No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump pulls last ditch stunt to claw back attention from Kamala

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

Trump has his worst week yet of the campaign as he tries a hail mary to claw back some attention. Brian interviews host of The Focus Group at The Bulwark, Sarah Longwell, about swing voters�� reactions to Kamala Harris, how much upside there still is for her, and how much of a drag JD Vance will be on Trump’s ticket.Pre-order Shameless & buy tour tickets: https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/shamelessShop merch: https://briantylercohen.com/shopYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/briantylercohenTwitter: https://twitter.com/briantylercohenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/briantylercohenInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/briantylercohenPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/briantylercohenNewsletter: https://www.briantylercohen.com/sign-upWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about Trump's worst week yet of his campaign and the Hail Mary he just used to try and claw back some attention. And I interview the host of the focus group at the bulwark, Sarah Longwell, about swing voters' reactions to Kamala Harris, how much upside there still is for her, and how much of a drag J.D. Vance is on Trump's ticket. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. So this is the situation that Donald Trump is in right now. The guy went from being the hands-down favorite to win re-election to the point that he picked a VP candidate. it with zero electoral value to, within the course of a week, watching Joe Biden drop out, the party rally around Kamala Harris and lightning speed, the outpouring of support from young people and people of color, which were the exact groups that Biden had lost,

her become a cultural phenomenon, and the polling that Trump had been running away with slingshot back in the other direction. I say this as someone who fully recognizes that Democrats are usually their own worst enemies, but I cannot imagine how the last week could have gone better for Kamala Harris. Donald Trump clearly sees that, which is why he's so desperate to do anything to get the one thing that he needs more than anything back, which is attention. So here's his latest stunt. He posted this on Truth Social.

I will be going back to Butler, Pennsylvania for a big and beautiful rally, honoring the soul of our beloved firefighter hero, Corey, and those brave patriots injured two weeks ago. What a day it will be. Fight, fight, fight, stay tuned for details. Like, this is basically the political equivalent of the high. hot toa girl doing new interviews where she just says Haktua. Trump is so desperate for that quaint time where he was up in the polls. Biden had come off a dismal debate performance

and then he survived an assassination attempt that he would go on to milk relentlessly that he's literally going back to his greatest hits right now. It really is par for the course, though, considering Trump loves wallowing in victimhood. It is the cornerstone of his entire campaign. He's the victim at the hands of the Democrats, his supporters are victims at the hands of the socialism that's being imposed on them, everyone's the victim. That is the theme of the Trump candidacy. And so Trump, of course, wants to go back to that time

where he could present himself as the biggest victim, the biggest martyr of all in Butler, Pennsylvania. He didn't see Kamala's ascendant campaign focused on the future and think, hey, maybe I should give voters something to vote for. Maybe I should create a vision for the future. Instead, he's like, this campaign is a cult of personality surrounding me, Donald Trump, so let's just go back to a time where something happened to me and we can talk again about that thing that happened to me.

Honestly, for the showman that Trump claims to be, this really is transparent and desperate. But frankly, I can't see how there's not a whole lot else he has going for him. His VP is such a drag on the ticket that even Ben Shapiro came out and said this. Speaking of errors that Republicans are going to have to avoid. So, J.D. Vance is the vice presidential nominee for President Trump. Now, if you had a time machine, if you go back two weeks, What do you have picked J.D. Vance again? I doubt it.

And Dave Portnoy from Barcelona Sports, definitely an outlet that trends right, called J.D. Vance's new plan to apparently give tax advantages only to people who have kids, which is part of his war on single people, always a great idea for a campaign, quote, fucking idiotic and then called Vance a moron. So yeah, when things are going so badly in your campaign that going to the place where someone tried to murder you is the best option, that pretty clearly sums up the state. of this race. But I do want to take a minute here to recognize what we've been able to accomplish. Like, I remember just a couple of weeks back, fully in the throes of despair, along with, I'm sure,

the rest of you, and watching voters in the UK reject a far-right labor party, and then watching all of the left-wing parties in France banned together in a matter of, like, days to reject far-right Marine Le Pen's party, and then watching Donald Trump's ascendant campaign right here in the U.S. and thinking, why can't we have nice things? Why does everything have? have to be so immovable and difficult here. And then in the course of days, we went through about a decade's worth of political upheaval and everything actually came together and defied the longest possible odds. And we got it done. And we still have a long, tough battle ahead. But for the first time, I feel a lot of hope and I do believe that we're really well positioned

to win. So this is the time to double down, to find your circles of people, to make sure that everybody has a plan to vote and make the most of these final 100 days so that we can make history and elect Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States. Next up is my interview with Sarah Longwell, but first, two quick announcements. My book tour is just about sold out in New York, so if you want to come to the New York show with Al Franken, I'd recommend grabbing tickets now. There are still tickets available in L.A. and D.C., and to grab any of those, click the link in the show notes of this episode or check out Brian Tyler Cohen.com slash book.

And second, we are just two weeks away from my book release. So if you haven't yet ordered shameless and you want the free signed bookplate that's only available in this pre-order period, again, you can head over to Brian Tyler Cohen.com slash book or click that same link in the show notes. I really appreciate it. Okay. Here's my interview with Sarah Longwell. Now we've got political strategist, founder of Republican voters against Trump and host of the Focus Group podcast at The Bullwork, Sarah Longwell. Sarah, thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah.

Hey, man. Thanks for having me. Let's not bury the lead here. You've spoken to actual voters in these focus groups that you run. What has been the swing voter reaction to Kamala Harris? Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I've been asking about Kamala Harris now for years. And so I'm pretty used to the way voters talk about her.

And for the longest time, the way that they talk is sort of negative-ish, but it is an impression. They have a negative impression born of the fact that they don't see her, they don't feel like they know her, they don't know what she does. And some of this is just a function of being the vice president where your role is just much more hidden from public view. But that has been the sense of people. And since the switch happens, we've done a couple of focus groups. And there's a number of people. There's still a bunch of people saying that same thing.

They're like, okay, well, I don't really know what she does or I haven't seen that much of her. But there's also a lot of people saying, man, this is a breath of fresh air. Oh, I'm so excited. And so I think that there's a little bit of both, right? there is, so number one, the real people are always, they're always lagging behind the speed of social media, right? So like, I often find that the Twitter discourse is not often reached like normies who are just, you know, not sitting on Twitter all day like the rest of us. Not steeped in the toxic stew.

That's right. That's right. And so for them, there's still like a lot of open questions, but I would say the main takeaway is that people were so desperate for an alternative. to the Trump-Biden rematch, that mainly what you get is like new life of curiosity. Hey, let me hear her pitch. I'm open. I'm ready to find out more, want to learn more. And so I think that that's the main thing that people don't have a baked-in negative impression or a baked-in negative opinion of her. They just have that impression, which can be turned around. Like, she's got the opportunity now to reintroduce herself to America. And I think that's what's happening in this moment. And it's going to take a little time before I think voters have decided

how they feel after having watched her for a couple weeks. Well, I feel like for some people, when the Democratic nominee was Joe Biden, Donald Trump, for them, felt like a pill that they were willing to swallow just by virtue of how dissatisfied they were with Biden. But has there been any change to how Trump is perceived now that the Democratic alternative isn't Joe Biden? You know, it's not so much that it is Trump being perceived differently. It's more that I think there was a sense after the assassination attempt, like you see this in some of the polling that his approval rating has gone up a bit. But what I've seen from swing voters especially is the idea of after we ask people after

the assassination attempt, do you think this will change Trump? Do you think he'll behave differently? And everyone was like, no. Like this guy. And they were quick to say, actually, I wondered if there was going to need to be more like education on this point. But they, right away, they said Donald Trump traffics in violent rhetoric. If this happened to somebody else, he would be terrible about it. In fact, and then some people brought up Paul Pelosi as evidence that Donald Trump. So like nobody thinks Donald Trump is changing or that he's going to be different to the extent that people, especially swing voters. So people who voted for, and the way that swing, but we talk about swing voters or categorize them is people who voted for Trump in 16 and then voted for Biden

and 20. And we've been seeing a lot of backsliding in the groups for people who voted for Biden and 20, but are now going back to Trump because they think either Biden is too old. That was like the number one thing you heard. I don't think you can make it through four more years, irresponsible to put him back in the White House, or it was about the economy. The economy really was a driving force where Trump just had the edge on him. And so the thing about Trump is that people's opinions about Trump are super baked. And people have, there's always, I was what we're trying to talk about the opportunity cost for people.

So for a lot of people who have voted for Trump in the past, they've lost the people in their lives or they've had the fights or they've made the moral concessions or whatever. And so people, people have a pretty fixed view of who he is and how he relates to their sense of themselves in voting for him. And so it really is about whether or not Kamala Harris, can persuade these folks that she is a better alternative. I think out of the gate, there's a little bit from people of, did she earn it? You know, it feels like she just got put in there, which is why they lean into the DEI

president stuff. It is because they try to play into this idea of like she didn't earn it. She just got put here because that is something that some of these voters are sensitive to. However, they're also open, like I said. And so there's a chance for her based on her performance. Like if she performs like a San Francisco progressive, they won't like that. And they will go back to being double haters. But right now, they're just single haters and kind of open to understand, okay, who is this person?

And what might she do for me? Now, we're seeing a lot of tied polling in this race. I think Reuters, Epsos, for example, was within the margin of error. Detroit News just released a poll that showed them 41 to 41 in Michigan, I believe, Kamala Harris may have been up a third of a point. But this is after Trump's gauzy RNC propaganda fest and after he survived an assassination attempt that the guy milked for all that it was worth. So is it fair to say that if his polling is where it's at now, this is the ceiling for Donald Trump while Kamala's polling is her floor, considering a lot of these voters don't know who she is

yet, are open to hearing what she has to say. Yeah, I think that's fair. Look, I think we sort of know what Donald Trump's ceiling is and one of the it's like it's like it's like 46 to 47 yeah it's like 47 percent uh and I think for her here so when I actually have a piece in the Atlantic today about this where uh you know there's a lot of times where I listen to voter so often I mean multiple times a week in in and out I've heard them talk about Kamala Harris forever and I've heard this this criticism of but I don't see her I don't know what she does she was so promising and now she's invisible that it just always kind of washes over me I'm like yeah people don't really like Kamala Harris. But when the context was shifting on Biden and it was really looking like,

oh, maybe we were going to contemplate a real Kamala Harris presidency or candidacy. I started listening to it with that in mind. And actually what I realized I was hearing was that negative impression, but also all the upside. Because if what they're saying is, I don't know or I don't see her, what they mean is, I don't know, she could be good, but she'd have to show it to me. And so I think that we are at the beginning of her potential upside. I don't I don't think that I think the polling right now like we are when this happened. It happened on Sunday. Like it's Friday. I think we should all. It feels like the last like four days have felt like like six months. Yeah. No, it feels long. The time is a weird phenomenon at the moment. But I do think it's fair to say that people, the polling right now

is reflecting, I think, a relief from people that it is not this faded choice that they had before that they were so unhappy with. But I also don't think it reflects people's true feelings about her after watching her for a little while. And so I think that we are far from what her potential ceiling could be. And I do think, you know, ultimately, oh, there's a lot of people voting for Trump that hold their nose and vote for Trump. And so I think the question is, is like, can she, and I've been of the opinion, and you may disagree because we don't, we're not quite aligned politically. But I think that she's going to pivot to the center. She doesn't have to run a primary, right? The clips that they're going to use from her from the 2020 Democratic primary

where she was trying to outflank everyone on the left, right? And so they're going to try to hit her with those comments. But if she behaves, right, and she does what a normal politician does in a general election, which is tacked to the center, there is, there are voters available that are right-leading independence, soft GOP voters, that depending on the kind of campaign she runs, she could pick up. And let me just tell you, if J.D. Vance can go from saying that Trump is America's Hitler to being his vice president, the sky is the limit. Kamala Harris can pivot to the center of it. Yeah. Well, actually, I was going to ask you about that. So the tax she seems to have taken is that there are a few. One is that, you know, she is the prosecutor running against a

convicted felon. So that's one. There is the new campaign slogan of we're not going back. and that harkens back to all of the chaos that happened during the Trump administration. And then, you know, looking forward, her agenda item, she's focused especially heavily on abortion rights. That's the issue that she's advocated for, you know, across the country for the last year or so. So what do you think about these decisions in terms of, you know, making them the central tenets of her campaign? Yeah, I think it's fine. And I've got really no complaints. I think she has exceeded all expectations in the way that she has rolled out.

her campaign. I even think the way that it reminds you how important it is to be an effective communicator. I mean, even watching her with Netanyahu and being able to sort of say the thing that is a little more nuanced about how she unequivocally stands with Israel, and yet she has humanitarian concerns about Gaza. Those two things can exist in the world together. Who sounds like somebody who doesn't spend enough time on Twitter. Yeah, but she's articulating what I think is a sweet spot for sort of Democrat voters and centrist voters. And so I think so far so good, I do think she is going to have to take a little bit of a tougher position on the border. The border is where Democrats

are most vulnerable. It is where she is vulnerable. They're having a stupid debate right now. It's like a proxy debate over whether she was the czar and the border czar. That's dumb. The point is, is, does she, like, what does she think about immigration policy? Because this is where that Biden gets killed with swing voters on immigration and he gets killed in the swing states on immigration. Democrats get so there's a reason John Federman is much more of a border hawk because in Pennsylvania people care about it. And so I think that her being able to take, again, a nuanced position about America being a welcoming place that is a place that is big enough and rich enough to have new people come while also saying this is a nation of laws and we can't

just have people pouring across the border and talking about the fact that since, you know, they took executive action on the border. Border crossings are down. And also Donald Trump refused. He scuttled the immigration deal that they tried to build with James Langford, very conservative senator. And so I think if her being able to prosecute that, like that was Biden's struggle as like just couldn't get there to make that case to people. And so many people sort of didn't get it. But I think she can. And so I think there's a couple issues. And then I do also think she's going to have to, again, thread the needle on the economy. Another place where Biden was struggling. Which is so bizarre because right, I mean, if Donald Trump or any Republican had a

fraction of the economy that we have right now where we have a record high stock market, 16 million jobs added, the longest stretch of 4% or sub 4% unemployment in half a century, you know, wages outpacing inflation, they would be, they would be, I mean, they beat their chess over this idea that Donald Trump was great on the economy. The guy lost three million jobs he had the worst presidency on on jobs in the economy in modern american history yeah donald trump would be out there being like best economy for women best economy for black people hey buddy has your 401k uh and i think that right now though where biden struggled a little bit was a the early branding of bidenomics before the economy had turned around um and so people were like not still mad at him

but also if you look in the data one of the places where uh democrats are struggling or Biden is running way but was running way behind his 2020 numbers is with low-income voters. And the reason is is that on the lower income voters, they're not feeling the macroeconomic gains. They're saying, I got a job, but it doesn't keep pace with inflation. Grocery's killing me. Gas is killing me. Cost of housing is killing me. And so this is another one where communication really matters. You have to be able to say, we have the best economic recovery of any industrialized nation in the world. We have record growth here and record growth here, but also we are not doing enough for low-income families who are having trouble making ends meet because inflation is still a

problem. Like, you just have to be able to get there where I think people felt about Biden, like, you know, he was so defensive of his record that he constantly wanted to put forward this rosy economic picture without sort of acknowledging that there's still a lot of pain out there. Right. The gut reaction from Joe Biden was just to kind of immediately get defensive and say, look, it's much better than you think, and that's not the thing that's going to break through. And actually, that's going to have the opposite effect because people are going to, you know, want to push back against this notion that actually everything is fine, completely fine, when people are still struggling.

But I do want to pivot to the Veep Stakes now. So how much of an impact could Kamala's VP pick have, especially with, you know, some governors and Pennsylvania's from key battleground states as possible choices here? Yeah, so I love the Veep Stakes conversation because, I don't know, it doesn't really matter. She's going to pick who she's going to pick, and I can't tell you much. But they're all good choices. This is all good, all upside. So here's the thing.

My personal favorite, I'm from Pennsylvania. I think Josh Shapiro, she's got to win Pennsylvania. You got to lock that state up. I think it's a big piece of her momentum. He is young. He is like, he's a political athlete. I'd go get him. I'd use him.

They know each other from their days as AG's. But Kelly, I think Kelly is a little bit of a bore. Like, I think he's exciting on paper, astronaut, but he's actually kind of like a math guy. And so, you know, he was an astronaut. And so he's not, he's not, like, rhetorically exciting. Whereas I think that Josh Shapiro would absolutely annihilate J.D. Vance in a debate. That being said, you know, you take Bashir, you know, with his drawl. And like, every single one of them does the thing that she needs, which is balances the ticket and sort of signals to basically white dudes.

I was just going to say they all do that. do the thing that she needs. They all do the thing that she needs, which is to be a white guy. Hey, listen, this is the funniest thing about this and people calling her the DEI pick is like, she was a prosecutor and then AG and then a senator and then vice president and now a presidential candidate. That's like a perfectly normal trajectory of success, whereas like we're all sitting around being like, which white guy who's definitely straight? I'm like, they're looking to check that box. I'm like, that's the DEI pick right there. Exactly. Exactly. But that's the They're all good.

You had alluded to sexual orientation. So I want to talk about the Pete Buttigieg of it all. Yeah, man. With Pete, you've got arguably the most skilled politician since Barack Obama. The guy is, like, one of my heroes. I could watch him do what he does all day. But I've gotten this question more than any other from my viewers. Is his sexual orientation a disqualifying factor in the Veep Stakes?

I don't think it's disqualifying. I think though it probably keeps him from being chosen. I don't know. Like disqualifying means something different than, hey, we're making a political calculation that optimizes for straight white men, which is where we feel like we're weakest, because where we feel like we need somebody that can talk to more rural voters, more white working class voters. And I think that it's not just him being gay. I think that it is the doubling down on sort of an elite way of of communicating. But I mean, here's the thing.

So I, if you cannot tell for my cool blazer and T-shirt, and I, you know, I am also gay. And I love Pete so much. One time, I'm never nervous in front of people, but I met Pete in person one time. And I had a complete meltdown. I, like, couldn't, like, find the way to talk to him. And at some point, I just sort of pointed at the corner.

And I was like, there's a guy. Like, I saw someone I knew and I just was like, there's a guy. And so anyway, my point is, I love Pete so much. And I think he really wants it, and I think he'd be amazing at it. I think it's, I do think it's risky because I'm not, I think he gets you some college-educated suburban white voters. I do not think he helps you with white working class voters, of which in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, there are just a lot.

And I think what you're going to see here in the polling for a little bit is that Kala re-energizes some of the Obama coalition, more, she's doing much better with black voters, even better. She's actually doing better with Hispanic voters, which was not a sure thing to me. She's going to do okay with college-educated suburban voters. That's part of my job is to help deliver those voters for her. It's more the white working class voters and older voters. And Biden was doing well with them. And so I do think she needs somebody that can get them.

Is Pete that person? I don't know. But I will say, if you were just going on pure talent, who were the best picks, it would be Gretchen or Pete. Yeah. Do you feel like, I mean, just building on that a little bit, it felt like when before Obama, it was like, well, a black guy can never get elected president until a black guy gets elected president. Do you feel like where it could be that kind of a scenario where it's like, oh, you can't have a gay guy who's VP until you do? And so we don't know that we are a post, you know, I don't want to say post racial because obviously looking at this country right now is anything but post racial. But as far as the presidency is concerned, a post racial presidency or, you know, a post-homosexual.

phobic presidency or vice presidency. Like, what do you think on that front? So here's the thing. I absolutely believe that America isn't ready for anything until you make them ready. And a lot of the ways that you make them ready is with a person. People are always like, are they ready for a black woman? And I'm like, that's not the question. The question is, are they ready for Kamala Harris?

And who is Kamala Harris and what is she showing them? And I think the same thing stands true of a gay candidate. Here's my thing, though. I think that America could absolutely elect a gay vice president. I think they could elect beat Buttigieg as a vice president. I'm not sure you can do a gay vice president and the first black woman all at once. I just think that's what people are reacting to. That being said, I don't know.

I would not, if she picked Pete, I would not be unhappy about it. I'm not sure that I think it is the opt. I don't know that it's optimized for victory, which is I think what people are going for is like, let's take the best absolute shot we can, but could it still work? It could, because he's amazing. Switching over to J.D. Vance, he ran behind Donald Trump's margins in Ohio. He also ran behind Governor DeWine's margins in Ohio. So he is not an especially compelling candidate. He ran behind, behind, you know, his own top of the ticket in his own home state. So is there reason to believe that he's actually a drag on Donald Trump's ticket? Far from, far from conferring any

electoral advantages like a Mark Kelly or a Josh Shapiro might do, is J.D. Vance actually not even not a positive, not even a neutral, but a drag. Yeah. I mean, J.D. Vance was a function of a Trump ticket that was peaking too early. This campaign peaked too early. It was, you know, going into the RNC somehow the Don Jr. and Eric convinced Trump that that J.D. Vance was their boy and he could pick him. And at the time, they were like, yeah, let's just double down on white men. Let's go get, let's do more MAGA and let's go get white men. And let's try to run the tables. If I think if Kamala Harris had been the nominee, they would have thought much harder about

Marco Rubio or Tim Scott. But they didn't. And now he's stuck with, but the thing about, so I do think that advances actually, and here's another reason he's a drag. So Donald Trump's deficiencies, and let's specifically with women, are relatively baked in. Like, it's sort of hard to get people exercised about them at this point. unless they're kind of resistance libs type. Like, I remember people like, yeah, I know he sucks, but also, I don't know, he's good

on the economy. J.D. Vance has big Blake Masters energy, right? Which is like, not only is the election denier, not only is he bad, like, extreme on abortion, but also he's like kind of a weirdo who, like, maybe likes the unabomber. And that is where you get somebody where women who maybe just, like, kind of dismiss the Trump stuff or it's already, like I said, a sunk cost. with J.D. Vance go, you know what? This doubling down on this, I hate this. This is gross. I don't want it. I don't. And the umbrage that he is drawing from people right now,

like he's just re-energized people's hatred of him. And like he does emphasize like the weirdness of this new MAGA party. They're just weird. These MAGA Republicans do have a proclivity to surround themselves with people who validate the worst fears, but stuff that you, that Trump has some plausible deniability with. So people look at Trump and they're like, this guy is. This guy is like really swimming in the Christian nationalism pool, but like, but it's still Trump and like, you know, he'll just kind of melds. He's malleable. He doesn't mean it. But he doesn't mean it.

But then you look at like Republicans elevated Mike Johnson to the Speaker of the House. And it's like, oh, no, they're serious about the Christofascism. And then they're like, well, you know, Republicans do want to control women and they're, they're terrible on abortion. But it's Donald Trump. And he's probably paid for abortions himself. And then he picks somebody like, like J.D. Vance, who's, you know, who has. had end abortion on his, on his website and who is as extreme as you can possibly get. And it's like, well, this validates the worst fears that people might have had about Trump,

but that they could have written off because, you know, Donald Trump doesn't really believe in anything. Yeah. And here's what's crazy about this. Donald Trump, the biggest liability for a candidate running in 2022 was abortion. In 2024, abortion was still going to be the major issue, the best thing Democrats had to prosecute case with. And Donald Trump was not invulnerable on it, but he was less vulnerable than many.

other Republicans for this exact reason. Voters perceive him as a cultural moderate. They think he paid for abortions. They do not think he's going to outlaw abortions. And so he had that, he had that sort of armor. He had that, that he could, and he could get away with it. And then he goes and picks J.D. Vance, who has it, makes it an enormous liability for him again, an enormous liability, not just that, but the Project 2025 stuff, I got to say, if you had told me a month ago, because it never came up. I didn't hear it in Focus Groups, Project 2025. It's everywhere now. It's in Every group, people are educating each other about it. People have heard about it.

And they don't always know the specifics. In fact, they're a little light on the specifics. But they know it's scary. And they have this. And he is Project 2025 personified. And so that gets people doing the thing they have needed to do for a long time, which is looking forward at what a next Trump administration would look like. Yeah.

And it is very bizarre that they haven't been able to own the narrative on Project 2025 because historically, Republicans can define anything. And it's the Democrats who are left on their heels saying, like, no, no, no, that's not what this is. Or, you know, Republicans have been able to redefine everything from Hillary Clinton and this email scandal all the way moving forward. And yet now you have this, this massive liability that is, you know, this, again, this Christo-Fascist fever dream that is Project 2025. And far from, far from really being able to own the narrative on this, they've just kind of been on their heels. And Democrats have been hammering away at this thing. Google searches have been skyrocketing.

I've been talking about it a ton on my channel. And it feels like Republicans for the very first time. I mean, ever since the days of Obamacare, they've been really good at jumping in and being able to define things in the exact way that they want to and, you know, turning Obamacare, which is an amazing piece of legislation into, like, death panels. They were so skilled at this.

And yet, for something like Project 2025, which is this huge liability, they haven't been able to do that. Yeah, I think part of it is, It's mean Donald Trump has. He's out there truthing, which nobody reads his truths, but he's out there truthing trying to distance himself from it. But it is pretty hard when half of his former employees, like it's so easy to tie him to it. And now with J.D. Vance, it's even more. And also, part of the reason that they can't distance himself from it is because the right won't let them.

Because the right says, no, Donald Trump, this is our quid pro quo. this is what you give us for sticking with you. And so they're not going to back away from it, even if Donald Trump does. And so the left can, but this is the best offense I've seen from the left in such a long time. I just want to make one note. I think sometimes a good fight is actually really clarifying. And I think the fact that the left went through this really tough fight over Joe Biden stepping down, the reason that Project 2025 became a real thing is that a whole bunch of people who were super pissed at people like me saying Joe Biden's got to step down. We're like, why are you talking about that?

Why aren't you talking about things that matter? Like Project 2025. And all of a sudden, they found an offense issue where there had been no surrogates, where there had been no defense of Joe Biden, nobody getting out there for him. Suddenly everyone's defending him. Everyone's going to the mat. And then he steps down, which is exactly the right thing to do. And then there's just like pent up need to come together, pent up need to get on board with Kamala.

pent up need for a better choice. And so, like, it's like, the whole, and now they had Project 2025, like, in the zeitgeist. And Kamala knows how to talk about it. So, like, it just all came together in this way that I think, I think that fight was cleansing. People are still mad. There's still some repriminations, but, like, it was good, ultimately. I'm grateful for the fact that you had to fall on the sword so that to give everybody somebody to direct their eye at, while also saying, like, why aren't you talking about this thing? Because then, again, to your exact point. It did put that thing into the zeitgeist in a way that otherwise wouldn't have happened because there was nothing else. That's all we had at that point. When it felt like just so

despairing moving forward and Biden wasn't able to prosecute any case for a second term, he wasn't able to articulate anything. He just came off this dismal debate performance. And it's like, what do we got? We have this shred to hang on to. And so we'll push on that as hard as we can. But with that said, then, I want to finish off with this. Can you talk about the Republican Voters Against Trump, which is an amazing, amazing group? The messaging that Republican voters against Trump does is second to none and highly recommend for anybody watching right now to follow them on Twitter. Can you talk about your Republican Voters Against Trump swing state ad campaign? Yeah, totally.

So just to be clear, so Republican voters against Trump, we had it in 2020. We had it in 2022. We ran Republican voters against Kerry Lake and Republican voters against. Blake Masters. And a lot, it was borne out of the focus groups that I do all the time talking to voters. And back in 2019, 2020, I realized that these just like the hammering on Trump with the ads that went viral, they just were not working with swing voters. And I realized we needed a different way to give people permission to join an anti-Trump tribe that didn't feel like they were on board with the Democrats. And so we built Republican voters against Trump, which is different than Republican

voters for Joe Biden, right? Like this allowed people to be like, I'm not a Democrat. Maybe I'm not for us. I'm part of what is the biggest coalition in politics, the anti-Trump coalition. And so we take testimony. And the other thing was like it needed to be authentic. It needed to be real. We need to be voices people trusted. And they trust people like them. And so we did these testimonial style videos, people sitting in their living rooms making a video on their cell phone talking about why they, as Trump voters, and this time in 2024, it's all people who voted for Trump previously, talking about why they absolutely will not vote for him again. And so we made one awesome television ad that is a big compilation.

of all of the things that they told us. But we also, they let us put their faces on billboards. We got billboards across swing states. And one of the things that my team is so skilled at is the second we knew it was Harris. We went back to all of, we call them champs internally. We went back to all of our Trump voting champs. And we said, hey, who's good with Harris? And guess what?

Almost everybody was. And so we're re-recording the testimonials because we had hundreds that already endorsed Joe Biden. But in the swing states, we have a whole massive billboard campaign of white dudes. I mean, this is just, it's who it happened to me. But they are Trump. voters who are supporting Harris and they are making it known that they're doing so and letting us put their faces out there. And that's how you build a permission structure for other Republicans. And I think it's so smart right now, too, because there is such declining trust

in the usual voices like politicians themselves. And so I feel like when you put any politician up, they come with their own baggage. And people are all, people, it's already baked in whether or not people trust a certain politician. And you kind of assume that they're going to say whatever they need to say to generally just tow the party line. But when you use, you know, different messengers and it becomes just these regular people, there's a whole higher degree of trust that's conferred onto these people that wouldn't even exist with the politicians, you know, even at their highest point. That's exactly right.

Thank you. You get us. That's right. For us, people are always like, well, what's the message that works? And I'm like, I don't, I think about that less. I think about the messenger. What messenger works? Because the messenger is your message.

Because people are always like, well, what do they say? I'm like, whatever they want. Whatever their reason is why they're not going to vote for Trump again, that's their message. And we're going to put that out there. Now, we do test them to find which ones are most persuasive. And fun fact, the ones that tend to be the most persuasive are the ones where people struggle with the decision a little bit, right? They're not like going gangbusters because these are center right folks.

These are people who voted for Trump last time. But when they say whether it's abortion, whether it's January 6th, whether it's because Trump is just a lunatic and they're absolutely fed up with him, when they say it, it is much more credible than anybody else saying it. Sarah, where can my viewers and listeners see and hear more from you? Oh, my gosh. It's everywhere. You can go to the bulwark.com. You can listen to the focus group podcast or me and Tim Miller, who's on this show occasionally. We are at, we do the next level. So check out the bulwark and then go to our vat.org, RVAT, republican voters against Trump.org. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on the web. If you're a Republican

out there, where you're probably not, but go ahead and make a testimonial. But yeah, come join us. Well, you are kicking ass over there. Thank you so much for the work you're doing and I appreciate you taking the time. Hey, thanks for having me, man. Thanks again to Sarah. That's it for this episode. Talk to you next week.

You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels,

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