Whose Faith Is It?

Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, and the thorny question of who's really advising our leaders

Pantsuit Politics, Sarah Stewart Holland, and Beth Ann Silvers

Jun 23, 2026

Last Thursday, my family huddled in our basement from about midnight to 1 a.m. while tornado warning sirens blared outside. We were all half-asleep, which makes it tough to evaluate how serious the threat is and respond to that threat with the kind of calm and focus we’d like to. When our younger daughter started showing real fear, I closed my eyes to pray for safety.

Then my brain shorted out a little. That’s not how I think prayer works. I don’t believe that we’d be spared a tornado because I prayed, and I don’t believe someone else would be hit because they didn’t. Sitting on my couch with the sirens blaring and the meteorologists pumping out information faster than I could process it, I felt a mini-crisis-of-faith. What do I believe about prayer? Does it even matter right now? I ended up praying that I would be able to handle whatever comes and that I would be a comforting presence for my family.

I can imagine that being a political leader often feels like sitting in the basement at midnight with sirens blaring and information being pumped out faster than any person could process it. So I’m interested in what principles guide our leaders in those moments, whether or not I can relate to those principles.

We have a long-established and still-hotly-contested aspiration about separating church and state in the U.S. We also have multiple candidates for higher office and the sitting Vice President writing and speaking about faith and a new report from the Washington Post suggesting that the former Director of National Intelligence took more than advice from a faith leader. Sarah and I discuss the role of faith in the lives of our politicians today. I’m eager for you to join the conversation. - Beth

Topics Discussed

- The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool's $14.5M makeover gone wrong
- Keir Starmer's resignation and Brexit at ten
- What the center-left can learn from Europe's leadership turnover
- The Washington Post investigation into Tulsi Gabbard and the Science of Identity Foundation
- JD Vance's conversion memoir, Communion
- Sincere faith vs. faith as a political tool — Hegseth, Talarico, and Beshear
- Where a faith advisor ends and a political advisor begins
- Pantsuit Politics featured in the Washington Post

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Episode Resources

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: They spent $14.5 million on a very rushed, clearly not thought through, six-week makeover in which they repainted the floor American flag blue, which increased the temperature of the water, leading immediately upon its refilling, to a powerful algae bloom. Then when they dumped in a bunch of hydrogen peroxide to try to treat the algae bloom, it made the paint peel. So now the $14.5 million paint job is peeling up off the bottom. It’s like vomit green with big old chunks of blue paint floating in it. This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:57] Beth: This is Beth Silvers.

[00:00:59] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Up first today, we’re talking about peeling paint and algae blooms at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. And an ocean away, Keir Starmer’s resignation landing one day shy of Brexit’s 10th anniversary. Two very different portraits of government struggling to deliver. Then we’re digging into faith and politics from The Washington Post bombshell on Tulsi Gabbard’s guru to JD Vance’s new conversion memoir. We’re going to talk about faith and what it means inside politics. Finally, Outside of Politics, that’s very close to home, we got featured in The Washington Post in a piece called The New Kings of the News Business Are in Your Inbox, all about how independent creators like us are building sustainable media one newsletter at a time. So we’re going to talk about that.

[00:01:50] Beth: Before we get going, we’re still celebrating America 250 here at Pantsuit Politics, and my heart is full because this weekend people started having their murder mystery parties and posting pictures, and I’m just so proud of all of you who are doing this. I’m so proud of your friends. I’m so proud of every person who got an invitation to dress like a founder of this country and show up for this weird exercise and said, “Yes, I’m doing it.” “I’ll do it.” I’ve never made something like this that turns into something so tangible, it’s just like a different form of creation, and it’s just filled my cup, you guys. I’m so grateful for it. So if you would like to be part of these amazing celebrations that are being carried out in a variety of ways, we would love for you to join us over on Substack, where you can also participate in the Pantsuit Politics Film Club.

[00:02:42] Sarah: Yes, our beloved cinephile, Norma, who has created past Pantsuit Politics Film Clubs, is back with Happy Birthday, America, our America 250 edition of the Film Club. So she’s chosen three movies about the Declaration of Independence: a 1938 short, a 1972 musical, 1776, that I did not know existed, and yes, of course, National Treasure. Watch all three. Notice what each era’s America sees in the Declaration of Independence, and come talk about it with all of us live on Wednesday, July 29th. The registration link and Facebook group are in the show notes. Up next, let’s talk about the Reflecting Pool. Beth, you would struggle to create a more apt metaphor for the Trump presidency than what is happening right now at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. They spent $14.5 million on a very rushed, clearly not thought through, six-week makeover in which they repainted the floor American flag blue, which increased the temperature of the water leading immediately upon its refilling to a powerful algae bloom Then when they dumped in a bunch of hydrogen peroxide to try to treat the algae bloom, it made the paint peel. So now the $14.5 million paint job is peeling up off the bottom, so it’s like vomit green with big old chunks of blue paint floating in it just in time for America 250.

[00:04:55] Beth: I also read, and I can imagine that this is how being president feels for everyone, that once they put the chemicals in to kill one type of algae, another type popped up.

[00:05:05] Sarah: Yep.

[00:05:05] Beth: So they’re fighting multiple types of algae in this situation. And look, I want to say, I have real sympathy for the people out there trying to fix this problem. We have a pool, and when it gets hot, if you get algae, it takes a long time, in a much smaller surface area than the Lincoln Memorial, to deal with it. It is you versus 100 million live things that just keep multiplying and getting worse and worse. And so I’m really sorry. Whenever I see the pictures of the workers and the waders out there trying to deal with this, I just think, “Bless you. You did not ask for this, and I am sorry.”

[00:05:50] Sarah: I am sorry for them. I am not sorry for Donald Trump, who is really struggling to try to blame someone else for this problem. Now, look, the problems with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are not new. That part is true. And he could have, not in six weeks, tried to fix those drainage problems that have existed for a long time. But what he wanted was a big, flashy, short-term, bullshit, made-for-TV makeover which has been a disaster. He’s blaming vandalism. Algae vandalism? Okay. And which was the problem you were trying to fix? You talked about this repeatedly, that you hated how it was always green, and there was algae, and you were going to fix it with a paint job. I listened to JD Vance in preparation for our conversation next on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times, talking about his memoir. The Reflecting Pool didn’t come up, sadly. But he was talking about the negotiations with Iran that are taking place this week, and how the president just wanted optionality. Just wanted some optionality. “Let’s get in there. Let’s mix it up. Let’s create some options.” And I thought that’s a stupid word, but it probably is a pretty succinct understanding of y’all’s approach to governance. “Let’s just get in there, mix it up, and create some options.” No matter if the options are actually disasters or additional problems. We don’t need solutions. We don’t need long-term strategies. So this is what optionality has gotten the poor, sweet reflecting pool, peeling paint and worse algae blooms than it had to start with.

[00:07:35] Beth: And a lot of money spent. And now people’s interest is aroused in it, and so we get to fight about whether it’s worth being interested in. You see all kinds of people saying “I can’t believe journalists are spending all this time covering it,” but you’re right, it is such a microcosm. In a vacuum, it sounds nice to say we’re going to spruce up America for her 250th birthday, and that’s probably an agenda a lot of people would be behind. When you think down to the next level, you’re dealing with historic buildings, budgets that have to be approved by Congress to be done legally or else you’re going to face a lot of lawsuits, a huge number of constituents, coordination among multiple agencies. It’s complicated. If we were going to do this for America’s 250th, it probably should’ve been started about 10 years ago. To be mapped out correctly, for bidding to take place so it’s not just a free-for-all of grift and corruption where we award no-bid contracts to people who don’t have any business doing this work. And then once it happens, looking for someone to blame and bringing this heavy-handed approach of “Let’s start arresting people. Let’s arrest people over the Reflecting Pool.” But that is what this administration does on every single thing. If it sounds good, let’s do it. Let’s do it haphazardly.

[00:08:59] Sarah: Yep.

[00:09:00] Beth: And if it goes wrong, let’s blame someone else and try to punish them to the maximum extent of what anyone ever thought our power might look like.

[00:09:09] Sarah: What infuriates me is if we want to talk about sprucing up America for America 250, you know what I would’ve liked to seen that $14 million spent on? Additional staff at all the parks that are struggling under the mass amount of tourism happening right now. Partially I’m sure because of America’s 250, and partially because it’s too damn expensive to go anywhere else. And they’re getting crushed. They cut staff at the national parks. They cut the reservation system-- no one can quite explain why-- that was trying to help control the crowds. And so now our actual America, our national parks, one of, to my mind, the gem in our crown, is getting beat up because we don’t want to spend money where it matters because it’s not sexy and it doesn’t show up on TV. If the national parks are running smoothly, that is not a sexy headline. That doesn’t make for good TV. But it does make for important impact in the lives of everyday Americans who just want to go to Yellowstone and want to know that it’s being handled well, that the park isn’t getting beat up in the process.

It’s just, it’s all so frustrating.

[00:10:22] Beth: It’s again the reverse of what this president promised. Because he came into office on this anti-DC crusade. Yeah. The rest of America is important too. So true. Not everything is about Washington, DC. If that’s what he meant, tending to the parks would seem to further that agenda. Instead, we have all this conversation about what’s right in front of him in Washington, DC, and this desire to add this monumental arch.

[00:10:51] Sarah: Yep.

[00:10:51] Beth: Last week on More to Say, my daughters and I read some of the public comments submitted about the proposed arch, and as I dug into that topic, again, maybe in a vacuum that’s fine. Maybe in a vacuum someone somewhere would say, “Yeah let’s erect more monuments. Let’s be proud of our country. Let’s do something that really commemorates America 250 in this way.” But the design was so haphazard.

[00:11:19] Sarah: Yep.

[00:11:19] Beth: A commission of people appointed by this president had to point out to him that probably we shouldn’t put gold lions on it because lions aren’t native to the United States. There’s just a thoughtlessness in everything, and that is really concerning, especially as you read headlines about how consumed the White House is with the Reflecting Pool in the middle of negotiations with Iran to try to end a war.

[00:11:42] Sarah: Ugh. Let’s hop across the pond to Britain. So as we are recording on Monday, June 22nd, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has officially resigned the day before, as this episode comes out on June 23rd, the 10th anniversary of Brexit. This is the seventh prime minister in 10 years. He came in on a landslide, and he is going out with a whimper. His own party has turned on him. They believe he will be replaced by Andy Burnham, the former Manchester mayor. But I always think the United Kingdom is an interesting precursor, and I think Brexit was absolutely a precursor to MAGA. And watching the way they are, running through prime ministers because no one is really addressing in a way that makes the voters happy, their concerns about particularly cost of living, the social safety net and now Keir Starmer’s the latest victim

[00:12:51] Beth: The combination of things that have occurred in this 10-year period, right? Brexit for the UK, MAGA for the United States, followed by COVID, followed by wars. The phrase that keeps coming to mind is you just can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Too many things shattered at once, and the public is not going to have the tolerance to put them back. You layer onto that the fact that the United Kingdom has been trying to address a lot of debt and a very stuck economy, and Keir Starmer’s party promised voters they were going to get in and fix that stuff. They’re going to fix the wait times for the National Health Service. They’re going to restore benefits that have been cut in some of this austerity. And then Starmer himself is a realist and says, “Actually, this is probably going to get worse before it gets better. It’s going to take a long time to make real progress on these issues.” And I wonder if in a different time the public would’ve accepted that differently, but right now I think he didn’t have any kind of personal magnetism to sell a really bitter pill of a message.

[00:14:04] Sarah: Yeah, I think anyone on the center left in the United States should be paying attention to this because it shows the limits of the Clintonian, Obama era approach to governance. I think someone needs to put together the speed and impact at which the Trump administration and some other populist administrations have moved with some just baseline competence would be fun. You really have to be able to walk and chew gum. Mamdani comes to mind. You have to be able to speak to people, command that attention, have baseline competence, and also be willing to try new things all at the same time. All at the same time. It’s a tough job. And I think in 1996 Keir Starmer would’ve been fine, but it’s not 1996. And especially post-Brexit in the same way that the MAGA has ushered in a new era of politics here, it’s true for them there. That our understandings of what used to be good enough has changed, and the way you communicate has changed, and what people want from governments has changed. And I think all of Europe is struggling, including France. I think Meloni has done a surprisingly better job in Italy, but communicating or shepherding them through some like very difficult decisions. Like people are mad because the cost of living has gone up and they want more from the social safety net, but the social safety net is also linked indelibly with the cost of living. And so there’s just some like really tough decisions that have to be made when you have a structure of government, I think, that especially a parliamentary system that can just kick them out if they don’t like that approach. You’re just going to continue to see an enormous amount of turnover. France, Lord, they’re just running through them left and right. Because they don’t want to hear, “We don’t have the money to pay for this.” And so I think that all of Europe is facing this to a certain extent, but particularly in the UK, and I think you’re going to need some robust leadership to be able to sell that to people. You have to offer something else too. It can’t just be all austerity. It’s going to have to be a more complex narrative about what comes next.

[00:16:16] Beth: A more complex narrative means higher taxes, though, and people don’t want that either. It’s tricky. I wonder sometimes watching this, and I’ve wondered this for years, is it better to have a system that’s responsive where the public gets fed up, there are elections indicating that the public’s fed up, and you get a new leader? Or seven leaders in 10 years inevitably going to compound the problems that create this public frustration and volatility?

[00:16:48] Sarah: Only time will tell. I am interested in the Manchester mayor to see if he has a different, more charismatic, approachable, connective approach that appeals to people. I think that will be interesting to watch. You’re really seeing the splintering of the two main parties in the United Kingdom. I think that will continue post-Starmer, and so we’ll just continue to keep an eye on our neighbors across the pond. We decided to talk about maybe not faith in politics, but faith in our politicians. Our politicians’ personal faith. There we go. There’s not a lot of faith in the politicians under the other meaning of that word. But there are a lot of politicians talking about their faith and a lot of politicians’ faith coming under a closer examination. Particularly over the weekend, The Washington Post dropped a years-long investigation into the relationship between Tulsi Gabbard, our former Director of National Intelligence, and Chris Butler, the leader of the Science of Identity Foundation, of which her parents were members, and Tulsi Gabbard as well, over decades. And they got twenty-five thousand pages of documents that showed that there were these memos seemingly coming from Butler telling Tulsi Gabbard how to vote, what legislation to introduce, how to speak to Wolf Blitzer and other twenty-four hour cable news shows. The memo says this, and then you’ll see a clip of her saying exactly that to Wolf Blitzer or whoever she’s talking to. The response from Tulsi Gabbard’s team has been like this is anti-Hindu bigotry, but I think there’s a lot more here. I had read about this relationship before and was very intrigued. So when it came clear that John Swain has not given up on the story, he’s not forgotten about it, he’s been digging through twenty-five thousand pages of documents, I was super interested

[00:18:57] Beth: I think this is an exemplary piece of journalism. Because as you read it, John Swain tells you what he knows and what he doesn’t know, how he got things, what his questions were as he reviewed those things, the complexities of the story, who responded to him and who didn’t. And it left a lot of space because it isn’t driving at a narrative as much as just taking you through an investigative process. It left a lot of space to ask questions of yourself. I kept thinking this is so interesting to me in part because I don’t know anything about the Science of Identity Foundation. Because Tulsi Gabbard has always been such an enigmatic figure because she’s beautiful and has always communicated in a really unusual way because of her kind of party hopping from the center left to the Bernie Sanders wing to the Trump administration. So there’s so much in here that just pulls you in. But because the piece was so careful and conscientious, I was able to think what would this look like to me if I were reading about a Christian in Congress and that Christian’s pastor sending the same kinds of messages? What if this were a context that’s more familiar, and what would I think about this? And that made me realize, I bet this happens all the time. I would love to read more pieces like this just to understand the relationships that people have with folks who are spiritually important to them. In her memoir, Kamala Harris talks about one of the first calls she made after President Biden decided not to run again was to a pastor to talk about, “Am I called to do this?” And to be prayed for. And I think that is helpful as we try to figure out who these people are that want these very powerful positions.

[00:20:45] Sarah: I think this is a little bit different. This is not just a pastor. There has been pretty credible accusations that this guy is basically a cult leader. There’s an enormous amount of control, including insulting her, saying “You’re doing that I thing again. Get it together. Don’t be a loser. Do what you’re supposed to.” When you put that level of aggressive assertion together with someone who has been accused of cult-like control, he is called a guru among the people who follow his philosophy, then to me that feels very different. As I was reading I was like party bosses I’m sure back in the day would send people to say things and say “You’re going to vote this way.” Because there was a transactional control and understanding of the power between the party boss and the people in the positions of political power itself. To me, this feels very different. It’s not like we don’t have examples of that ministerial role. One of the people who comes up a lot in this conversation is Pete Hegseth and his relationship with Doug Wilson, and Doug Wilson’s extreme views about not only white Christian nationalism, but women voting, women’s roles inside the marriage itself, much less the halls of power. And I don’t like it. And I think in a democracy we’re not voting for your minister. We’re voting for you. And to understand that you have some sort of independence-- I think that’s why when you go back and you look at John Kennedy, and he’s saying “The Pope doesn’t control me. The Pope isn’t going to tell me what to do.” I think that is an ongoing concern for people. It’s the reason Jeremiah Wright came up with Barack Obama to say “How much control does he have? And if he has radical views, do you share those radical views?” I think that those are legitimate concerns, and I think when you look at this reporting, she was not in control. She was doing exactly what she was instructed to do. There seems to be no sort of discussion or pushback or saying, “I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to say that this way.” In a way, that’s very concerning if this was your representative, much less if it was the director of national intelligence, because we don’t really have the memos going all the way through her time there. But it’s hard to believe that they just stopped after decades of him giving her very specific instructions about what she was supposed to do with her democratically elected power.

[00:23:03] Beth: In that ground that you traversed from Kennedy to Gabbard, to me there are two questions that come up when we’re talking about politicians and religious advisors. One of them is that agency question. Is this a person who’s taking advice from someone who’s important to them and takes or leaves that advice based on their own sense of what’s right and wrong or appropriate based on their position? So there’s the agency question. And then I think the second question is the boundaries question. To what extent do we want faith to influence our leaders? And I think the answer is really complex, and we have Americans who would say none at all. It should be in a black box on the shelf. In which case you have to ask then what other influences are going to replace it? Because some will. Do we want it to be party bosses, like you said, or lobbyist, donors? I just read this really compelling piece from Slate about Susan Collins and why she keeps winning, and it makes the case that she keeps winning in Maine because she is one of the most competitive, exacting politicians you’ll ever meet, who makes sure that every person in Maine knows exactly how much money she brings into the state, and that she is positioned because of her seniority and her position on the Appropriations Committee to keep those floodgates open and make them even wider. So there will be some influence, some driving force for everybody in a position of power. How comfortable are we with religion being that driving force? And what does it mean that we have a number of people right now betting on people wanting the answer to be, yes, religion is a driving force. We have that on both sides of the aisle, people kind of selling their religious experience. And I think when you put those things side by side, the agency question and the influence question it gets thorny fast, and it can feel almost discriminatory fast, like you’re in that territory that Kennedy was trying to combat. He had to say all of that because people were concerned that Catholicism would exercise too much influence, that he would do what the Pope said, not what he really thought.

[00:25:22] Sarah: We’ve clearly moved on from that because JD Vance has just written his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, about his conversion to Catholicism. Now, I think with Tulsi Gabbard, there has, of course, been sincere discriminatory ideas, particularly about non-Christian religions inside the United States like Hinduism. But I think that the way they throw that out and expect it to shut down all honest and, I think, sincere and deserved questions about her relationship with this man is not what we’re dealing with here. And, with JD Vance, I think to the thorniness of those questions, I think there is a way to treat his conversion sincerely. It sounds sincere to me. He went on a journey a lot of people have gone on, including myself, which is turning from the faith of your childhood, going through an extended period of non-belief, and then particularly when you enter into a new phase of life especially as a parent, reexamining that faith and going back to church. So I think there is a way to treat that story sincerely. I don’t think that JD Vance is lying about converting to Catholicism. I don’t think is just like a performative, solely politically motivated move. However, I think when you bring a personal faith, particularly when you put it in a book and then literally sell it to the American public, then you’re going to get questions like the one Ross Douthat asked him on the podcast, which was, “How do you justify the Trump administration’s approach, which is very often unkind and cruel and not Christian?” Because what we’re talking about with faith, and I think when you’re talking about influence and agency, is really morality. What is your morality? We know what Donald Trump’s morality is. He’s very clear about it. “I get to decide. I get to decide what is moral and ethical and good. I don’t lean on any sort of outside structure, foundation, theology. I don’t believe that you should love your enemies as yourself. Erika Kirk might, but I don’t. I don’t hold any sort of baseline respect for the Pope. He is as much of a political foe as anyone else,” which is a very interesting approach when you have a vice president writing a memoir about his conversion to Catholicism. So I think, yeah, you can have a sincere conversion, but then once you put it out there, especially as a public figure, then it’s going to be examined, and you’re going to get questions about not just the influence of your faith, but the choices you make and whether they align with this faith or morality that you espouse.

[00:28:09] Beth: I have so many questions about JD Vance’s decision to do this book right now. I think it’s bizarre that a sitting vice president is releasing a book and doing essentially a book tour. Don’t you have things to do? Isn’t he the primary negotiator with Iran right now? It seems like a bad use of your time. I would love to know what the money looks like around this book. I would love to know what the president thinks about this. Feels to me like JD may be flying a little close to the sun for Trump’s tastes in soaking up this amount of attention. Putting the politics to the side though, those questions about faith and the office and the actions of the office make me want to sit down in conversation with some of the Democrats who are doing this too because I cannot imagine anyone in the Oval Office being able to justify their decision-making always through the lens of faith. One reason I don’t think I could ever be close to the office of the presidency is because I don’t think I could live with a lot of the decisions that would come across your desk. Because they are life and death decisions, often for people thousands of miles away where you’re choosing among terrible options. If someone said to me, “This doesn’t seem very Christian,” in the midst of trying to make those decisions, I’m sure they’d be correct, but that office lives in this moral gray area on almost everything that happens, right? I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this administration and the way that it uses faith and hides behind it and makes it both sword and shield. It does open up to me space to say what do we want? Because in the same breath, I’ll tell you that I am comforted by the people who have some kind of moral grounding and some kind of moral code, and are telling us, “I’m going to bring that to this office. I’m not just going to wing it personally. I’m going to look to the wisdom of the ages. Now, I’m going to do that with respect for the fact that people across this nation have varying wisdom of the ages that they adhere to and varying ethical frameworks for their lives, but here’s mine.” Because I think you need it in a position like that. So how do you both claim it and also recognize that it’s aspirational, and try as you might, you cannot live up to it while serving in that capacity?

[00:30:51] Sarah: I have a theory about why he wrote this book.

[00:30:53] Beth: Okay, I want to hear it.

[00:30:55] Sarah: I think that he is trying to get in front of the fact, to put these two faith conversations together, the fact that his wife is Hindu. And he was talking about how she’s at 36 weeks pregnant. She’ll go to Catholic church with him every Sunday, which I also have lots of questions about. But I think he can sit down with Vivek Ramaswamy and have a real honest conversation about the fact that you can do all of this you want, but you exist on a side of the political aisle that has very strong ideas, often fed, strengthened, empowered by the people you share power with, like Pete Hegseth, that is white and Christian and nationalistic. And I appreciate that you’re just trying to split the hairs here, but I don’t think it’s going to work. Like, I just don’t think it’s going to work. The ideas around not just white Christian nationalism, and maybe this is just because I’ve recently finished Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s new book that’s coming out in September about white Christian womanhood, but those ideas are baked in, and you have made no effort over the course of your life or the course of this party. You have ousted people who try to bring some complexity to that. You treat the women within the party like Marjorie Taylor Greene, even Kristi Noem, God save us, with such contempt. If you think that you are going to, with any legitimacy, try to split this baby with the women who subscribe and the men who subscribe to this version of white Christian nationalism on steroids that you love to use when it serves you, and that they’re going to find some space for your Catholicism alongside your wife’s Hinduism, I don’t think it’s going to work, buddy. I don’t care how many books you write. That dog don’t hunt. It’s just not going to work. Again, go ask Vivek Ramaswamy what he runs into out there on the campaign trail for Ohio governor. I don’t know what you thought was going to happen, but you don’t get to pick and choose your racist, sexist bullshit and then be like, “Oh, but my wife gets a pass because she takes my kids to Catholic church with me on Sunday.” Because apparently her in particular in their marriage plays a very prominent role in this memoir, and I don’t think it’s going to work. That’s my personal opinion. Not because I give a shit, just for the record. I don’t care. I don’t care about Usher’s religion. I don’t care how or when they take their kids to church. I don’t care. But other people, the people on the white Christian nationalistic MAGA movement, they care. They care a great deal

[00:33:38] Beth: That kind of calculation takes me back to what does Trump think about this? Did he bless this? Does this timing piss him off? I read that he’s annoyed with some of the way that Vance approached the Sunday shows about the war and wants everybody to just repeat what he has to say. I’m really curious about the contours of that relationship right now, and I’m curious about the contours of the faith discussion for Trump, because it is obviously very uncomfortable for him. As much as he’s willing to cozy up to evangelical leaders he cannot carry it off and he knows that. It is not part of his shtick.

[00:34:14] Sarah: No, because it’s always very transactional, isn’t it? “I did this thing for them and now they love me.” The way he talks about it is just so give and take.

[00:34:22] Beth: Yes. So I want to talk a little bit about the Talarico campaign and Andy Beshear’s book about his faith and the way that there’s this effort to reclaim Christianity on the Democratic side, and whether you think that is a smart strategy or destined to lead to these same kinds of problems.

[00:34:50] Sarah: I think that there is room if you have a sincere faith that informs your understanding of power and the separation of church and state or global aid or abortion. There’s just a lot of areas in American life that can be sincerely informed by one’s understanding of their own faith or theology. But it has to be sincere. I find James Talarico pretty convincing. Maybe it’s because he’s the grandson of a preacher and because he’s in theological seminary. I don’t know. He also strikes me as someone who has a sincere and authentic interest in politics as much as faith and has for a long time. That doesn’t bother me. I get what Andy Beshear is doing. It reads a little less authentic to me. And that’s the thing. A lot of this is like your own individual journey with faith and politics. How mad are you about white Christian nationalism? How traumatized are you by past church hurt, or are you not at all? Like, all of that comes into how you react, so you can’t really say this is how it’s going to read to people because you don’t know. Because everybody brings something so different and personal to their own understanding of faith and how it should or should not inform someone’s politics. So I think if this is a sincere part of your identity, speak to it. If it informs how you think about the decisions you’d make, speak to it. Even if it doesn’t hit for me, I know it hits for other people and it works. I think George W. Bush compassionate conservatism worked. I think that so many pieces of other politicians speaking to their faith or how it informed their decision-making, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, like I think if it’s real to you, then you can make it real to other people. But whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, it’s still going to open you up to questions about your sincerity, your authenticity. What does that mean? But listen, if you’re playing the game at this level, you got to be comfortable with that.

[00:36:59] Beth: That personal baggage that you bring to it is part of the reason I’m trying to really push on my own reaction to the Tulsi Gabbard reporting. Andy Beshear and I are members of the same denomination. His faith reads as sincere to me. I do think he’s laying it on pretty thick in pursuit of a higher national profile. I wish he weren’t, to be totally honest about it, but that is the choice that he’s making. But I will say when I saw him speak at a gathering of our denomination, it was the best I’ve ever seen him in public. I do think his faith is quite sincere, and I can put it in context because I understand it. When I read about Tulsi, I don’t know what the word guru means to her, or generally within the Hindu faith, which is extremely diverse. I don’t know how a lot of Hindus would view the Science of Identity Foundation. I can imagine enormous diversity. So I’m trying to not assume that this level of control over her exists, because I think it’s unclear from the piece. I agree with you, I think the piece makes it clear that Chris Butler, if he was the speaker in all of these memos, was mean to her. I’ve read a lot of political books though, and a lot of advisors are pretty mean to their principals all the time, and the language is coarse and harsh. I don’t know, because I am so unfamiliar with this type of spiritual practice, how to interpret this and how it would strike me if I popped it into my own cultural context. And I think about the disclosure side that you were just discussing, and whether she can do that because it sounds so unfamiliar to so many Americans. Or if there was a way for her to handle this early in her career, where no one would accuse her of deceiving people about who’s influencing her. Where she could’ve said, “Yes, this is my faith. It’s extremely important to me. I will discuss policy with my faith advisors.” Is there a way to do this well if you’re not Christian and operating in a context that a lot of people who care about politics are going to understand and be able to react to more easily than what Tulsi’s dealing with?

[00:39:22] Sarah: But I think the problem is think about how you just switched back and forth several times between the word faith advisor and political advisor. Which is it? Because I think most Americans will say they need to be separate. We have a separation of church and state. The idea that someone who you talk to about the most intense questions of life, death, what happens after we die, how we are expected to move around in the world, that you weigh this stuff that is just at the core of so much of the human pursuit of knowledge and wisdom and a life well-lived. Alongside, you need to introduce this legislation now that makes sure veterans don’t have to get preapproval for their medical screenings. I think most people are going to go, “No, that’s too much in one person.” If they’re advising you about the most intensely personal questions of faith, and also telling you what specific legislation, what specific talking points, what specific strategies, policies, political decisions you need to make, then they’re going to say, “That’s too much.” It doesn’t need to be a faith and political advisor. It needs to be a faith advisor or a political advisor. And when those lines start to cross, then you get into a place where that person has too much power over you and too much power over your decision-making. And then that’s when we need to have a conversation. I think most people would be uncomfortable with that. When someone is using their position of authority over the deepest questions in life to tell you how to function day to day, that is a level of control most people describe not as faith, but as a cult in which you don’t have any say. They tell you what to do, and you do it. And I don’t mean just in denominations or religions I don’t understand like whatever version of Hinduism this white dude from Hawaii is asserting, but I’m talking about within certain Christian denominations in which you absolutely have cultish control over people’s everyday decision-making and how they’re doing their jobs and how they’re speaking out in the world, how they’re presenting out in the world. And I think most Americans will go, “That’s too far. That’s too far.”

[00:41:38] Beth: Yeah. How do we assess that when the role of religion in campaigns is so Salesy. If that’s the case, if we’re looking for a separation of church and state, then why is the vice president writing this memoir? And why is Andy Beshear doing what he’s doing and James Talarico doing what he’s doing? We’re looking for this Goldilocks place that I don’t think really exists in most people. I don’t think there is that clean... I agree with you that’s what we want, and I also think that in most of us, that is a fantasy. We’re not really going to get that.

[00:42:13] Sarah: But is it that much of a Goldilocks situation we’re searching for when we’ve just spent 10 years with Donald Trump, who makes no bones about the fact that he ultimately decides and nobody’s telling him what to do? So maybe Americans have really made their voice on this clear, which is, they don’t want to be shamed for feeling or having religious opinions that maybe perhaps everyone doesn’t agree with. They don’t think that there’s a right way to be a Christian or a wrong way to be a Christian. Some people do. But you do see what I’m saying? I think if you really want to look through the lens of the Trump era, the answer is we don’t want to be shamed for it, but also if he’s not perfect, we don’t care either. We’re not looking for somebody who perfectly finds this Goldilocks because Trump is not religious. And he is very much the principle is “I’m the decider. I decide. No one tells me what to do.” Which clearly appeals to very many Americans. So it’s hard to put together all the lessons of this era with somebody who has united the religious right to a certain extent but does not represent them. And so watching J.D. Vance come along behind and try to do that from a place of seemingly sincere conversion but also clearly in pursuit of political objectives, I think makes the questions and the learnings of this Donald Trump religious era even more interesting and something that we will probably continue to talk about as we get closer and closer to 2028 and see other people with every spectrum of sincere religious beliefs present those in varying ways to the American voting populace. Beth, Tulsi wasn’t the only one in the Post this weekend.

[00:44:01] Beth: She was not.

[00:44:03] Sarah: We were.

[00:44:03] Beth: I was having such a normal Sunday when I got this Google alert that Scott Nover had written a piece called The New Kings of the News Business Are in Your Inbox that profiled us and other creators on Substack.

[00:44:18] Sarah: Yeah. It wasn’t a complete surprise. We had spoken with him extensively, and he’s a really nice guy, and he seemed sincerely interested in how we built our business. I dig that he called us incredibly patient. Yeah. because we are, and we’ve been at this a long time, and so it’s nice to be recognized for what we’ve built in a very volatile creator economy, news media environment, and the sort of the interplay of those two things has been really hard, and I’m proud of what we’ve built. It’s really nice to see it recognized. I was very happy with the pieces of our interview he used. You got the closing quote in the whole thing. That was pretty cool.

[00:44:57] Beth: It was cool.

[00:44:58] Sarah: And so I was delighted, and I always like it when we are featured like this because I feel like it legitimizes our audience, and they really like to see this podcast. They tell everybody about. It’s like there’s a lot of people on Instagram right now being like, “You know that podcast I tell you about all the time? Here they are in the Washington Post,” which is nice.

[00:45:17] Beth: It is so nice the way that our audience responds when something like this happens, and I do feel like everyone gets that it’s a celebration of all of us, not just the two of us. To the point about industry changes, it is wild to be in a piece primarily about email. When we’ve always thought of ourselves as podcasters, but that’s true, and it is part of the reason we made the Substack move. One of the forces that we have been trying to surf, but also sometimes taking shelter in the basement from, and other times following with a truck and some measuring tools is the algorithmic way that people come to know your work now is so different than when we started 10 years ago. And that sense of I can just email you, and we can stay in touch that way. I don’t have to depend on what mood Instagram is in this week or what’s happening on Facebook or TikTok or even the podcast players. It’s just a really direct relationship with the audience, which is how we’ve built something that we can continue to do. We would not have a business that we could keep putting all of our time into if it weren’t for that direct relationship with the audience and email has been the way to keep that in this bizarre storm of algorithms.

[00:46:37] Sarah: Yeah, I thought it was interesting that the piece names it as the last man standing. I really do think about the RSS feed on which podcasting is built as a very similar thing. You subscribe; you know you’re going to get the episode. You’re not dependent like a TikTok creator or an Instagram creator on them surfacing your content to your followers, people who said they wanted to see your content. And so having a way to email these podcast episodes to people. That’s why we emphasize so much subscribing to our Substack, because you just never know when even Apple Podcasts will change its mind. And our advertising business was decimated because two years ago, three years ago, Apple Podcasts was like, “We’re not going to keep so many downloaded episodes to save you storage on your phone.” And poof, there it went. And so just because they don’t care about podcasts necessarily, they care more about their physical product, the storage of the phone. And so you’re at the mercy of so many decisions you have no control over. And so that’s why we’re always saying “Subscribe to us on Substack,” because that’s what Substack is. It is an email list primarily. If we make a new podcast episode, if we make a new More to Say, if we have a spicy live conversation, then it will be emailed to you. Email is still my primary sort of way I manage my online life. I like an email. I know some young people don’t like an email. I like my email inbox. That’s how I keep track and manage my life. And so knowing that I don’t have to go hunt down a creator or a writer I really like, like Derek Thompson, make sure I know what he’s saying. It’s just going to get delivered to my inbox. And it has been very important particularly with our business, to know that we can communicate with the people who do trust us and who do want to hear the news from us and who do want to process the news with us because I think that’s the other part of this piece is there’s just an enormous trust built when you have this relationship with a community, and it’s definitely not one we take for granted, but it was nice to have it recognized in this way. So the link to the Washington Post piece is in the show notes, as well as, of course, a link to our Substack if you’d like to finally make the leap. You don’t have to do the Substack app. You never go to substack.com if you don’t want to. It will just show up in your email inbox along with all of our exciting America 250 celebrations. So make sure you’re subscribed at paintsuitpoliticsshow.com so you never miss a thing. We will be back in your ears on Friday. And until then, keep it nuanced y’all.

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Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

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