"Democrats Were Mobilized During Midterms" Barry Donadio LIVE on BBC Radio Talkback November 4th 2026

Barry Donadio News Commentator

"Democrats Were Mobilized During Midterms" Barry Donadio with William Crawley LIVE on BBC Radio Talkback November 4th 2026. Listen to full interview in link below https://youtu.be/uR0yVFezluc #barrydonadio #saturdaymorningvoguereview #BBC #bbcradiotalkback #MidtermResults  Available for freelance news commentary and subject matter expertise Barry Donadio is a former member of the U.S. Secret Service, a Republican elected official, a news commentator, a celebrity author, the Founder of Public Security LLC, a war veteran, The Sergeant At Arms of the Maryland Republican Party, a TWA flight 800 first responder in 1996, a September .11th, 2001 Military Responder and a Trump Alternate Delegate to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee 2024.  Barry Donadio is a prominent news commentator who gained significant recognition starting July 13, 2024. He has appeared on major networks including NEWMAX, ABC News, CBS News, BBC News, Sky News, Sky News Arabia, Komo News, Capitol News Service, Alarabia News, Aletihad News, Alghad News, Jusoor News, Alhurra TV, Shams TV, AlQahera News TRT News, Al Taghier Channel, and other agencies. His rise to fame occurred rapidly, as he became a world-renowned figure in the news commentary space almost overnight.  Donadio talks about and offers commentary on the following subjects: U.S. Secret Service Trump assassination attempts Defending Trump policies The White House Aviation Disasters TWA Flight 800 crash First Responder American Airlines 5342 Executive Protection National Security Military Strategy Ukraine / Russia War Israel / Iran War China / Taiwan Israel / Hamas War Syria War Yemen U.S. Air Force Security Police and law enforcement Questionable Police use of force Questionable Police shootings Police excessive force  CONTACT ​ Cell phone USA 202-631-1153 International contact via Whatsapp 2026311153 Email for live video Interviews, send video zoom links to barrydonadio@yahoo.com Official website www.barrydonadio.com Official facebook https://www.facebook.com/barrydonadioofficial/Official X profile https://x.com/Barrydonadio LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/barry-donadio-37879868/  For some examples of Barry Donadio LIVE interview appearences see hus youtube channel Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@saturdaymorningvoguereview.  #barrydonadio #donadio #newscommentator #commentator #secretservice #formersecretservice #usarmy #usairforce #whitehouse #privatedetective #privateinvestigator #publicsecurityllc #antiterrorconsultant #securityconsultant

Transcript

00:00back with us. He's a Republican delegate. Annika Green is a former speechwriter for the Republican

00:05President George W. Bush and Catherine Clinton, Professor of American History at the University

00:11of Texas at San Antonio and a former professor at Queen's University in Belfast also joins us

00:16from Texas. Welcome all of you. Glad to have you with us. Scott Lucas, first of all, Scott,

00:24what do these numbers mean? What can a Democratic Congress with a majority in the Senate and the

00:31House actually do when you have a Republican president in the White House? Well, on the

00:37current numbers, William, at least 54 Democratic senators, could be 56 depending on Alaska and

00:43Missouri. The Democrats are on track for an 87-seat majority in the House, which is astounding when

00:51you think that this was considered a toss-up this summer. What can they do? Well, they can't push

00:56through legislation because, of course, Donald Trump can veto that and it requires a two-thirds

01:02majority to overturn it. But they can propose legislation. For example, I think you're going

01:07to have legislation which calls for financial accountability by legislators, including over

01:11their stock holdings. That's going to become important because of some hearings I'll talk

01:16about in a minute. I think they can go with legislation in terms of climate change. They

01:21can go with legislation in terms of pushing back against the harsh approach to immigration taken

01:27by the Trump folks. And, of course, the budget comes out of the House. So you could have that

01:33type of approach being put forth to the economy, to health, to education, and other issues with the

01:39Democrats trying to reach out to Republicans, a number of whom may now stand up to Trump now that

01:43he's weakened. But beyond that, I think there's two things that are important. The first is Democrats

01:48will be in control of committees. Committees get to set agendas, and they get to hold hearings.

01:54And I would expect they might have hearings about specific members of the Trump administration

02:00whose conduct has been questionable. Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth comes to mind.

02:05I think there will be hearings about the Epstein files will be renewed. There'll be hearings about

02:11accountability. I think that will include the allegations, and I stress the word allegations,

02:15of corruption, given the amassing of billions of dollars by Trump and his family. And I think

02:21there'll be hearings on agencies, about rebuilding and independence of agencies, given they've been

02:27gutted or forced to become Trumpist outpost. And then the one other thing, just to be honest with

02:33you, that they can do is that, again, hopefully with Democrats reaching out to Republicans is you can

02:38change the language of politics. What we have really faced and what we face in this election,

02:43the most important since 1865, was an attempted autocracy, almost the authoritarian, by a Trump

02:50inner circle that believed you don't have to obey the courts. Congress bow down to you. The agencies

02:56are ours to intimidate and to simply dominate. And I think you can set the example not only at national

03:03level, but at state and local level, which is you don't run America this way. You build the system

03:09back up, you build the agencies back up, and you do that at local, state and national level.

03:14So there's a lot ahead in the next two years, before you get the next presidential election.

03:21Catherine, can I come to you sitting there in Texas today? And as far as I can tell, these are

03:27the best

03:27results for the Democrats in Congress since about 2008, but other people may have different dates.

03:34place it in some historical significance for the state of Texas. Would you know how that may be

03:39representative of what happened last night? Well, I'm so pleased to say that coming to Texas

03:45was, for me, a political journey and being here for years and learning about the rather

03:51arcane positions of the Texas Railroad Commissioner, the Texas Land Commissioner. But I can say that one of

03:58the issues is to have an outspoken, younger Democratic candidates say, I want to be the senator for the

04:05people who cannot afford a senator means that electoral politics in America is shifting away from the money

04:14to have oligarchs like Musk pouring money in, to have the repudiation of this MAGA mentality is very

04:26important, particularly in a state like Texas, which is so representative. Here in Texas, we're not

04:31thinking of it as a wave, but more like an asteroid externally being forced to look at not only how

04:40the

04:41government can affect you locally with food banks growing, with family members being deported, with the

04:49wider reverberations, but also how this does affect the wider world. And I'm very proud to wake up and see

04:58an election where you have an increase of African Americans. Most people don't realize that there are

05:04more African Americans in Texas than any other state, that the, of course, Latino, the rise of Latino

05:11voters, very important here. We also have migrants coming into Texas constantly. So when you talk about

05:182028, what the impact is going to be, I think people are going to look and see that the practice

05:24of

05:25rejecting common sense, depending upon PR. This morning, I just woke up and happened to look at

05:32chat GPT, which said that Tallarico had become the attorney general, defeating Ken Paxton. So we're going to get

05:41back to humans really trying to predict what will happen. And the people of America have spoken in

05:49repudiation of this constant rat-a-tat-tat. I'm very proud of Texas as a microcosm, a macrocosm they would

05:58demand. But nevertheless, the changes are quite powerful. We haven't had a woman governor since 1990.

06:04We haven't had a Latina governor. We are looking at many defeats of the manosphere in politics. Look at the

06:13women governors, look at the women senators, three black women in the American halls of Congress. It is a

06:24revelation, and I hope one that will predict the future. The previous speaker rightly said, we're kind of anchored to

06:31hearings. But please know, we are still anchored to the Electoral College, and the big 10 states with the

06:38largest electoral numbers are also states where nine of the 10 governors are Democrats, that this

06:48impact is going to have impact, certainly in 2028. And that's something we can look forward to

06:54fighting for the next two years.

06:57Barry, good to have you back on the show again. Always good to talk to you, Barry.

07:00Donald Trump has said a number of things today already in the last few hours. He said,

07:05you know, if he were on the ballot, he says, he would have had a landslide, right? That's what he

07:11said in the last few hours. We know in the days leading up to the election, he said to people,

07:16vote like I am on the ballot, right? So my question to you is, is this defeat on Donald Trump?

07:25Great question. I would say that the Democrats got so mobilized and energized on an anti-Trump platform

07:36that they came out in the big gargantuan blue wave that they did. And this went not just federal

07:44level. I myself, I ran for Queen Anne's County, Maryland commissioner. I did get elected. I'm a

07:50Republican. Oh, congratulations, Barry. I didn't realize it.

07:53Yeah. And thank you. And our county's named after Queen Anne of England. So come on and visit us. But

07:58listen, even down to the local level, the Democrats were energized, well-funded, mobilized like I have

08:07never seen before. So I think the Democrats pretended like Trump was on the ballot and said,

08:16yeah, we're going to show how we feel about this. And I can tell you from, this is going to

08:23be funny

08:23for some of your guests, but from my time in the Secret Service working at the White House, I could

08:28tell you two things probably. You can tell me a lot of things, but you won't. I could tell you

08:35and hold

08:36your breath for this one. Crow was served for breakfast, certainly. Okay. And the White House

08:42Usher probably had some work orders for holes being punched in the walls. That I could probably

08:48guess. So I hope somebody's laughing at that. It's all good. But this is democracy. This is the

08:53way it's supposed to be. Same thing happened with President Obama about two years into his term,

08:59midterms. Republicans didn't like what was going on and they came out in a big red way.

09:03More often, you're absolutely right. More often than not, midterms go against the incumbent White

09:09House. But the Democrats did a good job. They earned it. The Republicans saw it coming. We saw

09:16President Trump going out and mobilize himself. He saw it coming. He's accountable to the voters.

09:21Even now, you know, they say that he doesn't care, but we see him out there and that's because he

09:26knows. He knows the writing on the wall. He's trying to get votes.

09:31Anika, obviously, people are, I mean, maybe people are getting ahead of themselves with these

09:35kinds of questions, but I'll ask them anyway, Anika. People are asking questions about what this

09:39means for MAGA as a phenomenon that's been there for the last decade in American politics and whether

09:46this represents a turn away from that, a different kind of America coming back to the world. Is that

09:53an overstatement? Is that getting ahead too far?

09:57Well, that's always a question after elections like these. And I understand the temptation of

10:02some of the others on our session right now to be a bullion. And congratulations. That was,

10:07you know, results that they should be pleased with. But it's not a redefinition of the country.

10:13In some ways, you could say this really was a fulfillment of what Trump asked for,

10:18which was act like I'm on the ballot. And I think people did. Democrats have been working to get Texas

10:23for a long time. And there's some shifts in how people have moved in from California,

10:27which is very liberal that I think is also reflected in these results. But ultimately,

10:31I think it was a rejection of Trump broadly and particularly, right? Broadly in the sense that

10:35people are unhappy with the results of what's happening in Iran, which I do agree with him.

10:42Some of this is a short term problem, right? The longer term problem is Iran becoming nuclear.

10:46That's a problem for the world. But in taking on a worldwide problem,

10:49we have had we have shorter term issues with gas prices around the world. In America,

10:55we are fortunate to have energy reserves. And because of his policies, we will see gas prices

11:00continue to come down over time, as production is just freed and released from some of the clean

11:06energy, you know, hobbling that we've seen under Democratic candidates. So that's a little bit of

11:12irony here. If people are voting because gas prices are high, that's what Democrats want to have

11:17happen because they want to move away from the sources that keep gas prices low. But it is

11:22particularly a rejection of Trump because there was a candidate issue. Some of the things we saw,

11:27like Georgia, which has been, you know, conservative, has had been a Republican stronghold for years.

11:31They had two very strong candidates in the last couple elections for Senate. And the Republican

11:36candidates were supported by Trump. In South Carolina, Darlene Graham, political novice, has never held

11:43office. She was picked by Trump. Now, she was validated through the primary system, but he put

11:47his influence behind her to make sure she was the Republican candidate. And we we saw that in Texas,

11:53there was basically at the local level, a civil war among Republicans for the Senate candidate Ken

11:58Paxton. He had lots of problems as a candidate for conservatives, including with his personal life.

12:04And we even saw a reverse of what happened in Michigan with Republicans endorsing the Democratic

12:12candidate, James Tallarico. But that doesn't mean that the party shouldn't learn the right lessons

12:17here. And I would say broadly, in terms of what we see in America, we I think we will see

12:21more

12:22fighting. Now, because I'm conservative, I think accountability for the government is a great

12:27thing. So having Democrats holding people accountable, holding the trying to contain the growth of the

12:33executive branch, which is the president and the agencies, I think that's a great thing. I think

12:38parties should do it when they have power. But more broadly, that's not typical what has happened.

12:43It hasn't happened under Democrats. It hasn't happened under Republicans when they have the

12:46majority. So we have to have that inner party accountability and check the growth of the

12:50executive that really was advanced first by Obama, some under George W. Bush, who I worked for

12:56more by Obama. And then Trump kind of took the ball that Obama handed him with executive orders and ran

13:00with it. And that is a generous and Democratic response for opposition is is important in

13:05democracies as well. There may be more fighting within the Democratic Party as well, Scott Lucas,

13:10because the centrist world of the of the Chuck Schumers of the Democratic world has been rather

13:15challenged, has it not, by the success of the progressives, the Democratic Socialists of America

13:20kind of grouping within the party?

13:22Well, I think last night put paid to a lot of the white noise about those divisions in the

13:28Democratic Party. It's absolutely right that the Democrats after 2024 and losing that election,

13:34largely on people's feelings about the economy and about immigration, were in a generational moment.

13:41I mean, for more than a generation, you know, Obama is an interesting exception. But you're talking

13:45about, you know, the Clintons and Biden. And you have a younger generation that was coming through.

13:49But it was not the case that the Democrats went into this election, you know, with this division

13:54of senators versus progressive. Instead, what you saw last night is they played they went with big

13:57tent politics and they had candidates. And I think, you know, your previous speaker quite rightly said

14:02this is where the Trump has failed by sort of, you know, insisting that Trump get to pick the

14:08candidates. The Democrats instead had people that sort of fit the areas they were there in. So,

14:12yeah, you get you know, you get in Abdul Al-Sayed in Michigan. You know, he's not a member of

14:17the

14:17Democratic Socialist Party, however you want to characterize him.

14:19First Muslim senator.

14:21Yeah, exactly. First Muslim senator. He goes for Medicare for all. He goes for

14:25a green economy. He goes for a responsible approach to the economy in Texas. And he goes

14:30for accountability. And that message resonates in Michigan, which happens to have the largest

14:35Arab American population in the world and a very large young population. You go down to Texas,

14:39James Tallarico, grandson of a preacher, compassionate Christian, and he's tapping into the issues

14:44that deal with Texans. You go into Iowa, you go into Kansas. Kansas is the preacher of a megachurch,

14:50Adam Hamilton or Ohio. And they're speaking to folks about what they're feeling in terms of

14:55inflation, which is spiked under Trump. They're speaking to them about the effect of the Iran war.

15:01And Iran was not on the verge of a nuclear weapon. So they're talking about the fact,

15:04why are we in this anyway? And then I think here's the big thing. And this is where I sort

15:09of push

15:09back a little bit on what we talked about. The reason why this was not normal is not that it

15:14was a question of redefining the American system. It was a question of Donald Trump trying to redefine

15:19the American system. He was trying to redefine the American system, not as a system, but as his

15:24domain. And he simply went too far on that.

15:28You see this as a pushback to the America before Donald Trump. I mean, the issues that the message

15:32issues that kept coming across every time I heard these Democrats talking, wherever they were,

15:36for all the differences were to deal with corruption and accountability, the cost of living crisis,

15:42the affordability crisis, as they call it in America, and the Constitution, returning to

15:46constitutional politics away from personalised power in Donald Trump or other people. That was

15:51a consistent message. I wonder what advice, Catherine Clinton, you would give to Hakeem Jeffries,

15:57who will be the new Speaker of the House in January, and the other Democratic leadership about

16:01what they should do with this new power that they will have in the Congress.

16:07Well, I'm tempted to say that Hakeem has proven himself to be a very judicious leader because

16:15he was criticised for some of his meetings before this election, speaking at the table with

16:22Republicans. And I think that we have to see that it's not going to be a coalition of the willing,

16:28but politicians will follow politics. And look at the way the gerrymandering and trying to say,

16:35let us shore up our power. And I hope that this path is not taken by the Democrats, because we

16:43can look

16:43and see historically, all those gerrymandered seats that were put in by Republicans to ensure their

16:49victories flipped in last night's script. And that's very important to see. I think that also this issue of

16:56war is very important, that all across campuses, all across cities, and when I was living and teaching

17:04in Europe last year, I saw Gaza demonstrations. I saw Israel at the top of the politics. And I do

17:11think

17:11that America's place in the world has been a long time taking the world for granted. And we now see

17:19that

17:19under Trump, no more of that. So the politicians going forward, especially those Republicans,

17:25who can see what is going to happen to them in the election in two years, are going to be

17:29following

17:30their own political instincts, which is to survive. But it's also true that raising money has been the

17:37issue. And money can't buy you seats the way it used to. So that's a good change.

17:42Young people rising up. The numbers, the money invested in these midterms, multiple, multiple.

17:48Half a billion in Texas. Just in Texas. You're talking about something like 11, 12 billion,

17:53aren't you, across all of it. Annika, do you believe Donald Trump is now effectively

17:58a lame duck president? Often people talk about whoever the president is in a period like this as a lame

18:05duck president. But in terms of the pushback that you would expect to see from a Democratic Congress?

18:12I first just need to address your previous speaker. Iran was at 60% purity for uranium.

18:17They were on the verge of being able to develop a nuclear weapon. Civilian use of nuclear fuel is

18:223.67%. So I just have to lay the facts out there. You can look it up on your own

18:28time.

18:29Now, for Donald Trump, he's going to have a lot more distractions in the Congress from having

18:34potentially a lot of investigations like we've already addressed. Now, what was very interesting

18:40to me is that Kamala Harris, before we even saw these results, said, hey, let's not impeach him

18:44again. She accurately said that I think that will be a distraction and not, you know,

18:51They may be impeaching others. It looks like they may be focused on others within the administration.

18:56Yeah. But in terms of him being a lame duck, like I was saying earlier, Donald Trump uses

19:01executive actions the way that President Obama did as well to expand and push his agenda.

19:06Now, the drawback of that, apart from I don't think being a long term good way to govern

19:10the country, no matter what your party is, the drawback is, is the next president, if

19:15they're from the other party, can just roll them back very easily. And we saw a lot of

19:18President Obama's agenda challenged in that way.

19:20I've only got 30 seconds left. Can I can I go to Barry? I want to hear from Barry just

19:23finally. Barry, is MAGA done? Is MAGA over?

19:27No, I don't think so. I think there's a lot of good things that happen and no tax on tips,

19:32no tax on Social Security. Every child born will get a thousand dollars. These are good

19:37things. The president's just going to have to work with Congress to meet on what they

19:42all agree on and get some stuff done. And that will be his legacy moving forward.

19:46All right. Thank you all very much. Barry.

19:48Bye bye.

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