Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsDonald Trump continues to insist that he is popular on the eve of an important election, even though everyone else knows he is not. “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote. It’s so important,” he said recently. In the meantime, the GOP’s first-ever midterm convention this week—headlined, of course, by Trump—has several Republican candidates sitting it out, probably because they pay attention to polls. The war in Iran, tariffs, and high gas prices have pushed his popularity rating down to about 35 percent, and even some of the MAGA faithful have been complaining. House seats that had been solidly red in Texas, Colorado, South Carolina, and a handful of other states are starting to look “soft,” as pollsters say.On paper, this presents an opportunity for Democrats to take back control of the House or Senate or both, and put forth some charismatic leaders of their own. But to do that, they would have to start behaving and talking very differently, Sarah Longwell, the publisher of The Bulwark and author of the new book How to Eat an Elephant argues.A longtime Republican, Longwell now says, “The Republican Party has to be defeated, and I think MAGA specifically, I want to defeat it and then salt the Earth with its ashes.”She’s spent the past few years conducting hundreds of focus groups with Trump supporters, and also swing voters, to try to understand better how Democrats can reach them. What she’s discovered is that many Democrats are mostly using the wrong approach, and they are missing a chance to speak to voters’ fears and deepest concerns.On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Longwell discusses how she thinks Democrats should talk about sensitive issues, such as immigration, and the words they should stop using. She outlines which Democratic leaders are doing a good job communicating and how to achieve what she calls “narrative dominance.” And she shares why—despite the contradictions, misinformation, and conspiracy theories she hears in her focus groups—she is hopeful about the American voter.The following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: We’re less than 60 days away from the midterms, and in a rare moment of unity, the president and congressional Democrats have a shared goal: Make this election about Donald Trump.Donald Trump: What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote. It’s so important.[Music]Rosin: Trump is so sure that he is the key to Republican victories that he has insisted on holding a Republican-convention-slash-Trump-rally in Dallas this week, where he will deliver a, quote, “presidential keynote,” presumably to help voters envision, when they’re in the booth, that he is on the ballot.But this whole scenario is true only in Trump’s imagination. As Democrats are well aware, and no doubt gloating over, Trump is not, in fact, very popular at the moment. His approval rating was at 33 percent at the end of August. And even MAGA Republicans are bristling at the war in Iran, tariffs, and high gas prices.Sarah Longwell: Trump is as underwater as I’ve seen him in all of the years that I’ve been focused on politics in the Trump era, in large part because, much like George W. Bush toward the end of his time in office, Trump is fighting an unpopular war and he’s got a lousy economy.Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.And that is Sarah Longwell. She’s the publisher of The Bulwark and author of a new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time, which she describes as, quote, “the playbook for consigning MAGA-style politics to the ash heap of history (where it belongs).” Longwell is also a nerd for focus groups. She’s conducted hundreds since Trump first came into office. And she says voters’ attitudes toward the president have changed, even in just the past year.Longwell: In the beginning, when he first got into office, we would ask people how they were feeling about things, and they would say, Give him time. You know, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Joe Biden, XYZ—it’s his fault. Gotta give Trump some time. But now they’ve given him time, and they also identify very clearly that both the war in Iran and tariffs were both choices that Trump made himself. And so he is currently like an albatross around the necks of Republicans running in Senate races and in House races.I listen to these voters in focus groups. I was doing one a couple weeks ago; it was Florida Trump voters. We asked them to give him a letter grade, and C was the highest grade he got. It was just a bunch of C’s, D’s, and F’s.[Music]Rosin: Theoretically, this should be a great opportunity for Democrats.Longwell: I was looking at the Senate map 18 months ago, going, God, this map is terrible for Democrats. What are they gonna do? And now the Senate’s legitimately in play.Rosin: But—and this is a big but—just because Democrats have an opening here does not mean they are ready to jump into it. In fact, in her book, Longwell argues that many Democrats are not. From what she’s seen in focus groups, they don’t connect with voters in the right way. In fact, they alienate them a lot.We’ll talk about all that. But first, we need to know something about Longwell, who got her start in politics working for [Senator] Rick Santorum, who is a pretty conservative Republican.I wanna ask you: You’re a Republican. Why are you in the business of giving advice to Democrats? Why is that important to you right now?Longwell: I am not a Republican anymore. So as I lay out in the book, I grew up as a Republican and was sort of a John McCain Republican coming out of college. I was 18 when [President] Bill Clinton was impeached for having an affair with a woman, a girl, not much older than I was at the time. And so I got, in my very early formative years, slightly polarized against Democrats and then found [Senator] John McCain to be a really compelling figure as I sort of grew up into politics in my 20s.And I sort of hung in there with Republicans, although I was always, you know, I’m gay and I’m a moderate. I was always a moderate kind of Republican with some libertarian tendencies. But Trump was anathema to me, not just because he had a completely—I think he had a totally different set of policy beliefs from me. But much more importantly, as a matter of character, as a matter of liking America or, like—to have somebody running the country whose goal is to weaponize fear and anger to make us hate each other, I reject that. And I tried to hang in there for a couple of years and say, I’m gonna fight Trump from within the Republican Party. I tried to primary him going into the 2020 election, and tried to get Mark Cuban or [Maryland Governor] Larry Hogan or somebody to primary him. It’s actually why I started doing the focus groups in the first place, was I was trying to figure out how we could primary Trump.And then I continued by saying, Okay, well, nobody’s gonna seriously take this guy on. How do we get these disaffected Republicans to vote for a Democrat? And that was sort of my beginning of trying to figure out how to get people to vote for Democrats.As long as Donald Trump has the stranglehold on the Republican Party, there’s nothing in this party—in the Republican Party—for me. And more importantly, I believe it is an actively dangerous political party at the moment. Do I still believe in limited government, free markets, and American leadership in the world? Sure, I do, but I don’t see any reason why Democrats aren’t being more responsive on a number of those issues than Republicans are. I mean, the level of corruption they’re tolerating, it’s unfathomable. And so there’s nothing for me in the Republican Party, and I think the Republican Party has to be defeated. And I think MAGA specifically, I want to defeat it and then salt the Earth with its ashes.Rosin: Wow, okay. Very Rambo. (Laughs.)Longwell: (Laughs.) I know, I’m super intense about this. I think that Trump is really bad for America. I think he tries to weaponize our worst impulses. You know, he understands how to take people’s darkest impulses and amplify them, and he does that for his own power.I’ve never seen in my lifetime, and it’s hard to find characters like this in American history who, I think, ascended to the presidency while caring so little about America and her people. And I think he has made us all worse. Everything he has done has made America a less good country, and I’m desperate for change, and I’m desperate for Donald Trump to be a failure. My singular goal is that when we look back on the Trump years, everybody sort of agrees: That was a mistake. That was a failure. We never want to do that again.Rosin: So your driving belief is: There is a part of us that can remember that. I think there’s a lot of people sometimes who feel like voters are lost, they’re numb, they’ve forgotten how to be good. We’re hopelessly polarized. But that is not your view. This book is intended to find the place in the American voter where they can turn the country in a different direction. It’s essentially a hopeful book.Longwell: It is a hopeful book, and I wrote it because I’m confronted so often with the cynicism and desperation from people who think, Man, we’re done. America’s toast. It’s over. And our voters are fundamentally corrupt and bad. And that’s just not what I think. And what I think is that every—it’s kind of just part of the human condition, right? People have light and dark in them, and I tell this story at the end of the book, or I relay this parable.It’s, like, a Native American parable where a grandfather’s talking to his grandson, and he says,Look, inside every one of us, there’s two wolves. There’s a good wolf that represents truth and light and decency, and there’s a bad wolf that’s avarice and greed and hatred, and those two wolves are always in tension.And the grandson says, Well, which one wins? And he says, The one you feed. And Trump feeds the bad parts of America, and they’re there, those bad, dark parts. But the good parts are there too. And the question is: How do you amplify that? How do you get to a place where—both from a communication standpoint, a leadership standpoint, a political standpoint—that you are sort of feeding the good wolf?And not in a schlocky way. I’m not looking for a minister or somebody who’s perfect. We just need somebody who has the best interests of America at heart and is willing to fight for her and is willing to speak to people like they have the capacity for good again.And the other thing that I just I believe strongly is: If you think that America is finished, and you think there’s nothing left to fight for, well, then it is finished, right? If you don’t think we have agency to change things, then, yeah, it’s done. And so I really sort of reject and push back against this idea that it’s a fait accompli, and I kinda wanna shake everybody else out of that as well, because I don’t think it’s true. I think there is a lot to fight for. I think there’s a lot of good ways to do it. And frankly, I think, as we speak, there are leaders that are emerging that are coming closer to meeting the moment than we’ve seen in a while.Rosin: Okay, so let’s get into it, what the details are of how to do this. You found a lot of answers in focus groups. You’re, like, an evangelist for focus groups. Why? Like, what was the light bulb that went off for you in the early days that made you think, Oh, we can learn from these small groups of people who are sometimes frustrating and contradictory and all of those different things, but the answer is here?Longwell: Part of it was that Donald Trump was so jarring to me, such a surprise to me, that I realized that I was missing something important if America could elect somebody like Donald Trump. And so I went and started listening to voters, yes, in part because I wanted to primary him, but also I was trying to understand. And it was, like, one of those just scales-falling-from-your-eyes moments, as I listened to voters talk about why they liked Donald Trump.Rosin: Like what? What did they say?Longwell: Well, I mean, one of the craziest things that jumped out at me right from the beginning was how many people had watched The Apprentice. You forget about this, but Donald Trump had been living in people’s living rooms for years. And this is a really key part in why I’m optimistic.Donald Trump himself is somebody who has completely hollowed out the Republican Party and turned it into a cult of personality. So what happens when he’s gone? But he has a unique relationship with voters that other people can’t emulate, because they didn’t go on Howard Stern a thousand times, or go on Oprah all the time, or have their own talk show where they were in people’s living rooms as a carefully curated businessman that made voters believe, Oh, this guy is a good executive. He will know how to do these things.I looked at Trump and thought he was a buffoon. I looked at Trump and thought, I can’t imagine how somebody would take this person seriously. And I think it’s, like, an easy thing to forget about how Trump had fashioned himself as having a parasocial relationship with voters, even before that was kind of a thing.Rosin: And so what is the light bulb there? It’s like, okay, you learn that he’s fixed in their heads as a good businessman, despite the million facts that you could throw at them saying he tanked a casino; he tanked this or that business. It doesn’t matter. There’s no fact-check, right? Like, what are you learning?Longwell: So what I learned was that people were desperate for somebody who wasn’t a regular politician, who they saw as transcending politics. A lot of times, we try to put it in the frame of: How could these Republicans vote for this New York liberal? He gave Hillary Clinton money, and they were like, Yeah, no, that’s good, actually. He transcends politics.And also, one of the craziest things was, you know, you think about Trump as being sort of—people now say he’s far right or authoritarian. These voters saw him as a moderate because he wasn’t religious. He wasn’t like [Vice President] Mike Pence. He didn’t talk about abortion all the time, and in fact, voters would tell you over and over again, they’re like, Yeah, that guy’s not pro-life. You know, he’s probably paid for some abortions. And you just hear, for voters, that they thought of him as somebody who was more moderate, which is, I think, not how sort of the conventional framing was working.The other thing that was wild to me is: A lot of my friends or people that I knew in the media, they would say, Well, how do voters respond to this crazy thing that Trump said? And I got the opportunity in the focus groups to say—and I’ll give you an example; it’s one that I give in the book—is I was in Columbus, Ohio, the day after Trump had had the meeting in Helsinki with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, where he sided against America’s intelligence community and with Putin, onstage, in Helsinki.Trump: They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I’ll say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.Longwell: Washington was beside itself. The whole city was, like, en fuego over 80 years of foreign policy being turned on its head. And I went into the group thinking, Okay, these are people who are gonna be Cold Warrior Reaganites. They are gonna be blown away. They’re gonna hate the fact that Donald Trump just sided against America and sided with Putin, and I was excited.And the moderator says, What did people think about what Trump said in Helsinki? And everybody just was like, What are you talking about? I have no idea what you’re talking about. And that, to me, the chasm between voters—they had no idea. Like, we had to explain it to them, and even then they’re like, I don’t know, I guess he has to meet with world leaders.The disconnect between what people out in the world cared about and what people in Washington cared about, that was a deep chasm. And it really was illuminating for me in thinking about: What are voters actually paying attention to? And the answer is: Things that affect them personally, is basically the easiest answer I can give you.[Music]Rosin: After the break: how the Democrats need to start talking differently, communicating with potential voters in a whole new way.[Break]Rosin: So let’s take an issue like immigration. That’s a complicated issue. I wrote down one of the quotes from your book. It’s from Matt from Indiana. Matt says, “The border issue brings drugs in, that’s a big issue, fentanyl. I mean, I don’t know how many times I’ve had to Narcan somebody because of fentanyl.” Can you parse that comment for me? And then, what is the advice that would come out of that comment? Because there’s a lot of confused information in that comment, and yet you would say that Matt takes it personally.Like, he connects whatever’s happening at the border with having had to Narcan people. So what do you do with something like that?Longwell: Well, in the group, I don’t try to push back on that, because I’m not trying to change Matt’s mind. But what I learned about immigration, and I’m gonna say a quote that you’ve heard a bunch of times from Donald Trump, but it gets at something very important. He says—when he was talking about immigration, he says, “They’re bringing drugs.”Trump: They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.Longwell: But what he is doing in that is: He is taking a bunch of different issues for people—people’s worries about drugs, people’s worries about their personal safety—and he’s saying, And immigrants are a threat to this.I call it “schema activation” in the book, but he’s basically making people afraid. He took immigration, he connected it to Your economic well-being is being hurt by immigrants. There is more crime because of immigrants. There’s more drugs because of immigrants.And so if you care about those things, as many voters do, Trump is able to tell you one complete story and put immigrants at the center of it. And I hear it back from the voters in comments like that. So what Matt is saying, it’s like, fentanyl isn’t coming over the border from Mexico.Rosin: My initial instinct is to fact-check Matt, is to just say, Matt, that’s incorrect. Fentanyl is not coming over the border. But I’m sure you would say that is a terrible way as a candidate to go about things. Why?Longwell: And that was the initial instinct of everybody, was, Well, we’re gonna fact-check all these things.Rosin: Yeah.Longwell: Everybody hired fact-checkers ’cause Trump was lying all the time. It’s like, Wow, we’re gonna fact-check. But voters were like, Well, who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Why should I believe the fact-checkers?And I think that the bigger thing to do is to recognize that Donald Trump saying he wanted to build a wall had nothing to do with a physical wall. It’s to understand that what Trump was doing was projecting that he cared about immigration, and he was gonna take it seriously. You don’t see any voters mad at him that the wall never got built, because the physical wall wasn’t the point.Interestingly, [Mayor Zohran] Mamdani, in New York, was talking about affordability, and he talked about his plan for grocery stores and transportation—he’s gonna make things free or low cost. I look at those policies and I think, Well, those policies are stupid, but focusing on affordability is very smart. And his ideas are like, Well, I’m gonna take affordability seriously. I’m gonna talk about the ways in which I’m gonna try to make things less expensive for you. That was the key. And so what politicians have to stop doing is fighting over the small stuff, and go right at the idea that voters care about immigration, and they think Republicans are gonna be better on it.And I think that they should, No. 1, you have to condemn Trump’s excesses on immigration, because he is committing many of them, and voters are frustrated with it, while also saying, simultaneously, as a contrast point, I will keep you safe. I care about your safety. I will make sure the border is secure. We will have law and order. We will have fairness. Because fairness is something that comes up in immigration all the time from voters, where they say, Look, I want immigrants to come into the country, but I want them to do—and this phrase, you hear it over and over and over again—I want them to do it the right way.And that is not an irrational thing to think. And so Democrats do have to find a way to sort of say, We care about law and order. We care about not having people come over the border, so we don’t know who’s in the country. That’s kind of table ante for this discussion. But also, We want immigrants to come here, because most Americans do.Most Americans just want them to come the right way. And look, there’s all kinds of racism and nativism and stuff that goes into these arguments, but as the broadest matter, and this is where I think sometimes Democrats really do—they’re like, Well, I’m gonna talk about the nativism. I wanna talk about the racism, the soft bigotry in here.And I say: Or don’t. Or just tell Americans, Hey, look, your safety really matters to me. We’re gonna keep you safe, and we’re gonna figure out how to attract the best and brightest to this country. We’re gonna figure out how to reform our immigration system so people can come here the right way. Like, that is how to talk about it.Rosin: One thing that stuck out to me in the book is when you said, If I could give Democrats one piece of advice, it is “stop talking about democracy.” ’Cause it’s true. Opponents of Trump do talk about democracy all the time, and it’s frustrating that that doesn’t matter. But it’s too abstract, or it just doesn’t break through.Longwell: Well, we talk about democracy because, like a lot of Democrats’ core constituents now, we’re all these college-educated voters who have taken a political-science class. And we understand that democracy is this term, that other countries have democracies too, and there are different democracies. Voters don’t experience democracy. They experience America.And the way that they experience democracy is—I can’t remember who I’m quoting here, but—it’s not by its roots but by its fruits, right? So when they experience democracy, democracy is voting. Democracy is freedom of speech.I don’t know; it’s just, like, the air we breathe. It’s the water that we swim in. That’s what it’s like for voters. And so when people say “democracy,” they’re like, “I don’t know what you’re—what is that?” Instead, you say, and I give this advice to politicians all the time, just stop saying “democracy,” and say “America.”And Republicans actually do this much better, right? Republicans make free speech the issue, not democracy. And that’s something that’s easier for voters to get their heads around.Rosin: Okay, let’s get practical. It’s before the midterms, then comes 2028. As you look around the landscape, are there Democrats that you see out there who are doing some of these things well—like, who are picking up this message, starting to use the right language in the way that you would want them to?Longwell: Yeah, there’s four people that I look at who I think are emerging as really strong communicators: [Senator] Jon Ossoff, [former Transportation Secretary] Pete Buttigieg, [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and Mamdani. And there’s some other ones, but there’s a lot of Democrats that I look at that sort of come up from time to time where I’m like, Yeah, that person’s really good on paper. Like [Senator] Mark Kelly, good on paper. [Illinois Governor] J. B. Pritzker, good on paper. And I liked [Maryland Governor] Wes Moore.But there are people right now who are getting out there and trying different ways of communicating with voters. So Jon Ossoff, his background is as a documentary filmmaker, so he has people shooting him from underneath and from below, so he looks up there presidentially. He’s up there president-maxxing.He hit the gym, and he looks like a pre-brain-worm [Robert F.] Kennedy [Jr.], you know? He’s handsome, and he’s got a theory of communications. And then he posts the clips from his speeches. He does the speeches. Now he’s actively running, but he posts them on social media, and I’m like, Okay, that is a theory of the case about how to communicate and build relationships with voters.Pete Buttigieg is out there stumping for absolutely everybody. He stands in the middle of these town halls with a microphone. He lets people ask him any question that they want, and he engages with them sincerely and deeply and meaningfully.AOC understands social media. She understands how to be a real person. Anybody who gets her in front of a camera, she seems like an authentic, natural person. And even if you don’t like her policies—like, AOC and I probably don’t necessarily share a lot of the same policy beliefs, but I think that she is a good, kind person whose heart is in the right place about what she wants to do for America, and that counts for an awful lot with voters.And then Mamdani, like I said, I think he’s really showing the way on how you focus on affordability. Now, when you say 2028, obviously, all of those people are not gonna be presidential contenders. Mamdani isn’t, for sure. But I do think they are starting to formulate a theory of the case.And then I think there’s people who are doing a really poor job. So [California Governor] Gavin Newsom, I think, is doing a pretty lousy job, because he’s doing sort of a performance art against Trump, sort of mocking Trump, which I think gets you some attaboys on social media, but I don’t think is showing the American public a real way forward.Rosin: Okay, wait. Slow this down a little bit. I’m trying to understand what it is exactly that you’re reading, like, what your scale is. Because in the first set of people who you said were really good, like, why shouldn’t I have a tiny heartbreak that what we’re saying is: The main qualification for a good leader these days is someone who’s good at social media?Longwell: Oh, well, again, that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying that they’re good at communicating. And I think that for Democrats, they’ve spent 10 years with Republicans just out-communicating them at every phase.At the presidential phase, Trump practices narrative dominance. Republicans feeling shut out from mainstream media; they built their own media ecosystem that’s now dominant. Democrats don’t have something that corresponds to that.And so I’m not saying that they just have to be good at social media. I’m saying that Democrats have to go through and survey why it is that they are not connecting with the American public, why they have lost the ability to be a multiracial, working-class coalition, and the Republican Party is kinda eating their lunch on that front. What I’m asking for is for Democrats to figure out how to be a team together, repair their brand by having a set of policy ideas that they’re circling around, and to refocus on people’s material well-being, ’cause this is what voters want in the focus groups, right? When I go through the policy, we can fight about all the little stuff, but the main thing voters are saying is, Stop focusing so much on these divisive social issues, and focus more on improving my material well-being.And that means education. That means health care. That means my job. And I think Democrats can’t just say, Affordability, affordability, affordability. They actually have to put a plan forward that has a theory of the case of what it means to be a Democrat going into the 2030s.Rosin: Right. Okay, that all sounds amazing. Here’s what’s tricky about it. So if narrative dominance is the goal, what we’ve seen as the right and MAGA has built an alternative universe of narrative dominance is that it’s involved two things: lies and cruelty. And so I’m wondering, how you can create an alternate world of narrative dominance which is effective—because people might say they don’t want you to focus on cultural issues, but that certainly helped the right build narrative dominance.The famous “Kamala is for they/them. We’re for you.” Focusing on cultural issues really gets attention. So how do you avoid some of the pitfalls of building this alternate universe, and yet do it effectively? Like, maybe be aggressive but not be cruel. How do you walk that line, and have you ever focus-grouped that or seen it done really well?Longwell: Sometimes, people think that all Trump voters are alike, that for all of them, the cruelty is the point. And for some of them, the cruelty is the point, but not for everybody. And you say, like, If Trump built it on lies and cruelty, what do you do differently? And I’m like, Well, you could build it on the truth and decency. And honestly, that’s a little bit of a novel concept right now for voters. I think they’re hungry for it. I think they’ve been starved for it. However, it does have to come with offense.They do want a fighter, man. They want somebody, and not just somebody who’s gonna fight Trump. This is a little bit of a mistake. Yes, they are tired of losing to these bad Republicans, but voters tell me all the time, We don’t want to bring a pillow to a gunfight anymore, but also, we don’t want to be like them.And one of the big disconnects for voters is: Voters keep saying, Democrats tell us that the Republicans are an existential threat to democracy, but they don’t act like it. They don’t behave like it. And so I think that if Pete Buttigieg, and Jon Ossoff, and Mamdani, and AOC, and a whole bunch of these other people started doing things together, started pitching themselves as a team, started showing up together—just think about it for a second, how different it would be if Democrats said, We’re gonna show up for each other.It’s happening a little bit in the states right now as people repair the damaged relationships from these tough primaries on the Democratic side. But it’s not happening everywhere. [Representative] Jasmine Crockett’s not doing anything for [the U.S. Senate candidate] James Talarico. And that, to me, is a real mistake, because I think Democrats need to start showing up together as a community that draws people to them, instead of this crazy faction that is always at each other’s throats.Rosin: Okay, so that’s the future for the Democrats that you wish for. You say you wanna burn MAGA to the ground, also that MAGA’s dominant in the Republican Party, also that the Republicans are never going back to the way they were. So what is the future Republican Party after Trump is gone?Longwell: Well, this is why Democrats have such an opportunity, because not only do I not really know the answer to that question, neither do Republicans, right? They don’t stand for anything anymore. And when people are like, Well, who is gonna be the Republican nominee in 2028? You’re like, Well, I don’t know. Is Trump still alive? And how popular is he at the end of his term? Because the chances of Trump picking the next person or trying to pick the next person are very, very high.He wants to maintain his control of the Republican Party. It has always been more important to Donald Trump to maintain control of the Republican Party than to beat Democrats.And so I think that the Republicans don’t know what they’re gonna do about turnout without Donald Trump. I don’t think they know how to build that coalition without Donald Trump, and they’re fracturing between the “America First” wing—which is your Tucker Carlson, your [former Representative] Marjorie Taylor Greene—and your MAGA establishment, which are your [Secretary of State] Marco Rubios and [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth and all of these types.And they’re all gonna try, and none of them are gonna be able to do what Donald Trump did, for the reasons that I stated earlier, which is that they do not have the same connection to voters that Donald Trump does. And so I think that Donald Trump brought so many new people into the system, and was so specific in the way he did it and the relationship that he had with voters, that the Republicans have no idea what they’re gonna do in a post-Trump world.And that’s why if Democrats can get there first with an affirmative vision, they have an opportunity to dominate in a way that puts MAGA in the ground for the foreseeable future.Rosin: Right. Okay. Well, Sarah, this has been great. I really appreciate it. I appreciate the book. Thank you so much for joining us today.Longwell: Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me. It was fun.[Music]Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jacob Smollen. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.