“The Confederacy Won” the Election, Says Professor Carol Anderson

Donald Trump has been reelected president of the United States. Ahead of Kamala Harris’s expected concession speech, we speak to professors Carol Anderson and Michele Goodwin to discuss Harris’s historic campaign — and historic loss. “The Confederacy won,” says Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University. “It paints a picture of what Americans are willing to embrace,” says Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown and an expert on healthcare law, who warns of the public health dangers of a second Trump administration and discusses the election’s implications for reproductive rights.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Donald Trump is headed back to the White House four years after attempting a coup to stay in power. In a resounding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump is projected to have secured at least 277 electoral votes, surpassing the 270 needed to win the presidency. It appears he may also win the popular vote, which he lost twice before. Republicans have also regained control of the Senate, but the House is still up for grabs.

The presidential race was called for Trump after he won the critical swing states of Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Trump’s also in the lead in Michigan, Nevada and Arizona as we broadcast. Trump’s the first convicted felon — and at 78, the oldest candidate — ever elected president. He appears on pace to win the popular vote for the first time, after receiving fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.

We begin with two guests. Michele Goodwin is professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown University and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, author of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. And in Atlanta, Georgia, we’re joined by Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University, author of many books, including One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. Her other books include The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

We welcome you back both to Democracy Now!, after our four-hour special last night. Professor Anderson, let’s begin with you. If you can respond to Trump’s victory?

CAROL ANDERSON: The Confederacy won. When you begin to really think about what he advocated, the kind of racism, the kind of xenophobia, the kind of hatred, all wrapped in a sense of honor and gallantry, and how that resonated with such a large, wide swath of the American public, that begins to tell you that you’re seeing the backlash to what they call the great — you know, that you’re seeing the backlash to what they fear was the great replacement. And so, this feels like the kind of last stand of white supremacy.

And it’s going to put so many of us in jeopardy. And it’s also part of the drug of American exceptionalism, where those who voted for him believe that they’re going to be safe from the policies that he’s going to rain down. And so, that becomes part of the amnesia of not seeing how he handled COVID, not remembering how he handled COVID, of not remembering his tariff wars that basically almost bankrupted farmers in Iowa, and the kind of chaos that he brings, the kind of divisiveness that he brings. It’s like living in a reality show and believing that it’s not reality. It is — this is a dark day for America. I think of Thomas Jefferson when he said, “I tremble for my country, because God is just,” because that’s what we’re looking at. I’m trembling for our country right now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Anderson, the vote that Trump got, right now it’s at 71 million. It will probably go up 1 or 2 million more as other states are counted in and absentee ballots. But it’s still roughly about the vote that he got certainly last time. But the big drop appears to be in the vote for Kamala Harris. She’s at around — the national vote is 66 million now, significantly below the 81 million that Joe Biden got. Why do you think there’s been such a disparity in her vote totals this time around?

CAROL ANDERSON: I think part of what we’re looking at, because she was explicit about policies, and so the language that she just needs to explain her policies is hokum. It’s that it is — we’re looking at the misogyny and the racism and the fear of what it meant to have a Black Asian woman who’s married to a Jewish man sitting in the White House, that this was not the kind of vision of America that that large swath that voted for Trump believe is America. It is the fear of what a multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, diverse America could mean. It means — and so, you’re seeing the backlash to her very being.

It’s a sad day for America. It’s a sad day because there was a — really explicit about the horrors of Project 2025 and what that meant for Social Security, what that meant for Medicare, what that meant for education, what that meant for equity. All of that could not override the depth of the misogyny, the depth of the racism that fuels the MAGA movement, that fuels Trump.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring in professor Michele Goodwin into the conversation from Georgetown University. Professor, your reaction to the results?

MICHELE GOODWIN: We have to understand this as a Project 2024. So, the response, which I think was so eloquently put just now, is an amalgamation of a number of things. If we look at what the election results were based on race, it paints a picture in the United States. It paints a picture with regard to how people think about electing a woman, how people think about electing a woman who is Black and of Asian descent. It paints a picture policywise about what Americans are willing to embrace. And in that way, it’s a Project 2024, it’s a Project 1619, in terms of what Americans are willing to accept, to the extent that we know that Donald Trump is willing to fulfill on what it is that he says.

He said that he wanted to criminally punish women. He said — in 2016, 2015, he said that he wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. After that occurred, he took full credit for that. There were a number of things that he had hoped to dismantle. This was a president who right after coming into office had a Muslim ban, was responsible for kids at the border being placed in cages, being fed frozen burritos. This was an administration that had its lawyers fighting to deny those children soap and toothpaste, arguing before federal judges that those children who were locked in cages in federal custody did not deserve soap, did not deserve toothpaste. This was a president who failed on COVID, who made sure that he had medications for himself, vaccine, and then also sent to others, including, what has been alleged, to Russia and to Putin so that there would be access to the best of what we had for COVID at that time, but for Americans, did not do a good job at all in terms of collaboration, cooperation and leading with regard to COVID, and instead had suggested that perhaps injections of bleach and other things might be the way to respond to COVID. And one could really go down the list in terms of what that presidency represented. And Americans overwhelmingly voted for that.

But is that something that is new? I think that one of our challenges in our country is to really understand the arc of who we’ve been and the arc of who we are. We tend to think that we actually had our own truth and reconciliation, such that we have confronted what have been the thorny, horrific parts of our past. And we haven’t. We’ve not done the work of a South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, right? We’ve not looked and said, “How could we tolerate systems where women were denied citizenship? How could we tolerate women being denied the right to vote? How could we tolerate women being denied the opportunity to become lawyers?” And I’m talking about Supreme Court cases. “How could we tolerate women being denied from serving on juries? How could we tolerate women being denied the opportunity to have bank accounts in their own names, have their own checking accounts in their own names?” And that’s a modern iteration.

And then we can unpack what this means in terms of Jim Crow and slavery. How could we be a nation that tolerated children standing on auction blocks and being auctioned off, bid upon? Not for a horrific day, where we wake up and say, “My goodness, what was that all about? Bidding on children in shackles and chains?” No, but not practice that lasted a day, a week, a year. A year alone might have been waking up and saying, “How in the world could we have tolerated that?” But to see that flow into centuries and then to create patterns of justification and narratives for that, that then flowed into Jim Crow, a time in the United States that was marked very narrowly by what happened to Rosa Parks, but more fulsomely the denial of people being able to walk in the parks, swim in pools, go into motels, stay at hotels, live where they wanted to based on their race, and a practice that lasted for generations upon generations, that then required federal intervention.

So we have to ask ourselves: How could we have tolerated all of that? And in part, the answer is what we see in the election yesterday, is that we’re willing to tolerate more of that. And then we have to ask ourselves: Why? What is behind that?

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Goodwin, you’re a professor of global health. You mentioned Trump’s policies during COVID. And now he said he’s talking about putting Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, in charge of women’s health. But also Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said that he expected to be in charge of — what did he talk about? — the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, a well-known vaccine denier. The significance of all of this? Because it’s beyond Trump. It’s who will be in his government, from Elon Musk to RFK Jr.

MICHELE GOODWIN: That is a perfect question. And in 2015, 2016, I wrote an article about this, that while we would pay attention to, and it was right to, in terms of who would be elected president, what we needed to think about is who that individual would pick to lead governmental agencies, because that’s critically important. It relates to our clean air, the water that we drink, the education that children will be provided, and so much more.

To place in context the Trump administration and COVID is to realize the following. There were more Americans that died in the first three months of COVID under his leadership that in 19 years of the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I know your listeners and viewers might be stunned by that and wonder, “Does Professor Goodwin have that right?” Well, I have testified before Congress with regard to that. I have looked at the numbers. I have run the numbers. I’ve written about this. Yes, more Americans died in our first three months of COVID under Donald Trump’s leadership than all of the Americans that died in the Vietnam War and these other wars that I mentioned. And so, the risks with regard to Americans’ health happens to be high.

And again, it’s a Project 2024 that we’re moving out into a Project 2025. And I want to be clear about that, because it’s not hyperbole. It is to really understand that there has been a struggle in our country towards recognizing that all Americans deserve to be healthy, deserve to be able to have access to healthcare. We are not like our peer nations, and ones that the former president would not call our peer nations, where there is universal healthcare, where there are doctors that even will come to your home, where you can be treated easily. I know that they talk about “in those other countries,” and “you’ll wait a long time,” all of that. Americans have to pay a high price for their healthcare. And fortunately, there is the Affordable Care Act. But note that under his administration, there were attempts to still do away with the Affordable Care Act.

So, what will all of this mean in terms of the people that he will appoint? I would say, let’s not just look at what this means in terms of health. We have to look at this in terms of the EPA. We have to look at this in terms of other agencies that serve the American public. And I think that people should be quite concerned.

And one other thing that I will add to that, Amy, is that it is very likely that there will continue to be global epidemics, pandemics. COVID was the first of its kind in a hundred years, was the second we, a hundred years before, had experienced something like that. But these may happen with greater frequency. People move far more today. We have more planes that are taking people from one part of the world to the other part of the world. And so, it actually is really important in terms of thinking about global public health that we pay attention to who is governing in these spaces, in the United States and elsewhere.

AMY GOODMAN: And very quickly, Professor Goodwin, the historic ballot measures enshrining the right to an abortion passed in seven of the 10 states that they were introduced, passed in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Montana, Maryland, New York and Missouri, where voters backed a measure that will overturn one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation that prohibits abortion even in cases of rape and incest. The significance of that, and yet at the same time Kamala Harris loses?

MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, again, if we parse this out, what we can see is that white women overwhelmingly voted for the former president, but yet also voted for the constitutional protection or statewide protections of abortion rights in their state. So they were able to parse these issues out, even though Donald Trump has articulated wanting to criminally punish women and wanting to — in the past appointed federal judges and justices on the lower courts, as well as the Supreme Court, in order to make it very difficult to access reproductive healthcare. Yet they could parse their vote. And it’s not just them. It’s men, too.

And I want to make one clarification, too. In Florida, it’s being articulated that women in Florida rejected the ballot initiative there. No, overwhelmingly, the majority of people in that state voted for that initiative, except it was required that there be at least 60%. And what we know is that it’s been over 57, 58% that voted for the initiative, so it failed by a small percentage. But it’s worth noting that that was a requirement that meant more than a majority had to vote in support of that initiative.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. There’s so much more to talk about, and we’ve also extended this broadcast to two hours for those stations who are taking it. We have been speaking with Michele Goodwin, who is a professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown University, founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. And we want to thank professor Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University, speaking to us from Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta, Georgia, that President Trump has won the state of Georgia. We thank you both for being with us. When we come back, Ralph Nader.