Bulwark Takes - Sarah Longwell Slams Executive Orders as Political Revenge

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Sarah Longwell joins Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House to break down Trump’s insane executive order targeting Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor.  Watch Deadline: White House

Hey, everyone. Sarah Longwell here from the bulwark. I just sat down with Nicole Wallace to talk about this breaking news around Trump's insane issuing of executive orders to have Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs investigated for speaking out against him. Obviously, I had a lot to say about this. Go listen. Well, first of all, let me just say how insane it is that the mechanism by which he is attacking these people is an executive order. Why would that be? I mean, it's one thing if he wants to be upset or he wants to pursue litigation, if he thinks claims have been made. But to sign an executive order attacking these people, especially Chris Krebs. I mean, Chris Krebs, all he did was rebuke the president's false claim that the election wasn't stolen as somebody in his administration. And here's what Trump is trying to do. Look, I don't know how much of it you never know with Donald

Trump. Is he trying to distract you like a like a guy with a laser pointer in the media is a bunch of cats? Is he trying to get people to chase things so they stop talking about the fact that he caved and did a total about face on the tariffs after telling us for days that he wasn't going to do a pause and now he's suddenly pausing because the world economy is collapsing? Is he doing this as a distraction? I don't know, but on its face, it is incredibly pernicious for him to sign executive orders and launch investigations into people simply for speaking out against what they saw from his administration. And also what he was saying there is though it's like highly unusual. Look, lots of books get written by people who are insiders in administrations who talk about

the things that happened in the rooms. That's actually very common. That's what reporters do. And what he's trying to do here, though, is to make people afraid of speaking out against him, not just people from before, but people who are there now, people who have an understanding of what he's doing and who, as people are looking for insight, he's saying, if you leak, because people leak against Trump all the time. I mean, nobody leaks against Trump more because the people inside are trying to make Trump not do crazy things, right, by telling the media he's about to do crazy things. And so leaking is like a mechanism for them to curb some of Trump's worst impulses. And so he's trying to make people afraid by saying he's going to launch

investigations into anybody who speaks out. I mean, this is some of the most insane authoritarian is like authoritarian stuff we've seen out of him. Sorry, you made a perfect point, though, I think, to start this conversation about the laser pointer. I mean, the two stories that have left a mark are the manmade debacle of the tariff announcement, as well as Signalgate, another manmade national security crisis. Talk about sort of the wear and tear that those two sort of twin self-inflicted crises have taken on his early presidency? Well, just on Signalgate really quickly, the idea that Donald Trump is a real stalwart around classified information, considering that both he left a bunch of classified documents in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. He refused to return those documents. He's also held nobody

accountable for Signalgate. And the only reason we stopped talking about the fact that our national security was so compromised by that because they added a journalist to their signal chain as they discussed attack plans is because the economy was crashing around us. And this is what Donald Trump does, right? He lurches us from crisis to crisis, many of them of his own making. And then he acts like he's solved the crisis when he does something like announce a 90 day pause. But these are things that had been breaking through, especially the economic. I mean, I've been doing focus groups all week. People are very nervous about the state of the economy. They are very scared. People who are his supporters have been very nervous about

what they're seeing. And so, you know, I just, when you say the wear and tear, here's what I know. I know that it usually takes until the summer for somebody's own voters, a president's own voters to start to say, I'm not sure I made the right choice or I'm not liking what I'm seeing. Donald Trump, it's taken him two months before he's got voters starting to say, what is this guy doing and why is he doing it? This is nuts. I want to ask you a more cool question about politics. And then I want to bring John Howman into our conversation. Miles Taylor has responded to Trump's attack. One of the things that we've talked about for nine years, and it feels like snowflakes, right?

But there is a thing in the Trump voter that they need an off-ramp. And I wonder if the tariffs and the intentional damage to the economy is one such off ramp. You know, Donald Trump talked awkwardly about groceries, but he did run on making things cheaper. And he did the day he got elected, start talking about things going up. I wonder if that sort of bait and switch has registered. No, it is absolutely registered. And here's the thing. Like,

I always try to make this distinction between the hardcore MAGA types, right, who are going to give Trump a lot of leeway. And the big part of the Trump voter coalition were just people who wanted prices lowered. And they're different from hardcore MAGA people, right? They wanted things to be cheaper. Trump's a businessman. I think he's going to make things cheaper. And when he fails to do that, it drives a knife through the, like, right through the heart of the central mythology around Trump, which is that his business acumen can somehow make the economy better for everybody. And so that's what's happening right now is people are feeling like, oh, wait, he's not making the economy better. Prices aren't going down. And I think that that is where that is the off ramp, not for everybody in the Trump coalition, but for a certain chunk

of voters. Sorry, you get the last word. Yeah, look, I don't want to give Trump any ideas about who to go after. But I will say this. He has always reserved his greatest ire for people who were members of the Republican Party who have stood up to him. And as a result, you have seen the vast majority of the Republican Party cave. But people should come to Chris and Miles' defenses here. Like, this is a, if people let them hang out to dry, if people act like this is OK because it's not them, they're going to get to you eventually. And so I hope all the people in the first part of the Trump administration who think that this is vile, who maybe also spoke out against him. I hope that everybody speaks up now to say that this is wrong.