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- [00:01]
Sarah Longwell
When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want, like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha chings from every channel right in one spot. And turn real time reporting into big time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today.
- [00:31]
Lisa (SimplePractice spokesperson)
Hi, my name is Lisa and I'm a licensed psychotherapist. Which means my work doesn't magically end when the session does. There are notes to write, appointments to manage, billing, insurance follow ups, and somehow all that admin used to creep into my nights and weekends. That's why I switched to simple practice. Simple practice is an all in one electronic health record built specifically for therapists with HIPAA compliant tools and high trust certification. So I don't have to worry about juggling systems or cutting corners just to keep things running. Scheduling, documentation, billing, insurance, client communications, even automated appointment reminders. It all lives in one place. And if you're starting or growing a practice, SimplePractice also offers a credentialing service that helps simplify insurance enrollment, which can be a huge lift when you're starting to scale. Start with a seven day free trial, then get 50% off your first three months. Just go to SimplePractice.com Again, that's SimplePractice.com
- [01:33]
Bill Kristol
hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to Bulwark on Sunday. I'm joined today by my colleague Sarah Longwell, author of the bestseller of a best selling book, even though it's not coming out in six months. How does that work? That's really impressive.
- [01:44]
Sarah Longwell
You know, I don't know. You know, honestly I was giving him a hard time because I was like, I can't not talk about this on the podcast. And I'm like, the number of times I want to begin a sentence with well, I talk about this in the book and you know, and there's points that I'm making or lots of big themes that I've seen that I'd like to get into. But you know, you're not allowed to talk about it until it's live. They're like, do not talk about this book until there is a place for somebody to go and buy it. And so I was like, can we get this up? And the thing is, I will say the book is more or less written. I think that there's, you know, JBL has, is my editor, he wrote the foreword. The biggest thing that I would say we're doing now in the next six months is like there's a point at which you have to lock it, like it's done done and they can't mess with it. But the most stressful part is so much of the analysis which obviously is around the voters and what they think and what I've seen over the last eight years, how I've seen voters shift, what are the things that have moved them, what is persuasive to them. But you know, I got stuff on foreign policy and it doesn't take into the fact that like we've gone to war. And so I think that the, the biggest difficulty is not being overtaken by events to such a degree that things don't feel like they resonate in the moment because the world changes a lot fast. And so that is like one of the things I've had to be the most careful of. And I'm trying to sort of continue to add to it because I'm still focus grouping all the time. I'm still watching it to try to keep it as close to the moment as possible.
- [03:16]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, that makes sense. So I guess you shouldn't go crazy and people understand books get publish at certain moments and then events happen. As long as Trump is still around and he's president and we're dealing with Trump and Trumpism and, and of course the experiences you've had over the last decade and before for that matter, which you discuss in the book, are no change. So I, I think you're pretty, pretty safe. But yeah, you will have to update a bit. So. Okay, title of the book.
- [03:37]
Lisa (SimplePractice spokesperson)
Let's.
- [03:38]
Sarah Longwell
So the book is how to eat an Elephant One voter at a time and obviously.
- [03:43]
Bill Kristol
And available for pre order. Let's just get this out of the way.
- [03:45]
Sarah Longwell
Sure, sure.
- [03:46]
Bill Kristol
Available preorder wherever you like to pre order your books. And that's, that's why we can. Sarah can sell many copies. It's pretty amazing. What the bull. What Once you started release the news about it Friday, how many copies have been sold? But that's why you can sell copies now. Even though as Sarah says, as you say, it's not open, you can't actually get it for six months.
- [04:03]
Sarah Longwell
But yes, I, I gotta say there's a, there's a meta aspect to the book and then the selling of the book right now because I talk. It's a communications book. It's a book about communications. But one of the things I'm talking about is communications in this new environment and how much the stickiness of community like the Idea that I have an audience is not what I have. I'm not. I'm not on, you know, I'm not Nora o', Donnell, who is a book that's very close to mine in the Thing, you know, or so somebody that is a big national figure. What I do have, though, not an audience, I do have a community. We have a community, this bulwark community, and the community is sticky. Like, even if you don't love me, you may love the idea that jbl, if we sell a sufficient number of copies, gets to, you know, we'll. We'll let him. We'll let him moderate the focus group that everybody's so desperate for, you know, like. But that. That those are. Those are sort of in. In community gags that people get.
- [04:59]
Bill Kristol
And it's.
- [04:59]
Sarah Longwell
It's so incredible what you can do with a community. Like, they will show up for you, you, and you will show up for them, right? And I like to think, you know, there's days where, like, this is a Sunday in noon, or like, days where. Where news breaks and we in our pajamas or, you know, wearing shorts or whatever, we come in because we want to talk to people, and that's how we feel. Like, we show up for people and then they show up back for us. And that is a newish phenomenon in this space, right? It's the. The new independent media. It's the way politicians have to start engaging with voters, which is to have this kind of parasocial relationship, have a relationship where people feel like they know them, understand them, like they're going to. They can care about them. Not just that they're some distant person they'd have no access to because that's not the world we live in anymore. So anyway, I don't. I don't remember exactly why we started talking about, but it is incredible. And I want to say how much I appreciate. I mean, I read the comments. I was trying to, like, stick with the comments. The number of people who are just like, I pulled my car over and I got it, like, you know, or said, I don't know, a million things, but they care about seeing it on the bestseller list. Like, they want us to beat. Because, like, right now, you know, there's a book by Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, called like, you can't fix stupid or something like that, you know, whatever. And they're all like, this should be better than that. This should be beating that, you know, And I love that and I appreciate it. I can't tell you how much it means to me. And I Promise I won't disappoint you with what it is when it comes out in six months.
- [06:30]
Bill Kristol
You know, it's one thing that strikes me a lot, having seen other people write books and bestsellers and then being, you know, talking to agents and all this over the years is how quickly that community has built up, don't you. I mean, that is to say, in the old days, I remember there was a big. When I started on TV and people began to know a little bit who I was in the late 90s and stuff. I remember an agent saying, it's great, you know, you got to keep doing this five, 10 more years. It really takes time. Takes time to become George Will or to become Sam Donaldson or to become someone who's well known enough that the book just kind of takes off. But really, we've been doing this together for, well, almost a decade, I guess, right? Nine years maybe. And. And Bulwark started in a very small way, a pretty small way, when the Weekly Standard closed in January of 19. So what's that? Seven, little over 70 years. But really it took off three, four years ago, I guess you'd say. And I mean, it's just striking to me, the, the.
- [07:20]
Sarah Longwell
The.
- [07:21]
Bill Kristol
I guess this is probably a phenomenon of modern. The modern world and social media and so forth and, and everything else. And also I think it credit to you and to our colleagues. I mean, how fast it's. It's ramped up though the community and how sticky, as you say, how, how much people. How much it seems to mean to people. I find that personally very moving, honestly. I've got to say. I. I've been well known, I guess, a little bit, you know, a little world for quite a while. And it's nice that people recognize you and say, hey, I like you, or sometimes I don't like you, or, you know, I'm glad you're on whatever show. But this is a totally different thing. The Bulwark Experience. Carvel said this to me the other day, actually. Then he's got this fantastic ranch, which come back to if you want, but how the Bulwark, the board community is different from just being famous, you know?
- [08:05]
Lisa (SimplePractice spokesperson)
Yeah.
- [08:06]
Sarah Longwell
And it's because this is how. What it's like at live shows, you know, people say there's like a lot. It's funny how people say focus groups are like this too, but how many people in the audience sort of say the same thing? They're like, will you keep us sane? And part of that, what they mean is you guys show up and you talk about things and I feel either like, seen like you guys are as angry as I am, you're upset as I am, or you're making me think about things differently. But the bottom line is one of my favorite things is when people disagree with us, they don't like what we're saying, but like at some point you've earned enough trust or like they know where you are coming from, they understand you. And so there's, there's a tolerance then for like they're like, yeah, I don't, like, I don't agree with Sarah on this but like, I don't think she's BSing me or I don't think she's saying this for some, you know, self serving reason. I just think this is what she thinks and like, I don't, I can count on JBL to argue with her and vice versa. And so no, it is, it is, it's incredible. It is moving. It is. We get moved a lot, especially at live shows, by just seeing. But this idea of when people say, you keep us sane, I always think, and you guys keep us sane. Like we keep coming and doing this together, but also for people. And that feels meaningful and useful at a time when one of the dominant feelings that I think people feel is a sense of, God, what are we going to do about this? What do we do in this moment? And that helplessness can be really debilitating, but being together and thinking through solutions and even sense making of the moment can, can buoy people and make you feel connected.
- [09:44]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. And without getting too sappy or anything, I would say that's really, I mean, look, we, we started this and whatever, we started 2017, 2018, we fought Trump, he got stronger. He did lose the 2020 election, so that's something. But then he comes back after January 6, he wins the 2024 election. It, it is sometimes demoralizing and it could have been totally demoralizing, honestly. And I really, if without the Bulwark community, I'm not sure that I would be, you know, maybe just say, look, okay, we did our best and we'll go, you know, read, read. No, know, do something else, write a memoir. I don't know, whatever, you know, not, not be in the middle of the fight. I do, I think especially Those months after November 2024, for me that was really an important moment. I think we haven't really discussed this, but I, maybe for you too, I mean that, you know, Trump wins. People could have just decided, well, that was okay, they did their best. But you just, it's not happening and we just have to go somewhere else or not, not go over to before Trump, but just, you know, kind of check out for a while or something. And we had the opposite experience with the bulwark. Right?
- [10:44]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. I mean, this is why I wrote the book. Right. So I wrote the book. I decided to write the book in those months sort of after Trump got reelected. A because I felt like one of the questions that people were asking is kind of like, how is this possible? Like, how is it possible after all of this that Trump could get reelected after everything that people know? There's no excuses this time. And so I felt like I actually could answer a lot of those questions. And many of them obviously were like, hey man, look, if you nominate an 82 year old renominate. An 82 year old who people already like. I mean, I just had been hearing it from the voters for so much how they did. They thought he was too old. They thought he wasn't capable of running the country. You were seeing all this polling about how Biden was a bigger threat to democracy than Trump. And I knew from listening to voters that they didn't think, they weren't interpreting that like Biden is a threat to democracy, like he will do the things that Trump is doing. They meant he is not in a position to run the country and therefore I think he is a threat to democracy. Right. It was like how they interpreted it. Again, why I like focus groups, but I, I really started to feel like, oh man, America needs a pep talk right now. And, and maybe some of it too is like being proximate to jvl. I mean, JVL was also. I don't think this is, I think anybody who's reading the Triad could see that like lots of us when it were feeling pretty dark about it. And because I am a frustrated optimist, I really did feel like I wanted to do like a. No, no, no. Here's how we get up off the mat. Here is why I don't think that Trump just winning that says exactly the things you think it does about America. Like, I just knew how much of it was about inflation because I had been listening to them talk. People talk about costs the whole time and how much people didn't like Trump, but felt like they didn't know Kamala. Like again, there was a lot of to just analysis about Kamala that I, I fundamentally disagreed with. And I was like, I want to talk about how the voters didn't say because the. One of the bigger fights is like, should the Democratic Party be more moderate or should it be more progressive? And a lot of people I think would say, well, Sarah Long will tell you it needs to be more moderate. And that's. That could be me arguing from personal preference, but me arguing from what I listen to is actually like, that's the wrong fight. We do not need to actually have a fight about whether we'd be more progressive or more moderate. We do think to think a lot about how Democrats become more aggressive, how they become better communicators, how they understand, like that Kamala. Kamala's problem wasn't that people. It was. People could just sort of make of her what they wanted because she didn't give them this, like, clear sense of who she was. They needed that parasocial relationship to her. They needed to know her at a 360 degree angle, and they didn't. The number one thing I heard from voters was, I just, I don't trust her because I don't know her. And people could say, like, well, that that's racism, that's sexism. Those kinds of things can be in there as, as a way of saying, yeah, I like, distrust this person for reasons I can't always put my finger on. But the way you overcome that is by being incredibly strong about who you are, being able to say it so clearly that other people can't define you. It's very difficult to define Trump in a way other than he is because it's all out there, just like, love him or hate him, and I hate him. He is clear about who he is. And voters, when they say they're like, oh, I know he lies, but I think he tells the truth. And you're like, what is that? But of course, what they mean is, I think he sincerely believes whatever insane thing is coming out of his mouth. And I feel like he's telling me the behind this. He thinks he doesn't talk like a regular politician, which is a new real voter thing. They don't want people who sound like regular politicians. And so again. And it jives again with the bulwark, like, people also don't as much want, especially out of their opinion journalism. It's different, sort of for direct reporting. But in terms of what people want when they think about politics, they want to know where the people are coming from. Like, they sort of want your biases right up front. They don't care if you have them. Actually, what they get annoyed by is somebody who says, oh, I have no biases, I'm completely neutral. And then they feel like they're divining their intent all the time.
- [15:00]
Bill Kristol
But.
- [15:01]
Sarah Longwell
But if you say I am a Republican and have been a Republican my whole life, and Donald Trump has completely changed the party and made it into something I want absolutely nothing to do with. And in fact I want to devote myself to defeating him because there's nothing conservative about him, there's nothing good. There's no first principles that he adheres to. People are like, yeah, okay, I see where that is going. You know, I see what that is. And then they can interact with you in that way and they can build trust with you to because they know exactly where you're coming from. Because you're being clear about
- [15:31]
Lisa (SimplePractice spokesperson)
hi, my name is Lisa and I'm a licensed psychotherapist, which means my work doesn't magically end when the session does. There are notes to write, appointments to manage, billing, insurance, follow ups, and somehow all that admin used to creep into my nights and weekends. That's why I switched to Simple Practice. Simple Practice is an all in one electronic health record built specifically for therapists with HIPAA compliant tools and high trust certification. So I don't have to worry about juggling systems or cutting corners just to keep things running. Scheduling, documentation, billing, insurance, client communications, even automated appointment reminders. It all lives in one place. And if you're starting or growing a practice, Simple Practice also offers a credentialing service that helps simplify insurance enrollment, which can be a huge lift when you're starting to scale. Start with a seven day free trial, then get 50% off your first three months. Just go to SimplePractice.com Again, that's SimplePractice.com
- [16:33]
Bill Kristol
Summer's heating up and so is the action with chumba casino and 23xi racing. Whether you're trackside with Bubba, Riley and Tyler or cooling off at home, the fun never stops at Chumba Casino, the online social casino packed with free to play games like slots, bingo and more. Jump into summer@chumbacasino.com and score your free welcome bonus 2 million free gold coins and 2 free sweeps coins. No purchase necessary. VGW Group Void where prohibited by law. CTNC is 21 sponsored by Jumbo Casino. I think your point about the centrist versus Progressive stuff is important and we've discussed it in the past and I think this is something you and I and and and Tim and JVL have all kind of approach pretty similarly but slightly different, coming from slightly different places, obviously just because of who we are. But the I mean Those are fights about policies. But one thing you stressed over and over, and I, I think in the book too, that one can differ on policies, but one can have shared values. Right. And also a shared approach, which is the sort of aggressiveness and also not yielding to Trump into the lies and to the bullying and so forth. And that can be done by centrists. It can be done by progressives and they can equally be centrist to progressives who don't fight either effectively or aggressively or intelligently. Right. I mean, I think that's such an important. I feel like so many people. Are we winning this fight? A little bit of trying to persuade people to get beyond the fights they all remember from 2021 or 2017 or for all I know, 22,008, you know, of like the centrists have to fight the progressives and they can differ and they should argue there's no problem with it. But values are so much more important than policies. That's one thing I've really learned over the years.
- [18:07]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. And this is where like my hope for this book, like if I had to just sort of pin a hope on it, it would be that it would do for the communications conversation what abundance did for the policy side. So like abundance started a conversation. You don't like it, you don't have to be into it. But like it started this conversation about what are the policies that we care about. What is our, what is our posture going to be on policy? Are we going to be forward looking? Okay, I want this to just on
- [18:33]
Bill Kristol
that if I can.
- [18:34]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah.
- [18:34]
Bill Kristol
There are lefty versions of abundance and centrist versions of abundance because people would differ on.
- [18:38]
Lisa (SimplePractice spokesperson)
Well, what.
- [18:38]
Bill Kristol
Okay, we all want more of good thing, you know, lower housing costs, let's say. But they're, you know, Mamdani type solutions. There are free market type solutions. Yeah. But the I do think you're right. Abundance sort of stepped over some of those old policy debates or encompasses them maybe. Yeah.
- [18:53]
Sarah Longwell
And it doesn't matter what you think of abundance. You know what I'm talking about actually, like you me saying it means that they were effective at starting a conversation about policy that I think is meaningful because it's about who are Democrats going to be. That's not the conversation I'm trying to have. I am trying to have though, a conversation that is at that level of impact and discourse about communications. And communications is also about like, who are you as a person? You know, one of the, when you say like, are we winning? I think people are starting to. Democrats are starting to understand that they have to change something. They have to under. They understand that they need to be thinking about offense, but they're still at the point where they are articulating that they need to be thinking about offense. They are not yet at the point where they have figured out how to just do offense. And I really want this book to be a helpful kick in the butt around what it looks like to do meaningful offense. And this is the one place where my background as a Republican communications operative and being able to see how Democrats do it and see how Republicans do it and be able to compare the two gives me an opportunity to say, like, I've been in the belly of the beast of both of these things and seen how both sides do it. And like, I've got a lot of thoughts about places where there's a lot of things Democrats do well. But like Republicans, the ruthlessness of their communication strategy, the ability to do narrative dominance, the ability of Trump to prioritize vibes over actual policy. Like the ability of him to create a real meaningful connection with his audience where people call it a cult. And I probably won't dispute that. But like, you have to understand that the undercurrent of that is that he has built a relationship with people that allows him to do whatever he wants. And so, like, how so for Democrats, I think there's a problem of bench building, right? So a lot of the, like Obama was this world class communicator, but I think one of the knocks on him, and I think this is probably true, is that like, there wasn't a bench that came in his wake of people who really understood how to do that level of communications to connect with an audience. And so instead people kind of are just like, well, he's a once in a generation talent. And I'm like, and then they're like, and Bill Clinton was a once in a generation talent. And I was like, okay, guys, well we, we need some more, once in, we need some more generational talent then. Because it can't just be that you get these, like, these are the only people that can do it, right? And so while I think Democrats are starting to have some of the conversations, like I'll just tell you, there's a, there's a bunch in the book around religion. Not a bunch in the book, but I have a chapter on sort of the difference between Republicans and Democrats. And one is that Republicans talk about religion all the time, Democrats don't. And so I had made that point and I talked about that before. James Talrico showed up. And so like Tal Rico has kind of Talrico has come in and sort of accelerated that conversation. Like it's now on the map in a way that when I wrote it in the book already it wasn't. And so, but now people are talking about it. So I think in that ways I see things stepping forward. But I do think there's a long way to go for Democrats to sort of internalize what it means to kind of stop crying and start sweating and being like, which is an old Jimmy Carter line actually. But it is a, like, what are we going to do to go fight? And Democrats want fighters. And this fighters is becoming a stand in for a level of urgency from their politician that matches the moment. And that's why progressive, moderate people are like, just show me that this moment is as significant to you as it is to me. And like that's the energy people are looking for.
- [22:41]
Bill Kristol
Now that's so interesting and very well said. So people should look forward to the book. And of course, meanwhile, they can watch you on many, many shows here on the book and read you. And well, of course watch focus group and, and the focus group and then read the whole book on September. It really doesn't come out till September 9th or something. It's kind of, it's kind of, I feel like September 8th. It's funny that it's so far off, right?
- [23:06]
Sarah Longwell
Yes. And I will do a book tour when it happens. Well, also it's going to. So part of it is that it's time to come out kind of in the midst, like right before the midterms. And I will just say as a last thing on the book, I wrote it to be not just of this moment, but really like 26 adjacent, but really for 28 and then beyond. It's a lot about how we got here, but it's a lot about going forward too. And it's really that, like at its core, sort of doing a root and branch operation on the toxic political forces that Trump has unleashed on our country is going to take, it's not going to take two elections. It's not just the normal vicissitudes of midterms and then elections and which party's in power. There has to be real work done to overcome that. And it's going to take sort of some sea change things. And so I lay out a lot of that in the book. And so anyway, that's why the timing. But you can get it on Audible, you can get it on Barnes and Noble, you can get it on from the little independent bookshop. There's a bookshop, I think it's called bookshop.org where you can go and they donate to your local one. You can actually call your local retailer, do all those things. Because the point is, is to use the bulwark community that understands this as a way to push it into the mainstream so that, like, people who are not political obsessives like our audience read it.
- [24:32]
Bill Kristol
Are you reading the Audible book?
- [24:33]
Sarah Longwell
Of course I am.
- [24:34]
Bill Kristol
Oh, good. Okay. So some people. It's funny, some people don't want to or they're not asked to because they don't. They don't sound good, I guess. I don't know. I've known authors who have been in good health and could have sat there for the 10 hours you need or whatever, or to read the book and just either chose not to or weren't asked by their publisher to. But you. You'll do that sometime this summer, I suppose.
- [24:54]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, that's my plan. I would like to be the one. Now that you say this, I gotta tell you, the publishing stuff is sort of still a little bit opaque to me, partly because I tried to do this. I'm doing this fast as a normal timeline. But, yes, I have every intention of reading the audiobook.
- [25:08]
Bill Kristol
No, I think. I think given how prominent you are in audio and video, you should. But that's my opinion. What do I know? Maybe they'll get, you know, Sarah Jessica Parker to read it or something like that, or Lucy Lawless or other famous Bulwark fans.
- [25:20]
Sarah Longwell
You know, that would. That would be cool. But I. I think the New Zealand
- [25:24]
Bill Kristol
accent would be good in reading the book.
- [25:25]
Sarah Longwell
You know, I want to be there to read JBL's footnotes. I will actually. No, actually, I'll let JBL read his own footnotes.
- [25:32]
Bill Kristol
That would be fun.
- [25:32]
Sarah Longwell
And his own. His footnotes. I'll just. This really quickly, as JVL and I went through this, he, like, he writes a whole forward about how the whole point is you can't just argue with these voters through the whole book. Like, he'll be tempted to do it, but, like, try to just, like, sit with what. What these people are saying. And then he goes on to fight with the voters in the forward. And then all through the footnotes, as we were doing it, I keep having to cut them because they take you, you know, whatever. But he. He is undeterred.
- [26:00]
Bill Kristol
He is generally undeterred. That's the way talk to the Iran. Well, I mean, let me ask, put it this way. Since you mentioned the war. You know, you're going to have to update some. And I remember, I think we were together in the office, maybe it was the day before the war Trump launched, it was Friday. And you were talking about the, we were talking about the COVID a little bit, which I think was still in slight question mark about how it would look. And maybe you had just signed off on the kind of final, not quite final for now, I guess, manuscript, you know, so they could copy edit and so forth. And the next day the war broke out. So how do you, how do you expect now, a week into the war, that the war might affect what you're writing about? In other words, what do you think the domestic politics, Trump related effects of this war with Iran might be? How does it look to you a week in.
- [26:47]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, so obviously there's a fair amount of the book, both about how I've changed, but also how the Republican Party's changed because we've gone like this. But one of the things that is just flat out interested me about, one of the big shifts has been how different Republican voters are today on foreign policy than they were when I was 22. And obviously when I was 22, you know, we had just nine, 11 had just happened and George W. Bush was president and we were starting to talk about going into Iraq and Afghanistan. There were actual congressional votes then. There was actually a public persuasion effort at the time, but the Republican Party was pretty convinced that we could export democracy. Right. That was sort of a. That was actually like a. Well, you know this better than I do. But that was an animating part of the movement at that time. That is just not the case now. Right. So you get on the other side of Iraq and Afghanistan and two decades of war and the voters, I mean, one of the trumpets basically did two things to make him stand out from the rest of the pack in the 2016 Republican primary. One was to get all over Jeb Bush about his brother's war and use that to discredit him. And that's when, that's when people realized Trump was right about the voters, that there was this tremendous fatigue about these Middle east wars and that voters did want that and they didn't want the old Republican model. And then the other was immigration. Right. Those were like two of the biggest things that made Trump president. So in the book, I write a lot about the new isolationists on the right and how big a shift that is and how voters talk about it and how the idea of boots on the ground in a Middle Eastern country And there's a reason that when the first polling came out about Iran, it was before we went in, 21% of Americans said we should do something about Iran. Like we should, we should bomb Iran, we should go to war with Iran. 21%. Now what's interesting is that after Trump running three successive campaigns, but two of them really focused on the idea that we won't get into these stupid wars, these Middle east Wars, especially this 2024 term, they really leaned on JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard and this idea of, you know, no, we are, we are isolationists. Pete Hegseth with no stupid wars, we won't get into them. So I'm desperate to understand now, okay, so I have this thesis that the voters have gotten much more isolationist, and yet when Trump bombs Iran, suddenly support for it jumps up to about 40%, 41%. Now that's interesting to me because it directly mirrors Trump's approval rating, which means that what's happening right now is that anybody who's basically rides with Trump is going to ride with him into this war. Now this makes some sense to me because a lot of the people who were attracted to Trump, the swingier voters, there are two kinds of people. One is they're kind of red pilled, so they're anti woke. But these are also people who like, might have been Democrats otherwise, like your Joe Rogans or some of these like podcasting bros, they might otherwise be Democrats. They were very anti war and they were attracted to Trump's anti war pitch. So that's one group of people. Now those people though are already out. Those are the independents that Trump has been falling off a cliff with. And so he's still fine with his base voters, those supporters who stick with him through everything. But he's lost a ton of those independents. The other half of those independents though, and I see this in the focus groups already, is people who are in there and I swear to God, this happened this week. What do you think about what we're doing in Iran? And some of the people in the groups are like, sorry, what happened? Like what, what's happening in Iran? And they didn't know. They don't know we're at war. And I do think Trump, like, part of them trying to not call it a war is they're trying to keep it a secret from low information voters. Although those low information voters have one data point that Trump can't hide from them, which is their gas prices going up when they go to the actual pump, which is When a lot of Americans will look up and say, what is going on? Why is this happening? And that may sound insane to a lot of people right now, but, like, if there's anything I've learned from the focus groups, it is that the things that we talk about every day, 85% of it escapes the notice of your average American who's just out there doing whatever. But. So it's going to be interesting to me. So right now, public opinion is mapping with approval of Trump and it very much Trump's war. What happens if we're still in this war in three weeks, though, because the voters got really spoiled, is not the right word. But slightly attuned to this idea that Trump can just do these smash and grab jobs, goes into Venezuela, grabs Maduro, you talk about it for a week, and then Americans don't hear about it again. You bomb Iran. You know, back whenever we did that before Trump says we obliterated their nuclear program, that's a lie. We know that, like, everyone kind of stops talking about it. So Americans don't. They're just like, okay, well, if it's just like that, fine. If it's not like that, if it's protracted, if Americans are dying and oil prices are high at a time when things have not gotten more expensive. I'm sorry, have not gotten cheaper and inflation hasn't eased, I do think that that is how you get to what I have always talked about, which is the Bush line or the W line, as Tim wants me to call it, because that's how Trump does whittle himself down to a 32% and leaves office with a very demoralized public. And so that, that's. But that's that now, that's sort of an open question that I have to wrestle with on the foreign policy side that I wasn't quite thinking about because I obviously, I recognize the cultish ness and the fact that people will jump on board, but it is really, I will be interested to see whether that 20% gap that jumped on board, just because they're like, I'm here to defend Trump no matter what he does, will they stay if we're six weeks in, eight weeks in, 10 weeks in, there's more bombs going off, things are destabilized, things are getting more expensive. Like, then what happens?
- [32:58]
Bill Kristol
Or even, I suppose if six or 12 months from now, something happens that in retrospect seems to reflect poorly or, well, I guess on the judgment to go to war, you know, these things don't just click off at some Point. I thought one thing you said is so much, so important, maybe just develop this for a bit and then we can let you go back to your Sunday. Let people go. But the. You said in passing this is why they don't want to call it a war. One reason they don't, you know, they, and we've all made fun of that and, and they've online and so forth and correctly not just made fun of it, but said it's kind of, it's bad. I mean, what do you tell the parents of these six Americans, servicemen and women who've died, that, you know, there wasn't a war. I mean, but they're not, as always with the Trump, with Trump, there's always like a germ of cunning in his even most ludicrous lies and fictions and bloviations and so forth. Right. And I, I sort of wondering, wondering about that. I mean, if you say it over and over, it's not a war sign. You get Republican senators earnestly to say it over and over. It's not really a war. I don't know. Do some of those voters think, well, it's not really quite a, you know, they don't get into the linguistics, you know, fine tuning, but it kind of sinks in a little bit. It's not quite, this isn't quite quite like the wars we didn't like. This could be different. I mean, they're not entirely foolish maybe to fight what seems to be on the surface a very foolish and almost offensive almost, you know, argument. Do you think that's right or am I overthinking that?
- [34:17]
Sarah Longwell
Oh, I think that, I think that's right. That's the reason that I said it is that there's something, there's a reason. I mean, it was just happened on the Sunday shows. I think it was Walls was asked, are we in a war? Like just the straightforward question, are we in a war? I was doing the illegal news with this really smart woman from just Security and I, that was my opening question is like, is this a war? Like, define it. And she's like, of course this is a war. Once you start bombing other countries, right. And people are dying and US Soldiers are dying, like you're in a war. Walls on the Sunday show wouldn't answer it. Mike Walls. And so, you know, they don't want to answer it because they, they don't want to admit that this is what's happening. And they are hoping that it, that either Trump just pulls us out of it, that, you know, that it for some reason it turns out okay and they can declare victory and Trump's gonna might try that. Although, I mean, Bill, you've been through this more than I have. The thing that astonishes me, and it's again, but this seems important. Why is Trump only updating us on his personally held social media account, a private company? He doesn't go to the White House and interrupt the cable channels. He doesn't interrupt the Survivor, you know, season 50 to make sure that Americans are watching it. I think that's deliberate. Like I do think they are trying to not say they're in a full fledged war for as long as they can to see if they can get out of it by saying, see how smart Trump was? He went in, he got this thing done and now it's over. But this is where sometimes these things get away from you. In fact, lots of times things get. These things get away from you. That's George W. Bush. Mission Accomplished is like a pretty good. But that, that's where it starts to look eerily like they are repeating almost beat for beat some of the, the things in the past that didn't work. Post people do not wait for the perfect time. They learn between shifts and family dinners. At Post University, online education is built for busy schedules so you can keep moving forward without putting life on hold. And post makes it personal with support from real people who care about your goals. Become a post person. Learn more at post Edu.
- [36:44]
Bill Kristol
Mark, that's such a shrewd point about the. A lot of us, a lot of people certainly complaining we have to have an Oval Office address where this is a major, massive operation. It is a massive, biggest thing we've done in 20 years, certainly. But in a way they're shrewd not to. Right. Because they don't want all the analysis comparing it to the previous Oval Office addresses launching military conflicts and the previous votes, obviously in Congress, they certainly didn't want that ratifying it. People like me can say, you know, if you go to where you're better off having some bipartisan support, it gives you a little more of a cushion. But yeah, they really are. Yeah, they want it to be Venezuela. It's a little bigger version of Venezuela. It's a tougher version. People hate the ayatollahs more than they hated Maduro, probably. So it's okay to kill more people, frankly, and keep it going for a while. But I mean, yeah, I've sort of assumed he calls an end to it just because he's so the one lesson he seems to have learned over 50 years of watching American politics is don't get involved in land wars anywhere, really. He was, he was around during Vietnam, he was around during, obviously, Iraq. And incidentally, he was around during the war that broke out when I was in the White House, that we declared and fought to get Saddam out of Kuwait. And that went well, much better than people forget how worried people were, but very, very well. And it didn't help George H.W. bush. So good wars don't help you much and bad wars hurt you a lot. I think that is generally true, actually, which is why I do think it's going to be tricky for them to navigate this. And they could. I wrote that little thing in warning shots, putting myself in Trump's mind and sort of making like, I'm going to get out of this. I'm not letting this go forever. And I think could, though I've got to say he's also close to this because you've watched Trump carefully for the last 10 years. I don't know the true social stuff. It's all such bullshit. You never know with Trump. Right. He's capable of being unbelievably grandiose and then pivoting on a dime, I suppose. Having said that, I feel like the megalomania is more real than it used to be and the lizard cunning is less there than it used to be. I mean, the unconditional surrender and the relishing, almost like Hegseth, of the death and destruction and we can do this. We can do Cuba next. I'm already announcing the next war. Before this war, I don't know. Do you think that's the case? The second term is just a little more out of control, I guess.
- [38:59]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. Look, I think that one of the worst things that can happen to any person, and again, this is why I inflict focus groups on people, is that you get into your silo and you start to believe that the entire world reflects something that you believe. I think in Trump's first term, he was surrounded. He was a. He was younger. He was a younger person, but he was also surrounded by more people willing to tell him no, more people willing to give him the counterpoint. I think now he is surrounded by people who are like, sir, you have a. This war has a 96% approval among Republicans and they're not telling him that 70% of independents don't like it, that it's fallen off a cliff with Hispanics, that going into the midterms, Democrats have a seven point, you know, generic poll advantage. And that their voters are way more fired up. Like, I do think people are maybe shielding him more. And when he's not campaigning, I'm not sure he gets as much like he's on the phone all day with billionaires who are trying to get bespoke deals out of him. And so like everybody tells him he's doing a great job. And so I do think he's just losing some of what is a. You always talked about that low cunning, that almost like reptilian ability. He had to understand where the American people were. And I think he has lost a lot of that because he is cocooned among yes men.
- [40:24]
Bill Kristol
It's such a good point. I mean, I someone I was having a conversation yesterday with our friend, actually, Andy Zwick, and I can't wait for I said this, one of us said the gas prices, that's what you can't really that's just real. And you know, obviously Susie, I mean, normal Republican politicians know that and therefore that's got to make a dent on Trump at some point that, you know, he's got to have at least a plausible story of how they're going to go back down or something. And I think it was Andy made this point that, well, actually, you know, the cocoon has gotten pretty cocoonish. The people in Mar A Lago that he's having dinner with don't care about gas prices. They're not filling up every week and worrying about, gee, it's costing me a lot more to do. I just go to get to my job or take the kids to school or whatever than it used that it did a week ago. So I agree. The kind of billionaire, oligarchic sycophantic overlapping cocoons that he's now in, I wonder if that has diminished his demagogic skills. If you want to think of it that way. The good, good demagogues. He was a good con. He wasn't good. He was sort of a good con man. He had many failures, but he became a very good con man in politics, let's put it that way. That's another way of saying demagogue really. And salesman. If you want to be nice and you lose those skills if you're not. You know, one thing salesman have to be to be a good salesman, you have to kind of understand your customers. Right. And maybe you're right. It's just less touch with them than it used to be. I wonder about that.
- [41:41]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, it's always hard to know. I mean, like sometimes there's also this part of me that wants to be like, I don't know, Trump likes to see things go boom. You know, he likes to see big bombs go off and, like, feel like that somehow reflects because Trump's a broken person. Like, I mean, he has some of these qualities, but, like, he's a fundamentally broken human being who has no conception of how to really love America, want to take care of Americans. And so, like, this was why I opposed him from the start. Like, from the beginning, Trump is a bad person who doesn't have a lot of the normal qualities of that. Like, an empathetic, decent human does. Hasn't lived his life that way. Like, you know, if. If he's the kind of guy who rips everybody off and stiffs everyone and thinks that that's him being more sophisticated. And, like, you just can't have somebody like that running country. And you really. I got on a kind of a tear on Nicole where I sort of lost my temper just about Trump sort of being like, yeah, people are going to die. And, like, I don't. I don't usually. Some of the imagery stuff, you know, Trump wearing the ball cap at the. When he was just where they were doing the. The soldiers. The. The dead soldiers. Yeah, they were doing the transfer.
- [42:48]
Bill Kristol
Dignified transfer.
- [42:49]
Sarah Longwell
The dignified transfer. Trump's wearing a cap. Like, sometimes I think that stuff can go over. Be overwrought, the fact that he was wearing a hat, but it. It's not the hat. It's that Trump does not mourn the deaths that come with the decision that he makes. Like, he doesn't. He doesn't take them on in a way where he thinks, like, the enormous weight of people's lives. And he does this on affordability. Affordability is a hoax. You don't need this or that. Like, he just doesn't care about people. And so when you don't care about people and you're just like, oh, look, I've got this big military, and they're really good at stuff, and they can go blow things up and that's cool. Let's go. Like, that's as much a reason for Trump as anything. It's hard to always know his. His reasons. But I do know, I do know that because he doesn't care about people, he will not conduct this war. In a way, I think that is, like, reflected on a human level, it will all be about him. And, like, if he starts to feel enough pain from it politically in some way, although it's difficult to inflict as much pain on a lame duck, but if he really starts to feel public opinion constraint, like, then he just walks away like he's destabilized a region and he'll just walk away. Like he won't feel like, oh, I broke it, I bought it. He won't feel a commitment to that.
- [44:08]
Bill Kristol
So, but I mean, you could walk away and it can go, everything can go south and you end up still being held responsible for an unbelievable mess that you've left behind. Right. So it's not, I mean, I wrote that little thing also saying that he will, I think his instinct at some point will be to walk away, but that doesn't solve his problem necessarily. Right. You know, Star wars that you've started that don't you walk away from halfway through may not end so well. But you'll have to discuss all. You'll be just, you'll look back on all this in six months on the book tour. But people should order the book. It's really, this has been such an interesting discussion and I think, yes, they need, people need not just pep talk, but advice and guidance on certainly the politicians do on how to fight Trump. And voters need to think about how they can talk to their fellow voters too. Right. I mean, it's not, this is not just a top down thing. Right. And the book is entitled how to Eat an Elephant. That's a good title, I think, incidentally, my, my 2 cents worth one voter at a time. So, I mean, it is, there is something for everyone to do, not just for, you know, Hakeem Jeffries.
- [45:05]
Lisa (SimplePractice spokesperson)
Right.
- [45:06]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. I mean, look, I think part of it when I was talking about the helplessness before, the reason I called it how to Eat an Elephant is obviously it works on just like a normal Republican level, but it's like, how do you solve a big intractable problem? How do you solve a problem that feels too big to solve? And the question is, is like you take it piece by piece. And so like here is the communications piece and a bunch of elements and, and there's obviously a fair amount of policy in there as it relates to like what voters say they want about policy. But it, it tries to take these different things that we're grappling with and break them down so that people can think about how to tackle them. So anyway, and it also has a lot in there about the early days of Bill Crystal and Sarah Longwell, when all this started. No, I would never skip that part. I would never skip it. One day Sarah gets in an argument with Bill Crystal in a little room and then they start having coffee and then everything from there.
- [46:02]
Bill Kristol
Amazing. It was less than 10 years ago, right? It's been, it's been a. Well, it's been a rough 10 years for the country, but it's been a fun 10 years. Years. I've enjoyed the 10 years personally. So Sarah, thanks for taking time out of your Sunday to join me here and congratulations on the book and everyone should pre order it and look forward to reading it in September.
- [46:21]
Sarah Longwell
All right, thank you. Bye guys. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Granger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.