The Press Box - The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell on Early 2028 Vibes, a Post-Trump GOP, and Building a Personality-Driven Media Company

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

On today’s bonus episode of The Press Box, Bryan sits down with the Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell to discuss her early thoughts on the 2028 political landscape, starting the Bulwark (29:09), and much more. Host: Bryan CurtisGuest: Sarah LongwellProducers: Isaiah Blakely and Sarah Reddy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Sarah Longwell, let's start by listing your accomplishments. Do it. Your CV, if you will. You are the publisher of the bulwark. Yes. You are the host of the Focus Group podcast. Sure. You've got a new book coming out in September called How to Eat an Elephant.

One voter at a time. One voter at a time. That's a sub title. That's right. I'm glad we got that whole end. So nice to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the press box. Yeah, thanks for having me. I want to start with focus groups because you have so much fun with focus groups on your podcast.

For people who might not be familiar, how do you put together a focus group of interested or disinterested voters? Yeah, so there's actually people who do this professionally. Focus group facilities, focus group companies. And so we work with a bunch of different companies across the country. And it was funny. In the beginning, when I started doing focus groups, it was pre-pandependip. and so I was flying everywhere. You'd fly and you'd sit behind the glass

and it'd be like on a pleat show where it's like the mirrored glass and you're sitting behind it, eating M&Ms, listening to the people talk. But once the pandemic hit, we asked these focus group facilities, hey, can you help us do this on Zoom? Because Zoom was like the thing then.

And so that's how we do all of them now. And it's allowed us to do them basically at scale, right? So you can do them four times a week. You can mix and match different people. You say, hey, I want women who are college educated in households that make over $100,000 from swing states. And you can find, you know, and then they curate them, and then you can put them in a room. But you can also do, hey, I want men and women, or I want non-college, white voter, you know,

and that allows you to just take the different demographics that you see in polling, because the polling will tell you the what, you know, 87% of people, you know, white people think this or, you know, 50% of black people think this. That's fine. But if you want to know why they think it, you've got to go talk to them. and you've got to sort of say, explain your thinking here, explain why you approve or disapprove of this. The other thing you can do, and this is really helpful right now, is you can give people sort of a quiz, or we call them screeners, and you can say, okay, you voted for Trump.

Rate him right now is doing a good job, a bad job, a neutral job, or like a very bad job. And then you can find what we would call Trump disapprovers. And so right now, when you see Trump's disapproval rating, you know, at these new highs, you can say, okay, well, why are people disapproving of him? And so that's what focus groups are. And you get to puppet master these, like in the Truman Show? Do you watch live and say, hey, prompt, ask that question? So it's actually, I sit there with my phone.

And so I've got moderators that are doing them now. I used to moderate them myself and I'm texting them and I'm like, follow up on this or, hey, that person hasn't talked in a while. I'll ask them. So I'm not puppet mastering so much as I do. That was kind of an evil word, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. That's funny.

So you can say, oh, follow up on this, ask that question. Get a little more out of that person because they seem like an interesting. Totally. That's fascinating. What have you been hearing about J.D. Vance in focus groups or Republicans? Well, this is why I think focus groups are so great. Okay, so I wrote a piece in the Atlantic a few months ago that said, hey, I'm hearing something in the focus groups. Strange new respect for Marco Rubio.

And it was funny because I always thought, look, they're never going to go for a pre-Trump sort of Republican figure. And that's, I see Marco Rubio as somebody from the before times. Back in my days as a Republican, Marco Rubio, I supported. Marco Rubio going into sort of 2015, 2016. He was my guy. I thought he was the future of the Republican Party. I would never vote for him now after watching how much he's betrayed everything he stood for. But watching voters decide in this new era that he's kind of the adult in the room.

And also, I think he is rising in part because you didn't ask me about Marco Rubio, but I think he's rising in part because people really dislike J.D. Vance. Because the more they see him, he has gotten into the sour spot with voters because he wanted to be the person, I think there's two wings of the Republican Party right now. There's the America First Wing and there's the MAGA establishment wing. He was trying to sit up on top of that. And sometimes when you try to sit up on top and bridge, you actually fall through the middle of the crack. And I think that's what happened because the Iran war has put him in a really bad place. He clearly doesn't agree with it, but there's nothing he can do

about it. And so he's both carrying a lot of Trump's baggage and then he also has no charisma, negative charisma, if you will. And voters feel that. And even with It's funny actually because, you know, women know that Trump has terrible attitudes about women, and they sort of forgive him for this long list of reasons that I won't bore you with. It's like we could do a whole podcast on the way that different people rationalize things. But these same women all remember J.D. Vance talking about childless cat ladies, and they dislike him intensely for that. Wow.

That's the first time I've thought about that since, you know, every Kamala Harris button at the 2024 convention. Women remember. That's fascinating. I was going to ask you about the Iran war because clearly either he or somebody very close to him wanted to put out this message that I was skeptical of the war, I was against the war, but now I am supporting the war because I'm a good soldier and I'm Trump's vice president, and that's my job. Has that nuance penetrated down to voters? No, I mean, first of all, most nuance does not penetrate down to voters. But it's more a matter of does it fit with the broad frame that they hold? And I think this is the problem for JD, Vance is that for people who like specifically like J.D. Vance, like they actually like him not, yeah, he's the heir apparent, he's a fine vice president or whatever, people who actually like him and might be able to tell you what J.D. Vance stands for. Of the top three things that they expected

from him, one is no new stupid wars. He couldn't have leaned on that harder. And so I think part of the problem for J.D. Vance is that he looks like he has betrayed everything. Like the MAGA establishment wing will forgive you because the MAGA establishment. establishment wing says whatever Trump says is what you do. And so you get points with them for being a loyal soldier. But for the people who are like, I see J.D. Vance is the person I'm going to go fight for next. Releasing the Epstein files, that was one of his big things. No New Wars. That was another one of his big things. A more populist economic message in the middle of everybody having to pay more. Like he's, he's O for three on people feeling like he's doing the thing that they expected J.D. Vance to do.

The strange new respect for Marco Rubio. How much of that? is attributable to Trump putting him in a position where he can wave at the camera at the UFC fight while JD is in Islamabad with the Iranians. It does feel like J.D. Vance got done dirty on the whole Iran thing. Like they also sent him to do the negotiating. And yeah, Marco Rubio got to hang out with Trump at the UFC fight. And while J.D. Vance was sort of telling us all, I failed. Like these talks failed. The thing about Marco Rubio is this is one of the first times I feel like I've seen a politician get kind of memed into more positive. territory. So, okay, so you know that meme of Marco Rubio where he's sitting on the couch? And every time, like today, Tulsi Gabbard, she's out as the DNI. And so I saw one of Marco Rubio sitting

there with Tulsi's hair saying, Marco Rubio finding out he needs to be a new Russian asset. You know, but the idea of Marco Rubio is the adult in the room sort of comes from this idea that you give him every job. Everything you need somebody to do, they give it to Marco Rubio, because the only one who knows how to do anything is the implication of that meme. And so more and more, what you're seeing from voters is the idea of he seems like he knows what he's doing. He seems like a serious person. He seems like a grown-up. And I swear to God, part, we were just doing this big, like a whole big group of talking about Marco Rubio. And we were hearing things like, they love that he can speak Spanish. And this causes some people's head to explode because

they're like, I'm sorry, they like that he speak Spanish. And I'm like, yeah. Like, there's still an alchemy to people don't want a regular politician, but they still want somebody who's competent. And I think especially as Trump is right now in a real incompetent place, the competence of Marco Rubio kind of bubbles up as something that people find attractive. The meme is fascinating. The idea that we would see a picture of him in the costume of the Rebel Alliance. Yes. And then a voter would think, oh, well, he knows how to do things like defeat Darth Vader and the empire. But that is the, that is the meme.

The meme is you give this guy all the jobs. And so you can see how voters big takeaway from that is, if you want something done well, he's the guy you give it to. I cannot wait to remind these people the last time we knew Marco Rubio as a national political candidate when he was on the stage with Chris Christie before the New Hampshire primary and he got dismembered. He did. He bled out right before New Hampshire. You're right. He also, I mean, think about Marco Rubio, but this is again, listening to voters reminds you of things you might have forgotten, which is it's been a long time since that happened. And there's an entire new generation. of voters who are like, this Marco Rubio fellow seems good. What was he doing before? You know, like, they don't remember that Chris Christie, like, stabbed him in the back, and Marco Rubio, like, left a trail of blood on the way out while he debased himself saying that Donald Trump had like a small penis by saying that he had small hands. You know, that Marco Rubio, a lot of people

just have forgotten or never saw in the first place. Broadly speaking, what are Republican voters or mega voters looking for in a Trump air? Well, I mean, right now, look, the thing about voters, right, is you're always going to have to segment them because I think that there is a group of voters that don't want anybody but Trump. Like, there is a group now. And people forget how many of the Trump coalition are people who did not vote before. Trump brought them into the political system. There's a whole new segment of voters in the political system now that comes only, for Trump. And so one of the things I don't know is do they stay post-Trump? Trump is the truth. You are not Trump, therefore you're not the truth. That's right. Which is why

if you think about the structural advantages that Democrats have in the off years, right, going into 2026 or what they had in 2022, what they had in 18, a lot of that comes from the people who are Trump-only voters really only come out and vote when Trump is on the ballot. And so Republicans are constantly, I remember I was in the green room before some event with Kevin McCarthy. And Kevin McCarthy was right after the 2024 election. And he's telling anybody who will listen, just, I can't believe what a turnout machine this guy is. Like, we never see numbers like this. And he was saying it as kind of a marvel and a positive thing. And I sat there thinking, what are you guys going to do when he's not on the ballot? So that's one group that I don't think

cares that much about the alternative because they just wanted Trump. Then there is sort of the the generation of voters that Trump has taught that what you want is somebody who communicates constantly, who is kind of a, who's going to own the libs. That's very important. Somebody who is strong enough, big enough, aggressive enough, cares about the rules little enough that they are very invested in owning the libs. They also want someone who's not a regular politician. I hear this all the time.

And this is why I think you see Marco Rubio, like, J.D. Vance growing the beard, Ted Cruz growing the beard, all of them suddenly cosplay as like hunters and fishermen. All of this is about trying to capture the voter's new interest in somebody being a regular person and not having the artifice of a politician because that's the thing that they reject. They feel like they're being spun. And so everybody's now like that's why people you hear that sort of buzzword authenticity. It's like the coin of the realm. But, you know, what it really means is being super comfortable in your own skin. And so I think the question about what comes next for the Republican Party or what kind of candidate.

You're going to have Marco. You're going to have J.D. Vance. And then you're going to have a Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Green kind of lane. And that's the MAGA establishment versus America First Split that I was talking about showing up. Rubio's stab at authenticity being a regular person. Is that wearing the track suit on Air Force One on the way to China? I mean, that is what he's doing. I think, yeah.

That is now everybody, you know, we laugh, right? But that's his, you know, way of being like, ha-ha, I can have fun. That is it. regular dude. Yeah. No, I think the era of being casual as a way to demonstrate like, hey, I'm a regular person. You know, this is

why you see even like Fetterman, like a lot more people in that car heart gear and anything that can communicate to people, like I'm not one of these elites. Like, they are aware that coding as an elite is the thing that is turning people off in this populist moment. And so they are trying

to code regular person. And like for some people, they do it because they are a regular person for other people. And this is for J.D. Vance. I think J.D. Vance is like, do I look, you know, cool in my hunting shirt and my very expensive press jeans? And everybody's like, you're a fraud. That's what they think about J.D. Vance. They think he's a fraud. Two years ago, we all wanted to see whether Kamala Harris would break with an unpopular president. Spoiler alert, she did not break with an unpopular president. Will Republican voters want to see Vance or Rubio break with Trump in any substantial way? I think it depends on where Trump is at the end of his term. So I talk a lot about something called

the Bush line where when George W. Bush left office, he was at 32 percent and he was in the middle of very unpopular war and an economic catastrophe. And that allowed for not just George W. Bush, but also the entire Republican Party to be sort of forced into a recalibration. They lost two presidential elections. They were doing their autopsies. It all sounds very similar to where Democrats are right now. But they were deeply in the wilderness. And then when the Republican Party sort of came back online, there's that big crowded primary, as you were just referencing through, Rubio and Christy and Jeb Bush and everybody else, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump wins it because the Republican Party in that intervening time changed. The voters changed. And they not only got to the point where Jeb Bush

couldn't run with his last name as Bush. Like so much, there's so much, the extent of the failure of the George W. Bush years had completely changed the party. And so we need Donald Trump to get to at least the Bush line. Like, we want him to live at 32 percent or below because the only way that people will break with Donald Trump is if Donald Trump at the end of his term is viewed as a failure, an economic failure led us into another quagmire war. And even if we could get, this is a bulwark inside joke, but as I've talked to... about George W. Bush being the line. My colleague Tim Miller can't help himself. I took, I started the Bush line commentary earnestly and without any double entendre. Tim couldn't help but change it.

And so now he looked up Nixon. And I believe Nixon, when he left office, it was, he was around, I think it was 28 percent. And so now Tim has taken the calling at the dick line. But we do, the point is, are you a grown up podcast or I don't know, I feel bad. I'm the grown up in my group, but I feel like I still feel like I need to explain that to you. I try to be, but I laugh. Yeah, okay. The point is, is to get Trump as low as possible in order to make him a liability. I mean, we just watched with the Republican primaries.

He still dominates a Republican primary, right? Which means more than half of the party in just about any primary. If Trump's endorsement or Trump's spending money or Trump wants to get rid of somebody, he still can. because his popularity within the core base of the party is still enough to do that. At the same time, his popularity broadly is waning. And so you've got to cut in to that part where he can't totally control every primary. Because as long as he controls every primary, he will still have a grip. But I do think more and more, and we're seeing this again right now because Donald Trump is unpopular,

we're watching people break with him on the slush fund. And so you are starting to see some Republican movement. think in part that is because he's not as popular as he once was. And so they feel like they can do this without people, you know, screaming at them in airports. Did you ever think you'd be using the word slush fund when you weren't talking about Richard Nixon? Is that surprise you that we're just using that now in political discourse because there is, in fact, a slutch fund at the DOJ? I am not surprised. I mean, this is the never-trump mantra on Trump, like me and my colleagues at the bulwark, every single one of us spent all of the last, however many years, saying, here's what

Donald Trump will do. He will dismantle the international world order. He will be the most corrupt president we've ever seen. He tried to overturn an election. He is not going to respect the contours of the Constitution. And so we were, like, we saw us. We weren't sure exactly what it would, what form it would take exactly, but we knew all of this was coming because this is what happens when you hire somebody who is a deeply bad and corrupt person. And so, no, I'm not surprised. I'm surprised, although, again, because we have lived through the last 10 years, I'm less shocked than I might otherwise have been.

If Republicans or the country lets him get away with it, because this is just blatant theft of the American taxpayer. Yes, this is not within a campaign arm, as it was with Nixon. It is within the Department of Gold, Justice. Yes. Which is just unbelievable, which leads me out in the next question. January 6th. Scott McFarlane, formerly CBS now Midas Tetch was on the pod the other day, and he was talking about how January 6 is not a matter of history.

It's a matter of right now. It is a very palpable event for a lot of people, including Donald Trump, because that slush fund may go to pay January 6 rioters. How do people in your focus groups talk about January 6th? You know, the January 6th phenomenon, and again, let's be specific about which kind of voters. Trump voters specifically have gone through an evolution on January 6th because in the immediate aftermath, and I can track this. Like I've been doing the focus group for so long that every year on January 6th, we often put together a compilation of how voters changed over the years on this because they've been rewriting history actively. And this is why Donald Trump goes down to Fulton County and takes all of the ballots and seizes them. It's the reason he puts pressure on Jared Polis to commute the sentence of Tina Peters.

because he isn't, and it's the reason that he is going to give money to the January 6th insurrectionists payouts from the slush fund is that he is trying to actively rewrite the 2020 election to say that he won. He won. And whether that sets him up to say, and that's why I deserve a third term, or simply that he wasn't lying or any of it, he has been on this. And so voters, in the beginning, many of them, the immediate reaction was, this is horrible, this is shocking, this is terrible, it's happening. and many of them were out. I'm out on Trump. Can't believe he did this. Then you started to hear the false flag narrative. It quickly sort of said in, well, this was Antifa. This was Black Lives Matter. And then you got also people started to get their minds around the whatabouts. And the whatabouts come

fast and furious. The conservative media knows how to get people into what about mode. And so they said, well, yes, what they did was wrong. But what about what the Black Lives Matter people did in Wisconsin or whatever, wasn't any worse than that. And so, look, it's all a wash. Everybody's bad. And over time, it transitions into victimhood. They say, well, why didn't anything happen to the Black Lives Matter people, which of course it did. They were prosecuted, people who looted stores or anything like that, say, how come we're the ones getting in trouble? How come, and then, like, being persecuted by the FBI for being there. And so over time, it went from, it didn't happen, you know, It was a false flag to, yeah, actually, it was bad, but so was this other thing was bad to, no, it was actually we were the victims.

It was just people walking through the Capitol to now. It's like, not only are we the victims, we deserve remuneration because everything, we were the ones who were harmed that day. And so people owe us. And that's where Trump has moved a lot of voters. Now, of course, that is hardcore Trump voters. But that's about 75% of the Republican Party who believe that the election was stolen in some form or another. Now, that's not as, I don't, I think that number is too high in terms of people who agree that the January 6th insurrectionist should get a payout. But the Republican Party, it's more a question than they'll tolerate it.

Right. They might not like it, but they'll tolerate it. Speaking of evolutions, how have you heard voters talk about the war in Iran? Now, that one they hate. This one's this is a this is one where at them and it's getting worse. And here is the thing. And I try to always impress upon people whether you like it or not. This is how the vast majority of voters think. They think in terms of direct personal consequences. And so January 6th, they don't they don't feel the direct personal consequences of that. Now, I would argue that there is an enormous direct personal

consequence to all of us for people no longer believing in elections and believing in the results of free and fair elections. But that is different than Iran, where the Iran war right now is affecting people's gas prices. Just affecting what they pay. And once gas prices go up, the cost of other goods and services go up, inflation is high. And so there is one thing that I hear from voters every day over and over again. I start every focus group the same way. How do you think things are going in the country? The answer is terrible. Universally. Nobody thinks that what is happening is good. Then the next thing out of everybody's mouth, is always something economic. The price of these goods and services are too high. This is how high

gas prices are. And they immediately start telling you about the personal pain that they feel or the personal pinch or the tradeoffs they're having to make about, I can't take this drive because, or I'm not doing this over Memorial Day because of gas prices. And so the Iran war is both for people a direct like rhetorical betrayal, meaning he said he wasn't going to get us into any new wars and then he did. It has the additional problem of both the Republican and the Democratic Party have really re-evaluated how they feel about Israel. And so the extent to which people think that Bibi Netanyahu pulled Trump into this war, that also creates their sense of it's a bad idea. We shouldn't have done it. You know, the things that are in recent history are also just Iraq and Afghanistan. Like,

the country is still in a place where they were like, no, we weren't going to do this again. And then on top of that, you have the direct personal consequences of high gas prices. And so you find very, there are Trump voters, you find very little overall support for the Warren-N-run, there are the Trump apologists who tend to say, yeah, it's not good, but I trust that he has a plan. And they'll just leave it at that. You know, they'll kind of make those noises until, and this is why I think he can still go lower in the polls, is that there are voters who sort of trust him and they'll go for a period of time, but eventually if things don't get better, they will start to drift away. Trump's purge of his enemies from Bill Cassidy to Thomas Massey to half the Indiana State Senate.

Do voters care about that? No. Not really the Republican voters. I think, so I did a bunch of focus groups around Cassidy and they all wanted Cassidy gone. They do remember his impeachment vote and people don't like it when these, you know, they did, I saw this happen with Liz Cheney. They immediately get into these people are rhinos. And Cassidy had a little bit of a few other things where, you know, he's a doctor. So around COVID, he was saying that we should mask and we should be careful.

People remember that too. So they just, they had decided they were done with Cassidy. You know, Massey still got 45% of the Republican vote. And I don't know how much Trump spent, but like 19 million in a congressional race. Like, that's an insane amount to spend there. But it's, it's the thing after, after 10 years, there's so much baked into voters' understanding of Trump. know he's vindictive. And some people either like it about him, some people tolerate it about him, some people don't like it about him, but they like other things and so they don't care about that.

But yeah, I just, that is, it's the problem, because he did this in 2022. In 2022, he handpicked most of the candidates through the primary process and he had a litmus test, which is, will you say that the election of 2020 was stolen? Well, that meant that the candidates that the Republicans put up were all bonkers. It was like you had Blake Masters out in Arizona talking about how the Unabomber was great. And you had Herschel Walker and Carrie Lake and a bunch of these insane characters and they all lost. Trump cost so many seats with terrible candidate quality because he was only picking people who share his worldview. And that's he's been doing that.

Look, it's always been more important to Trump to control the Republican Party than to beat Democrats. That is Trump's M.O. And it remains that way. And no, voters aren't going to hold it against him in Republican circles. But once you get to the general elections, watching these Republicans right now tout Trump's strength. I'm like, cool. He beats somebody in a Republican primary. Like, okay, what's happened?

Show me what happens in a general election. Then we'll talk. Last one on focus groups. When you listen to Democratic voters, which potential 2028 candidates are they interested in at this point? Oh. So it's Democrats are so funny. they are real sort of armchair analysts. And so they really think in terms not just of who they want.

In fact, Democrats right now are so pragmatic. They are like, who's going to win? And so you'll just be listening to a group of black women go, we need the straightest, whitest man that we can find. You know, and so I think Democrats tend to have settled on the idea that it can't be a woman. It can't be somebody of color. it needs to be a straight white man. And then they tend to look at Asoff, J.B. Pritzker, Newsom comes up a lot. But like, then people will still say, they will say,

Democrats are funny this way. They'll say that America is too racist and too sexist to elect a woman. But like AOC is still very high on a lot of people's lists. Because there's also something happening in the Democratic Party where because affordability and Israel are two dominant issues and because Mondani has been such a sort of communications success for the Democratic Party, you see a lot, there's sort of some juice now on the more even socialist side that says, okay, well, voters want somebody who's going to give them health care, they want people who are going to care about their material well-being. And there's sort of this split in the Democratic Party, too, over super pragmatists who are like,

just give me someone who can beat these guys. And then there's sort of the more idealistic sector, which is like, no, we don't want these corporate Democrats. We don't want centrists, even if that's more likely to win. We want these true believers who are going to deliver on these particular issues for the American people. And so I think that the Democrats kind of haven't made up their mind exactly on what they want. But I suspect that the, we want a straight white male who's going to fight really hard is probably going to prevail. Because one of the things everybody loves Pete, I love Pete. But there is a lot of just like people say it can't be a woman or it can't be somebody of color.

They also say they don't think it can be somebody who's gay. And even though they're all like he's the best communicator in the party, there is this people right now, they're on the Democratic side, They're really, they're like gun-shy. They're like afraid of making a step wrong. They're like, no, we need to, no, can't take any chances with anything that the American people might go for. And I think that they have felt pretty shocked by the level of racism and sexism in the country that they feel like and just sort of seeing what Americans will tolerate in terms of Trump's rhetoric, you know, saying to American Congresswoman of color go back to where you come from. And so there's this fear that you just, you have to nominate somebody who would be broadly appealing. But I do see, maybe I'm off, because we're doing a lot of Georgia stuff because it's ongoing, he is quite popular.

Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro, sorry. He will not be winning the Democratic nomination in 2028. But Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro is extremely popular in his state. He's much less popular with Democrats broadly, but like so popular in his state. So he comes up if you're doing a Pennsylvania group. Let's talk about the bulwark. You founded the site in 2018.

At the outset, what did you want the site to do? So I had the dumbest idea I've had. Actually, if you have lots of ideas, lots of them are bad. And I at the time, you know, I'd spent most of my time in sort of conservative politics. And so I was like, well, let's build a website where we can aggregate all of the conservative voices who are standing up to Trump. you know, and Applebaum and, at the time, Ben Shapiro, actually. You know, there was all these never-Trumpers, and I was like, let's put all their stuff in one place. And we called it the bulwark.

And of course, I realized pretty quickly, why would anybody visit this site? Twitter exists. Like, they can just follow these people. But then the Weekly Standard, which Bill Crystal ran and had been this sort of seminal conservative publication, it got the plug pulled on it for being insufficiently pro-Trump by its billionaire owner. And Bill was like, hey, can you find these people jobs? And so at the time, I was just sort of like scraped together some money, hired the old weekly standard crew, brought them in.

And we were just like, let's start like doing real journalism. Let's start doing real pieces. And what was amazing is, A, people were here for it. People were interested in what we had to say. We were small. There was like seven of us. But people would send us money unbidden. They would send us little donations and everything.

And at some point, we decided J.V. L. and I, he's the editor at the bulwark. Guy writes 2,000 words today, has this incredible Jonathan V. Last. Jonathan V. Last. For those who don't know. He has, he writes this triad newsletter. And it is excellent every day. It's excellent even when I really disagree with what he's saying. It is still excellent. But he basically said, hey, we should do something for people who are sending us money. Let's start a podcast. And so he and I started something called the secret podcast, where we would just chat the two of us. And this is when I learned to podcast. And then Tim Miller, who was my old friend for my Republican days, I was like, he was having a nervous breakdown out in Oakland, where he'd been since, you know, Trump sort of Trump won. And I went out there and I was like, you know, did kind of a Hoosiers thing where you dunk the guy in some water and say, pull it together, man. But actually he was just, he was getting, he was starting to sort of come back. And so we just all threw in together. And we did the thing. And we just wanted it to be a place for people who were Republicans and conservatives who thought that Trump was a deep threat to the Constitution, to the country, to the Republican Party. And then it's evolved since then. Susan Glasser wrote a profile of you in the New Yorker. And I thought this was an interesting quote. She was talking about how you opposed Trump from within the Republican Party, supported marriage equality from within the Republican Party once upon a time. And you said, I got comfortable with everyone being mad at you. That ability to be comfortable. What's that allowed you to do as a publisher, do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I'm just like, if people yell at me, I'm just not going to be like, oh, someone's yelling at me. I should change what I'm doing. I think, I mean, I was a lesbian Republican. There was like five of us. I did get comfortable sitting in that space of, I don't know, this is who I am and this is what I think. Back then, the other thing, though, is, and this is important to me, actually, and I write about it a lot in the book, that marriage equality was really formative. for me, from a political standpoint, in seeing how effective persuasion could be. I think we live in a moment right now where people feel like we're so hyper polarized that nobody can change their mind, that you can't sort of shift the vibes of the country. And marriage equality just showed me that that wasn't true. But it also showed me how important it was. And I do think this is why I spent such a long time trying to say that like try to fight Trump from within the Republican Party, even though it was pretty quick that I was like, this is not for me.

And I could even see how quickly other Republicans were just going along with it. And I was so shocked by that. But I kept saying for the first couple of years, felt like it was important to be a Republican fighting for the Republican Party because the marriage equality having, I was like, I did young conservatives for the freedom to marry, but having that center-right group making the case for marriage equality within the Republican Party was an enormously important part. of building that coalition that allowed us to now live where we are today, where the vast majority of people do support marriage equality.

And so I tried to bring that same mentality to this fight or the fight against Trump. And so I still believe in persuasion. I just, man, presidential politics, though, is really different from issue politics. Because issue politics kind of stay, like the issue stays the same all the time. Like the number of inputs into Trump and how people make their decisions. is so multifaceted that, you know, and people get so dug in on this. Like they're not open to changing their minds anymore in part on Trump because there's like a ton of sunk costs.

Like the number of people who've broken up, broken up relationships, they no longer speak to their parents or they know their brother is can't talk to him. And so people just have this sunk costs around Trump. What's the Bulwarks audience? It's big. So we just cracked, I mean, bigger than I could have ever imagined. We just cracked a million subscribers on substack. We have 1.7 million on YouTube.

And those are really different people. The substack people are readers. The YouTube people are watchers. And then we have an enormous audience for the podcasts. And so... Who's in this audience, would you say? You know, I think it's a weird mix of, like, real progressives. A lot of center left folks where I think we have found ourselves now.

I think to the extent that if we had to care, categorize ourselves politically, we would say we are liberals in a liberal democracy type sense, but we would say that we are liberals and probably on a spectrum, but I would sort of put myself, you know, center, center left now. And I think that's a lot of our audience. But we still maintain like the people who, I was, you know, we were just out here doing shows in San Diego and L.A. A number of people who still come up and say, I'm a never Trump or like you. Like I was a Republican in my whole life and this happened. So we have remained a home for people who were Republicans their whole lives and hate Trump. That has always been kind of the base or the foundation of our

audience, but it has grown to have a lot of people on left. And people also come up all the time. They're like, I'm so liberal, but I still love you guys because, and I think for a lot of people, they do want to know what a conservative argument might be against something. They just don't want to be gaslit by somebody else. And so, you know, if you go to the National Review or some of the other Center-R-Right publications or conservative publications, I shouldn't even say Center-R-R-R-Rite, the conservative publications that you used to go to, it would be like, well, what is the conservative perspective on this? You can't do that anymore without feeling like somebody's lying to you about the nature of what's happening with Trump. And so we will be completely

honest with you about the threat that Trump poses to democracy, how toxic the Republican Party is, but we will also bat around between ourselves things that are not just the standard sort of liberal position and we'll wrestle with that. And I actually think that's what a lot of people like about us is what that we are, we're up for debating it with each other. We sort of all agree Trump's bad. And then there's a wide range of opinions on strategy and other things amongst us. Is that a surprise to you that part of your audience would be part of the MS Now audience or the Pod Save guys audience? Not really. Not now.

I think it surprised me at first. I remember when it started to get bigger and I was like, man, a lot of progressives. Like, they're listening to us. But now I think, especially going into Trump's second term, there's just, there is only the big broad pro-democracy coalition. And I think the Democratic Party becomes like the organizing, the organizing institution for that or the organizing mechanism for that. And I think that's like there's a big jumble now that lives in that space of I'm trying to figure out how to save the country from this toxic force that Donald Trump unleashed on it. And like I'm into debating these ideas. And I think the pod save guys or what people might see on MSNBC or what people might hear from us.

Like there are shades of different, but we're all sort of equally concerned about the moment and trying to figure out our way through it. I'm so fascinated by how the media has become more personality driven, including here at the ringer. How many people do you think come to the board because they love. the site's politics versus come to the board because they love you and they love Tim and they love JVL. 90% the latter. I mean, it is, it is personality driven media is a where I think everything is going. Two, because I do the focus groups all the time, the thing that has really stood out is the low trust environment that we're in and how, what a difficult time voters have or people have in the country assessing information. And so I mean people, I listen to especially people

who really want to know. They're really trying to figure out what they believe. They'll be like, well, I had to go over here and read this and then I read this, but I wasn't sure if this was true. And they're like triangulating all these sources. Or what I think people are going to do is to say, okay, who do I trust to give it to me straight? And I'm going to find the personalities that do that. And I think what they found at the bulwark is, A, because we reevaluated our political positions, even though some of us maybe didn't reevaluate many of our actual positions, just re-evaluated our affiliation with the Republican Party because the Republican Party, just to be clear, retains no semblance of familiarity to what it was in sort of the McCain years when I got

brought in or what attracted me to it. Like now, what, we got tariffs. I think Democrats often say like, no, it's the same thing. It's a logical extension. I'm like, not for me. When I, like, the character counts conservatism, gone. fiscal responsibility, gone. American leadership in the world in a stable series, gone. You know, no morality, no sense of certainly no balancing budgets or, you know, they're not

anti-corruption. Like, everything about it is something that I reject. And now I've wound myself into a place that's different from where you wanted me to go. Personality-driven media. And so I just, I do think that what is happening is people say, all right, I trust these, guys to work out an issue between them. We will, we fight. I mean, the next level, Tim JVL and I argue about everything. JVL and I still do the secret podcast. We've been doing it for seven years, and we have several fundamental disagreements that we structure our conversations around. And I think people want to hear that. They want to hear the debate. They want to hear the best argument from each side. But they also, and this is the thing that I do think the bulwark does

really well, we're not going to let the darkness keep us from having fun. Like, we love each other. We've all been friends for a very long time. We think each other are funny and we're going to mess around with each other. So I see it a lot of times. You know, everybody clips things now and they become the standard of what people see of you. Every time I see a clip where they're like, see what these lunatics over at the Bork are saying, it's like some 45 second clip of something we were doing to mess with each other or joking around that does make us sound crazy. But it's, we're almost always joking. It's interesting because I think we're all trying to deal with this problem of lack of trust in the media particularly.

Yeah. 28% of people trust the media, according to that Gallup poll from last October. But what you're saying is part of the solution is if you put it in the hands of a person, right, if you personalize it, then whatever Donald Trump says about, you know, the failing so-and-so, well, I hear that, but I trust Sarah. I trust Tim. I like them. Is that the way do you think around this or part of the way around this for media institutions?

I do. And I also think it's just going to get more important. Like when I, sometimes people say, well, what do you want to do with the business? And I'm saying, I want to grow it as fast as I can right now because the AI, Slop Revolution is coming for all of us. Obviously, it's already here. But part of what that will continue to do is create a continued eroding of trust in the information that we're seeing. And I think more and more people trying to find personalities or even just communities.

Because I think about the bulwark as a community, it's not just a, it's not each of our individual personalities. It's like the constellation and the world. world that we build inside that allow people to kind of come live there with you, get the news that they want, get the laughs that they want, and hear the different personalities bounce off each other. And I think to the faster we can build audience now, the better position we are when even as mainstream media sort of collapses around us, as AI comes for everybody, I think one of the last things really standing that will become kind of the cornerstone of how we think about media is who are the personalities that I trust? What are the communities that I feel like I can sit in

where I can have good, honest conversations. I get nutritious information. I also get funny information. Because that's the thing everybody says at this shows when we talk to people, which is my favorite thing to do. But they're all just like, you keep me sane because we're reflecting back to them a world that they also see. But they're like, but you also make me laugh.

And yeah, I think that people who can do that, including like, why is Joe Rogan have a weird outsized, you know, why does Joe Rogan have any impact on our politics at all? Well, he has an impact on our politics because if you clip Joe Rogan and, you're like, making them look like a doofus, which he often is on his show. But people who hang out with him for three hours, they know that if you clip something of him looking like a dufus, they're like, yeah, but that's not really him because I hang with him all the time. And the depth of that parisocial relationship is like that's where the trust lives now. I thought this was an interesting tweet from Jonathan Chade of New York Magazine, comparing the bulwark to the dispatch, another company formed during the Trump years. He said, in my opinion, the dispatch considers conservatism a good and true ideology that somehow got hijacked by a bad guy,

while the bulwark believes Trump exposed some deeper rot. You think that describes the bulwark? Yeah, I think that's right. And the rot isn't, especially with conservatism itself, but with the conservatives who carried the message, right? Because they didn't believe any of the things that they said they believed. I mean, that's been the real shock and betrayal of, and this was very prominent in Trump's first go round, and then it actually got worse going into the next election. There were a lot of people like Eric Erickson or Ben Shapiro, who in the first term remained kind of never Trump, and then coming into the second term or going into the election, and I would fight with the guys at the dispatch because they knew how bad Trump was. They couldn't

bring themselves to just say, and Kamala Harris is better. Like, and I was like, this is, of course Kamala Harris is better. Like, what threat assessment are you doing? One person will literally shred the Constitution in the world order, and you say that about him. And what is she going to be a normie dem? Like, she'll be fine. And I just, I've been, I've been disappointed with the rest of conservative media and the way that they've handled it. But I do think what we We just saw that people weren't going to live up to the ideals that they had espoused for the entire time that we knew them, that, you know, Stuart Stevenus has this book. It was all a lie. I think, you know, we were a bunch of people who were in our 40s, but that means in our, let's say, mid-40s,

we all came up under John McCain and had a kind of aspirational sense, you know, in the real culture, sort of character counts post-Clinton years. And where, you know, he had an affair with a woman who was just a little bit older than I was and then lied to the country. country about it. And you can look back and think, how quaint. But at the time, it was, for me, as a young person, it went to the center of who could you trust in politics. And one side was talking about character and the other side was lying about sleeping with an intern. But now it's just so funny to look back on that because the level of corruption in the Republican Party, like, especially the stuff around morality and character, like unbelievable, how little it meant

to anybody, how little they cared and how little shame they feel now. that none of it mattered. It's hard to explain what it was like having all of the people who taught you as you came up in conservatism, like what it meant, why it was important. Because there's all this stuff in conservative world, conservatism ink, where they, all these conferences, all these places where you interact with all these people. Every single one of them betrayed everything they ever said. And so I think that the rot that we saw was just that actually so much of it was fake and didn't matter. They don't care about the debt. I was always a debt and deficit hawk.

It's just like something that mattered to me. I like balanced budgets. I think it's a mark of responsibility for a country. No one cares. So, yeah, I think we saw that, and that led us to a reevaluation of who we trusted, who we feel like as an honest broker. And it also, at some point, you know, you're not an expert in all the issues, but you've been trusting sort of people on your side for a long time.

I think a lot of us looked up then at that moment and said, well, you can't trust any of these people. So what do we genuinely certainly believe about all of these different issues? And I think on some places we're still, some of us are more still center right. And then there's a bunch of places where I think we've said, you know, if Donald Trump can spend a billion dollars on his ballroom and he can spend a billion, many billions doing this war of choice in Iran, and he can do a $1.8 billion slush fund. You're like, I don't know, maybe you should just provide the rest of the country with primary health care.

Like, don't tell me, you really do as you watch this stuff change and you watch the way Republicans, I used to get all into the weeds on what it would do take to Medicare for all and all these issues. And now I'm like, I don't know, we should probably just do things for the American people. Like I have become actually more America first in my thinking, not in a Trump way, but in a watching the way that Elon Musk and these tech oligarchs are just mining us for outrage. They took fear and anger and they weaponize it against each other. I'm like, tax those. guys. And, you know, and we should be paying, like, we need a world-class education system. We need a world-class health care of the people. And we need to take care of the people who are, like,

working day in and day out. And I'm not saying that I've become sort of a populace or whatever, but I do, I feel like our policy should focus on the material well-being of Americans. A couple more before you go. Yeah. If Trump is a unifying factor between your audience and Rachel Maddow's audience and the pod save guys audience. What's the plan for the bulwark after Trump leaves? Oh yeah. People like this question. They think that because we were sort of launched as an anti-Trump thing that we won't be able to sort of sustain in a post-Trump world. I think there's a few different components of that, some good, some bad. I think one of the good components is the bork is a really quality publication. Like the analysis is just quality.

And so, and I think people are attached to the personalities. We grew all through the Biden years. we did have a big surge after Trump came along, but like I think we will continue to grow as a publication based on the quality and based on what I talked about before about us being really early to video, early to personality driven media. I think on the bad side, the forces that wrought Trump in the country are not going away. The Republican Party is not going back to something responsible in the near term. and it's one of the reasons that I think getting below the Bush line is so important is that what you do then is you try to disincentivize the Republican Party from emulating the things that Trump did. But to the question you asked me earlier, won't Trump still have this power over, you know,

this primary base and won't, isn't there still just a ton of the things that the toxic forces that Trump unleashed on the party and on America, those are still in there? And they're not going away. The Republican Party's not going back. We're not going back to a place of John McCain's or Mitt Romney's. And even if you hated those guys, I think most people would say, like, well, but they're better than what we have now. But we're not going back. You don't think that will come about. There'll be a Republican party that you'd be happy to be a member of or be associated with again. No. Now, look, life hopefully is going to be very long. And so we'll see where we are in 30 years. But for the next 10 years, and we are going through a place of, I think, both parties are doing a lot of grappling with what they stand for, who they want their voters to be, what positions they're going to take. And obviously, I'm going to continue to be super invested in American politics, but I'm invested now at, like, the highest order level of,

like, can we have the rule of law? Can we have institutions that sustain? And I feel a little less partisan or ideological about that stuff than I used to. But more importantly, having listened to Republican voters, especially young Republican voters, the Republican Party's not going back to, it could maybe get to a place where it's not like an active threat to the country like it is right now, but something that I would want to be a part of. I do think there's a lot of people who think that about the Bullock. They're like, well, if Marco Rubio is the nominee, then the board goes back to the Republican Party. If you think that you've got us all wrong, because I think anybody who aided and abetted Trump as far as we're concerned, who changed their whole personality to go along with this, none of them ever deserve to be in a place of leadership. And it's going to take a long time for the Republican Party to both find a place where it is not an active threat, but then also to cycle through all of the politicians that did nothing in this moment. Like they have been weighed and measured and found wanting. Like we watched every single one of them not rise to this occasion. And so not a single one of them, I think, would get our support. I was going to say that's close to every Republican.

Because they're all gone. They've gotten rid of anybody that we might have fought for back in the day. They're all gone. This is Trump's party. That is the one thing that is true. Lindsay Graham will tell you it's Trump's party. It is Trump's party. And as a result, everybody who let him do, this is why, look, Susan Collins,

who I've always liked Susan Collins as somebody who, she was an advocate for gay marriage in the early days. But Susan Collins knows better and has known better for years and has been multiple cycles to do the right thing. And of course, she did do the right thing around impeachment, just like Cassidy did. But then they both run back to try to like make amends for doing the right thing with the Trump voters.

And even though they stand up sometimes, the fact that especially the moderates provide cover for what Trump is doing is to me so intolerable that I will, I just, yeah, I think she should lose her Senate race. Last one for you. What do you think Trump's going to be like post-presidency? Well, the theory we're cooking up over at the bulwark is that the ballroom is really just a bunker that he's trying to go live in so that he can like run around in a tattered bathrobe, screaming like a mad king in there. Like Howard Hughes? Yeah, exactly. No, look, I look at the things like the Board of Peace that he's trying to stand up and put billions of dollars in. I think he wants to find a way to continue to control things, control the Republican Party. Now, he's also decomposing in front of our eyes. And so I think we have two and a half years left of Trump. I, if, you know, we saw where Biden was at the end of his term, like the presidency, and Trump, you know, he's skipping his son's wedding. and he's obviously golfs a lot, so he's not taking the job so seriously that it weighs on him. But, I mean, he'll be, what, 82?

I will say, and this is something I always try to say to make people feel better, is if Trump were 60 and behaving like this, I would feel very different about the threat. But there is an actuarial limitation to how long he can wreak this havoc, which doesn't mean it couldn't be another 10 years. but Trump is not forever. And I think he will try and assert himself until he shuffles from this mortal coil. And I think he will continue to have some purchase within the Republican Party unless he leaves office as low as we can pop. Like the lower we get him, the less pull he has in the long term. Sarah Longwell, Focus Group podcast, How to Eat an Elephants out in September. Thanks so much for coming on in the press box.

Yeah, thanks for having me.