-Well, Donald Trump has won the 2024 election and he'll be president again for four more years, or eight or 12 or whatever. Ha, ha, ha, ha. .
. We live in an infinite time warp, where Donald Trump has always been and will always be the center of the universe. There can be no escape.
All hail our powerful and benevolent Supreme leader. Windmills do cause cancer. Hannibal Lecter was a lovely man.
And if I'm lying, then Arnold Palmer doesn't have the biggest [bleep] in the clubhouse. [Bleep] me! For more of this, it's time for "A Closer Look," baby.
[ Cheers and applause ] Here we are. Donald Trump will be the president a second time. He'll be the oldest person to ever take the oath of office, and this is cool.
The first person convicted of felony charges to assume the presidency, so that's not bad. When I was in grade school, they always told us anyone could grow up to be president, but they didn't say literally [bleep] anyone. [ Laughter ] And by the way, it's not just me.
He's just as shocked as we are. -It is now clear that we've achieved the most incredible political thing. Look what happened.
Is this crazy? -I mean, even he knows. This is [bleep] nuts.
He's reacting like a nerd who gets picked first for dodgeball. "Who? Me?
But I have no lateral movement. " We're really doing this again. I mean, look at him.
Man's exhausted, he's fried. Making him president again is cruel to the country. And you know what?
I'm just going to say, it's very cruel to him. -We're going to turn our country around, make it something very special. It lost that, lost that little -- and lost that little, uh, that little thing called special.
We have taken back control of the Senate. Wow, that's good. -Wow.
He's about to become the president. He sounds like he's looking through someone else's vacation photos. "Oh, you went to Niagara Falls?
Wow. Wow, look at all that water. " But don't worry if he sounds exhausted to you.
He's made clear that he'll surround himself with super competent people. -We have a new star. A star is born -- Elon.
These are fantastic people, and we can add a few names like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He came on.
He wants to do some things, and we're going to let him go to it. I just said, but Bobby, leave the oil to me. We have more liquid gold, oil and gas.
We have more liquid gold than any country in the world, more than Saudi Arabia. We have more than Russia. Bobby, stay away from the liquid gold.
Other than that, go have a good time, Bobby. -First of all, very cool. We're going back to the "Beverly Hillbillies" description of oil.
Black gold, Texas tea. Second, please don't tell RFK Jr. to have a good time.
His idea of good time is scraping roadkill off the side of the highway and slapping it on the George Foreman Grill. Side note, if RFK Jr. becomes the health secretary, does that mean his brain worm will become assistant secretary?
Ooh, will the worm give press conferences? Tiny little podium on the top of RFK's head? Also, not call Elon Musk a star.
You know, stars don't jump up and down on their tippy toes like a 12-year-old trying to dunk. But of course, who was with Trump at his election night party last night, and Trump has promised in free reign to slash away at the federal government. Musk will arguably be Trump's closest governing ally in a second term.
-So many Republican voters in particular have lost trust with the legal system, the political system, the news media. And they see in Elon Musk and his X platform and Trump, as I said, this emerging power structure that they are comfortable with. It's a new America will be covering.
It's a new framework for how someone conceives the presidency itself. -That's what it is, a power structure. They want you to think they're just edgelord podcasters, but they're not.
They're oligarchs. The richest man alive, whose company has contracts with the Pentagon and who owns one of the largest social media platforms, has teamed up with a billionaire who will soon be the most powerful man in the world for a second time to consolidate their power over society and the economy. They're not your bros.
They're not going to come over to your house and smoke weed and play "Diablo" with you. I mean, come on. There's got to be someone else who isn't insane at Trump's side.
-Bryson DeChambeau is up here someplace. What happened to Bryson? Where is he?
Bryson? Oh, [indistinct] He's hitting balls. -He's on the way.
-Oh, he's on the way. He's hitting balls. Bryson?
-He sounds like a grandpa who just woke up in the hospital from a morphine fog. [ As Trump ] Bryson? Where's Bryson?
"Grandpa, who's Bryson? " We served together in Korea. Bryson!
[ Laughter ] [ Normal voice ] So here we are. Unlike Bryson, here we are. [ Laughter ] We're on the precipice.
. . [ Cheers and applause ] Yeah, I mean, I know where I am.
We're on the precipice of the unknown, staring into the abyss. No one can know what happens next. Least of all Donald Trump, who said hardly anything about policy in his speech last night.
Here's a taste of what he felt was more important for the American people to hear on such a seismic evening. -I tell the story. I told it last night.
I had a man on the phone. I had the screen muted, no sound. I was talking to a very important man.
Happens to be here tonight, a very important guy, one of the most important people and I would say the country actually. But, you know, I was president and now it looks like I was going to be maybe president again. So I figured I could ask him to hold.
So I asked him to hold. And because especially, because you're going to be president again, they hold. So I took the phone down and I'm looking at the screen.
I'm seeing this crazy thing that's going around and coming down. It looks like it's a crash into the gantry. And I said, oh, no.
And I said, "Do me a favor. Do you mind holding for a couple of minutes? I want to see this.
" I thought it was a space age movie or something. -Yeah. No, let's give him the nuclear codes.
You know? Why are you know -- so you thought you were watching a space -- What does that even mean? [ As Trump ] I saw the rocket going up, and then I saw the large black monolith and the monkeys throwing the bone up in the air.
And then there was a baby floating in space, and this wasn't that long ago. This all happened in 2001. [ Normal voice ] And if the way things played out last night felt hauntingly familiar to you, you are not alone.
Right at this moment, this does feel more like 2016 than 2020. -Yeah, no [bleep]. The only difference is in 2016, I had the energy to get through a Trump presidency.
Now look at me. To get through another one, they're going to have to give me whatever drugs they're giving Trump. I assume they hide some Adderall in his Big Macs the way you give medicine to a dog.
It's 2016 all over again, it'll be 2016 forever. And if we're going to have to relive all the bad [bleep] from 2016, we should at least get to do the good [bleep] too. HBO should bring back "Veep.
" Beyoncé should re-release "Lemonade. " We should all go back to playing "Pokémon Go. " If American democracy is about to crumble, we should at least spend our time wandering around with our phones looking for a visible Charizard.
And then when you find one, report it to Donald Trump so he could deport it. [ As Trump ] Sorry, Charizard. Sorry, Charizard You're going back to Saffron City.
We'll go back to [mumbles]. [ Normal voice ] That's right. Trump's back just four years after he siced a mob on the Capitol to overthrow American democracy.
We had a long montage all teed up to remind you how awful things were the first time. But you guys remember, and it was a huge bummer. But you remember when we were constantly immersed in crisis after crisis, and our nervous systems were perpetually overwhelmed by a never ending cascade of catastrophes and cataclysms, and the president was the biggest, loudest weirdo on the [bleep] planet.
And I'm sorry. I don't care if he won. He's still so weird.
I mean, why does he stand like that? Why? [ Laughter ] He looks like a snake who swallowed an antelope.
Once again, this snake's eyes were bigger than its stomach. Last night's results don't change a thing about how awful Trump's first term was, and how awful the second term has a chance to be. It was a nightmare that plunged the nation into non-stop disaster and caused mass suffering for millions of Americans.
Or, as Trump put it in his victory speech last night. . .
We had a great first term, a great, great first term. -Yeah. Who didn't love waiting hours to get a swab shoved up to your brain so you can go to the unemployment office to beg for a check and then come home and wipe your ass with your mail because the store was out of toilet paper?
Yeah, Trump's back, baby. And as a reminder, all the Republicans, all the Republicans you see celebrating today, they all wanted off the Trump train back then, too. -There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.
No question about it. Former President Trump's actions preceded the riot for a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty. -"We need to acknowledge he let us down.
He went down the path he shouldn't have, and we shouldn't have followed him and we shouldn't have listened to him. And we cannot let that happen again. " -Trump and I, we've had a hell of a journey.
I hate it to end this way. Oh, my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he's been a consequential president.
But today, first thing you'll see. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.
-[ As Graham ] Count me out. Unless he wins, then count me right back in. You hear that, memaw?
The man just about destroyed democracy, but I still rather be with him then spend another night sanitizing your CPAP, you old warthog. [ Laughter ] [ Indistinct ] [ Normal voice ] We think Democrats are being hyperbolic about a second Trump term. Just remember, the man who would be Trump's next vice president once said Trump could be America's Hitler.
They all know the real Trump. When they got a close up look, they were all horrified. And yet, Trump's apologists and right wing media want you to think he'll magically transform into a different person.
-I think, Harold, he will surprise his detractors. I think he will be not anything like what his detractors have described him as being. -He has said that the assassination attempts had an impact on him.
But now he -- he will take the stage tonight as the next president of the United States, and he will not be able to run again. And I think that is another liberating factor potentially for President Trump. -You think Trump is a changed man?
Five days ago he was simulating fellatio on a microphone. I don't think that's a side effect of surviving an assassination attempt. I don't recall Ronald Reagan coming out of the hospital honking imaginary boobs for cheap laughs.
Well, honk, honk [ Laughter ] -Donald Trump ran a dark and ominous campaign where he called his opponents vermin, scum and the enemy within. He's not going to suddenly become a soft and cuddly uniter. I know he likes to play dress up, but that's one costume he can't pull off.
By the way, how that he's going to go back to the White House, I think Trump should keep wearing the orange safety vest. So we always know where he is in case he gets lost and accidentally wanders away on the white House lawn again. But it's not all bad news.
Trump, of course, also bragged repeatedly about overturning Roe v. Wade, which has put women who can't get medical care in harm's way. And yesterday voters spoke loudly and clearly that they disagree with Trump's position.
-In Nevada and in Arizona and in Missouri, we've got the abortion referendums, the abortion ballot measures that were on the ballot in front of those voters. They have passed in all three of those states. So this is Nevada.
You see the yes vote here for right to an abortion, Question 6 on the Nevada ballot with 62 to 38. So that passes in Nevada. That is the projection in Arizona.
We have similarly the Arizona abortion rights measure, Proposition 139, right to an abortion, look. Similar -- Similar margin there. 63% vote in Arizona in favor of abortion rights.
A pretty stunning result there. And also a third one in Missouri, in deep red Missouri. A majority win and a win, a yes for the right to an abortion.
-And that's truly great, and I'm very happy about that. But I can't get over the fact that they voted to restore rights while also voting for the guy who ripped away those rights in the first place. It's like voting to make chainsaws illegal while also voting to make Leatherface president.
Look, I wish I had some trenchant words of wisdom to impart. I'm sad to say I don't. We're about to step over the precipice into truly uncharted territory.
You need only look back to Trump's first term to get a sense of how dangerous his second term will be, and no one could say they didn't know what they were getting because Trump made it crystal clear. All I do know is that the fight for justice doesn't end with one election. We must all gird ourselves for what comes next and do everything in our power to make real the world we want to live in.
At times like this, when everything feels overwhelming and impossible, like all hope is lost, we have no choice but to look back on the broad scope of history. Justice is not automatic. Comeuppance is not guaranteed.
Politics, unfortunately, is not a Marvel movie, even though Joe Biden does look eerily like old Captain America. [ Laughter ] That doesn't mean -- that doesn't mean the struggle toward a more just and compassionate world is futile. It just means it's [bleep] hard and heartbreaking and soul crushing and agonizing, and it never ends.
Democracy does not happen only on Election Day. For nearly a decade Americans organized, protested, donated, voted time and time again to repudiate Trumpism and the MAGA movement, a broad anti-Trump coalition won decisively in 2018, 2020 and 2022, and MAGA candidates were routinely rejected. But it's a big, divided country, and this time the streak just ran out.
You know, today I found myself revisiting 2004 a lot and what that felt like. George W. Bush won a resounding victory despite waging an illegal, catastrophic war, losing the popular vote in 2000 and campaigning on a promise to ban same sex marriages.
Four years later, the country repudiated his party in a landslide, and now even Republicans pretend Bush never existed. After he got trapped in that poncho in 2017, he was -- he was never seen or heard from again, you know? Hey, if 2017 is back, then so are the 2017 jokes.
[ Laughter ] A lot can change in a democracy, as we've seen in the last 10 years. Not too long ago, Rudy Giuliani was a semi respected public figure, and now he's a disbarred, penniless, life-size metronome. Anything is possible.
Donald Trump has been very clear about what he will do when he returns to power. Military style roundups of migrants using the power of the state to crush his opponents, pursue his grievances, eliminating the Department of Education, letting climate change run rampant, spreading conspiracy theories about health care and vaccines. He said he would be a dictator on day one.
The question now is, what will the rest of us be doing on day one? If you're one of the tens of millions of Americans who said no to Trump's dark, dangerous vision for America last night, now is the time to stand in solidarity with our friends, with our neighbors, with the vulnerable communities, and begin the hard work of making real the world we want to live in. That's what we will be doing on day one.
We do hope you'll join us. The clock is ticking. [ Ticking ] And we are still going to try to have fun.
This has been "A Closer Look. " [ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ Hey, guys.
