Bulwark Takes - Bill and Sarah Ask: How Bad Can It Get?

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

Bill Kristol and Sarah Longwell discuss Bill's thoughts on possible paths 2026 could take—from a democratic rebound to a far darker slide.

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Welcome to Bulwark on Sunday. I'm Bill Crystal, joined by Sarah Longwell. It's the Sunday morning at 9.30. It turned out to be an eventful weekend. We were going to have a nice discussion on, you know, what might happen in the year ahead. And there's no big news this week. So we could really have a big picture talk. Maybe we should begin with a little bit the kind of big news in the last 24, 36 hours. Anyway, thanks, Sarah for joining me and taking your last, taking 45 minutes off from your Last Sunday of sortification, did you have a nice break? Yeah, I mean, sure. Of course, I don't want to be hiding for my family now that we're, you know, two weeks deep in this vacation. Yesterday I was like, oh, two and a half hours podcasting about Venezuela.

I feel like I'm back. But no, great vacation. I'm joking. Amazing two weeks with my family. But it's great to see you. Great to see you. Great to be back talking about politics. Yeah, good to see you.

And that was a great show you. and Mark Hurtling and Sam Stein and Joe Perticoane did yesterday, but before and after Trump's press conference at 11 a.m. And I think General Hurtling was great, as always. He had an excellent piece Friday, I guess, just the day before at the bulwark, worrying about regime, wanting to have regime change without planning in a serious way.

It's hard enough when you plan for it seriously, right? And he's been through that in Iraq. And I thought he was excellent. and you guys were excellent. But talk about, if you changed your mind about anything in the last 24 hours, and I'd say particularly you watched the Trump thing. I read it afterwards.

The Trump statement and press conference in real time, what did that feel like? I mean, when we went into it, we knew that the military operation had been successful, and that was pretty much what we knew, right? And then he was Trump. Yeah, I mean, look, there are things in which my instincts from the before times

create in me a sense of, oh, Maduro's a really bad guy. It would be great for Venezuela, were he not to be in charge? Like, there's like sort of just an objective way in which there's no world in which Maduro being gone is a bad thing. Now, could it be destabilizing? Like, this is where, like, the problem, but then there's, so there's the before times where it's like objectively, Maduro, bad, him being gone good. But then there's what I know now.

which is that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and this administration are to be trusted in no way for having a plan about what we're going to do, nor can we trust them to do things constitutionally. Right. So in the immediate aftermath of this happening, you're sort of pulled between these two tensions of, I'm glad Maduro's gone, but did they just do that legally? Like, what does this mean for the future? And so we're all waiting as we're sitting there on the live stream just trying to get some answers because we we don't know. One of the things that I keep thinking about is how even though I think that it's good that Maduro's gone, you want it to happen in the context of a foreign policy that is articulated and understood, right? If we are taking out bad dictators, is that a thing we're doing just in Venezuela? Are we doing it other places?

because Trump actually has a lot of, he likes dictators. And so, like, what is the through line? And so then Trump gets up and speaks. And honestly, the thing that, it's not that I've changed my mind, it's that when you are reacting at real time to what Trump did, you're sitting there being like, I'm sorry, what? We're just staying in Venezuela. We're in charge now.

Like, these are monumental things. And they both, they hit you hard, both because you're sitting there going, hey, I've seen this movie before, and if we don't have a plan for getting out, because Trump can sort of be at his best when he gets to hide behind the absolute professionalism and quality of the United States military, right? Their ability to go in, get a job done and get out. And so you think, like, well, there's a way for this to be maybe a net positive, but I don't know, because we don't have any information about what American foreign policy is. But then you listen to Trump in real time say boots on the ground are an option. In total, I always do this with the thumb. It's totally

the opposite of everything he ran on, everything he says he stands for, everything that a lot of his followers thinks he think he stands for. People like, and people like Tulsi Gabbard and other people in the administration, even J.D. Vance, you know that this is not their foreign policy. And so, because I'm sort of like, are the neocons back? Is that what's happening right now? And so, which there's a real irony. This is a sorry, a side note, but there's a real irony in Trump of 2026, suddenly looking a lot like the neocons of sort of 2015.

And so it's more, though, that after listening to Trump, I was like, wait, we're taking over Venezuela. Marco Rubio Pete Hegset and some group are going to do it. And you realize that on over here, there's this sliver of the professionalism and excellence of the American military and then the total apple dumpling gang idiocy of this administration. And you sort of to hold those two apart. And that's the thing that I've been trying to like reconcile, I guess, in the aftermath. No, I thought you guys really conveyed that, explained that well yesterday.

And I would be even slightly stronger in the sense that if Trump had gone up, even being Trump, And even with not having a coherent partner policy in general, even without, with all the other obvious things to worry about the illegality, the lack of congressional, you know, okay ahead of time and so forth, if he had just given a normal presidential five-minute statement, you know, we're very proud of our military. This guy, it was a bipartisan agreement that he stole the election. He wasn't recognized by us as a legitimate president, nor by the Europeans, nor by many even Latin American countries. we're going to work with everyone there and we urge peace and calm over there. We're going to work with everyone to make this stable transition. We think Venezuela can be a healthy, you know, active participant

and economic progress, blah, blah, blah, right? I mean, I would have even now then said for all my doubts about Trump and God knows Heggseth and Vance and all these guys, maybe they're, you know, this will be done in a semi-professional or competent way. It's not even neocon. It's just kind of like normal Bush

or, you know, or even, not even Bush, but Clinton kind of just, you know, foreign policy, right? And, you know, that could work out okay. It may not be great, but Panama worked out okay. I mean, Haiti for a few years. We got a little bit of better government there, and after Clinton threatened to go in in 94. You know, there are examples of that, obviously, the Balkans. So, but what was amazing about the Trump statement, and again, I didn't watch it in real time. Our family was showing up for 50th anniversary dinner, which we had last night, which was very nice.

Happy anniversary. Thank you. Thank you. but we um so but i read it obviously the whole the trump statement and then your show and it was really terrible i mean that's to say it wasn't even it goes beyond incoherence and just you know bravado but well the bravado was striking but it's the disconnect between the bravado and the reality we're going to run the country we have no troops there we did actually run panama for about a month or two after we went in we had 27 000 people in a country that's you know one-tenth of

size of Venezuela, one-eighth size of Venezuela, in population. And there was a transition, and it was okay, you know. But we had, and of course Panama was right next to Panama. Our base there, very, you know, historic American area, so to speak. And that's even Iraq. I mean, the first few months went okay, because we did have a ton of troops there that degenerated very badly. She didn't have a good plan afterwards. But here, we're saying we're running the country, and we have literally no ability to do so.

I mean, literally, we have no troops there. I don't even know what he thinks he's talking about. He thinks we can just bluster and bludgeon people doing what we want, maybe. But then the second thing that was so striking was when he threw Ms. Machado under the bus. Totally. Well, we're working with the vice president who was as guilty really is as the president in terms of anything that Maduro of all the bad stuff, almost as guilty of all the bad stuff they've done. And suddenly it's like, I mean, It shows how both, I think, maybe that they've got some thought of various deals they're going to cut with the new authoritarian government there.

But then how's that going to help the Venezuelan people? And how stable is that government going to be? Incidentally, aren't there going to be fights for succession? It's not like you can just make these things work automatically. In that respect, it was better off cutting a deal in Maduro himself, you know, and just if you want to go down that path. But again, she was such an obvious, I mean, so easy to say we are, of course, we're going to work with people who actually won the election. She's a Nobel Prize winner. She has huge status in Europe and so forth.

It'd be so an easy thing to hide behind, honestly. Whatever you privately thought three or six months from now might be happening. The failure to do that, the impulsiveness, the braggadocio, the strutting around without anything behind it, it's the worst. I now really am very well. in the sense that it feels to me like the worst of all worlds if you if you went in and said we don't honestly know what's going to happen there we're america first it's could be a mess but we got this guy who was smuggling drugs and who was indicted here and that shows we're strong okay that would be one thing but to go in in the way we've gotten in snatch them out no ground troops talk vaguely

about how we might send some in is he really going to do that what two three four weeks soon now is there going to be support for that once chaos starts to break out in the streets of caracos and people start getting killed we're going to then send troops in i don't believe trump will do that i'm not even sure you should honestly would we support that i mean so i i got to say the statement i'm now very rattled in the sense that it's i thought this could be anywhere between very mild positive to neutral to mild negative honestly and now i'm pretty worried that it could be pretty bad don't you think i just feel like I mean, I think what's your point? I'm just, these people are in charge, but it's not even the worst aspects of these people are in charge, you know? And the one part of our government that seems to work well in the military and intelligence community has to been ruined by these guys, at least not yet. They're now kind of out of it, really, in a certain way, right?

And the worst people are in it. Well, this is where, right, I guess that was the point I was trying to make, is like, you separate the success of the mission that was done by this professional whatever. And now it's in the hands of these menacing buffoons who, yeah, clearly have no plan because they were telling us. Like it was like jaw-dropping listening to that. It was jaw-dropping listening to him, throw Machado under the bus. Because part of, I don't know if you saw this, but the vice president also came out and said she was going to fight for Maduro's release. Like it was totally, it did not sound like they had her at heel. And if they're sending

in American companies to start extracting oil, which is sort of the other part to me that was interesting. And the reason that Machado isn't the pick is because this has nothing to do with democracy. Right. This is one of the big sort of key differences that settles in between the thinking around. Now, it could have been, whether you think it was right or wrong, the idea of nation building in the Middle East was about, it was about exporting democracy to the Middle East, which in the beginning, people sort of thought was a good idea. Now, later on, people were like, no, it's just a war for oil, whatever, but Trump is explicitly saying, this is a war, we want the oil back. And, or they're talking about him being a narco-terrorist. Nobody's talking about democracy. And so it is unclear,

like, if we're just doing oil extraction, is that who we are now? Like, is that why we're doing it's like it'd be nice to understand a real strategic reason. And this is where you know they don't have a plan. They can't offer you a rationale for who America is in the world and how we will consistently behave in the face of other people's actions. And I don't, you know, even the oil figures you say at least it would be, I guess, it's back to the early 20th century in a way, which was going into grab resources. That's what nations did back then. They haven't done anything until they were the groundwork for doing that. I mean, he can talk about all companies going back in. And if there's not peace and security in there, oil companies aren't going back in.

Or are we going to accompany them with tens of thousands of troops? Are we going to provide security for the oil companies in the place for every American who goes to work there? I mean, this is where I think they haven't thought it through. They don't really care. I said to a friend talking about it yesterday afternoon after I kind of got on top of the thing that maybe it's sort of like Gaza. I mean, sounds like a crazy comparison. But, you know, he got us these fires, sort of, and that was good. But then he boasted about how they're going to turn it into the Riviera and all this nonsense.

and we're going to be, you know, and then, of course, it's now a mess. It's not a horrible mess, thank God, as bad as it was, but it's not great. And we're doing nothing, and Trump's forgot, is not interested, and maybe he'll talk occasionally if, but, and I guess I said to my friend, well, maybe that's the way it kind of works out, but, and his point was very, this is different, though. You've removed ahead of state, and, and you can't, not so easy to just say, well, I guess we don't really care what happens there anymore, and he's now put himself on the line a little bit with all this oil stuff. What if we're getting no oil out of Venezuela a year from now? That's a

totally possible outcome. And the final point I'll make is just what happens on the ground of Venezuela is important, obviously. And people have this vague assumption still that, well, I guess it'll just be, what's just going to wait for us to do the next thing. These people are going to act. They're going to be fights for power. They're going to be conceivably the democratic opposition will go to the streets, presumably of regime forces will go first to try to crush whatever there out there that could cause trouble other players can come in cuba most obviously but russia i mean i just think the degree to which there's not a lot of history of smooth transitions in latin america when you remove the president you know and like everyone says okay i guess the vice president just takes over

and we're all just everyone just kind of goes back to business as usual i mean the role company thing i think is literally crazy how does you think we're going to get in there i mean chevron was in there right with with yeah chevron was but they were in there because they were getting along, maybe it was bad to do this, but with the actual government that existed. I mean, I don't know. I feel like the whole thing is, it's so badly not thought through, but also the combination, it's one thing to have an incoherent foreign policy, but if it's like Gaza or honestly like the Iran, let's say, bombing, it's one day, it's one off, maybe you did some good, maybe you didn't do as much good as you thought, it's done. Not a huge amount of after effects,

you might say. Yeah. This is not, that was what I was saying to my friend, and maybe we could end up, almost best case would be, we sort of have forgotten about this in three months, if I could put it that way. But he was, I don't know, he thought this is big enough that you can't quite work that way. Both on the ground of Venezuela and in the region, but also here in the U.S. I mean, maybe that gives us a transition to here in the U.S. How big a deal do you think this is for us, I mean, politically? Well, it all depends, right? It depends on if you, if we get mired, if we are in two years from now, or even at the end of this year, boots on the ground in Venezuela, and it's starting to unravel, and, you know, the country's seeing a lot of Pete Hegsef having to answer for whatever's going on, although it'll probably be Marco Rubio.

You know, then that's bad, right? So, because right now, you're watching the reactions, or I've been watching the reactions, and the Trump faithful are beating their chests right now. They're just saying, see, he got in, he got out, you know, this. This is this is Trump's way. He doesn't get us mired down in these things. But you're like, you don't know that. Like, you don't know if this is, they should be more cautious in their celebrations because they could very well be in a mission accomplished moment that actually like is the beginning and not anywhere close to the end. Right. They're assuming this is the end. And we might have assumed that yesterday. Like I was waiting for what he said. And then when he came out and talked, I was like, oh my God, he is talking about. putting boots on the ground, taking over Venezuela, like, this is insane. And if he doesn't take, and I just make the flip point, so quickly, is that, and if we don't send in boots on the ground, and it just dissolves into chaos, you know, people fighting each other or, you know, one coup after another, no oil companies go in because it's not stable enough. There's outward flows of refugees again because, you know, there's other people now are scared for their own future.

I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess they won't, we can stop them from coming here. I guess, but we're going to deport people back there. I just think the degree to which we could have a chaotic situation, which then does force almost a boots on the ground choice or not. And if you don't choose to do it, that has its own costs, right? I mean, we didn't put boots on the ground in Syria, to use another analogy. And 500,000 Syrians, you know, fled, you know, migrated to Europe.

And we had the migration crisis of 2015. I mean, I just think people haven't really, and this is in our hemisphere. So people haven't really, yeah, that's what's most worrisome. I mean, I hope it doesn't happen for the sake of Venezuela. the sake of us. But that thing yesterday was, as I said, I initially thought, okay, even when he first said it when I first skimmed it, you know, maybe he's just being, it's just Trump beating his chest. But there's no evidence of anyone in the government being serious, right? Who were the serious? Like, Marco Rubio's the most serious person there. And he spent his,

first of all, he didn't have prepared remarks. So he was definitely speaking off the cuff about people in Havana should be worried, which I was like, oh, are we just doing this on the fly? Feels awkward. But he spent most of his time just kissing Trump's butt and being like, this is a president who means what he said. I mean, that part of it will never stop being so weird to me just because it's weird to hear Americans talk that way because we don't usually. Like, you're used to seeing sort of four very professional people get up, just the facts. I'll tell you one last thing, sorry. Actually, two last things. One is because in modern history, we've seen this, we know that it is a lot easier to topple a dictator than it is to deal with what happens in the

aftermath. And so everybody who's stating an opinion right now should just know that like all they did was the easy part. They did it well. And I think potentially with real justification, on the legality side, I have seen legal theories for what they're standing behind. It's unclear to me how good those are, but nobody seems sure about how to interpret the legality. And even like they notified Congress in real time, like they're living on the edge of the legality, which might be on the other side of legality and actually be illegal. But it's, you know, that like international law gets violated a lot. It sounds like this is a norms more than laws situation.

so but that but it is just it's that's the easy part the easy part is taking out the dictator the hard part is what comes next and they do not seem well equipped to do it nor do they seem like they have a plan and incidentally they will other countries will be worried it's not like a ruby it's not wrong when he says cuba is more worried today than they were two days ago and columbia probably is on the other hand maybe that's good i mean it's good i don't like those people so it's nice of Cuban, the Cubans have some sleepless nights, the Cuban government. On the other hand, are we going to go in there? If not, A, if you can get worried, you can do things like get more aid from Russia to stop, you know, to cause more trouble, right? I mean, it's sort of, bullies are pretty

good at, it's sort of just a compound or to really build on your point. Bullies are good at the first step of bullying when they beat up a very weak person. They're not good at establishing stable bullying regimes. And that's kind of what they're promising now. And I do think there'll be a lot of intimidation for a short while, but not so much, I mean, that can last for a while, I guess, but it's not a basis on which to build anything at all stable. And ultimately, the bullying leads to a, we're not as strongest. I guess I'll make this point.

Trump really essentially internalized the notion that we are really strong. Now, we are very strong, but that we can just basically go in, snatch them, blow up some fish, some boats in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, and everyone's just going to hop to it and do what we want. 30 million people in Venezuela, neighboring governments in Colombia and other countries, which are not small countries,

that have their own relations to other nations and so forth. I think he's why, in that respect, he's overestimating the American power, just overestimating his own power. I mean, he is one of these guys. It has, don't you think the fumes have sort of gone to his head in this now? And, you know, and he just thinks he can snap his fingers and say, we're in charge and everyone in a 30 million people in Venezuela.

and say, okay, I guess they want to do this. We just have to all be quiet and give up our own political determination to Trump. And one other thing, which is to footnote, this trial that we're, I mean, he'll be in custody here in a criminal case. Criminal defendants have rights. The idea that that's all going to be like a piece of cake, I think, again, people, the Trump people are internalizing the notion that, you know, he's, he's perprock, that looks great, he's in jail, that looks great, he's convicted, that looks great. It's not so obvious. I mean, Noriega got off on some of the counts. Luckily, they convicted him on others back in 1991, 92.

Took two years. It was kind of a mess. And he really was guilty very directly as the general judge. I've got another example. Donald Trump, a former head of state who staged an insurrection and who broke the law in variety of ways was able to get off. The legal system can be unpredictable in that regard. That's a good.

Yeah. I mean, that was very, I think Will Salatin has an excellent piece. People should meet up on the bulwark this morning, which really makes the point that Trump is in, yeah, the sighting in the content. There's another thing yesterday we didn't even mention. We're spending a lot of a lot of time of this, but it is important, actually. He mentioned this is sort of like what happened to him in 2020. That was sent a shiffer down my spine. I mean, don't you think that really is a, I'm entitled to do this in the U.S. in 2028.

I mean, basically. But here's what, this is, this was the other point I was going to make is that the other. There's like a bunch of offhandedly, very chilling things. I think people are focused on whether it's legal or illegal. And I got to tell you guys, that part is very murky. And like, because here's, let me just quick state the legal case that they're making, which is they say that if they're going to go in, right? So we've had a warrant out for this guy.

Like the international communities, they, and he is an illegitimate leader. When we go in to snatch him, the bombing that happens around them, can then be part of it, like they're saying that's part of the process of protecting the troops on the ground, which is why they don't need to notify Congress. Now, I think that it is like tenuous, but it's not like totally out of nowhere. And I've been watching like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have both come out to be like, say vaguely roughly that. Like they need to keep us better apprised. This is murky legal territory. And not that we should rest on their thing. But like, Congress is not howling like I thought they might be about this. And so anyway, all I'm saying is that Trump is a criminal in all kinds of ways. I don't know that people saying this is illegal is going to get very far in part because everyone is very glad Maduro is gone. Like right now in this moment, Venezuelans are celebrating.

The international community is celebrating. Like no one's going to shed a tear over this dictator being gone. So does that sound right, though? Just interrupt one thing. Yeah. Venezuela is in Caracotta, in Venezuela, do not seem to be out in the street celebrating because they presume we are still intimidated by the regime, which is a very, very bad sign.

If you go to decapitate a regime, you need to take over the media and you need to sort of, frankly, help the people who are going to be your friends. It was the signal Trump sent by saying we were fined with the vice president means that the country could be not, we're not getting the kind, I mean, that Venezuela is in the U.S. are celebrating as they should, and Venezuela's. that Exile Elsa are celebrating as they should. Let's see how many of them were back in three to six months. Anyway, I'm just agreeing with your point

that I mean, the illegality is important, but it's not the most important thing. What happens on the ground event as well is the most important thing. And I know that'll sound odd to people, but I will just tell you this is like, I read all about this trying to figure it out because my instinct was like, how could,

but like it is extraordinarily gray. And like, you know, I checked in with some of the scholars that I think are the absolute smartest on stuff like this, Jack Goldsmith. And, and, and, and, Everybody's like, well, it's a little if than that. But that is, my New Year's resolution, I was going to stop interrupting myself so much to go on tangent points,

but I'm still doing it. So I've got to work harder at this. You're going to have to help me. One of the most chilling things that was an aside in his comment is when he lapsed into a thing about how the National Guard in American cities. So he's talking about going into Venezuela. and then he and like we're going to nation build there and then he just lapses into an aside where he starts talking about how we've gone into Chicago and we've gone into these American cities and why wouldn't they want us there and here's how crime is dropping and it was chilling to me to see how connected in his head it was to basically go into American cities and do whatever he wants and how that in his mind was connected to just going into Venezuela and doing whatever he wants and that is the kind of of thing that freaks me out, right? There was a bunch in what he was saying. Also, him just

talking about how we're going in for the oil, like stating that clearly. And if you go back and look at Trump's speeches, you will see that he has been talking about this for forever. It's like tariffs with him. It is a groove in his brain where he has been saying the reason you go into a country is to take their oil, to take their resources, because Trump has always had a dictator's like constitution. And so it's very consistent for him to do this. But you listen to him talking the asides and the part of this is not the prepared remarks. And you can hear how psychotic and dictatorial and authoritarian his aspirations sort of are.

I think it's so important. And Maduro's election in 2024, he said Maduro's stolen election. It was like Biden's stolen election in 2020, which what does that say about 2028? I really do think I've notched up one bit in my sense that we cannot. count on traditional American elections and respecting of election returns and so forth in 28. But that gets to, let's talk about the next year. So I wrote this little thing, whatever, five paths, pretty, you know, from very good to very bad, mildly pessimistic, I suppose. But I think there were some positive scenarios for 26, too. I don't know. What do you think?

You've thought a lot about this. So I just, just to lay out what I thought was an excellent treaties from Bill on the five paths that we could take. They're basically less paths and more scenarios, right? And they start with the most optimistic and they go down to the most pessimistic. And it's funny reading them from you because I, like, it's so clear what your lenses are for what makes a really bad outcome and what makes a really good outcome. And some of them were tethered to like Ukraine and like the state of the world. But what was not mentioned, and so you gave, if I recall correctly, and you can, since you wrote it, you had about a 20% potential for the best case scenario, which is like Democrats win the Senate, they win the House

overwhelmingly. We see an authoritarian retreat. We see public opinion crater for Trump, which allows. And I really agreed with this point. I liked how you sort of pegged public opinion to what Trump is able to do, because I believe this to the core of my being that, and we've discussed this on this show before, that really the only way you get the good outcomes is for the public to sour on Trump in a significant way. Like his ability to do things, the extent to which the Supreme Court, I think, curbs him, the extent to which Congress and other members of civil society find their spines is pegged to public opinion. And so public opinion cratering is almost is sort of the first step to what Trump can and can't do because it will change not how Trump

behaves, but how people, because we live in a democracy where people say to themselves, public sentiment does everything. If people think that Trump has everyone's support, they will continue to support him too. If they think he is going to leave office with no support, they will behave differently. I did think there were a couple places where you were like, the voters see the authoritarian project and reject it. And I was like, no, probably not that. And the one thing that I thought was missing from your analysis in all of them is, because this is for me the central thing, public opinion, which is pegged to people's behavior, public opinion is going to be most affected by the economy. And so the question that I had when I was reading your scenarios,

right, which was sort of like 20% best case scenario, 20% second best case scenario, 20% 20% neutral. And then you, I would just call it the JVL bottom, which is like the public, you know, basically still supports Trump and authoritarianism was on the march and all of the bad things. Putin gets Ukraine. I would say I kind of lived in the number two. Like I thought the above the neutral is kind of the Sarah line. And I think that it's pretty unlikely for the Senate, in part because you can already see Democrats are missing opportunities in places to nominate people that can win in some of the open seats. Like I would take the, I'm not counting out James tell Rico. I hope he does pull through, but like the Republicans really want to Jasmine Crockett,

they will beat Jasmine Crockett. And so I think the second scenario where you basically say, public opinion continues to decline for Trump. Dems can't win the Senate, but they win the House. And it goes in the right direction, but maybe not as quickly as we would like. That feels kind of right to me. But a lot of it for me depends on a couple things. One, does the Supreme Court bail Trump out on the tariffs. Because if they save him from himself and the economy starts to tick back up or rebound somewhat, I think you've Trump, they just, it mitigates how big the pushback is. But if the, if we slide into a recession in 2026, a Trump session, which is what I predicted in my 2026 predictions, is that we move into recession territory, then I think,

you start to see abroad because Trump right now is sitting at 41% approval and you and I have talked in the show I think you need to get him to 32%. And so, you know, that's a nine point. You got to, you know, you're trying to dig into people who I listen to in the focus group say Rome wasn't built in the day. You've got to give him more time. They know things aren't good, but they're not going to turn on him yet. And like those people need to fall off to really get where I think you're, you want to go in the better case scenario. And so for me, what I think about is how do you, over the next three years, diminish Trump to the point where he leaves office right around where George Bush did? And he is seen as a failure, right? And this isn't me being like an accelerationist. Like,

I want things to be so bad. But I do want people to experience Trump as Trump wants to be experienced so that it, like, I don't want him saved from himself because I want people to get the full Trump so that they know what they have to reject. So they know what we don't want again. I mean, I think that was very good. And I don't, yeah, I left the economy out just was, I don't know. So I'm slightly on the bearish side. I mean, I think the recessions more likely than not. But I just thought didn't want to make everything hinge on that. But I take the point that's a very important variable. It's not in there. I mean, I'd say two points on your last point, which I think is so important, well, one footnote would be there's a sort of virtuous cycle where public opinion

goes down, elites start to desert, the public sees elites deserting a little more than they have, they therefore go down, you know what I mean? So that was by sort of my top 20% thing, which I think it's slightly more likely than people thought that is to say if it really does slide another few points, I don't know that it could be just a gradual, you know, you pick up 30-house seats and two Senate seats, and that's okay. But it could also be a real landslide and wave in an other way and the elite that the court turns against them and so forth. So that was my sort of slightly bullish thought. But I think public opinion is so important, not just for 26 or for 28. Ron Brown Brown asked him at this point in this conversation we had, which is very, I mean,

if you think it's important that Trump or his successor, whoever it would be, Vance, or some Trumpy Republican, which is presumably going to the Republican Party will still presumably nominate someone pretty Trumpy, even if his numbers are going down quite a lot. It's a pretty good, predictor of holding the White House, the incumbent president's popularity is a pretty good predictor of whether that party's going to hold the White House. I mean, McCain wasn't like Bush in 2008, but once Bush was, you know, wherever he was at the end, 30%, they were probably because we're not going to win that election. If the incumbent was pretty popular, the incumbent party at least has a decent shot. So it's very important if you want to get beyond Trump and Trumpism to keep knocking Trump's

popularity down. It's not a 26 issue. It's a 28 issue, too. I mean, we can, attack fans all you want you can attack don junior you can whoever the nominee is going to be you can vuvio you can say it's not going to turn as much on that if if trump's overall presidency is viewed as success we're in super deep trouble in 28 if trump's overall this is in a way the point you were just making if trump's overall presidency is viewed as just a real failure politically it's bad for the country obviously a bit of cover from it but it's we're in good shape in 28 and if it's in between it's, you know, closer and that's often been the case sometimes where they've been close elections for this. So I think it's the, I would just emphasize your point about the public support. It's so

important, not just for the next year, but it's important for the next three years. And honestly, it's important for everything that comes after. So I think about this a lot that I think people right now, to the extent that they're feeling somewhat hopeful, and I'm glad that they are because that is better than kind of the hopeless posture of early 2025. We're doomed. We're never. Like I think people now are in a thing like, no, no, no, we got some fight left. us. There's, there is, there is, there is, there is room for change. And yes, people are concerned about whether or not we do have a free and fair election in 2026. But, you know, I, and I have fears around some of those things, too. But I would say those are, those are getting lessened by the fact

that, like, in our big federalist country, uh, some things seem to be holding, okay, it doesn't mean he won't try some things. I believe he is very afraid of oversight. He's very afraid of Democrats taking back the house. He likes having Mike Johnson as a puppet. Um, but I think a lot people are feeling like, no, we're on the march. Like, we got some fight left in us yet and we got some things we can do. In 2030, they're going to do another census and things are going to get a lot harder for Democrats. Democrats have got to understand that they have some real structural disadvantages coming their way politically and that the inability of them to win in some of these redder places is going to get harder and harder. Like, they don't have that Senate seat in Montana. They don't

have that Senate seat in West Virginia. And there aren't a lot of places that they're finding to pick up new places. Like, Republicans are demographically because of how people are moving. They're moving. Like, I just, I want people to understand that the way. Because of the Senate. I mean, Ron Brownstein makes this point extremely. There are 25 states that Trump has won all three elections. Right now, they have 50 Republican senators. Yes. Yeah, unless you're going to explain how a Democrat is going to win a state, not just these purple states, Georgia and stuff, which is good, but it actually win a state that Trump has won

in a Senate race, which hasn't happened in a long time. Yes, just to make your point, I mean, the Senate's an additional burden for the Democrats just politically. Politically. Politically. And so, and I think that the popular vote, which they used to rely on, or like, you know, like these are, things are changing and they're not going in the right direction. And so Democrats are going to have to think if they want to save democracy, they want to save America, you cannot think about 2026 alone and you cannot think about 2028 alone. I need people to look into the future because that's the fate of America. And we have to decide whether the march is something where we're like, we're going to build the biggest, broadest coalition possible in order to stamp out what is happening now. the toxic forces Donald Trump unleashed on our politics, not just Trump himself, but J.D. Vance and the future of all the people that are now going to be in the Republican Party, they are Trump light. They are people that he raised up. The voters are people that he raised up. This is a root and branch operation. And people are going to have to start getting their heads around the fact that this is a root and branch operation. And I believe that that case is helped significantly by Trump just doing what he's trying to do. I'm not trying to trick him into making bad decisions. Trump do. Trump do.

the things that he's doing is going to leave people worse off in all kinds of ways. And I think that the economy, if it goes into recession, that does help accelerate people's understanding that Donald Trump is a failure, which I think creates, however, but sorry, to keep it to interrupt myself, but Democrats have to be thinking for the long term, because what Trump does is just one side of the equation. What Democrats do is the other side. And this is not a question of more moderate versus more progressive. I actually think that framework is silly. It is a question of how are you going to build the biggest, broadest coalition? How are you going to hold people who are the never Trump red dog Republicans into a coalition and bring on a lot of the voters who were sort of Trump

populist voters, red-pilled voters? How are you going to get Hispanics back? How are you going to think about all of these different groups? And how are you going to run candidates who can who can compete in an environment that's getting increasingly challenging for Democrats just from a structural standpoint. I think that's really well said. The good thing to come close to ending on, I suppose. I mean, no, I really think that's crucial. It's less crucial for 26 itself because that's mostly a referendum on Trump. And if you want to check Trump, you're going to vote for the Democrat, not agonized too much, maybe.

I mean, there's some, you'll lose a couple of points, supported to with bad candidates and so forth. Very important for 27, 28. Obviously, when you have a presumably open seat presidential race where people start. to care. Though even there, if Trump is very, very weak, probably Democrats have an advantage going into the presidential, maybe not the Senate. But then so important, I couldn't agree more for the future. And therefore, you're absolutely right. So it's hard to juggle these things, right? You've got to be fighting Trump and building your own new party, really, or a new kind of party, I would say, a big coalition overcoming. I totally agree the backward-looking moderate versus progressive fights,

which I don't think of really quite addressed the issues that are coming down the pike either. I'd say my negative, my JVL-like scenarios, focus less on public opinion and more on just power, power. You can write a scenario in America where with ICE at 50,000, not, you know, people and $150 million to spend, with hecksteth controlling promotions in the military, with, you know, the power, the Department of Justice going down the path is going. just the power ministries become very effect. They're clunky and clumsy, and the people running them were kind of clownish, but it's just a lot of power, you know,

and people need to, I think, also think harder about how to undercut Trump's power in this case. I mean, I think Epstein has been very, I think it's terrible. It reflects a lot about America, and it's very much worth there for finding out the truth about all that. It's also the case that it honestly hurts the attempt

to sort of mobilize the justice, Department against against America you know because people look at this and say well they're not they're supposed to release the stuff where is this and they lose faith in bondi they lose faith in patel they lose they see that you can have unfortunately a situation where the corruption can go down a little more into the ranks than what would like and and so forth so anyway just being a little more power politics conscious i think is important for the opposition too because it's important to undercut that as much as possible partly because you can have the best outcome possible in in 2028 and if you take over a country where you've got out of control, you know, DHS and a DOJ

that's doesn't have any, you know, memory of professional responsibility and a military that's been corrupted to some degree, that's a very dangerous situation. So that's my sort of, my more negative one assumes they get away with much more on the power side of things. And I hope that's not the case. I do find that our liberal friends are very, they're very big on messaging, but they should think a little more about power actually and what they could do to stop that. federalism is a very important part of that helping that you know putting pressure on the Supreme Court to uphold the district judges who are doing the right thing putting pressure on corporations I mean what if the country three years is a stupid example but what if two or three years are

now all three major networks are like Barry Weiss and CBS what if or or only Barry Weiss of CBS is or even this even CBS is backsliding to normalcy because people are thinking that's that's ridiculous what she's doing that's not a trivial little thing right I mean it's it is not the most important thing, but it's one of many, many instances where the way in which actual institutions and who controls them and how much power the people who control them have can matter, don't you think? Yes. This is, well, this is when people are like, what keeps you up at night, me, it's like the fact that Donald Trump's allies are all seizing the means of communications, whether it, and whether it's new allies like Zuckerberg and people who got

on board after Trump's second election, or whether it's Elon, who I think quite prescient bought X and bought himself an enormous not just not it's not like he didn't just bought he bought himself like the dissemination platform for ideas and now he dominates them I of course was on it yesterday over Venezuela and listening to the speech and like Elon is all over it and now you've got the CBS it's so although it's so funny I was

over the break I was somebody I was talking to people about the Barry Weiss thing and everybody's like I don't know who that is and you forget that people that people will only see CBS in its current iteration without understanding the context under which that is happening. Like, nobody, regular people aren't following the fact that Larry Ellison bought it and stalled Barry Weiss to get the merger he wanted with Paramount. Like, that's not a thing regular people know about our viewers who are smart do, but like, or very tapped in. And I think you're smart.

But like just normal people who aren't following it have no idea who she is and no idea why this is happening. And so it is the kind of thing that can go under the radar and all of a sudden. The entire media environment is flooded with Trump's sympathetic media stations and platforms, including the social media platforms, like TikTok and everything else, which he has basically, like TikTok is going to be owned by his friends too. This is a, then this is my point about I need Democrats to have an offense mentality that isn't just reacting to Trump. And this is going to take a change in mentality that right now, We have a defensive mentality. We have an analysis mentality. As opposed to, I want to build things.

I want to get in the game. We got to go after people. You want things to be illegal. Guys, you want people to view them as illegal if they are? Well, then we need a bunch of scholars that we are able to elevate on that point. Now, again, well, whatever. I'm not going to get into it. People are really in the chat, like, mad at me about the legality stuff,

because I think they're listening to a lot of... I mean, I'm one tick for whatever it's worth, more on the illegality side than you. But again, I think you're right to say, this is not the fundamental issue. Panama happened. The Balkans happened. I mean, things have happened without Libya. Obama did Libya without congressional authorization. It's worth arguing about and discussing fundamental judgment of then as well is not

going to be based on a bunch of law professors debating the complexities of the War Powers Act and resolution and whether he notified Congress in the right way. how much the indictment here gives them out from actually getting congressional authorization and all that. So I very much agree with that. So don't worry about the chat. You're very sensitive to the chat. You know, it's kind of a little. Well, I mean, I want to take the legality of it seriously. But I just, I went and like read a bunch of people who know a lot about it. And they were all kind of like, well. And so I was like, okay, part of it is that I am trying to find where it is where you oppose Trump on what. what he's doing that I think is most effective, right? I can't, I can't sort of turn off the

strategist in me. And to me, it's, to me, it is on the fact that Trump is going to take over a country. Like, to me, that is the gobsmacking part. That is the unprecedented part. That is the part that Trump's own allies and Trump's own supporters will oppose. And, and so I guess that's why my brain jumps to that. And because this is everything. Going forward is the offense. mentality. It is we are going to need a sustained campaign going after Stephen Miller and explaining why Stephen Miller is an evil bastard who is acting extra constitutionally who is trying to, like you have to lean into the excesses of what this administration is doing because that's the part that the American people get uncomfortable with. They're not uncomfortable with the border

being shut down. They're just not. They think that's one of the things Trump did well. They don't like you snatching people off the street who have no criminal rights. record, who've been here for 20 years. They don't like the National Guard being in American cities. They don't like us going in nation building in Venezuela. They don't like the way that the economy is going. They don't like the tariffs. And so I don't understand why Democrats aren't every day. Like, they can't just do this sort of anodyne affordability message. Like, they should be talking about affordability. That's good. But it's like they get it in like a talking point kind of way, as opposed to a righteous way in which they are fighting for the

American people. And for the people who sit in the chat being like, Sarah is still a Republican, her Republican roots are showing, you know, it's funny because I do often separate my own personal beliefs around what I think is the best way to manage an economy versus what I know voters want because voters do want a more populist economic program. They just do. They want, including a lot of Trump voters, right? They do want a focus on, you know, But just they want to keep their government programs and they want the government to spend more. They just want it to spend it on America and not foreign things. No, I do find this always in the focus group, and that he's gotten distracted.

He's not fighting for us. He's off on his own vanity projects, whether it's the Kennedy Center and the East Wing or Venezuela in a way, right? I mean, incidentally, I was talking with an old neo-con friend yesterday, and we agreed that we spent 10 years fighting, you know, the war for oil stuff with Iraq, which I think was an unfair charge. of Iraq, whatever the other problems of Iraq. And generally in 30 years fighting this Marxist account of American foreign policy in the Cold War and stuff, for those of us who are older. But you know what? No war for oil is a fine slogan for me now. It's a correct slogan. It is for oil. They're fighting it for. Trump said it's for the sake of oil. And you know what? We shouldn't go to war for the sake of oil, especially when in this case, I mean, it's honestly,

the economic argument is kind of illiterate too. What it was, the oil is not wildly expensive. We're not shorter, but we're making a ton of it. We're net, I think. exporters now on energy and well because Venezuela has big oil fields we're going to risk totally destabilizing the region risk America risk having to send troops back in and so forth i mean i i do very much agree that um yeah this is not the we need to think hard about what the right message and different people have different messages and so the left's entitled to have their message and the centrist can have their message and so forth then is what happens in Venezuela i guess i'll come bring it back down and ask to the where we began though and ask

I do think what happens on the ground in Venezuela is non-trivially important. Everyone says, Americans don't care about foreign policy. If people have the sense to 10 months for now that it's stable, it's calm, oil companies are there, we have adequate government. Some Venezuelans are going back home. That's one thing. I think it's less likely, not impossible. But I hope for Venezuela's cases, that might be the case.

But what they're doing isn't pushing in that direction. And to the degree it's chaotic and just to flop, you know, all the bravado that they, engaged in yesterday, comes back to haunt them a bit. It is mission, it's mission accomplished on steroids in a way, right? I mean, it's like, it's declaring mission accomplished. Bush gave that speech. I looked it up six weeks after the invasion. It was a lull where it looked like it had gone well. We'd got rid of Saddam. It wasn't the Civil War hadn't broken out yet, but I'm not defending Bush. It was a foolish to stand up there with that backward drop and so forth. But that was six weeks after the invasion. Hegstaff and Trump declared mission accomplished 12 hours. Which is literally

crazy. And people aren't, in that respect, voters understand some things. One is that you cannot do that in a foreign policy. And as Mark Gertling said, in a war, these things take unexpected paths. And this is, I'll just say as a matter of strategy, you've got to look forward, right? Like, you've got, I just, I need people to realize that this fight, people are tired because we've been fighting for a decade. But actually, like, the fight going into the next four years, years, five years is extraordinarily important. And there has to be a shift away from Trump did these things that were bad and whatever to here is what is happening to the country. Here is like a different vision for what we want it to be. And so like the offense mentality is different

from a defensive mentality. And it is also a forward looking mentality as opposed to a backward looking mentality. And that is hard because you have to vision to do that. You have to know where you're going. And so what I'm asking is that while we look, Venezuela is a perfect example of them having no vision for where they're going. That means we have to have vision. We have to have vision about a place we're going and a theory of the case. And like, it can't be us because we're not Democrats. Like, or we are, we are part of the broader pro-democracy coalition that wants to see Democrats succeed in this moment. And we want them to succeed in ways that we, We may, like, not love on policy grounds, but, like, if it helps them build a durable

pro-democracy coalition that pulls America back from the brink of Trumpism, like, we're in, but everybody has to start looking forward to the fight and not backward at it. Yeah, so well said, such a good note to end on. And really an interesting one that we'll have plenty of time to plenty of occasions to discuss over the next year, over the next three years. I think you're right. Keeping that one-year perspective and the three-year perspective in mind is so important. and that was so well said.

Sarah, thank you for taking the time. Go back to see your family for one last 12-hour stretch here before we really get back on the salt mines. And so thanks for joining me today.