President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are cratering fast towards a historic milestone, and one that, according to one top conservative analyst, could finally leave MAGA a “failed experiment.”
Sarah Longwell is a long-tenured conservative political analyst, best known now for her extensive focus group work and as the publisher of the anti-Trump outlet, The Bulwark. This week, she appeared as a guest on the latest episode of the “Fast Politics” podcast with host Molly Jong-Fast, who questioned her about Trump reaching the “Bush Line,” a concept that Longwell is credited with coining.
As she described it, the Bush Line refers to the abysmal average approval rating that George W. Bush left office with in 2009, around 32 percent. At that level, not only did Democrats handily win the following two presidential elections, but Bush was also turned into a pariah within the GOP, and left the party a “hollowed-out” husk ripe to be remade by the Tea Party and MAGA movements. Trump is currently hovering near that line — with some polls putting him well below it — with over two years left in his term, which gave Longwell hope for the country’s ability to move past MAGA.
“And so for me, I think there’s a bunch of things that Trump being well below the Bush line would do,” Longwell explained. “One, it would say that this was a failure, the MAGA experiment was a failure. Two, it would hang around. We want Trump’s presidency to hang around future Republicans like J.D. Vance, like Marco Rubio, like an albatross. We don’t want it to be a thing that bolsters him. But also the lower he is going into the midterms, like right now, Gallup’s got him at 33 percent.”
She added: “Like we are approaching the Bush line. Some polls have him at the Bush line or below. And that bodes well for the out-of-power party in the midterms. And so I want to drive Trump’s approval as far down as possible because I want it to be a failed experiment that never happens again.”
Jong-Fast later pressed Longwell about the things she has heard from Trump voters about their disappointment with his second term, and about what issues seemed to have been the turning point for them. She explained that these voters gave Trump a lot of leeway about not fixing the economy immediately, but by now, their patience has mostly run out. She also noted that the Epstein Files fiasco probably represented the first major betrayal, with Trump fully going back on a major promise. A similar reaction emerged when it became clear that the Iran conflict would not be a quick operation like Venezuela.