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- [00:00]
A
Hey guys, it's JBL and Sarah. Sarah, say hi.
- [00:04]
B
You're so sad. Today.
- [00:09]
A
We. We are here for a timless show. This is, you know, the secret show. It's just us and we wanted to share with you our T L friends.
- [00:19]
B
It was a good show, but the things that we talked about that I think some of the delusions of Jeff Flake thinking that the Republican party is migrating away from Trump. We talked about some Elon stuff, his trillion dollar package and we got. It was great. It was great. But JVL's little. He got his shingles vaccine and so I try to put him on my back, carry him up the mountain.
- [00:49]
A
Here's the show. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my best friend Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark. Sarah is going to carry me today because. Because I got the shingles vaccine and. Holy fuck, that's a rough vaccine, dude. This is the only time I think I've ever.
- [01:07]
B
How do you feel right now? What's it doing to your body?
- [01:11]
A
So I got like, I think a reasonably high fever from it yesterday. Like last, last night I was under six blankets with my teeth literally chattering and I couldn't get warm for hours. And now I just feel like somebody is, you know, run a steamroller Fish Called Wanda style over my entire body. So. It's great. It's great. Anyway, I'm sorry. Get your. Get your shingles vaccines though, people.
- [01:42]
B
I just got shingles. I got shingles like during COVID So now I'm immune now. Right? I never get it.
- [01:49]
A
Yeah, it's like chickenpox. Yeah, Shingles is single. Shingles is old person. Chicken, chickenpox.
- [01:54]
B
Sweet. I got a super mild case.
- [01:57]
A
Yeah, you did. That's living the dream. All right, so we got a lot to talk about. We've got to talk about USAID and the hundreds of thousands of people who are already dead because of what Elon Musk did. We got to talk about Elon Musk's trillion dollar pay package. We have to talk about the focus group and we have to talk about Jeff Flake who. Who sees that their light is at the end of the tunnel and that true conservatives are ready to take back the Republican Party.
- [02:26]
B
Can I just say, I want to talk about. I want to keep. Keep going. I want to end the week talking about the big electoral victories this week, what it means, why many of the Republicans who are drawing very silly conclusions from them are wrong. But you want to talk about USAID and all the people that are dying.
- [02:47]
A
Yeah, I mean, it feels like, especially in light of Elon Musk's $1 trillion pay package, that that's a thing worth talking about.
- [02:55]
B
Why do you only want to talk? There's good news this week. Why do we have to talk about that?
- [02:59]
A
I just saying I want to. I want to have that on our list. That's all. I just want to touch on it. Well, let's just go to Jeff Flake. Let's go to that first huge win for democracy and Democrats on Tuesday. We've talked about that quite a bit. It's great.
- [03:15]
B
Love.
- [03:15]
A
It seems like the more data we get from down ballot and small races, the. The bigger the win seems to have been. Right? Would you agree?
- [03:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. We've got 15 points. So it's 15 points is sort of the final tally for Abigail Spanberger. 13 points for Mikey Sher. 13 point victory in the race that Republicans thought they had a chance to win. Now, I. You and I were pretty convinced she was going to win. Uh, but we're. Although, no, you got nervous. You got pretty nervous.
- [03:51]
A
I thought she was likely to win. I thought her margin was likely to be somewhere between like three and eight.
- [03:56]
B
Yeah.
- [03:57]
A
And so I said anything less than three or more than eight would surprise me. And this surprised me. I did not see a 13 point victory coming.
- [04:05]
B
No. For. For sure. And I, as you know, I bet my team. I gave them, I laid down my markers. I said, if Abigail Spamberger gets 30, 13 plus. I was like, these are the stretch goals. She gets 13 plus. If Mikey Sheryl gets seven plus wins by more than seven points. Okay, guys, we'll go to Vegas because they've been like, they're mad. I'm going to Vegas for the indie fest with Sunny and Will Summer. And I was like, that's when we'll go, if that happens. And they did. Right. They screenshotted it, first of all. And then because I put it in slack and they said, Sarah, you have not. These odds are. These odds are in our favor. They really. They were like, we can beat these. And the second holes opened on, on Tuesday. I was like, oh, no, I'm gonna have to take all these guys to Vegas. Which I told Josh Shapiro about when I interviewed him. Did you see that I interviewed Josh Shapiro, my boy?
- [04:59]
A
I did see that you interviewed him. I didn't see the interview itself, but I, I saw that you interviewed him. It's a good guess.
- [05:07]
B
Yeah. Well, I thought people would enjoy that conversation, and it seems like they did. I think, I think people generally Thought that they took a, took a new look at him and said, yeah, this guy, this guy sounds pretty good.
- [05:20]
A
When we get to the end, I'm going to need to ask you some Vegas questions like where you put your team up when you go to Vegas. Are you an Excalibur office? Is that what you do? You send your, put your team up in Excalibur?
- [05:32]
B
First of all, I'm not an office that just like goes to Vegas, you know, with everybody all the time. That's not a thing we do. I just, but I, I do, I do make bets with them on things and often bet them dinners or things like that. If we achieve certain goals, I like to be motivating.
- [05:51]
A
I love that. I love that.
- [05:52]
B
Okay, so sorry, we were talking about the down ballot races and how Democrats flipped absolutely everything across Georgia statewide races, the Georgia statewide races. And, and look, I think there's, there's a bunch of lessons here. One is when nobody's paying attention except for like tapped in Democrats who like go to the no Kings protests. Those guys show up, they vote. And Democrats can do really well in these off year races. Republicans are weirdly doing this thing where they like refuse to acknowledge how destroyed they got, except for Trump who's kind of saying, you know, we lost because of the shutdown. Like Trump seems to have gotten it, but not everybody else. What do you make of that?
- [06:48]
A
Well, that's because Trump didn't get schlonged.
- [06:51]
B
That's right.
- [06:51]
A
He's like, if Trump's not on the ballot, right. I mean, this is the. Because he does not see himself as a Republican and never really has. He runs against the Republican Party all the time. Yes. So it's easy for him to say, to say that. I, I just want to read a couple of things to you from this Jeff Flake op ed. In politics, migrations rarely happen all at once. They start quietly, one or two members of a herd moving towards safer ground, while the rest pretend not to notice. But once the wind really changes, the movement become unmistakable. I believe that a migration has begun within the Republican Party. So first of all, I just don't think that that's necessarily true. Like you just state it's not true. It's not as a fact that like this is how these things work. I don't think that's how these things work. The political climate that once rewarded absolute loyalty to the President is shifting. Really. And then here's the part that I want to. The Republicans most likely to lead this migration are those senators not on the ballot in 2026. They have time, insulation, and perhaps a touch of perspective, having survived the whiplash of past election cycles. They know that public opinion is cyclic, but reputations endure. Most of them entered politics believing that fiscal discipline and internationalism were Republican virtues, not heresies. They want to return the Senate to the deliberative body it once was. I am sorry. Give me a fucking break.
- [08:30]
B
No, it's delusional. And I gotta say, like, my.
- [08:33]
A
I can't believe the Washington Post would publish this.
- [08:36]
B
Oh, I can.
- [08:37]
A
Yeah, no, you're right. I can.
- [08:39]
B
I mean, first of all, the Washington Post new editorial page sucks. And so there's. There's that, and then there's the fact that people want this to be true. Like, oh, yeah, I want it to be true, sure. But it's not. But it's not. It is not.
- [08:59]
A
Reputations endure. You tell that to Mitch McConnell.
- [09:03]
B
That's right here. I mean, it is. It is really like somebody was asleep for the last eight years or 10, and it's a little embarrassing. We haven't seen. Look, hey, man, Jeff Flake did the right thing at it. He was one of the few people to stand up. He lost his job over it. He was an early casualty of the loyalty to Trump over everything. And so I can see why Jeff Flake desperately wants to make the argument that things are starting to shift back. Mike Pence has a new book out that's like, rediscovering the conservative soul. And I just. I. I am. I'm a little embarrassed for these guys who somehow have no idea what's happening in their own party. Like, and they have. They are. They're attached to a world and a thing that just doesn't exist. Like, if Mike Pence thinks that there is a. A base of the Republican Party who is going to read his book and say, yes, yes, this is what I want to return to. He's wrong. He's. He's gonna. He's gonna discover it. Just like he discovered when he ran for president, there was no appetite for Mike Pence. And I gotta say, as good as Mike Pence has been, like, from January 6th, and by good, again, I mean he did his constitutional duty, but at least he understood his constitutional duty. And he has spoken out against Trump in his. In his sort of kind of way.
- [10:36]
A
Because he said that Trump was disqualified from office.
- [10:39]
B
And. And I think what he should have discovered, like, what that should have taught him, is that there's no appetite anymore in that party for what he's selling. He will get a more warm reception among Democrats these days than he will among Republicans. Like, and, and so this idea that. And also, can I just say this is, this is what killed me about that Jeff Flake op ed, and it's. The reason I sent it to you, is that it just, it starts right away where he says, things are moving away. Like, there's a migration. People feel more willing, you know, to criticize Trump. And then he's like, the next paragraph is like, the people who are safe, people who don't have to face an election should speak out. I was like, bro, see what you're doing here? Like, you, it's, it's implicit in the thing that you're saying, which is if you, if you're not up for reelection, then you have some opportunity to speak out, because if you are up for reelection, obviously you can't speak out then, which is something that they've all internalized. And so, and, and he, he also was clearly talking to some of the folks in the Senate who are like, oh, no, Trump is going to make us blow up the filibuster. Like, he's going to push us into this. And they are starting to figure out, I think, how they, they're trying to strategize about how to wriggle out of that. And I think they would like it to be, Trump is weaker post this election. But you know what actually is weaker? The Republican Party is weaker. Like, the big thing, Trump. Trump is right. When Trump's not on the ballot, these guys are sunk. Nobody wants what they're selling if it's not wrapped in the stupid red hat and dancing on stage, you know, in that weird fist dancing. Like, people want the Trump of it all. The show, the insults, the businessman. The. The businessman. I'm gonna put my air quotes in. But, like, they want the Trump of it all. And, and a lot of people can get there on Trump, even if they don't like the other stuff. Because of the businessman. Because the first time around, they thought the economy was good. But those people are like, well, I'm not here for Republicans. Others, they think Trump's a moderate. They think Trump, they think Trump, like, stands above politics, that he hovers above it in this unique way. He's not a regular politician. And I got to tell you, since you asked me to carry you, I grabbed some, some new data for you, which is we've been pressure testing your 2028 theory with Trump voters in the groups, like, whether or not these voters would go for it. And every now and then, you get somebody who's like, yeah, King Trump forever, let's go. Everybody's against it. Like almost like except for a couple people who are very performatively maga. These Republicans are all like, no, he can't run again. And guess why, why they believe in term limits. It's less like the Constitution specifically. It's like, no, we believe in term limits. You know, Nancy Pelosi stepping down. Like people were. Because this was just the one last night. So it was clear that was on people's mind. They were like, yeah, like we need a new generation of people. We like new people coming in. What was funny is we did. We were asking people like, okay, who, who do you like then if it's not okay, if it's not Trump? And they were kind of like, JD was everybody. And then we said, okay, if it's not JD then who? It's like Tulsi, Gabriel, Tucker. There was a Rubio. But like it was funny how there was like a few Tulsi's like, I'm just the horseshoe weirdness of it all. We didn't get Candace this time, but we did get Tucker. So I, I just. But, but mostly they were like, I don't know, I don't know. And so they. There was no appetite from the voters with the prep. And we did. We've asked a lot of groups. Now we're gonna. This is the episode we're gonna do on Saturday. We're gonna unpack it all. But next week, sorry, not this week. Because this week. What did I do this week for the focus group pod. Oh, dude, focus group pod. This week is so good. We do Gen Z and the young woman that I have on is excellent and does her own Gen Z qualitative stuff. And actually it's sort of a not can't miss episode. I think people are really going to like it. But anyway, I don't think there's an appetite for the 2028 from the voters at the moment.
- [15:21]
A
Just wait till they see how much Trump 2028 triggers the libs. They'll get on board then.
- [15:27]
B
I think that's, I think that's true. Like, I don't think, I think that the Republicans are getting themselves caught. And this goes back to Jeff Flakes proposition here. The people are going to move away from Trump. And some other people were saying like the lane every election that you have and this is why the Virginia, New Jersey elections, I think they represent kind of a next step in things is the lame duckness of it all does start to become more apparent with each election. Each election moves us to start looking forward instead of backward, which has people then asking the question after Trump. And I think Republicans are. It's a real catch 22 for them because they can say, all right, yeah, Trump, 2028. We don't. We're out of other options. We don't, we, we don't have the muscle memory now as a party, as an institution, to do anything other than Trump because he's so thoroughly captured and brain drained and shifted who we are. And that's the thing that I think Flake doesn't get it all. Like, if he thinks, you know, Thune not giving Trump what he wants on the filibuster represents a big moving away from Trump, you're wrong. And I think that Trump has real capacity to be kingmaker, should he still be corporally thriving corporate. What's that word? Corporeally.
- [16:53]
A
Corporeal.
- [16:55]
B
Corporeally thriving at, at the point at which we were talking about 2028. But if they, if, if Trump is so, they. So that's like, all right, well, if Trump's. We have to humor him as long as he's president, well, then they don't have the opportunity to start setting up other people. So Marjorie Taylor, like, it's funny. The, actually, the real movement is Marjorie Taylor Greene going out, starting to freelance. And so I'm not saying there's not going to be like a setting up of a showdown, but I don't think. It's certainly not what Flake is talking about.
- [17:32]
A
Your lips to God's ears. All right, I want to talk more about this and then some other stuff, but on the other side. So, guys, if you're listening to this and you're not a Bulwark plus member, Come on, what are you waiting for?
- [17:48]
B
Hey, you know what I keep wanting to say about this is I want to be number one on the sub stack leaderboard. Don't you not want Barry Weiss to be at the top of the substack leaderboard? Not you. Not you. Jbl. I know.
- [18:06]
A
I'm not gonna answer that question, but you are readers.
- [18:10]
B
Like, let's. Let's go dominate. Let's. Let's push. JBL had such a good appeal yesterday about what we're building. And here. I'll make. I'll make you a. I'll make you a deal, all right? Go subscribe to the Bulwark at Bulwark plus. And I promise that I will never take an enormous bag of money to provide cover for Donald Trump. Like you know, if, if NBC comes to us and they're like, well, you know, these lapsed Republicans, they would be, they would be good, you know, whatever. No, we aren't. We'll never do it.
- [18:52]
A
I thought you were going to say that. If we overtake the Free press on the subject leaderboard, you're going to take everybody who subscribed to veg.
- [19:00]
B
Big lift. Big lift.
- [19:02]
A
Come be with us on the other side, guys.
- [19:11]
B
Sam.