Republican strategist-turned-anti-MAGA commentator Sarah Longwell described the self-reinforcing mechanism that she said forced Fox News to cave to Donald Trump's stolen-election lie.
Longwell's new book "How to Eat an Elephant" draws on a decade of swing-voter focus groups, and she told CNN's "Inside Politics" how Trump, right-wing media and Republican voters and politicians all reinforce one another in a closed loop.
"Donald Trump sets the Republican triangle of doom in motion," Longwell said. "He says this is stolen. Those right-wing media outlets run to bless the lie ... which means that voters come to demand other outlets bless the lie."
She said she has heard swing voters describe Fox News as "a left-wing rag" simply because it accurately called the 2020 election for Joe Biden — pressure that pushed Fox and other outlets further right to avoid losing audience to Newsmax, OANN and right-wing podcasters.
Politicians then follow the same current, she said, pointing to how "semi-normal Republicans like Kevin McCarthy" eventually validated doubts about the election's legitimacy, until the falsehood became "orthodoxy on the right." She noted that roughly 70 percent of Republicans came to believe the 2020 election was stolen as a result of the cycle.
Longwell argued Democrats lack the "media amplification system" to counter that loop, relying too heavily on traditional outlets in a fragmented information environment.
But she said some Democratic figures are beginning to develop effective individual strategies for competing anyway — citing Sen. Jon Ossoff's cinematic, socially distributed speeches, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's influencer-style personal openness, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's relentless focus on affordability, despite her disagreements with his specific policies.
The larger opportunity, she said, lies in Trump's approaching exit from elected office, whether by term limits or otherwise, which she called a "generational opportunity" for Democrats to reset the political narrative — provided Trump leaves deeply unpopular, ideally below the 32 percent approval mark George W. Bush held on leaving office, a threshold she argues left the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover in the first place.
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