Sarah Longwell
About
Conservative commentator and co-host at The Bulwark
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Claims by Sarah Longwell (20 of 51)
Bulwark origin as never-Trump aggregator
The Bulwark grew out of a 2017-2018 idea for a 'never-Trump Drudge Report' aggregator of anti-Trump conservatives, which was abandoned in favor of hiring displaced Weekly Standard staff after that publication was shut down for being insufficiently pro-Trump.
Buckley Carlson's feed reveals Tucker's true trajectory
Tucker Carlson's brother Buckley, described as his best friend and posting increasingly Alex-Jones-level conspiracy content, offers an unfiltered 'raw heroin' version of Tucker's worldview that signals Tucker intends to continue on his radicalizing trajectory rather than moderate.
Shapiro shows courage on conspiracies but not on Trump
Ben Shapiro has shown some backbone standing up to conspiracy theorists like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and preaching the importance of truth, yet he stops short of applying that same truth standard to Trump—revealing selective courage.
Voters were exhausted with political dynasties by 2016
By 2016 voters were exhausted with the Clinton-Bush establishment and receptive to Trump because he had been a familiar cultural figure in their living rooms for decades, giving him an appeal the DC political class failed to anticipate.
Never-Trumpers seen as greater evil than the left
Trump supporters hate figures like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger more than the actual left because these dissenters are an in-your-face alternate version of what supporters could have done, confronting them with a shared reality they've chosen to deny.
Pundits are locked in by sunk costs
Right-wing pundits like Megyn Kelly, Erick Erickson, and Ben Shapiro cannot challenge Trump now because sunk costs and audience pressure lock them in—their audiences demand to be told Trump is good, and veering from that triggers complaints and lost subscribers.
Trump is uniquely able to bypass mainstream media
Trump is the first political figure to fully bypass mainstream media and build a decades-long parasocial relationship directly with voters via television, Twitter, and Truth Social, a singular capability that no potential successor except possibly Tucker Carlson possesses.
Trump is the singular author of the party's moral collapse
Trump, not any successor, is the worst figure because he broke every norm and moral code and created the conditions that turned J.D. Vance into a monster and gave Marco Rubio a values transplant; successors are dangerous precisely because they learned every bad lesson from him.
Epstein matters only when tied to Trump protecting elites
Absent economic calamity the Epstein files won't cause the bottom to fall out for Trump, but they help chip away toward the 'Bush line' (32 percent) by illustrating that Trump protects his rich elite friends while ordinary people's lives don't improve—a version of the America First critique that Trump focuses on the wrong things.
Newsom's Twitter is performance art not connection
Gavin Newsom's confrontational social-media persona is performance art mimicking Trump—people like the way he throws Trump back at Trump, not Newsom himself—so it is not the same as governing well or building an authentic parasocial relationship, and California baggage further burdens him.
Israel is a generational and intra-right cleavage
Skepticism of Israel and flirtation with anti-Semitism is both a generational cleavage—younger voters on both left and right are more anti-Israel—and the defining split between the America First wing (Candace, Tucker, Fuentes, MTG) and the pro-Israel MAGA establishment.
Focus groups revealed DC detachment from voters
Longwell's early focus groups overturned her strong theory that Trump was an accident of history that voters didn't actually want; the moment she listened to voters she realized she had spent too much of her career in a DC bubble detached from how voters actually think.
Trump Both Originates and Straddles Both Wings
What will break the two wings apart is Trump going away in some regard, because Trump is simultaneously the MAGA establishment and the originator of America First for this generation—he defined it for young people for whom Trump is not weird but totally normal in politics.
Voters See Fake Businessman as Real Businessman
Many voters support Trump reasoning 'he's a businessman' and will fix the economy, even though he is a fake businessman who played one on television and bankrupted casinos, because their parasocial impression from The Apprentice overrides the factual record.
Never-Trumpers Were Once Mainstream Conservatives
In the early days there were many more never-Trumpers—the National Review 'Against Trump' issue reflected a broad conservative consensus, and figures who called Trael somewhere between an asshole like Nixon and 'America's Hitler' (like JD Vance) should have had a seat at the never-Trump table.
Trump Fears Oversight and Seeks to Nationalize Elections
Trump is genuinely afraid of the oversight that Democratic wins would bring, which is why he talks about nationalizing elections to bring them under federal control and why Tulsi Gabbard's Georgia activity is entrepreneurial effort to discredit results—not backward-looking flattery.
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