Welcome to ElectionLine’s A View From Abroad series, in which we speak with media figures who don’t live in America but keep a close eye on its politics. These smart observers have provided a unique perspective on the race to the White House. Following Donald Trump’s victory, we return to a previous contributor: Matt Frei, who serves as an anchor and Europe editor for Channel 4 News. His reporting for Channel 4 News’ Inside Gaza: Israel and Hamas at War won International Emmy and BAFTA awards.
The moment Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro were whisked away from reporters, Matt Frei sensed Kamala Harris may have botched her U.S. election race.
The decorated British journalist, a veteran of the campaign beat, listened as the two actors delivered polemics in support of their candidate at a Philadelphia event days before the vote. “It makes me so f***ing angry that we’re here talking about a piece of s**t like Donald Trump,” De Niro rasped. Then he was off. “What happens if she doesn’t win?” Frei asked through the jostle of a security guard. “Good question,” De Niro barked back, walking into the distance.
Frei was not amused. “I just thought, hang on a minute. You are actors. You’ve decided to come out here to be very partisan and quite offensive, to be honest, but you’re afraid to test your assumptions with a journalist,” says the anchor for Channel 4 News in the UK.
He compared the “swarm of Hollywood people” to an encounter with the Trump campaign just a day earlier in rural Newport, Pennsylvania. Here, he jousted with Kimberly Guilfoyle — Gavin Newsom’s ex-wife turned Trump evangelist — after the president-elect delivered a rally speech. “She was very happy to do a bit of rough and tumble with a bloke called Matt she’d never heard of,” Frei reflects. “I thought that was impressive … it showed the divisions and engagement on both sides.”
For Frei, it crystallized the sense that Harris’ lean into Hollywood had backfired. “It was counterproductive with Trumpian caps[lock],” he says in a phone interview. “It probably moved the dial, but in the wrong direction.”
The former BBC journalist is not the first to make this observation: John Oliver memorably blamed Katy Perry for Harris’ defeat after she wailed Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” at a Pittsburgh rally on election eve. Frei acknowledges that the reasons for defeat are varied and nuanced, but believes the vice president’s embrace of star power helped reinforce the impression (even if it was an unfair one) that she was an out-of-touch “woke warrior.”
He explains: “We have forgotten the primary rule of Trump’s election mojo, which is: You upset liberals and liberals howl in anger and throw their hands up in despair. Every time a liberal does that, another Trump voter is born somewhere else in the country.”
Deadline caught up with Frei after the presenter, who also works for influential UK radio station LBC, originally sat down for ElectionLine’s A View From Abroad column in February. Back then, Frei said Trump was building a wall of electoral support that was not getting any higher, but was becoming more structurally sound. He was right. Trump’s 76.6M votes edged up from 2020, but not by much. His supporters remained loyal because of, not in spite of, court cases, conspiracies, and cognitive questions.
“What Trump was very good at was bringing out the grievances in people. He did it in 2016 as a backlash to the era of austerity caused by the financial crisis. He couldn’t do it in 2020 because he was an incumbent, and COVID had skewed everything, but he did it again in 2024,” Frei says. “Trump was interested in kitchen table stuff: The economy, immigration, crime.”
Frei says the Trump ticket was also helped by Harris’ curse of incumbency, which has become the “shallow grave” of election campaigns around the world. He also thinks the certainty of the outcome has been helpful for America: “Astonishingly, it has caused quite a lot of calm because the Democrats can’t argue with it. Republicans now own the shop, so they’re gonna have to do something with it.”
Frei thinks the U.S. Constitution will likely contain Trump, should he entertain any desire to squat in the White House beyond 2028, but says all bets are off when it comes to predicting the events of his second term in office. Frei says he would not rule out World War III or Trump winning the Nobel Peace Prize as he confronts war in the Middle East and Ukraine. “That is what keeps me awake at night as a journalist, and I think that’s what’s going to keep the audience watching,” he adds.
One thing he predicts with certainty is embarrassment for Britain’s Labour government, which has been forced to “kiss the ring” after ministers, including Foreign Secretary David Lammy, trashed Trump in opposition. For Prime Minister Keir Starmer, pragmatism appears to trump principle, at least for now.
On the evidence of Frei’s experience in Philadelphia, however, a similar rapprochement from DiCaprio and De Niro seems unlikely.
