S6 Ep17: America on Tape: A Brutal (and Hopeful) Year
The Focus Group Podcast
The Bulwark
4.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2025
⏱️ 183 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Original episodes:
Nothing is True, Everything is Possible (with Anne Applebaum):
https://audioboom.com/posts/8711563-nothing-is-true-everything-is-possible-with-anne-applebaum
Do the Next Right Thing, Change the World (with Heather Cox Richardson):
https://audioboom.com/posts/8741588-do-the-next-right-thing-change-the-world-with-heather-cox-richardson
The GOP's Life After Trump (with Robert Draper):
https://audioboom.com/posts/8806639-the-gop-s-life-after-trump-with-robert-draper
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. |
| 0:06.7 | I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark, and I hope all of you had a Merry Christmas. |
| 0:12.5 | I'm going to bring you a bit of a best-of focus group marathon this week with some of our most |
| 0:19.7 | interesting shows from the past year. |
| 0:22.1 | We've had a pretty interesting year with the focus groups in large part because we had a |
| 0:26.2 | pretty interesting year in America. You know, we started trying in the beginning to really find |
| 0:32.6 | our footing and get a flavor for the kind of people who put Trump back in the White House in |
| 0:37.2 | 2024. |
| 0:38.4 | We had a lot of very frustrating conversations that way. |
| 0:42.8 | We also learned a lot about where the Democratic base is. |
| 0:46.6 | You might call it their Tea Party moment, certainly their fight back moment. |
| 0:50.7 | And we're even seeing some fractures lately emerge in the GOP base. One of the shows we're |
| 0:56.5 | bringing you will be about swing voters, one's about Democrats, and one is about that fracturing |
| 1:01.7 | MAGA base. I think Pundit accountability is pretty important, and I'd like for you to listen to |
| 1:06.8 | some of what we said with the benefit of hindsight hindsight and to judge for yourself how well some of our |
| 1:12.7 | analysis has aged. The first show I'm going to bring you is from this past April with Ann Applebaum |
| 1:18.2 | from the Atlantic. We called it, nothing is true and everything is possible. We heard from a bunch of |
| 1:24.1 | swing voters in this episode who had, to put it bluntly, defended the Trump |
| 1:28.7 | administration, sending people to El Salvador without due process. And she had a lot to tell us about |
| 1:33.5 | how this moment in America compares to other countries when authoritarians are on the march. |
| 1:38.8 | This is one of the more important conversations we had this year. I think you'll like it. Enjoy. |
| 1:47.8 | Hello. important conversations we had this year. I think you'll like it. Enjoy. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, |
... |
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