Bulwark publisher and longtime conservative Sarah Longwell says President Donald Trump has ripped his cult to pieces and possibly given Democrats an edge for the foreseeable future.
“Donald Trump is doing terribly. He is sabotaging himself,” Longwell told Trump critic and host George Conway on his “Psycho Politics” Tuesday podcast. “He’s made a bunch of terrible policy decisions that allow Democrats, if they can seize the opportunity, they have a generational opportunity to demonstrate to Americans that Donald Trump was a failure that he is a failed president, that everybody will look back and say that was an experiment that failed and was bad for Americans.”
“We all got hurt by it. Not only do we trade away our integrity as a country, but it hurt everybody personally,” continued Longwell, describing herself as an “ex-Republicans telling Democrats what to do.” “He is failing right now. And so, the question is, can Democrats seize this moment. Democrats, go do your thing. But my god, communicate effectively.”
Longwell said Democrats must persuade a majority of the country that they are the better leaders in this moment — and thanks to Trump’s many failures they should have an easy case to make.
“Donald Trump has been a failure. That’s why you need him below the Bush line, guys. The below the Bush line is all about having everybody acknowledge this was a failed president. No one supported him by the end. And that is what gives Democrats the opportunity to go on offense and they’ve got to take it,” said Longwell.
Conway said he was furious that Trump had to be such a colossal fiasco to finally convince Americans to shake their Trump addiction in the first place.
“It’s almost like, well, they’d be perfectly happy with [Trump’s] crypto [corruption], and they’d be perfectly happy with the with Bribe Force One, [a 747 jet gifted to Trump by the Qatari government]. They’d be perfectly happy with Alina Haba getting $50 million from somebody who then gets a pardon from Donald Trump. they’d be perfectly happy with so much of this other stuff if they were paying $3 a gallon for gasoline,” said Conway.
But these were “his choices,” said Longwell, making them self-inflicted damage. This included Trump’s painful tariffs that extracted tolls from U.S. consumers at store counters and the war with Iran.
“Americans don’t understand all the stuff about policy and how things happen. They do understand though the basics of gas prices going up. It costs more to transport food. … And folks in rural areas know that AI is basically propping up the economy and they’re doing it where these billionaires are getting super rich while they’re getting poorer,” said Longwell. “’Trump did these things that are making my life materially worse,’ they’re saying. And then on the flip side, what is Trump talking about every day? He’s talking about his ballroom. He’s talking about the Reflecting Pool. He’s talking about [men’s anatomy]. And so, these voters are saying, ‘I hired him to do a pretty specific thing, and I thought he was going to care about me.’”