Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. I'm JVL here with my best friends, Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller of the bulwark.

We are on day three of the new era in American politics. It's the first time the three of us have been together since Donald Trump was inaugurated and took an oath that he takes very seriously to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States.

And I would just like to know how everybody's, how everybody's doing. How are you feeling, Sarah? You and I literally haven't spoken.

What's going on?

Where are you right now?

We've spoken over, like, text and slack.

Not one-on-one?

Yeah.

Not one-on-one.

We haven't done real check-ins.

What's wrong with us?

Best friends, not checking in on each other?

I don't know.

I mean, I think both of us have the same.

We're like physically ill as a result of this.

Actually sick.

Yes.

You know, it's on one hand, there's like a weird deja vu to it, right?

But like knowing so much more, but like I'm going through these weird processes

of watching the way other people process the new world and trying to like figure out, I got to

tell you, I did a focus group. My team's going to be mad at me for bringing up the focus group stuff

because we got a, this was your cope. You got an episode. You got real low and you're like, I got to have a focus group, man.

...