Sarah Longwell, political consultant and publisher of conservative news and opinion website The Bulwark, said President Donald Trump’s last few days qualify as “wheels-off week” with everything underway.
“… I’m hesitant to talk about things like ‘walls closing in’ or’ wheels coming off’, but didn't this feel like a wheels-off week?” asked Longwell of Bulwark editor Jonathan Last on their Friday “Secret Podcast.”
The week began on Monday with Donald Trump’s lambasted tweet about the killing of beloved Hollywood director Rob Reiner.
“And so that happens Monday and it draws some genuine pushback from some Republicans,” Longwell said. “Although, again, I want to overemphasize the number of people who are like, ‘oh, I haven't seen it’ or ‘it's not how I would have said it.’ It didn't draw the level of condemnation that it deserved by any stretch of the imagination. But there was … relatively universal revulsion at the sentiment.”
Trump is “to his core a bad person, maybe even an evil person,” said Longwell, with “sociopathic narcissistic pathologies.”
“Like you shouldn't rule things out when you have somebody who's that bad a person in charge, who knows what he might do,” she said, which led to other presidential self-owns this week.
Then, on Tuesday, Vanity Fair released a damning article wherein White House chief of staff Susie Wiles admitted Trump used the DOJ against his political enemies, among other revelations.
“So that's Monday and Tuesday. … Then Wednesday, he gives this speech that was the most insane thing I have ever seen,” Longwell said. “ … it was like somebody pumped him full of Adderall, gave him a really quickly moving prompter and he just got up and shouted through it and sniffed his way through.”
Critics then analyzed employment and inflation numbers and determined them to be “unbelievably flawed,” said Longwell, which preceded another weird moment when Charlie Kirk’s widow Erica Kirk implied there was blood in the water around Trump by publicly supporting JD Vance for president in 2028.
“It's a little weird to do an endorsement for a guy who hasn't declared that he's running and who, who you don't know he's running against,” Longwell said.
This, coupled with Trump putting his name on the Kennedy Center and his “cratering” public opinion, could potentially change the dynamic of next year’s election to alter the Republican Party for years, Longwell said.
“I've talked for a long time about how we need to get him below what I'm going to call ‘the Bush line.’ … George W. Bush left office at 32 percent, and he was so unpopular that not only did the next two Republican candidates lose to Barack Obama, but it left the party open to the Donald Trump reshaping that occurred [by repudiating Bush]. So, to me, the best thing I can think of is that Donald Trump needs to leave office so unpopular that the Republican Party … [makes] efforts to shift from what Trump did.”
Hear the Bulwark podcast at this link.