Stories credited to Thebulwark, by publication date. ChamberLight collects articles that mention the officials it tracks, so this shows its own coverage of this source, not how much the source publishes.

Stories from Thebulwark
Shaded: ChamberLight collected no stories, or almost none, from any outlet (a gap in its collection, not in the outlet’s publishing)

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Month	Stories	All outlets
February 2026	2	81 (collection gap)
March 2026	0	1,094
April 2026	4	4,538
May 2026	0	none collected
June 2026	0	none collected
July 2026	0	none collected
August 2026	0	1 (collection gap)
September 2026	2	1,320

Who they cover

Party of the officials these stories are mainly about, across all 12 officials named. A story counts once for each official it is mainly about, so the split is over 14 story–official pairs, from 8 stories.

Republican71% · 10 pairs
Democrat21% · 3 pairs
Party not recorded7% · 1 pair

Most covered

Stories mainly about each official, and their share of the source’s 8 stories.

+ 2 other officials (2 story–official pairs)

Article tone

ChamberLight’s article analysis assigns each story a tone toward the official it covers. It describes the coverage of that official, not Thebulwark’s stance, and reader votes do not change it. 8 stories.

Good Look: 1 (13%)
Mixed: 2 (25%)
Informational: 0 (0%)
Bad Look: 5 (63%)

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No one has challenged a score on this page yet. Anyone can; editors publish every outcome here.

Articles served from thebulwark.com

Even Putin Is Getting Sick of Witkoff and Kushner (w/ Rep. Jim Himes)

Rep.

Sep 22, 20268 votes

What’s the Matter with Kansas’s Senators?

They’re tied to Trump’s anchor.

Sep 21, 202618 votes

What’s the Matter with Kansas’s Senators?

They’re tied to Trump’s anchor.

Sep 21, 202612 votes

Can This Former Admiral Navigate Rough Political Seas?

Nancy Lacore after completing a six-day, 160-mile Valor Run in 2014. (Photo: U.S. Army) Mount Pleasant, South Carolina IN HINDSIGHT, VICE ADM. NANCY LACORE probably shouldn’t have been all that surprised when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired her from her position as chief of the Navy Reserve. Although she was just one year into what is usually a four-year appointment, Hegseth by that point had made abundantly clear that he viewed women and people of color serving in military leadership roles as relics of the “wokeness” that preoccupied the Biden administration. It wasn’t how Lacore’s thirty-five years in the Navy—working her way from a helicopter pilot to a three-star admiral before being put in charge of 60,000 sailors—was supposed to end. She and her husband—also a Navy helicopter pilot—had dedicated their lives to the service, moving countless times around the country with their six kids in tow for deployments and new duty stations. (Yes, you read that right, Lacore raised six kids while serving.) But on a Friday last August, Adm. James Kilby (who was running the Navy at the time, after Hegseth had fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti), called Lacore to his office in the Pentagon and, with tears in his eyes, informed her that the secretary of defense had instructed him to relieve her of her duties immediately. Hegseth hadn’t provided any reason for her dismissal.1 “It was pretty miserable, to be honest,” Lacore told me. “It just changed [everything]. Other than the personal insult that it felt like to me, I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ All these thoughts that started spinning in [my] head. I’m like, ‘We gotta move. We just bought a house. We thought we were gonna have three more years of income, and I thought my retirement was going to be that much more money.’ . . . It was just this spiral of all the stuff that’s going to have to change now.” Share Shortly after her dismissal, Lacore and her husband moved to Mount Pleasant, a large suburban town across the harbor from downtown Charleston. And in January, Lacore launched her campaign for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, which is being vacated by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who is running for governor. Vice Adm. Lacore testifying before the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee in May 2025. (Photo: U.S. Navy) If Democrats are going to have a massive blue wave this year—flipping somewhere in the range of forty House seats, as some pollsters and party officials have predicted—then it will require competing in Republican-held congressional districts like this one. Indeed, in the last wave midterm election, in 2018, Democrat Joe Cunningham flipped this seat and held it for a single term. The district has been solidly red since then; Donald Trump won it in 2024 by 13 points. As Trump’s approval rating continues to dip and gas prices soar, local Democratic officials believe that the district is in play. “If you were to go into a laboratory and make a district that would be most affected by a wave year, this would be it,” said Lachlan McIntosh, a South Carolina Democratic strategist who is backing Lacore. While top party committees have yet to commit to spending money in the race, Lacore is backed by The Bench, a new organization of longtime Dem operatives that recruits and supports candidates in competitive races around the country—part of a larger effort to reshape the party and usher in a new class of unconventional candidates. And as those operatives see it, South Carolina’s 1st district has larger implications beyond the congressional margin next year. It’s the type of place where Democrats will have to be more consistently competitive if they want to build lasting House majorities following the 2030 census changes. Join now I SPENT LAST SATURDAY WITH LACORE, meeting up at 7:30 a.m. at her house overlooking the coastal salt marshes for a twelve-hour day of campaigning. I wanted to get a feel for the district and the type of candidate that Democratic operatives believe can broaden their coalition in red parts of the country. And I was curious about Lacore’s experience adjusting to the political arena after spending decades in the chain of command, where she was expected to keep her political views private. Lacore’s first electoral test is just under two months away: the June 9 Democratic primary. On our drive to the Lowcountry Indivisible candidate forum in Bluffton, she told me that she didn’t grow up in a political household and spent most of her life voting for Republicans until the 2016 election. She knew very little about how political campaigns operated and was shocked by the amount of fundraising that was required. No one in her family had ever been a political donor before she jumped into the race. When I asked whether it felt odd to adopt a party label after eschewing partisan politics for so long, she asked to go off the record to answer it honestly. Publicly, she keeps her message focused on restoring democracy, the high cost of living, and the need to protect South Carolina’s coast. “I spent thirty-five years defending the Constitution—defending the freedoms and rights that it guarantees. And that’s exactly what I intend to do in Congress,” Lacore said. At the candidate forum, Lacore clearly felt uneasy wading into thornier partisan issues. When a voter asked the four participating Democrats seated at the front of the room to commit to impeaching Trump for his unauthorized attacks on Iran, Lacore sidestepped the question. When another voter lamented that the Democratic party wasn’t talking more about abortion rights, Lacore mentioned her Catholic faith but said personal beliefs on the matter shouldn’t be imposed on others—before quickly noting that she’d been endorsed by EMILY’s List, a pro-choice organization. At times, it didn’t always seem like she was thrilled to be running as a Democrat. But Democratic strategists believe that Lacore’s obvious distaste for reflexive partisanship is exactly what makes her a compelling candidate, helping her score endorsements from both Democratic and Republican local officials. Strategists stressed that this district is fairly well-off—packed full of voters with college degrees and retirees who flock to communities like Hilton Head and Seabrook Island—and is also home to a large number of veterans. “It’s just not MAGA. These kinds of Republicans that live in this district are of your dad’s Republican party,” said McIntosh. At a roundtable event later in the day, Sydney van Bulck, a former teacher who described herself as “about as far left as you can go,” said she viewed Lacore’s Republican past as a strength in the race. “While I would love for all of our politicians to be as far left as I am, we don’t make progress that way,” van Bulck said. “I think that you need to kind of resemble the district that you’re representing.” If you value this kind of reporting—if it deepens your understanding of the nation’s politics in this midterm year—consider signing up for Bulwark+. Do it today and you’ll get a fourteen-day trial period to check it out for free: Join Bulwark+ with a FREE 14-day trial The race for the 1st Congressional District got one of its first major shakeups this week when Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor of South Carolina who also used to represent the district in Congress, announced that he would run to retake the seat. Sanford—who often warned about the “cult of personality” taking over the Republican party—was one of the first Republicans to pay a steep price for criticizing Trump. He lost his 2018 primary to Katie Arrington, who made the election all about loyalty to Trump. Sanford also ran a brief primary campaign against Trump in the fall of 2019. He is just one of nearly a dozen Republicans vying for the nomination this time around, and it’s hardly guaranteed that he will win. But his entry into the race has some local Democrats on edge. “There’s a lot of Democrats who really like Mark Sanford,” said Renee Harvey, a Charleston-based Democratic strategist. “He’s going to be the hardest to beat if he should be so lucky to win that primary. But you know, him breaking with the Republican party, I think that still is a bit of a liability for him in the primary.” The other most notable episode of Sanford’s career was when he disappeared from the state for a week in 2009, when he was still governor. He had told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail; he was actually visiting a mistress in Argentina. That scandal and Sanford’s ensuing incredibly bitter divorce didn’t prevent him from completing his second term as governor and then getting elected to the House—and it would probably be even less damaging in today’s Republican party. The last time Democrats held the 1st district was in 2018, when Cunningham defeated Arrington by 1.4 percentage points by running largely on his opposition to Trump’s offshore drilling plan. Cunningham lost his re-election to Mace in 2020 by 1.2 points (this was back when she was pitching herself as a “new voice” of the GOP and not obsessing over transgender issues). Share But a lot has changed since 2018. The Republican-controlled state legislature redrew the 1st district in 2020 to be more GOP-friendly. Plus, running for office has become only more complicated for first-time candidates, who have to figure out how to balance traditional retail politics with a robust social media presence. A camera crew followed Lacore around for most of the day on Saturday, capturing interactions with voters that could be packaged for social media clips. Lacore ended her day in perhaps the most fitting place in the district for a former Navy officer: on a boat, touring the Charleston Harbor with Awendaw Mayor Chris Crolley, who eagerly explained the shrimp and turtle seasons and pointed out different bird species—from pelicans to snowy egrets. “You really don’t understand Charleston unless you’re on the water,” Crolley said, as Lacore nodded along in agreement. Lacore and Crolley out on the water. (Photo: Lauren Egan) While Lacore’s critics have pointed out that she doesn’t have deep roots in the district and it wasn’t her primary residence until a few months ago, she’s emphasized her connection to the water. She’s talked about living in other coastal cities during her service, including Norfolk, Virginia, and dealing with the threat of rising sea levels and flooding—an issue that tends to transcend partisan politics in districts like this. “I do feel drawn to the water,” Lacore told me, when I asked about her decision to retire in the area. “Every time I start talking about protecting the coast—that resonates with everybody.” Leave a comment My open tabs: — Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections — I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America — Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker — Cali Dems Need to Get Their Sh*t Together, by my Bulwark colleague Andrew Egger 1 Lacore told me that Kilby came storming into the office, clearly distraught by the position that Hegseth had put him in. “He knew that I was at risk, that all women in the Navy were at risk,” Lacore told me. “He took it very personally. He had been doing his best to kind of, you know, provide some buffer and keep us in our places as long as he could. And ultimately, it didn’t work.”

Apr 16, 202611 votes

Can This Former Admiral Navigate Rough Political Seas?

Apr 16, 202616 votes

Can This Former Admiral Navigate Rough Political Seas?

Apr 16, 20268 votes

Cali Dems Need to Get Their Sh*t Together

This week, Donald Trump posted a picture that portrayed him as Jesus Christ, before deleting it among a furious backlash from Christian conservatives. But his quest to discover which forms of idolatry they will and won’t put up with continues. This morning, he posted a meme portraying him being embraced by a Jared Leto-looking Jesus, which included the caption: “I was never a very religious man .. but doesn’t it seem , with all these satanic , demonic , child sacrificing monsters being exposed … that God might be playing his Trump card !”1 “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this,” Trump wrote, “but I think it is quite nice!!!” Happy Wednesday. Tom Steyer and Rep. Eric Swalwell take part in a forum at the Skirball Cultural Center on Thursday, February 26, 2026. (Photo by David Crane/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images) Golden State Clown Car by Andrew Egger Last month, I wrote in this newsletter that billionaire Tom Steyer’s campaign to become California governor was “one of the funnier ongoing subplots of this young election season”—another vanity campaign like his 2020 presidential bid that would set unholy heaps of Steyer’s own money on fire en route to another doomed finish. I should have known I was tempting fate. Now, the sudden collapse of Rep. Eric Swalwell due to sexual misconduct accusations has left California Democrats in a deeply unpleasant spot. Swalwell wasn’t running away with the contest, but he had started to seem a little inevitable, which Democrats, on the whole, were basically fine with. With him gone, the field is suddenly looking astonishingly weak—and Steyer simply buying his way to victory is actually a genuine possibility. After all, who would stop him? The other known quantity in the Democratic contest, former Rep. Katie Porter, is a staunch progressive with fervent fans. But she’s also developed a reputation for—well—instability: She has had inexplicable meltdowns during respectful press interviews, gone viral for shouting at staffers during Zoom calls, and in 2022 barred a young short-term staffer from returning to her office after accusing her of giving her COVID. Some Democrats are trying to cobble together alternative possibilities. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a more centrist candidate and one with actual California executive experience, had been considered an afterthought in the race. But the Washington Post reports that wealthy donors have begun looking to him as their way out of the jam: a super PAC supporting him received $12 million in pledged donations just this past weekend. If you want to support a better kind of politics, you could make a million-dollar pledge to PAC for a candidate you kinda-sorta believe in. Or you could join Bulwark+. (Or both.) Meanwhile, somebody out there is running a poll testing a different proposition: How would Kamala Harris fare in this primary if she were to suddenly enter the race as a write-in candidate? It’s a measure of how bad the vibes are that the only really good piece of news on the contest for California Democrats lately came from Donald Trump. Two different candidates, former Fox host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, had been polling above ten percent—raising the age-old anxiety about a Republican lockout.2 But then Trump endorsed Hilton, making the necessary near-even split between the two Republicans far less likely. Still, doesn’t this all feel a little horrifyingly familiar? How can it possibly be that Democrats have yet again sleepwalked into yet another high-profile race for which they seem to have basically zero highly qualified and popular candidates? Is it too much to expect this party to figure out one primary field that looks inviting enough that nobody feels compelled to do write-in candidate hopium long after the filing deadlines have passed? Am I the only one for whom this nonsense is starting to get old? Not to freak people out or anything, but the stakes are pretty high for the country right now. It’s not hard to imagine a world where the ongoing outrages of the Trump presidency galvanize Democrats to turf up more inspiring, more capable, more visionary candidates. Instead, Trump often has a flattening effect. As California Democratic strategist Brian Brokaw told the New York Times this week: “Trump himself occupies so much of the political conversation that the only way for anyone at the state or local level to break through that noise is to position themselves as an anti-Trump figure.” But positioning yourself as an anti-Trump figure is so easy pretty much anybody can do it. Which means that it’s even more of an advantage than usual to be able to purchase a much bigger megaphone than your competitors. Which is why California may, remarkably, implausibly, find itself saddled with a Governor Steyer. We can only hope Democrats will have these sorts of nominating kinks worked out by the time 2028 rolls around. That one’s going to be pretty important, too. Join now The Lessons of Péter Magyar by William Kristol Yes, yes, I know. I can’t keep on writing about Hungary forever. I mean, this newsletter is called “Morning Shots,” not “Reggeli lövés.”3 And yes, I’m aware there are other things going on in the world: Trump’s ever-more unhinged behavior, the increased danger of his Justice Department now under leadership that’s still malevolent but probably more competent, the continued depredations of ICE, Trump’s desperate attempts to mask the fact that he’s heading for the exits in Iran with the mission not accomplished, and the still-unfolding Epstein scandal. But I do want to dwell at least one more day on Hungary, and on lessons to be learned from Viktor Orbán’s stunning defeat and Péter Magyar’s inspiring victory. And I want to do this by bringing you a couple of key points made by David Pressman, our excellent ambassador to Hungary during the Biden administration, in a Bulwark Take we recorded yesterday. Here are some lightly edited excerpts: The message: kleptocracy and corruption. Péter Magyar took his campaign directly to the rural heartland of Hungary . . . to Viktor Orbán’s, and Fidesz’s, strongholds. And Magyar went to those strongholds, and he delivered a message and opened a conversation with conservative Hungarians that was about kleptocracy and corruption. Magyar’s campaign framing was: Victor Orbán and Fidesz are a criminal organization, and we need to dismantle this criminal organization. And he connected the impact of the criminal organization to these Hungarians’ experiences. So when you go to the countryside in Hungary, you realize they can’t go to a hospital that’s up to twentieth-century standards, they can’t find public schools that can properly educate their children, and they’re watching their grandchildren moving out of Hungary and leaving to try to find opportunity. What Magyar did is he explained to them that the reason your hospitals and your schools are crumbling is because these guys are stealing from you. I think that was hugely impactful. And he connected the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán as one vector of mass corruption in Hungary. You asked, am I surprised? I’m surprised that Magyar was able to penetrate this pervasive media control that Viktor Orbán has over Hungary. But I’m not surprised at all that the Hungarian people were prepared to choose a different path. Hungarians galvanized behind a candidate who wasn’t proposing policy change, but was proposing system change. One of the things that we have not transitioned to in the United States is we continue to see what’s happening as instances of corruption. I am concerned a little bit that as we look at the situation, we keep seeing some outrageous and unprecedented, in my view illegal, acts taking place. But we continue to view them as individual derogations from practice as opposed to a new system that has actually been put in place that needs to be challenged systemically. These are not aberrations. This is the new system of government. And in that respect, Péter Magyar wasn’t calling out individual abuses. He was calling out an entire platform that was designed to enrich a kleptocratic elite and the family of Viktor Orbán. The messenger: bold and unafraid. I’ve heard a lot of discussion in the Western press about the broad coalition that Péter Magyar brought together, which is absolutely true. But also, this is about leadership, right? It’s not just the ability to assemble a coalition. It was also not being afraid. And he was not afraid. It was his fearlessness—and the fearlessness manifested itself in the way he communicated. I remember when he emerged onto the scene and the Fidesz party started going after him. But remember, the Fidesz party controlled all of the instruments of state. So when the party goes after you, it’s a government going after you. And at one point, this was early on, they started making fun of him because he was wearing what they called women’s sunglasses. Just a small example. And his response to that was not to deliver some sort of a lecture on gender norms, or to say, how dare you do this. He started broadcasting and projecting as many images as he could of him in these sunglasses, smiling, having fun, more sunglasses. Then he auctioned the sunglasses off, did a public auction, which created a whole story, raised all this money to deliver to women’s charities. And through it all, he appeared to be having a good time, And so, you know, there was a brashness to his communications that felt strong. When we think about how you confront strongmen, it requires a kind of engagement that’s not something that we’re really accustomed to in politics. Magyar at his press conference yesterday said something that I thought was right. I want to say something to the foreign correspondents in the room, he said. The propaganda apparatus in Hungary, he said, was like North Korea. I don’t think you understand how bad it was. And I think he’s right. I think that most Americans and most Westerners don’t appreciate just the sheer power that having just all of these platforms of communication badmouth you, smear you, spy on you, what that does to individuals. But Magyar, to his credit, he didn’t shirk and plowed through it in a really impressive way. Really, the most important part is that he wasn’t afraid, and he demonstrated to people how not to be afraid. Watch or listen to the whole thing. Share AROUND THE BULWARK A Bittersweet 20th Birthday for Romneycare… Mitt Romney’s legacy is a reminder of how governing used to work. JONATHAN COHN is in Massachusetts, where he talked to former senator and Governor MITT ROMNEY. Trump Keeps Trying to Pressure Ukraine. Zelensky Doesn’t Care… The American president is trying to use leverage he doesn’t have, argues STEVEN PIFER. A New Hungary Is a Huge Opportunity for Europe… Once the problem area, Central Europe could become the engine of reform the continent needs, writes DALIBOR ROHAC. The Nationalist Right Isn’t Taking Orbán’s Loss Well… CATHY YOUNG takes a look at America’s nationalists mourning one of their own. Calling all West Coast Bulwark+ members: Tickets are now on sale for our Bulwark Live shows in San Diego on May 20 and Los Angeles on May 21. Click here to get the members-only presale code and links to the ticketing sites. Tickets go on sale for everyone else starting on Friday, April 17. Quick Hits JD AMOK: Do the hits keep coming for JD Vance or what? Fresh off his humiliating Hungary trip stumping for a two-bit authoritarian who lost in an enormous landslide days later, the vice president headed last night to Georgia for a Turning Point USA event. But the event fell far short of expectations, with videos going viral of Vance speaking to a basketball arena barely a quarter full. Nor were the vibes particularly good. Far from keeping fire focused on the left, Vance opened the event with a harangue against the right-wing conspiracy theorists who continue to harass TPUSA leader Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. Erika Kirk had been supposed to participate in the event, Vance said, but had pulled out over death threats. (Apparently, the risk to the vice president’s own life is not as substantial.) “It’s one of the most disgusting things I have seen in public life,” Vance said. “To say Erika Kirk wasn’t grieving her husband—that she was somehow complicit in his death—is preposterous and disgusting. . . . If you’re going after Erika Kirk and not the people trying to destroy the United States of America, you’re part of the problem.” Will Vance be successful in his attempts to scold the world’s biggest lunatics into focusing their lunacy on more politically useful targets? We’ll keep you posted. MORE SHOES TO DROP: Congress’s ethics reckonings aren’t over yet. On the heels of the resignations of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), many in Congress are now raising the pressure on another pair of ethically challenged members: Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Republican Rep. Cory Mills, both of Florida. Cherfilus-McCormick is under federal indictment for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars of FEMA disaster funds, conduct for which a House ethics investigation last month found her guilty of twenty-five ethics violations. Yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he believed Cherfilus-McCormick would be expelled from Congress: “I think the facts are indisputable at this point. . . That certainly rises to the level that’s needed.” Mills isn’t there yet—his own ethics investigation, covering a host of accusations of campaign finance violations, sexual misconduct, misuse of federal funds, and more, remains ongoing. But many lawmakers, including some in his own party, seem to think it’s only a matter of time for him as well. “Two down,” Rep. Nancy Mace tweeted yesterday, “two to go.” FRIEND OF A PREDATOR: The fallout from Swalwell’s implosion hasn’t been confined to the house. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) has been a longtime personal friend and political ally of Swalwell’s, and he came strongly to his defense when rumors about the congressman’s behavior started swirling last week.4 Now the senator, too, has been forced into damage-control mode. In a press conference in his office yesterday, a harried Gallego disclaimed all knowledge of the predations of his—he insisted—former friend. “I let this man into my family,” Gallego said. “Look, we socialized. We went out. But I never saw him engage in any of the predatory behavior, harassment, sexual assault, anything like that.” “I definitely look at the world a different way now,” Gallego added, pledging to “take, you know, personal steps and office steps to make sure that we don’t even get close to a gray line.” Share Cheap Shots Share 1 All sic, obviously. 2 In California’s jungle-primary system, all declared candidates participate in the same primary election, with the top two vote-getters advancing to a runoff. In theory, a fragmented enough Democratic field could lead to a situation where a strong majority of primary voters back a Democrat, but the top two single vote-getters are both Republicans. 3 Editor’s note: We have no idea if this translation is anything close to right. If you speak Hungarian, please leave a comment. 4 Here was Gallego on April 7: “When you are in first place, is when they target you. Eric is a fighter and he will win the Governors race.” (All sic.)

Apr 15, 202616 votes

Iran Schools Trump in the Art of the Deal

What does an “open” Strait of Hormuz look like, in Iran’s telling? This morning, we got some clarity. Iran is claiming that vessels can sail through as they wish—but that because they have heavily mined the main shipping channel, shippers must only transit while hugging the Iranian shore and in coordination with the Iranian military. You know, for safety. “We have to be very careful for the safety and security of those tankers and vessels,” Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Khatibzadeh told ITV News. Is this true? Who knows! But shippers will be unlikely to risk the main channel until they get more clarity. This is the shakedown America appears prepared to permit under our “ceasefire.” Happy Thursday. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images) The End of Madman Theory by Andrew Egger It’s a fundamental piece of MAGA mythology: None of the histrionic threats the president makes during his spasms of gangster negotiation should be taken seriously by Americans. If the president threatens a genocide against Iran, and that makes you worry that the president might order a genocide against Iran, you’re acting like an idiot or a rube. Somehow, Trump’s supporters insist, his threats are supposed to exist in some mythical space where we are permitted to discount them but they are expected to take them deadly seriously. This, in turn, is supposed to unlock for Trump devastating levels of negotiating pressure that only he can access. But the last thirty-six hours have shown us the truth. Trump’s threats aren’t only a blot on America’s conscience and stain on our reputation, as the world now sees the United States as a country that might threaten the worst possible crimes to get what it wants. They’re also a total failure on their own terms. Far from maximizing America’s agency, Trump’s ultimatum and accompanying threats finally placed him in a negotiating straitjacket. He had to back down, and the Iranians knew it. This backdown has landed America in a surreal place. For all intents and purposes, the ceasefire we announced with so much fanfare on Tuesday has already ceased to exist—indeed, never existed at all. All the belligerents, besides us, are still shooting. Yesterday, Israel conducted more extensive attacks against Lebanon, while the Gulf states reported that Iranian missile and drone attacks had not abated. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remains, despite the president’s assurances to the contrary, functionally closed: Iran continues to warn ships to transit the strait only in coordination with the Iranian military, threatening to attack vessels that disobey. According to the MAGA mythology of the Trump threat, none of this should be happening at all. Iran is supposed to be scared straight, too terrified that Trump might drop the gloves and bomb them back to the Stone Age to keep acting out. But it isn’t just that we’re back to the pre-ceasefire status quo. The White House now has a strong interest in pretending that a ceasefire is in effect even if it isn’t—because otherwise Trump’s threats achieved nothing, and they would have to admit he just chickened out. And so the whole White House messaging apparatus spent yesterday twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why none of these obvious provocations were really, truly violations of the ceasefire. That bloody fighting in Lebanon? Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Vice President JD Vance insisted it had never been subject to the ceasefire in the first place.1 The missiles and drones targeting the Gulf states? That, Leavitt suggested, was probably just because we’d bombed Iran’s military communications infrastructure too well: parts of Iran’s military maybe just hadn’t heard about the ceasefire yet. And Iran’s continued tolling of the Strait of Hormuz? Well, hey, that was a work in progress, and anyway the president was cooking up some ideas about how maybe America could get a kickback there, too, so why all the complaining? Here’s the Bulwark promise: We respect facts. We tell you what we really think. We support democracy. If that sounds like your speed, join Bulwark+. We’d love to have you. Meanwhile, the White House was insisting—against all evidence—that the ten-point Iranian plan Trump had said Tuesday would serve as a basis for negotiation was not, in fact, the ten-point plan that had been publicly reported and which Iran was claiming Trump had agreed to consider. Leavitt insisted that that plan, which contained a host of ludicrous concessions that no American president would agree to, had been “literally thrown in the garbage” by Trump and his negotiating team. Leavitt further claimed that Iran had secretly communicated a different, far more acceptable ten-point plan, and that it was this plan that Trump had agreed to make the basis for further negotiations.2 “The president’s red lines, namely the end of uranium enrichment in Iran, have not changed,” Leavitt said (Trump contradicted this himself; more on that below), “and the idea that President Trump would ever accept an Iranian wish list as a deal is completely absurd.” This, apparently, was news to the Iranians. In an angry statement after Leavitt’s press conference, Iranian Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf accused America and Israel of already violating multiple clauses of the ceasefire, including by continuing to strike Lebanon and by denying Iran’s right to enrich uranium. “Now the very ‘workable basis on which to negotiate’ has been openly and clearly violated, even before the negotiations began,” Ghalibaf fumed. “In such a situation, a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations is unreasonable.” I will repeat: Under the MAGA theory of Trump negotiation, all these roles should be reversed. It should be the Iranians who are desperate to maintain the ceasefire—because who knows what Trump would do?—and the Americans who are watching like hawks for any violation, warning Iran that the slightest deviation from the ceasefire terms would bring the wrath of Trump down on their heads. Trump spent yesterday evening trying to reclaim that role: If a full agreement with Iran is not reached, he said, “then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.” “In the meantime,” he added, “our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!” Join now ICYMI: Andrew talks with Sal about shipping in the Strait. Trump the Conquistador by William Kristol In his inaugural address fifteen months ago, President Trump proclaimed, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” We haven’t heard much talk recently from the president about wars we’re not getting into. Will one consequence of his humiliating failure in Iran be a return to such a stance? Perhaps the difficulties of the last two weeks have diminished Trump’s interest in foreign excursions? Appears not. A taste for foreign adventures seems to have lodged itself in Trump’s brain. Just under two weeks ago, Trump said in Miami, “I built this great military. I said, ‘You’ll never have to use it.’ But sometimes you have to use it. And Cuba is next by the way.” So Trump acknowledges a change of attitude from “You’ll never have to use” the military to “Sometimes you have to use it.” There’s no more boasting here about wars we’ll never get into. And “Cuba is next” seems to be a pretty straightforward promise that he’ll start yet another war. Yesterday evening, in the context of attacking NATO, Trump reminded us of his interest in taking Greenland: NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!! President DJT So both Cuba and Greenland seem to be in Trump’s sights. And later last night, Trump posted the threat Andrew mentioned above: All U.S. Ships, Aircraft, and Military Personnel, with additional Ammunition, Weaponry, and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy, will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with. If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the “Shootin’ Starts,” bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before. It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary - NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS and, the Strait of Hormuz WILL BE OPEN & SAFE. In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK! With respect to Iran, and despite the bluster about starting the shooting again, what’s noteworthy is Trump’s description of the goals of an agreement. “No nuclear weapons” is a far cry from no enriched uranium or no missiles or no nuclear program at all. In fact, the Iranian regime has always claimed they don’t seek nuclear weapons, so they can agree to that. As for the Strait of Hormuz being “open and safe,” that could be consistent with Iranian supervision of the strait, tolls for ships, and other elements of a new status quo the Iranian regime would be pleased with. So the bulk of Trump’s post is consistent with retreat from Iran. But the penultimate sentence is also striking. “In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest.” It’s unusual for an American president to proclaim “Conquest” as his goal. In his June 6, 1944 D-Day prayer, President Roosevelt said that American soldiers “fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.” Not so of American soldiers under the command of Trump. Like many wannabe authoritarians, he’s interested in “Conquest.” Indeed, the dream of foreign conquest seems to have become a more central part of Trump’s personal sense of grandiosity, not to say megalomania, than it was earlier in his career. The prospect of more unauthorized and unjustified foreign adventures is evidently very much on Trump’s mind. He’s even adopted a name for it: the ‘Donroe Doctrine.’ It’s all the more reason for Congress to check him preemptively as much as possible, and to remove him from office as soon as possible. Share AROUND THE BULWARK Trump Has a War Crimes Problem. It’s His Mouth… He can’t stop freestyling about plunder and atrocities, observes WILL SALETAN. Donald Trump’s Unfreedom of the Seas… GISELLE DONNELLY writes that Trump’s capitulation in the Strait of Hormuz could be the beginning of the end of America’s superpower era. Technology and Its Terrors… ‘Exit 8’ and ‘Undertone’ reviewed by SONNY BUNCH. Trump Went to War Without a Plan. Now He’s Scrambling to Get Out… TOM NICHOLS joins MARK HERTLING and BEN PARKER on Command Post to discuss the bleak reality of Trump’s Iran war. The Superpower Folded in Front of the Whole World… DAVID FRENCH and REP. SUHAS SUBRAMANYAM join TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to break down Trump’s erratic war leadership, rising global risks, and questions about his motives. Plus: Orbán, Virginia redistricting, and Dem oversight. Programming note: Our next Bulwark Founders Town Hall will be April 13. Upgrade to a Founders Membership today to join JVL and Sarah for this exclusive virtual town hall. And don’t forget to tell us what’s on your mind or what you’d like to know more about in the comments. Quick Hits OIL OUTRAGE: It might be good enough for MAGA—for now—for Trump simply to slap an “OPEN” sign on the still-closed Strait of Hormuz. But the oil industry is a little more concerned about that “solution.” Politico reports: Oil company executives are reaching out to the White House, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance to protest allowing Iran to charge tolls through the strategic Strait of Hormuz as a condition of peace talks, said one industry consultant granted anonymity to discuss relations with the administration. “Hell yes,” this person said when asked if executives were contacting the White House to protest a toll on Hormuz. ”We didn’t have to do that before—and I thought we won the war. Any place you have access to the administration, you ask, what are you guys thinking?” The response [administration] officials were giving industry representatives “is not a cold shoulder,” this person added. “It’s more like, ‘Yeah, ok, we’ll take note.’” Read the whole thing. CLAUDE POWERS UP: Even in its current state, AI is already poised to become the defining technology and political issue of our time—and it just keeps getting stronger, faster. This week, Anthropic made an eye-popping announcement about its next forthcoming model, Mythos: The company would delay its public release over fears that it was too good at finding and exploiting cybersecurity flaws—both in the safeguards built by Anthropic to contain it and in unrelated software. Instead, the company would for now deploy Mythos only to a consortium of top tech companies, to enable them to use it to strengthen their own cybersecurity defenses, an initiative the company is calling “Project Glasswing.” Anthropic’s claims here are startling: Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe. Oversold hype from a company talking up its own product? Maybe. But AI skeptics have been striking that pose toward AI companies’ claims for years, even as model after model keeps smashing through expectations of what large-language model technology can do. And a quick reminder: One major entity that has walled itself off from Anthropic—and thus from the ostensible benefits of participating in Project Glasswing—is the U.S. government. BALLROOM BENEFITS: He’s the anti-mail-voting president who votes by mail! He’s the anti-foreign-steel president who builds his ballroom with foreign steel! The New York Times reports: The White House has secured tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel for Mr. Trump’s $400 million ballroom project, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and private conversations. ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg-based firm that is the world’s second-largest steel maker, is providing steel for the structure of the ballroom project, the people said. They said the steel was produced in Europe, where the bulk of ArcelorMittal’s production is concentrated. The White House has not disclosed details of the donation, but Mr. Trump said last October that he had been offered a donation of steel for the ballroom valued at $37 million. What a nice, patriotic donation from ArcelorMittal! See, the Europeans aren’t all bad. The Times notes that, two days after Trump first mentioned that a steel company had approached him offering to donate the steel, the White House relaxed tariffs on imports of Canadian automotive steel—a provision that just so happened to benefit ArcelorMittal. Read the whole thing. Share Cheap Shots Share 1 When Pakistan’s prime minister, who supposedly brokered the ceasefire, first announced the agreement, the fact that Lebanon was included was literally the first thing he said about it. 2 Can anyone produce formal paper on the plan? Don’t bother asking.

Apr 9, 202622 votes

Iran Schools Trump in the Art of the Deal

Apr 9, 202610 votes

Take Mike Lee’s Deranged Posts Seriously

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on January 15, 2025. (Photo by Ting Shen/AFP via Getty Images) Mike and Yikes Public confidence in elections is a foundational requirement for a constitutional republic. Now, more than ever, we must have confidence and trust in Utah’s elections. . . . The election systems we built here in Utah work well because of a core tenant [sic] of the U.S. Constitution: federalism. When appropriately applied, the division of power between the federal and state governments means decisions that directly impact us are made by people closest to us in state and local government. United States Senator Mike Lee coauthored the above for Deseret News on October 5, 2022. I agree wholeheartedly with the senator’s argument: Utah has reasonable election laws and competent election officials, and the public can trust its election results. Mass interference in Utah’s vote is indeed “virtually impossible,” as Lee put it a bit lower in the piece. And if you don’t like the results of a particular election, you can always work harder to win the next one. But Lee is now making somewhat different arguments than he did in 2022. He regularly posts that non-citizens will steal our elections if we don’t require voters to provide documented proof of citizenship—something Utah didn’t require for Lee’s 2010, 2016, or 2022 elections.1 He also now says that secure elections require photo identification—but the vast majority of Utah ballots are verified by signature matching, not photo ID. He tells us to be suspicious of mail ballots. But Utah is an all-mail state. And he is suspicious of states that don’t finish counting ballots within forty-eight hours of Election Day—a deadline that Utah failed to hit in 2024. There’s nothing novel about a flip-flopping politician. Lee is already famous for making a habit of turnabout, including on Trump’s morals (“If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter, or my mother, or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person”), Trump’s lies (“We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK”), and Trump’s disregard for basic law (“I’d like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution”). But Lee hasn’t simply flip-flopped on whether this or that aspect of Trump’s character should be open to criticism; he’s belly-flopped into the deep end of the pool of Trump-style election conspiracism. Since March 16, Lee has posted or reposted content about elections and election-related legislation on his personal X account at least 300 times, including 31 times on March 20 alone. God might rest on Sundays, but Mike Lee spent Sunday, March 29, encouraging you to “ask your senators why the SAVE America Act hasn’t passed yet.” As for the SAVE America Act—which the Bipartisan Policy Center summarizes as a bill that would require “voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration and a photo ID at the time of voting”—Lee is an obsessive. He has explicitly framed the legislation as the only hope Republicans have of maintaining control of Congress. And recently, he warned that if the SAVE America Act isn’t passed, Gavin Newsom could become president, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his VP and Michelle Obama (???) as his secretary of state. The AI-generated image (the man loves few things more than spreading AI-generated content around) labels Zohran Mamdani as Newsom’s attorney general, though the picture clearly does not depict the New York City mayor, and it warned that this would be the “2028 White House Administration” even though the next president won’t take office until January 2029. But accuracy isn’t really a concern when sharing stuff like this. Get Press Pass on Tuesdays and Thursdays These posts and the obsessions they signal are bad enough coming from a sitting U.S. senator. But they could soon become even more alarmingly consequential, because Trump is reportedly considering Lee to step into the just-vacated role of attorney general. Lee has shrugged off the idea of running the Justice Department. But that’s just the sort of thing politicians are trained to do right up until they stop shrugging and take the job. Should Lee end up becoming AG, the implications for how we conduct our midterm elections could be serious. Federal law enforcement resources could be diverted away from national security, financial fraud, or drug trafficking to instead once again investigate the widely dismissed allegations of outcome-altering fraud in the 2020 election—the same allegations that couldn’t be corroborated by Bondi, Trump’s first-term AG Bill Barr, Trump’s private investigators, Dinesh D’Souza, MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, or any of the other fraud hunters. As attorney general, Lee would also have a far bigger audience for his steady stream of election lies. On March 22, 2026, for argumentative purposes, he seemed to imagine a scenario in which all “Red States” had gleefully given their complete voter registration databases to the Department of Homeland Security to help them sniff out illegal voters on their rolls.2 But no states have directly shared voter information with DHS. Some states have agreed to share (or already shared) voter information with the Department of Justice, but this is true of only a dozen states—and it is not true of Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, or, yes, Lee’s own Utah. DOJ has sued thirty states for detailed voter rolls, red states included. So far, the federal government has not won any of these cases, and a number of them have already been dismissed. Join Bulwark+ today On March 23, Lee posted that Democrats “have NO IDEA how common or rare [non-citizen voting is] because the status quo makes knowing that impossible.” But it is possible to know. Two months earlier, election officials in Utah (again, Lee’s home state) thoroughly searched the state’s 2.1 million registered voters. They found one non-citizen on the voter rolls (and not for nothing, but that one non-citizen had never voted). Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Georgia, Montana, and others have also recently searched for non-citizens, yielding similarly minuscule numbers of illegitimate voters. In January, Lee suggested that Virginia doesn’t use paper ballots (it does). And he previously claimed that it’s “illegal to show your ID at a voting location in California” (it’s not). Those are just a sampling of the ravings to which I responded online when he wrote them. I felt obligated to try and do so because I voted for Lee in his first U.S. Senate run in 2010 and because I admired his dad, former solicitor general Rex Lee, who died in the 1990s. And, dang it, I’ve always just thought that Mormons are less inclined to lie than the rest of us, so if I just gave Sen. Lee the facts, perhaps I could disabuse him of his baseless notions about the security of our elections. But now I realize correcting the falsehoods I see in Lee’s timeline is a pointless task. I can’t keep up with even a fraction of his lies. I do take some solace in knowing that his posts now seem as pathetic as they do nefarious. It seems unlikely that the SAVE America Act will pass, and according to reporting from Politico, Lee’s tactics have made him highly unpopular with his Republican colleagues who see his hyper-online activism as “a self-serving attempt” at juicing his own celebrity. As one unnamed Republican senator put it, Lee’s goal is simply “the clicks.” They added that “he has almost no self-awareness.” Right now, Lee is Congress’s election-obsessed iPad kid, the enfant terrible of the upper chamber whose real power is limited. But if you put the same guy in charge of 9,200 attorneys at the Department of Justice, the election lies of “@BasedMikeLee” start to look a lot scarier. Share Stephen Richer is the former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona. He is now CEO of Republic Affairs and a fellow of the Cato Institute. 1 That said, new requirements were just signed into state law that will limit Utah voters to participating in federal elections if they fail to prove their citizenship. 2 That’s one read of this post, at least. But he could also be relaying something in earnest that he heard or saw online without getting clear on the details. It’s always a bit hard to tell with Lee.

Apr 7, 202616 votes

AI Death Machines. No Human Oversight. What Could Go Wrong?

Another day, another round of insane, racist Truth Social attacks against minority congresswomen from the president of the United States: When you watch Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as they screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event, they had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized. When people can behave like that, and knowing that they are Crooked and Corrupt Politicians, so bad for our Country, we should send them back where they came from—as fast as possible. Happy Thursday. (Getty Images/Shutterstock) Hegseth’s AI Ultimatum by Andrew Egger Who gets to decide when the government AI-bots are ready to start killing people without direct human oversight—the Pentagon or the AI companies? This remarkable—some might say insane—question is at the center of a major standoff between the Defense Department and Anthropic, creator of the AI platform known as Claude. While the Pentagon has contracts with all the leading AI labs, Anthropic until this month was the only one contracted for AI use in classified settings: Claude was, for instance, reportedly involved in the operation to capture Nicolas Maduro. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has grown unhappy with two elements of the DoD’s contract with Anthropic. One, Anthropic won’t let its AI be used to conduct mass surveillance of Americans. Two, it won’t let the DoD use it to operate autonomous weapons systems that can identify, track, and kill targets without direct human involvement. To the Defense Department, the idea that a contractor would be able to tie the military’s hands like this is outlandish; they should be permitted, they argue, to use AI they contract for “for all lawful purposes.”1 Hegseth could simply drop Anthropic’s contract over this, pivoting instead to any of the AI labs—OpenAI, Google Gemini, Elon Musk’s xAI—that aren’t insisting on these contractual sticking points. But he doesn’t really want to. After all, Claude is supposed to be the best, and at any rate it’s already integrated into lots of DoD systems. It’d be a hassle. So instead, Hegseth has issued Anthropic an ultimatum: Change your policy, or we’re going to start getting nasty. This could happen in a couple different ways. The Defense Department is threatening to use the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to drop its usage requirements. Or it could go the exact opposite direction, declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk”—which would not only eliminate DoD’s Anthropic contract, but also forbid any business that contracts with DoD from working with Anthropic in any way. Both of these, it is hardly sufficient to say, would be enormous, unprecedented escalations. Hegseth says Anthropic has until tomorrow to decide. The fact that DoD is considering both possibilities—making it illegal for Anthropic not to work with them and making it illegal for Anthropic to work with anybody DoD works with—makes it pretty clear that all this is a pure squeeze play. Hegseth doesn’t actually think Anthropic is a supply-chain risk, a label typically reserved for software developed in hostile nations and suspected to contain hidden malign code. He’s just threatening to use the strongest weapon he has against the lab if it doesn’t give him what he wants. The confrontation has spooked the AI-policy world, which has until now viewed the Trump administration as highly AI-friendly. This week, I spoke with Dean Ball, who worked in a senior AI-policy role at the White House last year, helping the Trump administration develop its AI Action Plan. Ball now serves as a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a newly influential think tank on the tech right. In Ball’s view, the actual dispute between Hegseth and Anthropic had reasonable points on both sides: The government wants to control its own military, and Anthropic doesn’t want to be involved in specific use cases, so whatever—seems like they should go their separate ways. But Hegseth’s ultimatum was a whole different beast. Throughout our conversation, Ball seemed to struggle to summon words powerful enough to express his incredulity at what he called the DoD’s “giant escalation.” “I will say this in no uncertain terms, bipartisan, regardless of administration,” Ball said. “This would be one of the worst things for the American business climate I have ever seen the government do.” I asked the White House how Hegseth’s threatened kneecapping of Anthropic was in keeping with their broader AI policy, which has placed a huge priority on unleashing U.S. AI capabilities as part of a global AI arms race against China. The White House referred me back to the Pentagon; the Pentagon did not respond to my comment request. Even when they’re the targets of ludicrous government bullying, AI labs don’t necessarily make for the most sympathetic victims, which perhaps explains why we haven’t seen more Democrats rallying to Anthropic’s defense. One exception is Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who serves as the ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. In a statement to The Bulwark, Lofgren said that the administration’s “bullying tactics” against Anthropic were “shocking and senseless.” “Anthropic is trying to do the right thing and put their own guardrails in place in the absence of legislation,” she added. “It should go without saying that AI technology should not be making potentially lethal decisions without human involvement. I fear what America will become if the DoD is given this unrestricted power.” Maybe that’s the biggest takeaway from this whole crazy story: While it’s nice that Anthropic is digging in their heels here, it’s insane that such questions as “how much killing will we let the killer robots do on their own” are being hashed out as back-room handshakes between the military and its AI contractors in the first place. This seems like a matter of public policy if ever there was one. Have we got a legislature or what? If Congress were actually to do its job and legislate on this issue, what’s the right answer? And what would be the right solution to this standoff if your favorite administration were in power? Share your thoughts in the comments. Leave a comment Trump’s Murder Stories: A Case Study by Cathy Young Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was designed, at least in part, to trap Democrats in a no-win situation in which they participate in Trump’s theatrics either by joining in or by being shamed for not joining in. And lo: There has been much right-wing indignation over congressional Democrats’ failure to stand for Donald Trump’s tribute to Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee fatally stabbed in Charlotte, North Carolina last August. (Her mother, Anna Zarutska, was in attendance.) That faux outrage is morally bankrupt. For starters, MAGA couldn’t care less about the Ukrainians slaughtered daily in the war from which Zarutska fled. MAGA influencer Matt Van Swol, who asserted that the Democrats’ refusal to stand may have been his life’s “most radicalizing moment,” had previously been “radicalized” by Joe Biden giving billions to Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky not wearing a suit. The only reason Trump cares about Zarutska is because he could blame her slaying on criminal-coddling Democrats: The killer, Trump declared, “had been arrested over a dozen times and was released through no-cash bail.” In reality, DeCarlos Brown had previously served five years for robbery; his recent no-cash bail release was over misusing 911 calls during a schizophrenic episode. (The real problem was not leniency but failure of psychiatric interventions.) For quite a few on the far right, the story also fits a racist narrative of black criminality and anti-white terrorism. It gets worse still: Trump managed to spin a refugee’s tragic death into an attack on immigration, falsely claiming that the U.S.-born suspect “came in through open borders.” The next day, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Zarutska was killed “by an illegal immigrant.” From Trump gaffe (or lie) to GOP talking point. In other words, Trump cares about Zarutska not because of who she was, but because of who he imagined her killer to be. Trump’s demagoguing of Zarutska’s genuinely horrifying murder grates all the more because, earlier that day, the United States had abstained from a United Nations resolution backing Ukraine on the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion. Meanwhile, civilian deaths in Ukraine have surged in the past year while Trump’s “peacemaking” buffoonery gave Putin room to prolong the war. Worse, while Trump sheds crocodile tears for Zarutska, his administration is moving to strip Ukrainian refugees like her of protected status—which could mean deportation into peril. Trump told a whole Scheherazade’s worth of stories in his speech. The scale of the tendentious lying is almost hard to believe. Share AROUND THE BULWARK Trump’s Face on DOJ Is a Big Deal—Here’s Why… On The Illegal News, ELLIOTT WILLIAMS joins SARAH LONGWELL to break down Trump’s latest legal battles—from the Supreme Court limiting his tariff plan to a judge holding ICE in contempt for ignoring court orders. Easiest Money Ever: Bet Against Elon… On Bulwark+ Takes, SAM STEIN, SONNY BUNCH, and BEN PARKER give their takes on a Wall Street Journal story about a D.C. tax policy expert who made nearly $500,000 betting that Elon Musk wouldn’t actually cut federal spending, a wager that turned out to be almost free money. Borrowed Valor at the State of the Union… Military ceremony is no substitute for strategic leadership, writes MARK HERTLING. Congress Should Be Embarrassed… Which is worse, MONA CHAREN asks: being lied to or being ignored? Quick Hits PLEASE, SIR, MAY I HAVE SOME MERGER?: Donald Trump has been building up a head of steam against Netflix lately, so the streaming giant seems worried its planned acquisition of Warner Bros. may be entering stormy waters. Days after Trump publicly demanded Netflix fire Obama-alum board member Susan Rice “or pay the consequences,” CEO Ted Sarandos is heading to the White House today to try to smooth things over. Politico reports: The meeting comes as a bidding fight over the deal intensifies. Warner Bros. has said a revised bid from Paramount —now increased to $31 a share from $30—could outbid Netflix’s current offer, raising the prospect that political pressure and a bidding war are colliding in real time. Speaking to the BBC, Sarandos downplayed the clash saying: “This is a business deal. It’s not a political deal.” [Trump’s] rhetoric marks a shift, as Trump previously said he would stay out of the deal, leaving the matter to the Justice Department, which is examining whether a Netflix takeover of Warner Bros. would create a monopoly. Just hours after his studio raised its bid, Paramount CEO David Ellison appeared at the State of the Union as a guest of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a close Trump ally. Billions of dollars and the fates of some of the biggest entertainment products and companies in the world are in the balance—and it really may all come down to who can most vigorously gladhand the president. Just another day of normal business in 2025 Trumplandia. Join now OKAY, NOT OUR BEST IDEA: It was the MAGA brainstorm to end all MAGA brainstorms: “What if we put the great men and women of ICE to work busting crime at polling places?” The idea had been gaining popularity in some corners of the right this month. Steve Bannon pushed it on his “War Room” podcast, Karoline Leavitt dismissed the idea as “ridiculous” but declined to totally rule it out, and—as we wrote last week—MAGA lawmakers in Arizona introduced legislation that would have required county officials to welcome ICE oversight. Now, Republicans are more aggressively backing away from the idea. The Arizona bill—which would never have survived Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’s veto—was pulled before a vote amid a widespread voter outcry. And yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security assured election officials around the country in no uncertain terms that ICE wouldn’t be involved in election integrity efforts: “Any suggestion that ICE is going to be present at polling places is simply disinformation,” DHS Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity Heather Honey said, according to NPR. “There will be no ICE presence at polling locations.” In a statement to The Bulwark, however, DHS reintroduced a smidge of ambiguity. “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” an official said in an email. “ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement, and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action.” CASEY AT THE BAT: Dr. Casey Means, Donald Trump’s pick for surgeon general, may not be one of the president’s worst nominees, but she’s certainly among the kookiest. A wellness influencer, vaccine skeptic, and RFK Jr. ally—her brother Calley Means is a top aide at HHS—Means’s history of crunchy and kooky content caused plenty of head-scratching when her nomination was announced last year. It’s not hard to figure out why: I set up a small meditation shrine in my house and prayed to photos of my ancestors . . . I worked with a spiritual medium who helped me try to connect with my spirit guides for support and guidance . . . I did full moon ceremonies with grounded, powerful women . . . I did plant medicine experiences with trusted guides and wrote extensively about my experience and insights. Yesterday, in her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health Committee—ahead of what is expected to be an uneventful party-line confirmation vote—Means repeatedly dodged questions of whether she believed vaccines cause autism and if she would encourage American parents to vaccinate their children, although she did say that “vaccines save lives” and that she would encourage parents to talk to their doctors. Meanwhile, Means said she had “significant concerns” about the use of pesticides like glyphosate—unsurprising, given her past anti-pesticide campaigning, but notable given the Trump administration’s actions this month to boost U.S. glyphosate production. Share Cheap Shots 1 Nothing in current U.S. law or even current Defense Department policy forbids the development or eventual use of what they call “lethal autonomous weapon systems,” or LAWS. DoD Directive 3000.09 requires that all weapons systems be designed to “allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” But as a Congressional Research Service paper noted last year, “human judgment over the use of force” merely means humans must be broadly involved “in decisions about how, when, where, and why the weapon will be deployed.” In other words, DoD’s current policy toward hypothetical future AI weapons is that they would require lots of post-training and pre-mission human oversight, but could then be let off the leash to conduct operations without direct human control or involvement.

Feb 26, 202617 votes

AI Death Machines. No Human Oversight. What Could Go Wrong?

Feb 26, 202622 votes

A Republican’s Sex Scandal Could Paralyze the House

(Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images) Join me inside the State of the Union It’s time for another State of the Union address from President Donald Trump. (Please excuse my over-the-top enthusiasm.) If you’ve taken a high school government class, you’ll know that the State of the Union was submitted in writing for much of American history, but nowadays it’s conducted in a primetime address before a joint session of Congress.1 This gives the president an opportunity to brag about his accomplishments and admonish his political adversaries. Trump has promised that his speech will be unusually long. If you still want to tune in, please join The Bulwark’s livestream beginning at 8:50 p.m. EST. If you’d prefer not to have to listen to Trump’s voice for that long but do want to stay engaged, then I have another option for you. At The Bulwark, we like to do things a bit differently. That’s why during tonight’s SOTU I’m going to try something that I don’t think has been done before: host an AMA on Reddit from inside the House chamber. Up in the press gallery, the demands of decorum are fairly strict: You must remain quiet, show no signs of approval or disapproval, and (officially permitted videographers and photographers excepted), you are not allowed to take any photos. But posting to social media or filing an article would be totally within bounds. So tonight, hit me up with your questions, and I’ll give you a perspective from behind the cameras in the most packed room in Washington. We’ll get started when Trump does. Keep an eye out for our post in the r/politics subreddit to join in. Get Press Pass in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday Majority report The scandal involving Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) keeps getting worse. The Texas lawmaker is alleged to have had an affair with a congressional staffer who later ended her life by self-immolation. Newly released text messages show the Republican lawmaker repeatedly pressured the staffer to send him explicit photos. In more normal times, Gonzales’s behavior would prompt a swift resignation and condemnatory statements from party leadership. But the Republican majority in the House is in dire straits: With the balance of power in the chamber resting at 218–214, the GOP can afford only two defections2 with full attendance before they lose their ability to pass legislation. House Speaker Mike Johnson knows all about the hazards of his shrunken majority; it’s a problem he’s at grips with week in and week out. It’s only natural, then, that he would be reluctant to do anything that could further shrink his majority. In the Capitol Monday, Johnson made a very high-minded–sounding statement to a gaggle of reporters that he wants the investigations into Gonzales to play out before making any kind of judgment. These are serious accusations, and it must be taken seriously, and I’ve told him he’s got to address that with his constituents and he’s in the process of doing that. My understanding, there’s an investigation in the state of Texas on these matters and has been going for some time, and the Office of Congressional Conduct has also—it’s been reported—they’ve been looking at it. All of that was news to me. But I think, as in every case, that you have to allow the investigations to play out and all the facts to come out. I’ve been intellectually consistent about this, whether you’re talking about Republicans or Democrats. You have to let the system play out. Johnson added that he opposed the 2023 expulsion of former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) “because he had been accused of a crime, been indicted, but not found guilty.” “If the accusation of something is going to be a litmus test for someone being able to continue to serve in the House, you’ll have a lot of people who’d have to resign or be removed or expelled from Congress,” Johnson said. “So I think you gotta allow this to play out.” Johnson’s comparison of Gonzales to Santos isn’t quite fair. Santos had been indicted for fraud and was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 87 months in prison, a sentence he started to serve before a pardon from Trump got him out. His was a classic case of corruption, and appropriate redress ultimately belonged to the courts. Gonzales is accused of something quite different. His wrongdoing might not be as straightforwardly prosecutable as Santos’s by-the-book crimes, but it does speak profoundly to his character in a way that would normally be summarily disqualifying. Regardless of these differences, Johnson didn’t believe either lawmaker’s scandal warranted a clear condemnation. But many House Republicans have already called for Gonzales to step aside, their party’s tenuous majority be damned. Reps. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) posted that Gonzales should forgo his re-election campaign. “America deserves better,” wrote Gill. “Tony should drop out of the race.” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) stopped short of calling for a resignation, but said Gonzales’s behavior “brings dishonor on the House of Representatives.” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) went further, writing, “The allegations against Congressman Tony Gonzales are deeply disturbing: a sitting Member of Congress accused of soliciting explicit photos from a staffer and subjecting her to graphic sexual texts. This is an abuse of power.” “Congressional staff serve their country,” Mace added. “They should never have to endure predatory behavior from the people they work for. Congressman Gonzales must address these allegations and resign.” Share Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) called for Gonzales to step down immediately. She also tagged the National Republican Congressional Committee in a tweet with a directive to fund the campaign of Brandon Herrera, one of Gonzales’s challengers in the GOP primary for Texas’s 23rd district. The House Freedom Caucus’s campaign arm also capitalized on Gonzales’s troubles, endorsing Herrera Monday afternoon. Don’t mistake that for a real moral stand. The Freedom Caucus has plenty of degenerates and bad husbands in their club. But they are keen to back primary challenges to lawmakers they deem insufficiently MAGA, especially when those lawmakers enjoy the backing of House leadership. Asked by CNN on Tuesday whether he would step down, Gonzales said, “I am not gonna resign. I work every day for the people of Texas.” “What you’ve seen is not all the facts,” he added. For now, Gonzales does not feel obligated to step down, and Republican leadership continues to refrain from asking him to do so. This is not just because of the math of the current House majority. It is also a result of the party’s moral decay. In the past, even thin majorities with tough votes ahead have proven capable of ridding themselves of scumbags and criminals when their wrongdoing came to light. Past speakers, including Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, and Kevin McCarthy,3 all dealt with colleagues who had sex scandals, and each pursued resignations and investigations as appropriate. Johnson appears to have laid down that torch. Leave a comment Bullying works It’s been well documented here at Press Pass that Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has a problem with the computer. He seems to consume an endless amount of online swill while compulsively posting weird, dishonest, or downright cruel takes on whatever catches his attention in his feed. But over the weekend, there was an unexpected development in the Sen. iPad Kid file: Lee seemed to show regret over one of his posts. Amid the news that cartel members across Mexico went on a murderous rampage in retaliation for a military operation that killed their leader, Lee found a bizarre way to make the conversation about the domestic policy preferences of American Democrats: I don’t think he thought this one through before posting. It’s almost as though he is criticizing Dems for not behaving the way they might in a political cartoon by Ben Garrison. Lee’s Democratic colleagues started windmill-dunking on him in the quote-tweets. “Oh dear Mike. I literally couldn’t make our argument better than you do,” wrote Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn). “The bad guys wear masks. The good guys don’t.” “Mike, I would like ICE to have the same standards as a local police department, not cartel hitmen,” added Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). Lee ultimately deleted the post. Is he learning something at last? Probably not. But isn’t it nice to think so? Leave a comment Share 1 A joint session of Congress, as is held for the State of the Union address, is not to be confused with a joint meeting of Congress; they’re technically different, even if they amount to the same thing. And by tradition, most presidents’ first speeches before Congress after their inaugurations are treated as joint meetings and not counted as State of the Union addresses. 2 One of those defections is often Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has proven to be the Republican least afraid of the political consequences of angering Trump and the House Republican leadership. 3 Ryan demanded that Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) resign for attempting to impregnate a staffer. Pelosi said Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.) staying in Congress became “untenable” after a sex scandal involving a Capitol Hill staffer. Kevin McCarthy famously lost his speakership in large part because he didn’t quash an ethics investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who retaliated with a motion to vacate.

Feb 24, 202611 votes

A Republican’s Sex Scandal Could Paralyze the House

Feb 24, 202620 votes

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