen tomorrow, or the day thereafter, next year, if he gets the job. Nobody believed that. Let me take a different take on what you just said about Hitler. Okay. What if you think you're in the middle of the ocean and you're drowning and a boat pulls up and a guy reaches his hand out to you to pull you out and it's Hitler. Do you take it? Yeah. There you go. You can still think the guy is Hitler, and you can take it his hand and say, okay, here's the economy. I don't like you, but I like what you do for the economy. If you were messaging the Democrats, would you have branded him Hitler or Bozo the Clown? What he said, the Bozo the Clown stuff is the entertaining part. Exactly. But the Hitler stuff is the stuff that scares you to death project 2025. Scares you to death. Of course, he says he is. But that's only if you've been around here long enough to know what that really means. Right. Period. Most of the voters, frankly, would have to go back and check to figure out what it means. They have moved so far away from World War II. Yeah. Period. So many people here in the Bay Area are very disappointed, right? Because we were hoping for one of our own, you know, to ascend. Personally and politically. Right. And so what could Harris have done differently? Well, my take on this is that if you're going to examine that you have to start with the campaigns beginning and that was Joe Biden. What could Joe Biden have done differently? Well, when he became president, if he had taken care of the border and admitted that inflation was a problem, there would have been a, we would not necessarily have seen the return of Donald Trump. The second thing is that he's stayed too long before he got off the stage. And so he handed basically the Biden campaign. She took over the driver's seat of a bus that was already moving. She didn't have her own campaign and she was tied to Biden. It was Biden's people. So when they asked what would you do differently than Joe Biden, she didn't have an answer to that. And that I think was critical because that was saying it's four more years of Joe Biden. You asked the question, what could she have done at the outset? Or what should Democrats have done at the outset? What they should have done at the outset in the inaugural address on the 21st of January in 2021, they should have had Biden announce that he was only going to serve one term. If he had said, I'm going to serve one term and I'm going to address the problems of everybody who's going to the gas pump and station and paying more than they should for gas. I'm going to do everything I can to treat everybody. The way that I said I would treat people who are in college. You cancel the college scholarship. You cancel the college loan. Just think about that. If you don't go to college, you don't get that cancellation. So it means almost nothing to anybody else. Everything he should have said and done, including the fact that I won't serve, but one term as the president of the United States. If he had done that and if he had added to it, every time he thought about something that was alien people, he talked about curing it. He talked about addressing it. He didn't do that. He talked about building a great society for some of us who are not members of that society. And then finally, he did not, under any set of circumstances, understand about immigration. He had no clue that you were talking about something that offends many, many people. They hide it in silence. They have always hidden it in silence. That's what I want to talk about because Phil mentioned this earlier whether you call it illegal immigration or undocumented immigration or whatever. If you stopped right there and said, "Okay, the border is open. Too many people are coming across. It's a problem." But they didn't. They would say they're garbage. They're murderers. They're rapists. Yes. Those things that people didn't seem to hear, they heard the first part. Okay, let's flip the thing. And while on the Democratic side, when you said we have a problem with the border, they would go, "Immigration is great. It's what made America great." And people go, "Yeah, I'm for immigration. It's illegal immigration. You can't say illegal. That's racist. We're not going to talk about that." So you're building a pressure cooker and, yes, they went the other way. And it didn't help that you have communities across America that are impacted heavily. They just are. There's schools, everything. It's a big rush. It's a big change. We're seeing it worldwide. We're seeing mass migrations of people. And to the similar effect in Europe as well. Mr. Mayor, let's address the elephant in the room. We have a woman of mixed racial heritage and a woman of mixed racial heritage against a white man. Was there a demographic aspect to this? No, no, no, it's a woman thing. They did it to Hillary and they were motivated to do it to Hillary because Hillary appeared to be more combative and more contentious, frankly, of her opposition, so to speak. Kamala was hugging her opposition, but she was still for all of what they said and did. She was still, for everybody's purposes, Mrs. Clinton. She was not anything new on the woman's side. And I do believe that the woman literally is a problem politically for us. I had to address that when I served as the speaker and I did address it. I was aggressive about addressing it. I didn't lie about it. I said, why I want the woman? I wanted the woman because she could stand the review of her previous conduct better than most of my male candidates. She were never in a position where she didn't pay the bill when it should have been paid for taxes, for child care, for everything they needed to be paid. She was not the person blamed for that. And so suddenly you've got all the things that women do that are not ever liabilities for a woman in a candidacy process. Are we in a bubble though here? Are we in a bubble here though? I mean, look, we had two female senators. We had Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein representing state. We're no stranger to women leaders, but I don't think that's the truth all over the country. No, it isn't and believe me, by the way, we've got to change our course of conduct. Adam shipped one, but that's because he had virtually no opposition. If that Steve Garvey had been sold as if he was John Wayne, we'd have a Republican senator. You know, what else is or if they had had a minority woman candidate, I mean, Republicans are putting minorities up. They're doing better with that in the Central Valley and in Southern California. They are putting women up for the office to run for office and they are winning. Eric, what you're talking about is one of the more interesting things is how could they vote for this guy? You know, a woman, how could you do that? That is what's stunning everybody. After all he said and all he's done. Well, in part, we have to blame ourselves in the media. And we said he said it was going to be a bloodbath, right? We said that. What was he talking about? He was talking about the auto industry. He wasn't talking about a bloodbath in the streets. He was said, if they get back in office, it's going to be all electric vehicles and Detroit. We'll see a bloodbath in the auto industry. We didn't report that, but most part. He does say explosive things. He does say things that are untrue. And voters are still able to tune those things out. It's that thing we heard in 2016, his voters take him seriously, but not literally. Yes. And if he's tapped into their feelings, they believe it. Trump talks exactly like the people on the block. Everything he says and everything he does in response to and initiated the conversation is what people can understand. It is not in the elitist category. And I'm telling you, I said earlier about the business of cancer student loans. Yeah. Yes. Just think that didn't have an effect on anybody, apparently, because suddenly the numbers now show that all these young people showed up to vote and greater numbers on behalf of Trump than they did on behalf of Kamala. One of the things that people are going to have to take a look at, Democrats are Trump didn't better in democratic states than people were talking about. I think he only lost Jersey by five points. I mean, that's, that's, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's the economy stupid. And in another two years, that may be the other side. Local news can come at you fast. Want the latest on what's happening in your backyard? Download the free Odyssey app. Follow your local news station and you'll get alerts on the top stories making headlines in your city. You can stay in the know no matter what you're up to and be among the first to find out when news breaks plus keep tabs on weather and traffic so you're never caught off guard. To get started, download the Odyssey app that's A-U-D-A-C-Y and follow your local news station. The headline race in this year's election was, of course, the presidential election. But second on California's ballot was the race for a new U.S. senator to succeed the late Diane Feinstein and interim senator LaFonza Butler. The voters chose Adam Schiff, the longtime Los Angeles congressmen who grew up in the East Bay and went to high school in Danville. Schiff sat down with KCBS political reporter Doug Sovereign to discuss his ascension to the Senate and his agenda as he represents California for the next six years. So the economy turned out to be obviously one of the top issues in this election. We hear from people all the time how they can't afford to put food on the table and clearly made a big difference in the presidential race. What would you do as a U.S. senator to address that issue that seems so important to so many people that they just can't afford life? Yeah. This really is the top issue I think facing our state and the country and most particularly when it comes to housing. People can't afford a place to live. In rural areas rents are going up as faster, faster than urban areas. In all parts of the state, people are struggling to be able to afford their first home. People are moving back in with their parents and not because they particularly want to. Others are completely left homeless and living on the street. And this is the result of a lack of construction of new housing for years now. There are ways to solve this problem. We need to incentivize the building of affordable housing. The long-term housing tax credit is a federal tax credit that is way over subscribed. That is lots of people want to use it. It's not available to them because we cap it. If we lift that cap, we can stimulate the development of hundreds of thousands of new homes in California, which we desperately need. We also need local governments to get to yes much quicker. These are going to be two of my top priorities because unless we are building a lot more housing and increasing supply, we're never going to get ahead of this. We can spend billions moving people off the street and into housing as we are, but there will be new place, new people to take their place on the sidewalk unless we're building more housing. That's one attack on the housing prices, but each segment of the economy is going to need its own approach. With food prices, you've got this incredible consolidation of grocery stores, allowing them monopolistic power to drive up prices. Our oil companies are gouging the hell out of us. There ought to be a windfall profit stacks on oil companies. It'll vary from sector to sector of the economy, but there are things that we can do to help. We also need to raise incomes. Their strengthening, collective bargaining, offsetting the enormous power of corporate America is going to be really important. We're in a place today where a handful of the wealthiest billionaires, the Elon Musk's of the world, possess as much wealth as almost half of the country. That's a terrible place to be. It's, I think, morally bankrupt, but also it's bad economics. We need a more progressive tax code that is going to help lift up working families, middle class families. The ideas you mentioned as far as housing production, et cetera, you're probably going to have a very closely divided Congress. It may be that one party controls one house, the other, the other we don't know. How are you going to get some of these things through if the Democrats have one house, the Republicans have the other, and so on? Some of these ideas, like the low income housing tax credit, actually have bipartisan support. Other things that we want to get done on the Democratic side of the aisle, like the child tax credit, have some bipartisan support. How do you get it done when you have probably vast majority Democratic support for these ideas and just some modicum of Republican support is, well, you have to come up with a package where you're offering something that they want. What do they want? They want tax cuts for really rich people. They want tax breaks for corporations. This is where it gets painful because we're put in the position of, well, if you want to lift young people out of poverty, which when we doubled the child tax credit, 40 percent of the kids were living in poverty were lifted out of poverty, they're going to say, hey, if you want to help kids, we want to help rich people. You've got to give us what we want. There's going to be some give and take, and that's the only way in a divided government you're going to get something done. You've been a pretty high profile member of the House. People recognize you on the streets of New York City when you're from California. How do you envision your role in the Senate? You're already building relationships that could help you rise to leadership fairly quickly, but how do you see yourself in the Senate? Well, I would love to emulate at least the approach that Senator Feinstein used, which was to develop relationships with people across the aisle, get to know the stakeholders up and down the state, demonstrate a willingness to try to tackle some of the big challenges, take on some of the big fights in order to get it done. I think Californians have really come to expect in their Senator because of, for example, someone who both delivers, but also is willing to stand up and defend our institutions against some powerful actors. Dianne Feinstein stood up to the CIA when there was evidence the CIA had engaged in torture, these enhanced interrogation techniques. She stood up to the NRA to get the assault weapons ban. I've had to stand up to a corrupt president. If necessary, I'll do so again. There's something of a lightning rod, though. I mean, Dianne Feinstein had sort of a moderate, measured, even right-of-center sometimes reputation. How will you do that when you'll be coming into the Senate very closely identify with the anti-Trump forces? Well, sometimes you have to compartmentalize. When Trump was president, I was the chair or the ranking member of the intelligence committee. I needed to get the work of that committee done. And so I worked even with Devin Nunes to get our intelligence bills passed every year, and we did. Often, when the Senate committee wasn't able to pass their bills, we got them passed in the House committee. Sometimes you have to say, "Okay, I'm going to fight with you over these issues, but let's get to yes on these other issues." So that'll be my approach again, if necessary. My field has been singled out as an enemy of the people. You're actually the enemy within, or maybe we're both enemies within, but you've been singled out by name by former president Trump. Is that a badge of honor or something just truly terrifying for a former president and potentially future president to call someone? I mean, how do you wear that? What do you say to that? It's a bit of both. Roosevelt once said that you can judge a person by the enemies that they have made. And while I would much rather be known by my friends by Roosevelt's standard, I'm doing pretty damn well, but it veers into the dangerous when you start to be described as an enemy within for which you have a right to call out the military, or in the case of Liz Cheney when the former president fantasizes about putting her before a firing squad. We already see a dangerous, increasing acceptance of the idea of political violence, pre-Trump. I never used to receive threats. I was in Congress for 10 or 15 years before he came onto the scene, and in that whole course of that time, I might have had a single threat. Now not a day or a week goes by where we don't receive threats, and it's not just me, and it's not just members of Congress. It's school board members, it's city council members, it's elections workers. I'll never forget the testimony on the January 6 committee of those two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss, and Ruby Freeman, whose business was her name. Lady Ruby, she sold women's clothing. She couldn't use her name anymore because the president had come after her, and I remember her describing with tears in her eyes about how, "Do you know what it's like when the most powerful person in the world comes after an ordinary citizen?" And so we need to move away from that, frankly, the best justice I think we have seen in an era in which justice, in the case of the former president, has ever been delayed and ever been denied, was when the court ordered Rudy Giuliani to provide much of his wealth and belongings to these Georgia election workers that he had so badly defamed. You mentioned Dianne Feinstein, and we've had this era of 30 years in California, where we're represented by two women in the Senate, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, now Alex Padilla, of course, but Lefanza Butler, since Senator Feinstein passed. Once you are in the Senate, you and Senator Padilla, California's women will be represented by men. What do you say to the women who may fear that they're losing a voice after they've had such champions in Washington on women's issues of voice for the women of California? Well, what I would say is that I'm going to very much champion in every way I can the same issues that Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer did. When it comes to equal rights for women, attacking the glass ceiling, making sure that we have equal pay for equal work, making sure that whether it's my voice on appointments to the bench or confirmation of cabin appointments, or in any other respect that I'm looking for diversity in the applicants and in these fields on my own staff, that it's reflective of the beautiful gender diversity, racial diversity in every respect. That's going to be a very high priority for me, because I know that both in my own case and in Senator Padilla, we're going to have to really make every effort to make sure that we're lifting up these voices and we're lifting up women in these positions of responsibility. Given that, we will have two men representing the state in the Senate. Another big issue I hear from the voters is, of course, immigration and the border. How optimistic are you as a senator that you will be able to get something done either resurrect the bill that was killed a year ago or last winter or something productive done on immigration in the Senate? I think so much depends on who's controlling what the Republicans have made it very clear, especially in the last year. They don't want to solve this problem. They like the problem. They like campaigning on the problem. It's the political gift that won't stop giving. To pass a comprehensive reform, we will need to do away with a filibuster. Now we have the opportunity to do that when we control both House and Senate and the White House during the first couple of years of the Biden administration and for time during Obama and didn't get it done, and that's on us. We need to use the political capital to finally get it done, but I really don't see a Republican leadership at this moment that is willing to solve the whole problem because they like the problem. But if they are in charge, voters are going to expect them to do something about the things they promised they would fix. I mean, we've seen the ads. Obama broke it. Trump will fix it. Don't they have to produce results or they're two years from now, they're not in power anymore? Well, if they were truth in advertising, those ads would say Trump broke it and he wants to break it even further, that would be their ad. But maybe not such an appealing approach for them. They'll try to do something. The danger, I think, for the country is Trump believes he doesn't need to work with Congress, that he can just say to make it so. We already saw him previously tried to divert funding from the military to build his wall. Now the court said, "No, you can't do that." But frankly, the Supreme Court now in the decision-giving him immunity to commit crimes in office has torn down one of the most significant guardrails we had. So tragically, I think we can expect he will feel completely unbound by law, criminal, civil or otherwise. Thank you so much for coming and we really appreciate it. My pleasure. You've been listening to KCBS In Depth. Get every episode by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and other podcast platforms. Visit kcbsradio.com for more news and interviews. We are the Bay Area's news station, KCBS.