Bulwark Takes - Sarah’s Little Secret is Out | Bulwark on Sunday

Episode Date: March 8, 2026

Sarah Longwell joins Bill to talk about her new book—How to Eat an Elephant. Preorder Sarah's book now! https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-to-eat-an-elephant-sarah-longwell/1149619381?ean=9781250464170

Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to Bullwork on Sunday. I'm joined today by my colleague, Sarah Longwell, author of the bestselling book, even though it's not coming out in six months. How does that work? That's really impressive, you know? I don't know. You know, honestly, I was giving them a hard time because I was like, I can't not talk about this on the podcast. I'm on like the number of times I want to begin a sentence with, well, I talk about this in the book. And, you know, and like 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 is my editor. He wrote the forward. 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 biggest difficulty is not being overtaken by events to such a degree that things don't feel like they resuscary. innate 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. Yeah, that makes sense. So I guess you shouldn't go crazy. I mean, you people understand books get published at certain moments and that events happen. As long as Trump is still

around and he's president and we're dealing with Trump and Trumpism and of course the experiences as you've had over the last decade and before, for that matter, which you discussed in the book or no change. So I think you're pretty safe, but yeah, you will have to update a bit. So, okay, title of the book. So the book is How to Eat an Elephant, one voter at a time. And available for pre-order, let's just get this out of the way. Sure, sure, sure. Available for free-order, wherever you like to free-order your books.

And that's why we can, Sarah can sell many copies. It's pretty amazing with the Bullwark, once you post or 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, you can't actually get it for six months. Yes, I got to say 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 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 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 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 JVL, if we sell a sufficient number of copies gets to, you know, we'll let him moderate the focus group that everybody's so desperate for. You know, like, but that, those are, those are sort of in-in-community gags that people get. And it's, 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 and noon, or like days 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 new-ish phenomenon in this space, right? It's the new independent media. It's the way politicians have to start engaging with voters, which is to have this kind of parasycial 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 there's some

distant person they'd have no access to because that's not the world we live in anymore. So anyway, I don't remember exactly why we started talking about the meta of all of it. 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 were just like, I pulled my car over and I got it. Like, you know, or said, I don't know, a million things.

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, 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.

You know, one thing that strikes me a lot, having seen other people write books and bestsellers and then, 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 that's great, you know, you've got to keep doing this five, ten more years. It really takes time. It 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, I mean, we've been doing this together for almost a decade, I guess, right, nine years maybe. 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, I guess this is probably a phenomenon of the modern world and social media and so forth and everything else. And also, I think, credit to you and to our colleagues. I mean, how fast it's ramped up, though, the community.

And how sticky, as you say, how much people, how much it seems to mean to people. I find that personally very moving, honestly, I've got to say. I've been well known, I guess, a little bit, you know, in a little world for quite a while. And it's nice that people recognize you and say, hey, I like yours. sometimes I don't like you or, yeah, I'm glad you're on whatever show. But this is a totally different thing, the bulwark experience. Carville said this to me the other day, actually. Then he's got this fantastic ranch, which we'll come back to if you want.

But how the bulwark community is different from just being famous, you know? Yeah. 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 JVL to argue with her and vice versa. And so, no, it is, it isn't, 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 sensemaking of the moment can buoy people. and make you feel connected. Yeah, and without getting too sappy or anything, I would say that's really, I mean, look, 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 6th, he wins the 2024 election.

It is sometimes demoralizing, and it could have been totally demoralizing, honestly. I really, 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 novels or write, you know, do something else, write a memo, I don't know, whatever, you know, not being in the middle of the fight. 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 maybe for you two.

I mean, that, you know, Trump wins. People could have just decided, well, that was okay, they did their best, but we just, it's not happening and we just have to go somewhere else or 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? 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 for 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 its 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 really started to feel like, oh, man, America needs a pep talk right now. And maybe some of it too is like being proximate to JVL. JVL was also, I don't think this is, I think anybody who was 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, 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 two just analysis about Kamala. that I fundamentally disagreed with. And I was like, oh, I want to talk about how the voters didn't say, because 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 Longwell will tell you

it needs to be more moderate. And that could be me arguing from personal preference. But me arguing from what I listened to is actually like, that's the wrong fight. We do not need to actually have a fight about whether we be more progressive or more moderate. We do think, need to 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 in this, like, clear sense of who she was. They needed that parasycial 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's racism, that's sexism. Those kinds of things can be in there 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. But if you say, I am a Republican, 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. 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 because they know exactly where you're coming from because you're being clear about it. 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 of the you and I and Tim and JVL of all kind of approach pretty similarly, but coming from slightly different places, obviously, just because of who we are. But those are fights about policies, but one thing you stressed over and over, and 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, into the bullying and so forth. And that can be done by centrist, they can be done by aggressors, 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, 20, 2008, 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. 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 have to 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 that if I can interrupt us.

Yeah. There are lefty versions of abundance and centrist's versions of abundance, because people would differ on, well, what, 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 to make. Or encompasses them, maybe, yeah. And it doesn't matter what you think of abundance. You know what I'm talking about, actually. Like 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, 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 Democrat, 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 do, 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 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, well, I think Democrats are starting to have some of the conversations. Like, I'll just tell you 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, Talrico 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 it is a like what are we going to do to go fight and and Democrats want fighters like 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 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 board and read you and of course watch focus group and and watch the focus group and then read the whole book on September it really doesn't

come out until September 9th or something it's kind of it's kind of I feel like it's it's funny that it's so far off right yes and I will do a book tour when it happens well also it's 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, you know, midterms and then elections and which

parties in power. Like, 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 & Noble. You can get it on 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. Are you reading the audible book? Of course I am. Oh, good.

Okay. So some people go. Some people, it's funny. Some people don't want to or they're not asking. 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 for their publisher to, but you, you'll do that sometime in the summer, I suppose. Yeah, that's my plan. I would like to be the one,

now that you say this, I got to 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 thing, but yes, I have every intention of reading the audio book. I think given how prominent you are on 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 Wilburne famous Woolwork fans, you know. That would be cool, but I can't. I think the New Zealand accent would be good in reading the book, you know.

I want to be there to read JVL's footnotes. I will actually, no, actually, I'll let JVL read his own forward and his own got his footnotes. I'll just as really quickly as JV&L and I went through this book. 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 try to just like sit with 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.

And I keep having to cut them because they take you, you know, whatever. But he is undeterred. He is generally undeterred. All right. Talk to me about Iran. Well, I mean, let me 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 cover 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 it and so forth. And the next day the war broke out.

So how do you expect now a week into the war that the war might affect what you're writing about? In other words, how do you, what do you think the domestic politics, Trump-related effects of this war with Iran might be? How does it look to you a weekend? Yeah, so obviously there's a fair amount of the book, both about how I've changed, but also how the Republican parties changed, because we've gone like this. And, 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. were when I was 22. And obviously when I was 22, you know, we had just 9-11 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, you know, pretty convinced that we could export democracy, right? 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, Trump basically did two things to make him stand out from the rest of the PAC 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 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 J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard and this idea of, you know, no, we are, we are isolationists. Pete Hagseth. 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 were on, 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, 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. The supporters are 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'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's very much Trump's war. What happens if we're still in this war in three weeks, though? Because the voters got really not, spoils 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, 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 very demoralized public. And so 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 cultishness 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, ten weeks in, there's more bombs going off. Things are destabilized. Things are getting more expensive. Then what happens?

Or even, I suppose, if six or 12 months or 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 important, maybe just develop this for a minute and then we can let you go back to your Sunday and let people go. But you said in passing, this is why they don't. 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 they've, online and so forth, and correctly, not just made fun of it, but it's kind of,

it's bad. I mean, what do you tell the parents of these six Americans, a servicemen and women who've died, that, you know, they wasn't a war. I mean, but they're not, as always with 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 sort of wondering, we're wondering about, that. I mean, if you say it over and over, it's not a war sign. You get the 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 it to the linguistics, you know, fine tuning, but it kind of sinks in a little bit. This isn't 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? Are I overthinking that? No, I think that's right. 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, uh, 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, uh, woman from just security. And, uh, I, that was my opening question. 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 U.S. 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 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 for some reason it turns out okay and they can declare victory. And Trump's going to might try that. Although, I mean, Bill, you've been through this more than I have. astonishes me. And it's again, but that 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 these things get away from you. That's George W. Bush's mission accomplished is like a pretty good. But that's where it starts to look eerily, like they are repeating almost. beat for beat some of the things in the past that didn't work. That's such a shrewd point about the, a lot of us, a lot of people are certainly complaining,

we have to have an Oval Office address where this is a major, massive operation. It is a massive, because the 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. You can say, you know, frankly, if you can 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 the Dura 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 America politics is don't get involved in land wars anywhere, really. He was around during Vietnam. He was around during, obviously, Iraq. And as only, he was around during the war that broke out when I was in the White House,

the broke out 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 towards 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 he could,

though I've got to say he's also, maybe close with this was you've watched Trump carefully for the last 10 years. I don't know. The two social stuff, it's all such bullshit. You never know with Trump, right? He's capable of being, you know, unbelievably grandiose and then pivoting out of time, I suppose. Having said that, I feel like the megalomania is more real that it used to be. And the, you know, the, lizard cunning is less there than it used to be. I mean, the unconditional surrender and the relishing, almost like Hexath 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. 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% percent, of independence 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. It's such a good point. I mean, I someone had a conversation yesterday with our friend, actually, Andy Swick, and I can't refer to us at 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 at least a plausible story of how they're going to go back down or something. And I think it was anyway at this point that, well, actually, you know, the cocoon has gotten pretty cocoonish. The people at Mara Lago that he's having dinner with don't care about gas prices, right? 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 demagogues, he was a good con. He was a sort of a good con man. He had many failures, but he became a very good con man in politics. That's sort of that way. That's another way of saying demagogue, really. And salesmen, if you want to be nice.

And you lose those skills if you're not. you know, one thing salesmen have to be a good salesman, you have to kind of understand your customers, right? And maybe you're right. He's just less touch with them than it used to be. I wonder about that. 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 that like an empathetic, decent human does, hasn't lived his life that way. Like, you know, 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 kind of a tear on Nicole where I sort of lost my temper just about Trump's 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 soldiers, the dead soldiers. Yeah. They were doing the transfer. Yeah. 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'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 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, 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. But, I mean, you could walk away and it can go, everything can go south and you end up still being else responsible for an unbelievable mess that you've left behind, right? So it's not, I mean, I went that little thing also I was 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 started and that don't, you walk from halfway through, may not end so well. But, well, you'll have to discuss all, you'll be, 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 a 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 two 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, right? 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 there's obviously a fair amount of policy in there as it relates to like what voters say they want about policy. But it tries to take all of 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 it. 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. Amazing. It was less than 10 years ago, right? It's been a rough 10 years for the country, but it's been a fun 10 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. All right. Thank you. Bye guys.