The Bulwark Podcast

President Trump orders the National Guard to be deployed to Portland, Ore., after declaring it a war-ravaged city. And reports surface that the administration is considering strikes in Venezuela. Meanwhile, the military’s top generals are on their way to Quantico for a mysterious meeting called by Pete Hegseth that the president now wants to crash. Congressional leaders meet with the White House w...

President Trump’s quest for revenge escalates, as a grand jury indicts former FBI Director James Comey days after Trump forced out a prosecutor who refused to bring charges against his political enemies. Trump, meanwhile, is cheerleading the indictment and publicly encouraging prosecutors to go after more Democrats and left-leaning organizations. Adam Kinzinger joins Tim Miller to talk about the m...

The White House readies plans for mass firings in the federal government as Democrats weigh the stakes of forcing a government shutdown. The Justice Department prepares to seek an indictment for former FBI Director James Comey as President Trump hunts for revenge against his political enemies. Ezra Klein of The New York Times joins Tim to discuss what a fight about a shutdown should really be abou...

A government shutdown creeps closer as President Trump cancels a meeting with Democratic leaders. Former Vice President Kamala Harris embarks on a press tour to promote a score settling book about her campaign. Plus, Trump taps one of his former personal lawyers to replace a U.S. attorney he dismissed for not targeting his political enemies after publicly calling on the Justice Department to move...

The injecting-bleach president is getting some super-strong pseudoscientific information to scare mothers and blame them for autism while conveniently ignoring the role geriatric sperm may play in neurodivergence. Meanwhile, Kimmel may be coming back, but confusion remains about why his show was pulled to begin with—given the jokes Trump, his son, and other high-profile people made about the attem...

We thought Tom Homan was just an extreme border hawk and ideologue. Now we know this powerful law enforcement official, who's depriving immigrants of their freedom, may also be a corrupt law-breaker—after he was reportedly recorded taking a $50,000 cash bribe during an FBI sting operation. And MAGA die-hards, like Megyn Kelly, have made clear they don't care. Meanwhile, Kash is having FBI agents p...

Cancel culture lives on, but it's taken new turns, especially among some of the loudest opponents of woke culture who simply can not abide one word of criticism about Charlie Kirk or Israel. Meanwhile, the vice president of the United States is actively encouraging his kind of Americans to rat out their neighbors. Plus, how authoritarianism and corruption go together, the challenge for academics w...

The administration wants people to believe that Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air because he supposedly crossed a red line when it came to Charlie Kirk—yet at the same time, somehow totally ignore that this is naked government coercion of critics who embrace the time-honored tradition of skewering presidents. And because this is the Trump administration, there's also a corruption angle, namely a...

This country has been dealing with an increase in political violence for nearly a decade, and leaders from across the spectrum need to do everything they can to get us off this terrible path. Declaring 'free speech for me and not for thee,' or getting random people fired for not saying nice things about Charlie Kirk isn't helping to tamp things down. Meanwhile, it looks like Trump is sacrificing U...

The former senator and former Dem has some not-very-nice things to say about Schumer and Obama—as well as progressives—who he blames for hounding Biden to move left and diminishing his will to fight. And while he's proud he helped protect the filibuster while he was in the Senate, Republicans just invoked the nuclear option to get Trump's nominees approved. Plus, what's with all the Confederate fl...

The administration is threatening to take away money and power—and maybe even freedom—from some vague Trump opponents because of the Kirk assassination. It doesn't seem to matter that elected Democrats have roundly condemned his murder. And it doesn't matter that Trump himself largely ignored the recent political assassination of Minnesota Democratic legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband. But...

Trump and the people around him want to use the Kirk assassination to suppress their political opposition. And Trump is clearly laying the groundwork for cracking down on people he doesn't like—peaceful protesters, Dem fundraisers—while also offering rhetorical comfort to potential vigilantes on the right. Meanwhile, we are witnessing the danger of having an incompetent person atop the FBI, who al...

This country has too many guns and too many crazy people. And the social media oligarchs are fanning the flames of violence by constantly trying to piss people off. The Kirk assassination highlights just how dangerous a moment we are living in. America is not free if people are too afraid to speak their minds. Plus, parenting and the surprising gap in what Gen Z women and men think are the highest...

If Zohran Mamdani, as NYC mayor-elect, held a dinner with finance bros and threatened them with a huge wealth tax if they didn't sweet-talk him and say how much they agreed with his political vision, the Wall Street community would freak out. Yet, this version of a shakedown is *really* happening at the White House all the time and in response, the country's most powerful and wealthy business lead...

More than 10 years in, journalists still have not figured out how to cover Trump. He understands the media environment better than a lot of reporters, and knows his outrageous acts and statements command attention—and that people will not be able to finish processing one outrage before the next one comes down the pike. But now he's laying down the terms of how he expects to be covered, and media o...

In seven months, Trump has accumulated an astonishing amount of unchecked power. No one inside his administration is challenging his will, and Trump is assuming war powers with barely any explanation—while blacklisting Tom Hanks from West Point. At the same time, in the business world, only one MAGA-friendly hedge fund billionaire has raised mild concerns about the Fed, but top-shelf tech leaders...

Last month, Trump fired the "woke" job numbers person after she released weak employment data. Now, we have even worse jobs numbers—and burgeoning signs of a tariffs-triggered manufacturing recession. Meanwhile, the administration may be working on a de facto military policy that would fulfill one of Trump's biggest longtime wishes: summarily executing drug dealers. Plus, a trans gun ban would be...

The lethal U.S. military strike on a speedboat in the Caribbean was more about putting on a show than countering the drug trade out of South America. And it's not even clear that the people killed on the boat were running drugs, or that any contraband was bound for America. Meanwhile, if senators are truly concerned that local police departments are insufficiently staffed, then they should pass a...

The economic populists at the Nat Con conference may be talking a lot about elites screwing over the little guy, but the Trump administration itself has been catastrophic for working people—its policies are all about doing special favors for elite interests. And while many loud voices in Silicon Valley cursed the Biden administration for blocking some deals, other start-ups appreciated the efforts...

Democrats need to learn to fight like Republicans. So when senators with serious foreign policy chops vote to confirm a middling weekend talk show host as secretary of defense, Dems need to call them out for being unpatriotic. And when they allow an ex-junkie to sabotage vaccines that have saved millions of American lives, say they're destroying the legacy of what the Greatest Generation built. Th...

Red States are flexing their muscles and imposing their will on the other states through their coordinated redistricting efforts. And if they deploy their Guard troops to other blue cities beyond D.C., the only real precedent would be the era before the Civil War when the South tried to force more slave states on the union. Meanwhile, the infighting at the CDC over the Covid vaccine seems to be up...

Trump is like a dysfunctional 8-year-old whose parents are always in the principal's office arguing that their son is a good boy. The media, CEOs, and Wall Street keep giving him a pass for his behavior while his supporters and apologists explain why he just had to set the school on fire. At the same time, he's empowering ideologues behind the scenes who are dismantling the government and executin...

The resignations of senior leaders at the CDC is a calamity. People with decades of expertise in infectious disease are leaving the agency because the new director—who Trump just appointed—refused to get on board with RFK's anti-vax crusade, including limiting access to Covid boosters. And Wednesday's violence in Minneapolis may be a sign that the FBI should be keeping its eye on the threats from...

A year ago, China was globally isolated and its economy was struggling. But once Trump was back in office pursuing his own personal and political gain, the U.S. brand got tossed in the toilet and the view from Beijing got pretty sweet. Trump has allowed China to buy American microchips that could be used against our own national security interests, he caved on his own trade war with the country, a...

Some rando far-right social media suck-up, who Trump rewarded with an appointment to his administration, is pushing mortgage fraud investigations of Adam Schiff, Tish James, and now Fed governor Lisa Cook. Trump claims he's fired Cook based on a tweet—but will any institution stand up to these McCarthy-like campaigns against his political foes? Meanwhile, Bolton is being investigated because he we...