Sarah’s Little Secret is Out | Bulwark on Sunday

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Hi, Bill Crystal here.

Welcome to Bulwark on Sunday.

I'm joined today by my colleague Sarah Longwell, author of the best selling book.

Even though it's not coming out in six months, how does that work?

That's really impressive, you know?

I don't know, you know, honestly, I was giving him a hard time because I was like,

I can't not talk about this on the podcast and on like the number of times I want to

begin a sentence with, well, I talk about this in the book and, you know,

and like there's points that I'm making or lots of big themes that I've seen that

I'd like to get into, but you know, you're not allowed to talk about it until it's live.

They're like, do not talk about this book until there is a place for somebody to go and buy it.

And so I was like, can we get this up?

And the thing is, I will say the book is more or less written.

I think that there's, you know, JBL has, is my editor, he wrote the forward.

The biggest thing that I would say we're doing now in the next six months is like,

there's a point at which you have to lock it.

Like it's done done and they can't mess with it.

But the most stressful part is so much of the analysis, which obviously is around the voters

and what they think and what I've seen over the last eight years.

I've seen voters shift.

What are the things that have moved them?

What is persuasive to them?

But you know, I got stuff on foreign policy and it doesn't take into the fact that like,

we've gone to war.

And so I think that the biggest difficulty is not being overtaken by events to such a degree

that things don't feel like they resonate in the moment because the world changes a lot fast.

And so that is like one of the things I've had to be the most careful of.

And I'm trying to sort of continue to add to it because I'm still focus grouping all the time.

I'm still watching it to try to keep it as close to the moment as possible.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So I guess you shouldn't go crazy.

I'm just going to understand books get published in certain moments and that events happen

as long as Trump is still around and he's president.

And we're dealing with Trump and Trumpism and of course, the experiences you've had over

the last decade and before for that matter, which you discussed in the book are no change.

So I think you're pretty pretty safe, but yeah, you will have to update a bit.

So okay, title of the book.

So the book is how to eat an elephant one voter at a time and available for pre-order.

Let's just get this out of the way.

Sure, sure.

You can order it wherever you like if you order your books and that's why we can Sarah

can sell many copies.

It's pretty amazing what the bull, what what you post or the least the news about it

Friday.

How many copies have been sold?

But that's why you can sell copies now, even though it says you say it's not open.

You can't actually get it for six months, but yes, I got to say there's a there's a meta

aspect to the book and then the selling of the book right now because I talk it's a

communications book.

It's a book about communications, but one of the things I'm talking about is communications

in this new environment and how much the stickiness of community, like the idea that

I have an audience is not what I have.

I'm not on, you know, I'm not Nora O'Donnell, who is a book that's very close to mine in

the thing, you know, or somebody that is a big national figure, what I do have though,

not an audience.

I do have a community.

We have a community, this bull work community and the community is sticky, like even if

you don't love me, you may love the idea that JVL, if we sell a sufficient number of copies

gets to, you know, we'll let him, we'll let him moderate the focus group that everybody's

so desperate for.

You know, like that, that those are, those are sort of in community gags that people get

and it's, it's so incredible what you can do with a community.

Like they will show up for you and you will show up for them, right?

And I like to think, you know, there's days where, like this is a Sunday and noon, or

like days where, where news breaks and we in our pajamas or, you know, wearing shorts

or whatever we come in, because we want to talk to people and that's how we feel like

we show up for people and then they show up back for us.

And that is a new ish phenomenon in this space, right?

It's the new independent media.

It's the way politicians have to start engaging with voters, which is to have this kind

of parasocial relationship, have a relationship where people feel like they know them, understand

them, like they're going to, they can care about them, not just that they're some distant

person they'd have no access to, because that's not the world we live in anymore.

So anyway, I don't, I don't remember exactly why we started talking about a metaphor,

but it is incredible.

And I want to say how much I appreciate, I mean, I read the comments.

I was trying to like stick with the comments.

The number of people who are just like, I pulled my car over and I got it, like, you

know, or said, I don't know, a million things with that, that they, they care about seeing

it on the bestseller list, like they want us to beat because right now, you know, there's

a book by Kennedy, Senator Kennedy called like, you can't fix stupid or something like that,

you know, and they're all like, this should be better than that.

This should be beating that, you know?

And I love that and I appreciate it.

I can't tell you how much it means to me and I promise I won't disappoint you with what

it is when it comes out in six months.

You know, it's one thing that strikes me a lot, I'm having seen other people write books

and bestsellers and then being, you know, talking to agents and all those over the years,

is how quickly that community has built up, don't you think?

I mean, that is to say, in the old days, I remember there was a big, when I started on

TV and people began to know a little bit who I was in the late 90s, so I remember an

agent saying, it's great, you know, you got to keep doing this five, ten more years,

it really takes time, takes time to become George Will or to become Sam Dodd, or to become

someone who's well-known enough that the book just kind of takes off.

But really, I mean, we've been doing this together for almost a decade, I guess, right,

nine years for me, and we'll work, started in a very small way, a pretty small way,

when the weekly standard closed in January of 19, so what's that seven, little over seven

years.

But really, it took off three, four years ago, I guess you'd say, and it's just striking

to me the, I guess this is probably a phenomenon of modern world and social media and so forth

and everything else, and also I think a credit to you and to our colleagues.

I mean, how fast it's ramped up to the community.

And as you say, how much people, how much it seems to mean to people, I find that personally

very moving.

Honestly, I've got to say, I've been well-known, I guess, a little bit, you know, a little

world for quite a while, and it's nice to people recognize you and say, I like you

or sometimes I don't like you or I'm glad you're on what, whatever show, but this is

a totally different thing.

The Bullwork Experience Carvell said this to me the other day, actually, then he's got

this fantastic grant, which I'll go back to if you want, but how the Bullwork community

is different from just being famous, you know?

Yeah, and it's because, and this is how it's like at live shows.

You know, people say, there's like a lot, it's funny how people say, this is the focus

scripture like this too, but how many people in the audience sort of say the same thing.

They're like, well, you keep us sane.

And part of that, what they mean is, you guys show up and you talk about things and I feel

either like seen, like you guys are as angry as I am, you're upset as I am, or you're

making me think about things differently, but the bottom line is, one of my favorite things

is when people disagree with us, they don't like what we're saying, but like at some point

you've earned enough trust or like they know where you are coming from, they understand

you.

And so there's a tolerance then for like, they're like, yeah, I don't like, I don't agree

with Sarah on this, but like, I don't think she's BSing me or I don't think she's saying

this for some, you know, self-serving reason.

And I just think this is what she thinks and like, I don't, I can count on JVL to argue

with her and vice versa.

And so no, it is, it's incredible.

It is moving.

We get moved a lot, especially at live shows by just seeing, but this idea of when people

say you keep us sane, I always think, and you guys keep us sane, like we keep coming

and doing this together, but also for people, and that feels meaningful and useful at a

time when one of the dominant feelings that I think people feel is a sense of, God, what

are we going to do about this?

What do we do in this moment?

And that helplessness can be really debilitating, but being together and thinking through solutions

and even sense-making of the moment can buoy people and make you feel connected.

Yeah, and without getting too sappy or anything, I would say that's really, I mean, look, we

started this and whatever we started, 2017, 2018.

We fought Trump, he got stronger, he did lose his 2020 election, so that's something, but

then he comes back after January 6th, he wins the 2024 election.

It is sometimes tomorrowizing, and it could have been totally tomorrowizing, honestly.

And I really, without the boardwork community, I'm not sure that I would have been, you

know, maybe just say, look, okay, we did our best and we'll go, you know, read novels or

write, you know, do something else, write a memo, I don't know, whatever, you know,

not be in the middle of the fight.

I do, I think especially those months after November 2024, for me, that was really an important

moment.

I think we haven't really discussed this, but maybe for you too, I mean, that, you know,

Trump wins, people could have just decided, well, that was okay, they did their best, but

we just, it's not happening, and we just have to go somewhere else or not go over to

be part of Trump, but just, you know, kind of check out for a while or something.

And we had the opposite experience with the boardwork, right?

Yeah, I mean, this is why I wrote the book, right?

So I wrote the book, I decided to write the book in those months, sort of after Trump got

reelected.

A, because I felt like one of the questions that people were asking is kind of like, how

is this possible?

Like, how is it possible for all of this that Trump could get reelected after everything

that people know?

There's no excuses this time.

And so I, I felt like I actually could answer a lot of those questions, and many of them

obviously were like, hey, man, look, if you nominate an 82-year-old, re-nominate an

82-year-old, who people already, like, I mean, I just had been hearing it from the voters

for so much how they did, they thought he was too old, they thought he wasn't capable

of running the country, you were seeing all that's polling about how Biden was a bigger

threat to democracy than Trump.

And I knew from listening to voters that they didn't think, they weren't interpreting

that, like, Biden is a threat to democracy, like he will do the things that Trump is doing,

they meant he is not in a position to run the country, and therefore, I think he is

a threat to democracy, right?

It was like how they interpreted it, again, while I like focus groups.

But I really started to feel like, oh, man, America needs a pet talk right now.

And maybe some of it too is like being proximate to JBL, I mean, JBL was also, I don't think

this is, I think anybody who was reading the triad could see that, like, lots of us,

and we're feeling pretty dark about it.

And because I am a frustrated optimist, I really did feel like I wanted to do like a, no,

no, no, no, here's how we get up off the mat.

Here is why I don't think that Trump just winning that says exactly the things you think

it does about America.

Like I just knew how much of it was about inflation because I had been listening to them talk,

people talk about costs the whole time.

And how much people didn't like Trump, but felt like they didn't know Kamala.

Like again, there was a lot of two just analysis about Kamala that I fundamentally disagreed

with.

And I was like, I want to talk about how the voters didn't say because one of the bigger

fights is like, should the Democratic Party be more moderate or should it be more progressive?

And a lot of people I think would say, well, Sarah Longwell will tell you it needs to be

more moderate.

And that's it.

That could be me arguing from personal preference, but me arguing from what I listen

to is actually like, that's the wrong fight.

We do not need to actually have a fight about whether we be more progressive or more moderate.

We do think need to think a lot about how Democrats become more aggressive, how they become

better communicators, how they understand like that Kamala, Kamala's problem wasn't that

people, it was people could just sort of make of her what they wanted because she didn't

give in this like clear sense of who she was.

They needed that pair of social relationship to her.

They needed to know her at a 360 degree angle.

And they didn't.

The number one thing I heard from voters was, I don't trust her because I don't know her.

And people could say like, well, that's racism, that's sexism.

Those kinds of things can be in there as a way of saying, yeah, I like distrust this person

for reasons I can't always put my finger on, but the way you overcome that is by being

incredibly strong about who you are, being able to say it so clearly that other people

can't define you.

It's very difficult to define Trump in a way other than he is because it's all out there.

Just like love him or hate him.

And I hate him.

He is clear about who he is and voters when they say they're like, oh, I know he lies,

but I think he tells the truth.

And you're like, what is that?

But of course, what they mean is, I think he sincerely believes whatever insane thing

is coming out of his mouth.

And I feel like he's telling me the behind the scenes, he doesn't talk like a regular

politician, which is a new, real voter thing.

They don't want people who sound like regular politicians.

And so again, and it jives again with the bull work, like people also don't as much

want, especially out of their opinion journalism, it's different sort of for direct reporting.

But in terms of what people want when they think about politics, they want to know where

the people are coming from.

Like they sort of want your biases right up front.

They don't care if you have them actually.

But they get annoyed by us, somebody who says, I have no biases, I'm completely neutral.

And then they feel like they're divining their intent all the time.

But if you say, I am a Republican, I have been a Republican my whole life.

And Donald Trump has completely changed the party and they ended into something I want

absolutely nothing to do with.

And in fact, I want to devote myself to defeating him because there's nothing conservative

about him.

There's nothing good.

There's no first principles that he adheres to.

People are like, yeah, okay, I see where that is going.

You know, I see what that is.

And then they can interact with you in that way and they can build trust with you because

they know exactly where you're coming from because you're being clear about it.

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I think you're important about the centrist versus progressive stuff is important and we've

discussed it in the past.

And I think this is another UNI and Tim and JVL have all kind of approached pretty similarly,

slightly different from slightly different places, obviously, just because of who we are.

But those are fights about policies, but one thing you stress over and over, and I think

in the book too, that one can different policies, but one can have shared values, right?

And also a shared approach, which is the sort of aggressiveness and also not yielding

to Trump into the lies and to the bullying and so forth.

And that can be done by centrist, they can be done by progressives, and they can equally

be centrist to progressives who don't fight either effectively or aggressively or intelligently,

right?

I mean, I think that's such an important, I feel like so many people are we winning this

fight a little bit of trying to persuade people to get beyond the fight, stay all remember

from 2021 or 2017 or for all I know, 20 2008, you know, of like the centrist have to fight

the progressives and they can differ and they should argue there's no problem with it,

but values are so much more important than policies, that's one thing I've really learned

over the years.

Yeah, and this is where like my hope for this book, like if I had to just sort of pin

a hope on it, it would be that it would do for the communications conversation, what

abundance did for the policy side?

So like abundance started to conversation, you don't have to like it, you don't have

to be into it, but like it started this conversation about what are the policies that we care

about?

What is our, what is our posture going to be on policy?

Are we going to be forward looking?

Okay.

I want this to just, I'm not if I can describe it, there are lefty versions of abundance

and centrist versions of about this, because people with different, well, what, okay,

we all want more of a good thing, you know, the lower housing cost, that's like, but

there are, you know, mondonny type solutions, there are free market type solutions.

Yeah, but the, I do think you're right, abundance sort of stepped over some of those old

policy.

It's working compasses them, maybe, yeah.

And it doesn't matter what you think of abundance, you know what I'm talking about, actually.

Like you wonder, you're like, it means saying it means that they were effective at starting

a conversation about policy that I think is meaningful, because it's about who are

Democrats going to be.

That's not the conversation I'm trying to have.

I am trying to have though a conversation that is at that level of impact and discourse

about communications and communications is also about like, who are you as a person?

You know, one of the, when you say like, are we winning?

I think people are starting to, Democrats are starting to understand that they have to

change something.

They have to under, they understand that they need to be thinking about offense, but

they're still at the point where they are articulating that they need to be thinking

about offense.

Not yet at the point where they have figured out how to just do offense.

And I really want this book to be a helpful kick in the butt around what it looks like

to do meaningful offense.

And this is the one place where my background as a Republican communications operative and

being able to see how Democrats do it and see how Republicans do it and be able to compare

the two gives me an opportunity to say like, I've been in the belly of the beast of both

of these things and seeing how both sides do it.

And like, I've got a lot of thoughts about places where Democrats, there's a lot of things

Democrats do well.

But like Republicans, the ruthlessness of their communications strategy, the ability

to do narrative dominance, the ability of Trump to prioritize vibes over actual policy.

Like the ability of him to create a real meaningful connection with his audience where

people call it a cult and I probably won't dispute that.

But like, you have to understand that the undercurrent of that is that he has built a relationship

with people that allows him to do whatever he wants.

And so like, for Democrats, I think there's a problem of bench building, right?

So a lot of the, like Obama was this world class communicator.

But I think one of the knocks on him, and I think this is probably true, is that like,

there wasn't a bench that came in his wake of people who really understood how to do

that level of communications to connect with an audience.

And so instead, see people kind of are just like, well, he's a once in a generation talent.

And I'm like, and then they're like, when Bill Clinton was a once in a generation talent.

And I was like, okay, guys, we need some more, we need some more generational talent

then because it can't just be that you get these like, these are the only people that

can do it, right?

And so, well, I think Democrats are starting to have some of the conversations.

Like, I'll just tell you, there's a, there's a bunch in the book around religion, not

a bunch in the book, but I have a chapter on sort of the difference between Republicans

and Democrats.

And one is that Republicans talk about religion all the time.

Democrats don't.

And so I had made that point, and I talked about that before James Taleriko showed up.

And so like, Taleriko has kind of, Taleriko has come in and sort of accelerated that

conversation.

Like, it's now on the map in a way that when I wrote it in the book already, it wasn't.

And so, but now people are talking about it.

So I think, in that way, as I see things stepping forward, but I do think there's a long

way to go for Democrats to sort of internalize what it means to kind of stop crying and

start sweating and being like, which is an old Jimmy Carter line, actually, but it is a,

it is a like, what are we going to do to go fight?

And, and Democrats want fighters, like, and this, fighters is becoming a stand-in for

at level of urgency from their politician that matches the moment.

And that's why progressive moderate, people are like, just show me that this moment is

as significant to you as it is to me.

And like, that's the energy people are looking for.

That's so interesting, and very well said.

So people should look forward to the book, and of course, meanwhile, they can watch you

on many, many shows here on the board can read you and, of course, watch Focus Group

and, in fact, the Focus Group.

And then read the whole book on September, it really doesn't come out until September

night or something.

It's kind of, I feel like, you know, I mean, close-up is, it's funny that it's so far off,

right?

Yes.

And I will do a book tour when it happens.

Well, also, it's going to, so part of it is that it's time to come out, it'll kind

of in the midst, like, right before the midterms, and I will just say is the last thing

on the book.

I wrote it to be not just of this moment, but really, like, 26 adjacent, but really for

28.

And then beyond, it's a lot about how we got here, but it's a lot about going forward

too.

And it's really that, like, at its core, sort of doing a root branch operation on the toxic

political forces that Trump has unleashed on our country is going to take, it's not going

to take two elections.

It's not just the normal vicissitudes of, you know, midterms and then elections in which

parties empower, like, there has to be real work done to overcome that, and it's going

to take, sort of, some sea change things, and so I lay out a lot of that in the book.

And so, anyway, that's why the timing, but you can get it on Audible, you can get it

on Farns and Noble, you can get it on from the little independent bookshop.

There's a bookshop.

I think it's called bookshop.org, where you can go, and they donate to your local one,

you can actually call your local retailer, do all those things, because the point is,

is to use the bullwark community that understands this as a way to push it into the mainstream,

so that, like, people who are not political obsessives, like, our audience read it.

Are you reading the Audible book?

Of course I am.

Oh, good, okay.

So, some people don't want to, or they're not asked to, but they don't.

They don't sound good, I guess.

I don't know.

I have no authors who have been in good health, and could have sat there for the 10 hours

you need, or whatever, or to read the book, and just either chose not to, or weren't asked

for their publisher to, but you'll do that sometime this summer, I suppose.

Yeah, that's my plan.

I would like to be the one, now that you say this, I got to tell you, the publishing

stuff is sort of still a little bit opaque to me partly, because I tried to do this,

I'm doing this fast, as a normal timeline thing, but yes, I have every intention of reading

the audio.

I think given how prominent you are on audio and video you should, but that's my opinion,

what do I know.

Maybe they'll get Sarah Jessica Parker to read it or something like that, or Lucy Lollis,

or other bullfork, famous bullfork fans, you know.

That would be cool, but I think the New Zealand accent would be good on reading the book.

I want to be there to read JBL's footnotes.

I will actually, no, actually I'll let JBL read his own homework, and his footnotes.

His footnotes, I'll just this really quickly, as JVN all of a sudden I went through this book.

He writes a whole forward about how the whole point is, you can't just argue with these

voters, the whole book.

He'll be tempted to do it, but try to just sit with what these people are saying, and

then he goes on to fight with the voters in the forward, and then all through the footnotes,

as we were doing it, I keep having to cut them, because they take you, you know, whatever,

but he is undeterred.

He is generally undeterred.

All right, talk to him.

Talk to him about Iran.

All right, talk to him about Iran.

Talk to him about Iran.

Well, let me ask, put it this way, since you mentioned the war, you're going to have

to update some, and I remember, I think we were together in the office, maybe it was

the day before the war, the Trump launch, it was Friday, and we were talking about the

cover a little bit, which I think was still in slight question mark about how it would

look, and maybe you would just sign off on the final for now, I guess, manuscript, so

they could copy it, and so forth.

And the next day, the war broke out.

So how do you expect now, a week into the war, that the war might affect what you're

writing about?

In other words, how do you, what do you think the domestic politics, Trump-related effects

of this war with Iran might be, what has it looked to you a week in?

Yeah, so obviously, there's a fair amount of the book, both about how I've changed, but

also how the Republican Party has changed, because we've gone like this.

But one of the things that is just flat out interested me about one of the big shifts

has been how different Republican voters are today on foreign policy than they were when

I was 22.

And obviously, when I was 22, we had just, 9-11 had just happened, and George W. Bush

was president, and we were starting to talk about going into Iraq, and Afghanistan, there

were actual congressional votes then.

There was actually a public persuasion effort at the time.

But the Republican Party was, you know, pretty convinced that we could export democracy,

right?

That was actually like a, well, you know this better than I do.

But that was an animating part of the movement at that time.

That is just not the case now, right?

So you get on the other side of Iraq and Afghanistan, and two decades of war.

And the voters, I mean, one of the Trump basically did two things to make him stand out from

the rest of the pack in the 2016 Republican primary.

One was to get all over Jeb Bush about his brother's war, and use that to discredit him.

And that's when people realized Trump was right about the voters, that there was this

tremendous fatigue about these Middle East wars, and that voters did want that, and they

didn't want the older Republican model, and then the other was immigration, right?

Those were like two of the biggest things that made Trump president.

So in the book, I write a lot about the new isolationists on the right, and how big a

shift that is, and how voters talk about it, and how the idea of boots on the ground in

a Middle Eastern country.

And there's a reason that when the first polling came out about Iran, it was before we went

in, 21% of Americans said we should do something about Iran.

Like we should, we should bomb Iran, we should go to war with Iran, 21%.

Now what's interesting is that after Trump running three successive campaigns, but two

of them really focused on the idea that we won't get into these stupid wars, these Middle

East wars, especially this 2024 term, they really leaned on JD Vance, and Tulsi Gabbard,

and this idea of, you know, no, we are, we are isolationist, Pete Hague Seth, with no

stupid wars, we won't get into them.

So I'm desperate to understand now.

Okay, so I have this thesis that the voters have gotten much more isolationist.

And yet when Trump bombs Iran, suddenly support for it, Trump's up to about 40%, 41%.

Now that's interesting to me because it directly mirrors Trump's approval rating, which

means that what's happening right now is that anybody who's basically rides with Trump

is going to ride with him into this war.

Now this makes some sense to me because a lot of the people who were attracted to Trump,

the swingier voters, they're two kinds of people.

One is they're kind of red-pilled, so they're anti-woke, but these are also people who

like might have been Democrats otherwise, like your Joe Rogans or some of these like

podcasting bros, they might otherwise be Democrats.

They were very anti-war and they were attracted to Trump's anti-war pitch.

So that's one group of people, now those people though are already out.

Those are the independence that Trump has been falling off a cliff with.

And so he's still fine with his base voters.

The supporters are stick with him through everything, but he's lost a ton of those

independence.

The other half of those independence though, and I see this in the focus groups already,

is people who are in there, and I swear to God, this happened this week.

What do you think about what we're doing in Iran?

And some of the people in the groups are like, sorry, what happened?

Like what's happening in Iran?

And they didn't know, they don't know where it war.

And I do think Trump, like part of them trying to not call it a war, is trying to keep

it a secret from low information voters, although those low information voters have one data

point that Trump can't hide from them, which is their gas price is going up when they

go to the actual pump, which is when a lot of Americans will look up and say, what is going

on?

Why is this happening?

And that may sound insane to a lot of people right now.

But like if there's anything I've learned from the focus groups, it is that the things

that we talk about every day, 85% of it escapes the notice of your average American who's

just out there doing whatever.

But so it's going to be interesting to me.

So right now public opinion is mapping with approval of Trump, and it's very much Trump's

war.

What happens if we're still in this war in three weeks though?

Because the voters got really not, spoils not the right word, but slightly attuned to

this idea that Trump can just do these smash and grab jobs.

Those into Venezuela, grabs Maduro, you talk about it for a week, and then Americans

don't hear about it again.

You bomb Iran, you know, back whenever we did that before, Trump says we obliterated

their nuclear program.

That's a lie.

We know that, like everyone kind of stops talking about it.

So Americans don't, they're just like, okay, well, if it's just like that, fine.

If it's not like that, if it's protracted, if Americans are dying, oil prices are high

at a time when things have not gotten more expensive, I'm sorry, have not gotten cheaper

and inflation hasn't eased, I do think that that is how you get to what I have always

talked about, which is the bush line, or the W line, as Tim wants me to call it, because

that's how Trump does will himself down to a 32% and leaves office with a very demoralized

public.

And so that's, but that's, now that's sort of an open question that I have to wrestle

with on the foreign policy side that I wasn't quite thinking about, because I obviously

I recognize the cultishness and the fact that people will jump on board.

But it is really, I will be interested to see whether that 20% gap that jumped on board,

just because they're like, I'm here to defend Trump, no matter what he does, will they

stay if we're six weeks in, eight weeks in, ten weeks in, there's more bombs going off,

things are destabilized, things are getting more expensive, like then what happens?

Or even, I suppose, if six or 12 months from now, something happens that in retrospect

seems to reflect poorly or well, I guess, on the judgment to go to war, you know, these

things don't just click off at some point here.

I thought, one thing you said is so important, maybe just develop this for a minute, and

then we can let you go back to your Sunday and let people go.

But the, you said in passing, this is why they don't want to call it a war or what reason

they don't, you know, they, and we've all made fun of that and they, online and so forth

and then, crackly, not just make fun of it, but it's kind of, it's bad.

I mean, what do you tell the parents of these six Americans, the servers when a woman

who died, that, you know, they wasn't a war, I mean, but they're not, as always, with

the Trump, there's always like a germ of cunning in his even most ludicrous lies and fictions

and bloviations and so forth, right?

And I, I sort of wonder, I'm wondering about that.

I mean, if you say it over and over, it's not a war sign, you get the Republican senators

earnestly to say it over and over, it's not really a war.

I don't know to some of those voters thinking, well, it's not really quite a, you know, they

don't get into the logistics, you know, fine tuning, but it kind of sinks in a little

bit.

It's not quite, this isn't quite like the wars we didn't like.

This could be different.

I mean, they're not entirely foolish, maybe, to fight what seems to be on the surface

of very foolish and almost offensive, almost, you know, argument.

Do you think that's right?

Or am I overthinking that?

Oh, I think that, I think that's right.

The reason that I said it is that there's something, there's a reason, I mean, it was just

to happen on the Sunday shows.

I think it was, uh, walls was asked, are we in a war?

Like, just the straightforward question, are we in a war?

I was doing the illegal news with this really smart, uh, woman from just security.

And, uh, I, that was my opening question is, like, is this a war?

Like, define it, and she's like, of course, this is a war.

Once you start bombing other countries, right?

And people are dying and your soldiers are dying like you're in a war walls on the Sunday

show, what an answer it, Mike Walls.

Uh, and so, uh, you know, they don't want to answer it because they, they don't

want to admit that this is what's happening.

And they are hoping that it, that either Trump just pulls us out of it.

They, you know, uh, that it, for some reason, it turns out okay.

And they can declare victory, uh, and Trump's going to try that.

Although, I mean, Bill, you've been through this more than I have.

The thing that I astonishes me, and it's again, but that this seems important.

Why is Trump only updating us on his personally held social media account, a private

company? He doesn't go to the White House and interrupt the cable channels.

He doesn't interrupt the survivor, you know, season 50 to make sure that

Americans are watching it.

I think that's deliberate.

Like, I do think they are trying to not say they're in a full,

fledged war for as long as they can to see if they can get out of it by

saying, see how smart Trump was, he went in, he got this thing done, and now it's

over. Um, but this is where sometimes these things get away from you.

In fact, lots of times things get, these things get away from you.

That's George W Bush mission accomplished, um, is like a pretty good, but that,

that's where it starts to look eerily like they are repeating almost beat

for beat, some of the, the things in the past that didn't warning the following

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That's such a shrewd port about the a lot of us see a lot of people

certainly complaining, we have to have it over the office address where this is

a major massive operation.

It isn't massive because the thing we've done in 20 years, certainly.

But in a way, there's shrewd not to write because they don't want all the

analysis compared to the previous Oval Office addresses launching military

conflicts in the previous votes obviously in Congress.

So we didn't want that ratifying it, people like me.

So you know, I reckon if you go to where you're better off having some

bipartisan support, it gives you a little more percussion.

But yeah, they really are.

Yeah, they wanted to be Venezuela.

It's a little bigger version of Venezuela.

It's a tougher version.

People hate the itolas more than they hated the euro probably.

So it's okay to kill more people, frankly, and keep it going for a while.

But I mean, yeah, I've sort of assumed he calls an end to it just because he's so

the one lesson he seems to have learned over 50 years of watching

where politics is don't get involved in land wars anywhere really.

He was, he was around during Vietnam.

He was around during obviously Iraq.

And it's only he was around during the war that broke out when I was in the

White House, the broke out that we declared and fought to get Saddam out of Kuwait.

And that went well much better than people forget how worried people were,

but very, very well.

And it didn't help towards HW Bush.

So good wars don't help you much.

And bad wars hurt you a lot.

I think that is generally true, actually, which is why I do think it's going to

be tricky for them to navigate this.

And they can I wrote that little thing in warning shots putting myself in

Trump's mind and sort of making like I'm going to get out of this.

I'm not letting this go forever.

And I think he could though, I've got to say he's also going to be closer to

this was you've watched Trump carefully for the last 10 years.

I don't know the two, the two social stuff.

It's all such bullshit.

You never know with Trump, right?

He's capable of being, you know, unbelievably grandiose and then pivoting out of time.

I suppose having said that, I feel like the megalomania is more real than it used

to be and the lizard cunning is less there than it used to be.

I mean, in the unconditional surrender and the relishing almost like

Exath of the death and destruction and and I we can do this.

We can do Cuba next.

I'm already announcing the next war before this war.

I don't know, do you think that's the case?

The second term is, it's just a little more out of control, I guess.

Yeah.

Look, I think that one of the worst things that can happen to any person and

again, this is why I inflict focus groups on people is that you get into your

silo and you start to believe that the entire world reflects something that

you believe.

I think in Trump's first term, he was surround.

He was, he was younger.

He was a younger person, but he was also surrounded by more people willing

to tell him no more people willing to give him the counterpoint.

I think now he is surrounded by people who are like, Sir, you have a,

this war has a 96% approval among Republicans and they're not telling him

that 70% of independence don't like it that it's fallen off a cliff with

Hispanics that that going into the midterms, Democrats have a seven point,

you know, generic bold vantage and that their voters are way more fired up.

Like I do think people are maybe shielding him more.

And when he's not campaigning, I'm not sure he gets as much.

Like he's on the phone all day with billionaires who are trying to get

bespoke deals out of him.

And so like everybody tells them he's doing a great job.

And so I do think he's just losing some of what is a, you always talked about

that low cunning, that almost like reptilian ability he had to understand

where the American people were and I think he has lost a lot of that

because he is cocooned among yes men.

It's such a good point.

I mean, I, someone, as I'm a conversation yesterday with our friend,

actually, Andy Swick and I came with one of us at this, one of us said,

the gas prices, that's what he can't really, that's just real.

And, you know, obviously, Suzy, well, I mean, no more Republican politicians know

that. And therefore that's got to make a dent on Trump at some point that,

you know, he's got a release of plausible story of how they're going to go back

down or something.

And I think it was Andy made at this point that, well, actually, you know,

the cocoon has gotten pretty cocoonish.

The people at Mar-a-Lago that he's having dinner with, don't care about gas prices,

right? They're not filling up every week and worrying about, gee,

it's costing me a lot more to do.

I just go to get to my job or take the kids to school or whatever that I used

that I did a week ago.

So I agree the kind of billionaire oligarchic,

sick of fantic, overlapping cocoons that he's now in.

I wonder if that has diminished his demagogic skills.

If you want to think of it that way, the good demagogues, he was a good cop.

I wasn't good.

He was sort of a good con man.

He had many failures, but he became a very good con man in politics.

That's the way, that's another way of saying demagog really.

And salesman, if you want to be nice and you lose those skills,

if you're not, you know, one thing salesman has to be good salesman,

you have to kind of understand your customers, right?

And maybe you're right.

He's just a less touch with them than he used to be.

I don't I wonder about that.

Yeah, it's always hard to know.

I mean, like sometimes there's also this part of me that wants to be like,

I don't know, Trump likes to see things go boom, you know,

he likes to see big bombs go off and like feel like that somehow reflects

because Trump's a broken person.

Like I mean, he has some of these qualities, but like he's a fundamentally

broken human being who has no conception of how to really love America,

want to take care of Americans.

And so like, this was why I posed him from the start.

Like from the beginning, Trump is a bad person.

Who doesn't have a lot of the normal qualities of like an empathetic,

decent human does hasn't lived his life that way.

Like, you know, if he's the kind of guy who rips everybody off and stiffs everyone

and thinks that that's him being more sophisticated.

And like, you just can't have somebody like that running country.

And you really, I got on kind of a tear on the coal rise.

I sort of lost my temper just about Trump's sort of being like, yeah,

people are going to die.

And like, I don't, I don't usually some of the imagery stuff, you know,

Trump wearing the ball cap at the, when he was just where they were doing the,

the soldiers, the, the dead soldiers, yeah, we're doing the transfer,

dignified transfer, dignified transfer and Trump's wearing a cap.

Like sometimes I think that stuff can go over, be overwrought.

The fact that he was wearing a hat, but it, it's not the hat.

It's that Trump does not mourn the deaths that come with the decision that he makes.

Like he doesn't, he doesn't take them on in a way where he thinks like the

enormous weight of people's lives and he does this on affordability.

Affordability is a hoax.

You don't need this or that.

Like he just doesn't care about people.

And so when you don't care about people and you're just like, oh, look,

I've got this big military and they're really good at stuff and they can go blow things up.

And that's cool.

Let's go to, like, that's as much a reason for Trump is anything.

It's hard to always know his, his reasons, but I do know,

I do know that because he doesn't care about people,

he will not conduct this war in a way.

I think that is like reflected on a human level.

It will all be about him.

And like if he starts to feel enough pain from it politically in some way,

although it's difficult to inflict as much pain on a lame duck,

but if he really starts to feel public opinion constraint, like, then he just walks away.

Like he's destabilized a region and he'll just walk away.

Like he won't feel like, oh, I broke it.

I bought it.

He won't feel a commitment to that.

So, but I mean, you could walk away.

It can go, everybody can go south and you end up still being held responsible for unbelievable

best that you've left behind, right?

So I was that, I mean, I went to a little thing.

Also, I was saying that he will, I think his instinct at some point will be to walk away,

but that doesn't solve his problem necessarily, right?

You know, Star Wars that you started and that don't, you walk away from halfway through

it made out of it and so well.

But, oh, you'll have to discuss, you'll be just, you'll look back on all this in six months

on the book tour, but people should order the book.

It's really, this has been such an interesting discussion.

And I think, yes, they need, people need not just a pep talk, but advice and guidance

on solely the politicians do on how to fight Trump and voters need to think about how they

can talk to their fellow voters too, right?

I mean, it's not, this is not just a top-down thing, right?

And the book is entitled, how to eat an elephant.

That's a good title.

I think it's an elite, my two cents worth, one voter at a time.

So I mean, it is, there is something for everyone to do, not just for, you know,

Hakeem Jeffries, right?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think part of it, when I was talking about the helplessness before,

the reason I called it how to eat an elephant is obviously it works on just like a normal

Republican level, but it's like, how do you solve a big, intractable problem?

How do you solve a problem that feels too big to solve?

And the question is, it's like, you take a piece by piece and so like,

here is the communications piece and a bunch of elements.

And there's obviously a fair amount of policy in there as it relates to like what voters say

they want about policy, but it tries to take all of these different things that we're

grappling with and break them down so that people can think about how to tackle them.

So anyway, and it also has a lot in there about the early days of Bill Crystal and Sarah

Longwell.

When all this started, no, I would never skip it.

You could skip that part.

I would never skip it.

One day, Sarah gets in an argument with Bill Crystal in a little room and

then they start having coffee and then everything from there.

Amazing.

It was less than 10 years ago, right?

It's been a, it's been a, well, it's been a rough 10 years for the country, but it's

been a fun 10 years.

I've enjoyed the 10 years personally.

So Sarah, thanks for taking time out of your side data to join me here and congratulations

on the book and everyone should pre-order it and look forward to reading it in September.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye guys.

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