Recently, The UnPopulist senior editor Berny Belvedere hosted ISMA survey research director Thomas Shull and political commentator Nicholas Grossman on The UnPopulist Live to discuss our latest survey, which found that the populist share of Trump’s coalition shrunk by nearly a third since 2024. The conversation covered what’s behind that decline and what it means for Trumpism after Trump, so we’re publishing a lightly edited transcript of it here.
Berny Belvedere: Hi, I’m Berny Belvedere of ISMA and The UnPopulist. Welcome to The UnPopulist Live. Today, I’m joined by two brilliant people. Tom Shull is a longtime journalist, an editor—really, a craftsman of the editing trade. He’s also a survey research analyst, and he’s our survey research director. We’re going to get into what the latest survey tells us about populist sentiment in the U.S., along with a whole host of related questions.
But first, our other guest: the also-brilliant Nicholas Grossman. Nicholas and I came up together in this discourse game. He helped me run Arc Digital from its earliest days. He’s also an international relations professor, and he’s become a leading political commentator in his own right—his work has appeared just about everywhere. So I’m thrilled to have Tom and Nicholas here with me today.