Join us this Sunday night for a Bulwark LIVEstream featuring Pete Buttigieg + the gang broadcasting live from Charlotte. This livestream is exclusively for Bulwark+ members.
Tune in from the comfort of your couch to watch Sarah interview Pete in front of a live audience. The rest of the gang—Tim, Sam, JVL—and Bulwark favorites Lauren Egan and Catherine Rampell will be there too.
The show starts at 7:00p.m. EDT on Sunday, October 18.
For more than 10 years, Trump has been showing us how skilled he is at sowing division and riling people up. Alan sees the kind of tribal mentality that Trump has fostered on his own reality show, "The Traitors," where contestants make incredibly stupid decisions because they don't want to deviate from the pack. The actor takes the opportunity to urge people to vote, protest, and stay vigilant in the face of the Republicans' campaigns of hate against immigrants and trans people. (And that includes Vance's dumb, dated gay jokes.) Plus: Rep. Garcia of the House Oversight Committee is preparing to get the gavel in January. He's already teed up new Epstein legislation, and he's planning to end the cover-up of 3 million Epstein documents, many of which have to do with Donald Trump. Also on the target list: the Trump family's business deals and the donors to the ballroom.
Alan Cumming and Rep.Robert Garcia join Tim Miller for the weekend pod.
As always: Watch, listen, hit the like button or leave a comment. We want to hear from you.
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This is something you won’t find anywhere else: firsthand reporting from the journalist who investigated the story, paired with the perspective of someone who’s actually worked inside Trump’s White House. Become a Bulwark member to support more conversations like this.
Five days. That’s how long Katie Zachariah lasted as Trump’s White House press secretary before a disastrous debut, questions about her legal credentials, and a wave of West Wing backstabbing brought her tenure to an abrupt end. Former Trump White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews joins Andrew Egger and Judd Legum, whose reporting helped expose Zachariah’s questionable résumé, to explain how it all fell apart, why Trump bears the blame, and what this fiasco reveals about the chaos returning to his White House in the second term.
A quick note: There’s no shortage of people telling you Trump is corrupt. Catherine brings the numbers, the evidence, and, well, the receipts. Support that kind of journalism by becoming a Bulwark member.
Even Republicans are starting to notice Trump’s staggering corruption. Catherine Rampell and JVL take on the latest scandals engulfing Trump’s inner circle, new polling showing his own voters recognize the grift, and the economic damage being inflicted on ordinary Americans while Trump’s friends cash in.
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock, Truth Social)
Before we start: Katie Zacharia got turned inside out by Sean Hannity last night. This morning she bombed on . . . Fox & Friends. At this point I legitimately don’t know if she’ll make it to Election Day.
But there’s good news! Trump could just move her over to the Shield of the Americas, because one of the fake jobs at that fake organization just opened up.
1. The Tiger King
Three days ago the president of the United States posted a snuff film.
On October 10 a mentally troubled man visiting the Yorkshire Wildlife Park climbed into a tiger’s enclosure. The tiger killed him. Onlookers recorded the mauling. Somehow this video made it to the retinas of America’s commander-in-chief, who was, presumably, taking a short break from losing his war against Iran.
President Trump then shared this footage with the world.
One minute later—literally, a single minute—the president posted another video. This one was a medley of tigers and lions mauling people. I wonder how Trump had this video so close at hand. Maybe it was in his favorites. Maybe in a special folder.
At least three of these five clips were AI-generated. Here’s another question: Did the president of the United States know that this video, which he had—miraculously! right there!—was half-fake?
Time passed. Seven hours later President Trump posted a third video. This one was entirely AI-generated. It began with Trump in the same position as the dead Englishman, sitting while a tiger pawed at him.
Only in this video Donald Trump feints a smack at the tiger, jumps up from his sitting position, chases the tiger across the grass, tackles it, forces it to submit, and finally stands up, raising the tiger on its hind legs to join him in a bro-hug. Just two kings of the jungle, having a good time. Though one of them is clearly dominant.
I hope you enjoyed this little excursion through the psyche of the man who controls America’s nuclear arsenal.
But as we often say around here: Just wait. It gets worse. SO MUCH worse.
No, really. This paywall is practically a content warning. Because after you read the rest, you’ll never be able to unsee it.
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
PRESIDENT TRUMP IS ALREADY laying the predicate for interfering with the polls this November, from rhetorical and regulatory attacks on voting by mail to frenetic searches by his administration for non-citizens on state voter rolls, most recently in Nevada and California. One of the most threatening possibilities is that the Department of Homeland Security will deploy ICE or other armed agents to polling locations. The Trump administration denies planning such a move, but that hasn’t stopped opposition groups from gaming out scenarios and making contingency plans.
In late May, staff from the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and secretaries of state gathered in Milwaukee to wargame the threat of federal intrusion in state elections, including ICE agents showing up at the polls, according to one attendee.
Then in August, Hillary Clinton invited three dozen legal experts, elected officials, labor leaders, and cable news figures to Washington, D.C. to think through possible electoral chicanery by the administration and develop methods to ensure election integrity.
Beyond these tabletop exercises, pro-democracy activists have organized massive projects to train thousands of “democracy protectors” to observe polling places. In mid-September, state Democratic parties announced the New Battlefield Project to recruit and train poll watchers. Likewise, Vote Safe, a campaign by veteran civil rights and advocacy organizations, is working to deploy hundreds of observers to heavily Latino and black counties in states with competitive Senate races.
The purpose of the exercises is to build connections between lawyers and groups on the ground—including some that didn’t exist two years ago.
STEPHEN RICHER ATTENDED THE SIMULATIONS in Milwaukee in May. As a Republican who served as the top election official in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county and the site of razor-thin election margins seemingly every cycle, Richer received death threats for upholding the 2020 election results. “One of the reasons I’m invited is I know how elections are administered,” he told me.
He said participants in the wargame sessions regularly consider the possibility of ICE arriving at the polls within the first hour. Some possible responses Richer has seen include asking the courts for an injunction to remove ICE from the voting location, establishing a hotline to report sightings, and stationing observers at the polls.
Richer offered a note of reassurance. “I don’t mean to discount the very real anxiety that this could produce for voters, and arguably already has for voters, but logistically, ICE blanketing the states is far-fetched,” he said.
States would potentially have legal recourse after ICE-induced voting disruption. Richer notes that non-malicious election day occurrences, such as losing power, have led to district court orders to keep a voting location open past its scheduled closing time. Interference, he said, like Trump posting a targeted threat online or violence near a voting location, would likely result in the polls staying open longer.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S INSISTENCE that ICE won’t be at the polls is less than iron-clad. “I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November,” former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in February. “But what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations.”
In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said ICE could be at certain polling places if there is a specific threat or to serve a warrant.
Others in the MAGA universe have been more direct. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, said early this year that the way to prevent “another” stolen election is for ICE to “surround the polls.”
But immigration agents at polling places is just one of the possibilities Democrats are preparing for.
A FOIA request filed by the Democratic National Committee in August revealed an email from a DHS border security official to Under Secretary of Homeland Security Rob Law that included a lengthy compilation of state laws governing bilingual election requirements. NPR reported that one of the people copied on the email was Heather Honey, the person leading administration efforts to root out noncitizen voting. The DNC said the email strongly suggests an attempt by the Trump administration to target prosecutions based on the presence of bilingual election resources. The DNC filed eleven FOIA requests this summer, and it has sued the Trump administration over its failure to respond.
“Donald Trump and his allies are trying to intimidate voters and undermine confidence in our elections, but Democrats are fighting back on every front,” DNC Chair Ken Martin told me. “We’re taking them to court to protect voting rights and we are also training, recruiting, and deploying tens of thousands of observers across the country while partnering with communities nationwide to ensure Americans can vote freely and fairly without fear of intimidation.”
All the planning and preparation may be paying dividends.
Federal law prohibits “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held.” It’s a law with a five-year statute of limitations, which means violations of the law in 2026 could be prosecuted by an administration elected in 2028. This is the reason Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told me that, while his staff has attended exercises wargaming ICE at the polls, he’s less concerned about it as a significant election issue. He says his planning includes working closely with the attorney general and governor’s office to include county and municipal law enforcement and counterterrorism officials in the state’s fusion center, the intelligence hub designed to respond to threats, “just to make sure we’re ready for any scenario and any threats or intimidation against our voters.”
“It seems unusual that we would need to prepare for threats from federal officers, but if that’s what this administration decides to do, we’ll be prepared to deal with it,” he said.
But if the system should be robust enough to protect against something like ICE agents swarming the polls, what about ICE agents taking it upon themselves to park near polling places in Latino-majority districts?
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said that is “definitely a real possibility. We do have to address it.” He told me Nevada’s Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo has repeatedly said, both in public and in private, that he doesn’t want federal agents at the polls. Lombardo’s stance “gave cover to sheriffs in Washoe and Clark Counties to say, ‘This is not in our best interest as a community. Don’t do it.’” Aguilar added that Nevada, like several other states, recently passed legislation explicitly making it a state-level felony to intimidate poll workers.
Richer said that if these isolated but dangerous situations occurred, the media will be crucial.
“My bigger worry, if that happens, you all will have to figure out what is the responsible way to cover this such that you impress upon readers and viewers the extraordinarily unique situation we’re in,” Richer said, “but not give it more oxygen than necessary.”
Mary Corcoran, executive director of the Save America Movement, said when she thinks about securing America’s democracy, she finds it useful to consider what Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and policy impresario, would do. Then she thinks about how to counter it.
Corcoran, a former Democratic party staffer, returned to progressive political organizing after three decades in the private sector because she worried organizations like the DNC were too complacent. She envisioned the “fight back against MAGA as an American endeavor, not a political endeavor.”
One of the Save America Movement’s projects is Operation: Liberty, which sends volunteers, including clergy, veterans, and health care workers in “Liberty Vans,” named after the Second World War–era Liberty ships, to document ICE abuses and de-escalate situations where possible. Save America began the project in late 2025, sending observers to Los Angeles, where the Trump administration deployed the California National Guard as well as 700 marines alongside ICE.
Since then, Operation: Liberty has operated in eleven cities, and the Save America Movement is planning to expand the strategy in its Vote Safe campaign aiming to protect majority Latino, Asian, and black counties in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia from federal interference.
“I think that fear exists and we have to work on overcoming that fear regardless of if an agent shows up,” Corcoran said. “Their main tool is to instill fear, they could do those things to level up fear, so how do you counteract it? People are less afraid when they feel they’re less alone.”
We’ve come a long way since Jordan Peele’s 2018 PSA warning about the future of political deepfakes. Back then, everyone assumed that AI-faked video would mostly be the work of nefarious outside actors. Today, a remarkable chunk of the political ecosystem has openly embraced them, particularly on the right. The New York Times reports today that candidates and PACs, predominantly Republican ones, have already spent more than $137 million1 airing AI-generated ads this year alone. About 70 percent of the ads, they found, “contained no disclaimer that AI was used.” Happy Friday.
Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live at 12:30 p.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.
White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia arrives for her first news briefing at the White House on October 13, 2026. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Post-Truth Press Secretary
by Andrew Egger
The new White House press secretary doesn’t have the one skill Trump’s top flack needs. She just can’t lie good.
Katie Zacharia’s first few days on the job have become dominated by her halting, changing responses to accusations that she spent years falsely claiming to be a lawyer, even though she has never been admitted to the bar in any state and never practiced law. Asked Tuesday when she had passed the bar, she replied “when I went to China.” On Wednesday, she insisted she had misheard the question and had thought she was simply asking what she had done after law school.
Then, yesterday, she did a damage-control tour of conservative media, sitting for interviews with Fox News’s Sean Hannity and MAGA conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. She insisted in these interviews that legal experts had assured her she could call herself a “lawyer” so long as she never used the (she said) more specific term “attorney.”
This is a silly dodge: In America, “lawyer” and “attorney” are synonyms. And it’s not a good excuse either: CNN promptly found at least fifteen times since last year that Zacharia had shared posts describing her as an “attorney.”
Katie Zacharia’s job is to lie to you. Our job is to tell you the truth—about the world, the state of our country, and what we really think. Join us.
Even Hannity, far from giving her the softball primetime interview she plainly had hoped for, struck a prickly, skeptical tone last night: “Why get into this long, drawn-out thing about the difference between a lawyer and an attorney?” he asked. He then asked her point-blank about the CNN “attorney” report. “I think they were retweets,” Zacharia blustered, “and I corrected the record and said that I was not endorsing the title, they were retweets of a title that had been given.” As Judd Legum, who broke the story of Zacharia’s resume embellishment, pointed out, she shared one of these tweets just last week.
None of this, of course, reflects particularly well on Zacharia’s honesty and character. Just as importantly, it is terrible comms work. Being able to navigate through stories like this in a disciplined, low-drama way is the single most important requirement for her new job.2 But instead of competently smothering the story, she has prolonged it, her multiple ridiculous “explanations,” each debunked faster than the last, just dragging out the embarrassment.
Put another way: Zacharia’s dishonesty isn’t the reason her job is in trouble. Being dishonest without seeming to is a big part of the job! The problem isn’t that she’s a liar, it’s that she’s a bad liar. Neither Hannity or Trump or anybody in MAGA cares that she lied on her résumé. What they care about is her clumsiness in explaining that now. Because a person who can’t even wriggle out of a little lie like that is going to get completely tangled when it comes time to defend way bigger whoppers in the White House briefing room.
Recall here that Trump picked Zacharia for the job on gut instinct, after seeing her appearances on TV. He made the choice over the objections of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who thought that CNN commentator Scott Jennings—a truly seasoned, deft liar—would be the superior choice.
“I would not be surprised if he happened to be meeting with her and just decided right then and there to give her the job, without much input or vetting,” Stephanie Grisham, one of Trump’s first-term press secretaries, told me.
Some in the White House who have chafed at Wiles’s leadership were enthused about the move: “Susie wanted someone who would be loyal to her and instead Trump chose someone loyal to him, as it should be,” an administration source told the Daily Mail this week. “He is taking back control, and it is starting to feel more like the first term.” (No argument there.)
What Trump wants and what Trump needs from the people around him aren’t always the same thing. Trump picked Zacharia because she’s a sycophant in his preferred mold. And he thinks she fights hard. But there’s a difference between fighting hard and fighting well. A press secretary who can’t lie convincingly won’t cut it.
A Tip of the Cap to No Kings
by William Kristol
Earlier this week, I asked if a reinvigorated liberalism is possible. I think it is, and urged us to “look abroad,” at the examples of Volodymyr Zelensky, and Péter Magyar, Mark Carney, and Pope Leo XIV, all admirably “strong and confident defenders of liberty.”
And I added,
But you know what else gives me hope for a revitalized liberalism? The American people, or at least an increasing percentage of them. Seeing support for President Trump collapse among the public—with very little help from our pitifully complacent and fearful elites—is heartening. Even inspiring.
And tomorrow, it will be inspiring to once again see millions of Americans show up at No Kings rallies. Because before the polls changed, before the gradual move of the public away from Trump, there were the efforts of the No Kings organizers. There were the peaceful and patriotic demonstrations of the participants. Before it was fashionable, No Kings was there.
The first of the No Kings demonstrations, on June 14, 2025, was organized in response to Trump’s military march in Washington that he’d timed—monarchically—to coincide with his birthday. At the time, according to the New York Times average of the polls, Trump had 44 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval. Anti-Trump elites were engaged in hand-wringing over his apparently unshakable hold on the public. Other elites were busy accommodating Trump. But five million Americans turned out to protest.
The second No Kings gatherings took place four months later, on October 18, 2025. Trump’s approval had barely budged: 43 percent approval to 53 percent disapproval. But turnout at the demonstrations across the nation surged to about seven million Americans. And in Virginia, where I live, there were indications of a big Democratic victory coming at the polls two weeks hence, and a sense that the tide might be turning.
The third day of No Kings rallies occurred this spring, on March 28, 2026, a month after Trump launched the Iran war. They were the largest yet, attracting around 8 million people. The mood was determined but somewhat upbeat, despite all of the depredations of the Trump administration at home and abroad. And it was clear that Trump’s popularity was finally dropping. He was by then at 40 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval, en route to his current 37 percent approval and 60 percent disapproval.
Tomorrow, we’ll get together once again under the rubric of No Kings. The focus this time is less on protesting the Trump administration and more on the practical task of encouraging and aiding voter turnout for the midterms.
No Kings: Vote Early is the next step of reclaiming our power after a year of mass mobilizations. It’s a day of nonpartisan voter participation, being in community with each other, and making sure every eligible voter has a plan, knows their options, and is ready to make their voice count.
The events around the country tomorrow will be less dramatic, and probably won’t get quite the numbers the earlier ones did. But they will be the culmination of a genuinely impressive and important effort on behalf of our democracy and our freedom.
I’ll be there tomorrow. And I’ll take a moment to tip my Bulwark baseball cap to No Kings.
GOP’s Top GOTV Operative Employed an Organizer Convicted of Strangulation… And that’s not the only person with a criminal history who we found on his PAC’s payroll, reports BRENDAN HARTNETT.
FUN WITH ROLLS: Donald Trump’s war on mail-in ballots continues. Yesterday, the Trump administration sued the state of California, asking a judge to block the counting of mail-in ballots from around 20,000 California residents it considers “likely” to be non-citizens. Earlier this week, California election officials received the list of supposedly suspect voters on a thumb drive, along with a demand from the Justice Department to remove them from the state’s voter rolls within 48 hours. But Secretary of State Shirley Weber said that Justice had provided no evidence that the persons named in the list were non-citizens—and noted that, when the Department of Homeland Security sent a similar list with similar demands to Nevada last month, state officials ultimately determined that every person listed was in fact a citizen. The AP has more:
The letter sent by acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter gave the state 48 hours to research the list of the 20,000 people it claims might not be citizens. For those whose citizenship cannot be independently verified, the state is to instruct local election officials to segregate their mail-in ballots until their status can be determined, and to not provide a ballot to anyone who has not yet received one.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at an unrelated press conference Thursday morning that state officials would not carry out the federal government’s requests to withhold ballots for the alleged noncitizen voters. He noted that the administration’s alleged number of noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls had dropped from the 190,000 flagged over the summer by the Department of Homeland Security to the 20,000 noted by the Justice Department.
RED HOPIUM: The polls look terrible for Republicans. But Republicans have one reason to console themselves: How many times lately have the polls been flat wrong? Here’s Politico:
Polling over the last decade has struggled to capture Republican voters. The data underestimated Trump’s support in 2016, 2020 and 2024, and Republicans argue similar errors could be happening again this cycle, particularly in competitive Senate races.
“Polling is getting much more difficult to do,” said veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove, adding that if the polls reflect Democratic overperformance “then every one of these races that we’re talking about today—Texas, Michigan, Maine, Alaska, Iowa—they’re all within the margin of error.”
As Nate Silver has pointed out, “The polls have overestimated Democrats for three presidential elections in a row” (emphasis added). But “Polls in the 2018 and 2022 midterms did much better.”
One GOP strategist told Politico that the polls are so Democrat-favored right now that they suggest a change in the electorate “as profound as those seen after Watergate and 9/11”—and surely that hasn’t happened, right? “You’d have to presuppose we’re staring down the barrel of a generational national trauma that no one is aware of,” the strategist said.
Now, look: We’ll be the first to admit that you’d have to be crazy to have tremendous confidence in polling at this moment in time. But is it really so ridiculous to think that the catastrophic crackup of Donald Trump’s political movement—the most potent force in politics over the last decade—is driving some pretty remarkable political realignments? Read the whole thing.
Correction (October 16, 2026, 10:52 a.m. EDT): As originally published, this sentence misstated the amount of political spending on AI-generated ads as $137, rather than $137 million.
I’m rejoined this week by Matt Roller, the showrunner of Netflix’s Haunted Hotel, to discuss the second season of his hit animated show. We talked about the difficulties of getting a new season done in just one year, how the fandom has reacted to the show (and why he tries to avoid letting the fanfic influence his work), and whether or not season three is on the way. If you haven’t watched Haunted Hotel and are a fan of similar shows like Bob’s Burgers or Futurama, you should really check it out. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you share it with a friend!
(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
ONE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S most prominent voter-registration activists has paid multiple people with criminal records to run get-out-the-vote operations in Pennsylvania since 2024.
Scott Presler, a key Trump-era GOP operative, hired as contractors a man who pleaded guilty to strangulation and a former nurse practitioner who falsified prescriptions for opioids and ran a million-dollar operation to distribute fraudulent COVID vaccine cards. These personnel, whose backgrounds were uncovered in an investigation by The Bulwark, were engaged through Presler’s super PAC, Early Vote Action.
Presler has had these people working for him, notably, even as he has spent time in the past month accusing a Democratic congressional candidate of employing a canvasser who was arrested for indecent exposure—an accusation that, upon closer scrutiny, appears untrue.
Presler and his political operation have already faced criticism this election cycle for their get-out-the-vote operations. That criticism has come even from within the Republican party. Earlier this year, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called Presler—who backed Ken Paxton in this year’s Texas Republican Senate primary—a “grifter.” But these new revelations further call into question not only Early Vote Action’s hiring practices but also Presler’s own credibility.
And that’s before they get into Senate polling numbers looking really bad for Republicans. You want schadenfreude with a side of hopeium? The best friends have you covered.
If you have questions for Tim, Sarah and JVL, send them to nextlevel@thebulwark.com and they may answer them on an upcoming episode of TNL.
The Secret Podcast with JVL and Sarah is exclusively for members of Bulwark+. Upgrade now to watch (or listen) to this episode and join the Secret community in the comments. New shows drop each Friday. Ride with us!
Look, we’ll keep this simple: It’s the Trio. Uncut, ad-free, and uncensored. There could not possibly be a better reason to become a paid member of The Bulwark.
Sam Stein, Tim Miller, and Will Sommer give an update on the MAGA influencers caught pushing a false story about Texas Democrat James Talarico, and why those behind the smear may face few consequences. They also examine court documents revealing how Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski allegedly fed false information to Laura Loomer to smear a government employee, raising questions about how political disinformation spreads without traditional media scrutiny.
Plus, the trio breaks down Ben Shapiro’s growing conservative movie business, including why Hollywood stars like Rob Lowe are signing on to his films. And an update on Anthony Constantino, a Trump-obsessed Republican whose rap songs and devotion to the president have drawn attention to his campaign for Congress.
(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
DONALD TRUMP IS ROBBING Americans blind, and even Republicans are starting to notice.
You may recall that back in March, there were some suspiciously timed, uncannily lucrative oil and stock trades. About fifteen minutes before Trump abruptly announced he was retracting some threats against Iran, billions of dollars’ worth of contracts were placed on bets that oil prices would fall and the S&P 500 would jump. And those lucky bastards turned out to be right!
Less known was that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal regulator that supervises futures markets, began a preliminary investigation of the suspicious trading volume surge. But according to a bombshell story this week from Bloomberg, a senior adviser to the Trump-appointed CFTC chairman subsequently “intervened” and told them to lay off. Staff had made a referral to CFTC’s internal enforcement division to launch a full-scale insider trading investigation; they were ordered to retract it.
If this was a case of insider trading—and there are some beet-red flags to suggest it was—it would not be a victimless crime. There were losers on the other side of those bets, the chumps whom the insiders got to steal money from by virtue of having an inside line to the White House.
Sure, some of those chumps might have been rich, unsympathetic Wall Street traders; but some of them might have been your pension fund.
Were this an isolated incident, it would be bad enough: Trump and/or his cronies may have used access to market-moving information to enrich themselves, and the Trump-appointed regulators made sure none of their actions were properly investigated.
But this sort of apparent malfeasance looks like one of the defining characteristics of the Trump era.
For months Trump Media has been trying to shake down Wall Street firms for early access to Trump’s Truth Social posts. The idea being to more formally monetize insider access, and give Trump a cut. As San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, who is suing Trump Media on behalf of Californians, put it: “Trump Media created a marketplace that enables insider trading, which Trump directly profits from. . . . Californians should not be forced to compete against wealthy trading firms buying early access to market‑moving information.”
This is public robbery, and it isn’t confined to selling early information about administration decisions to allies and eager profiteers. Under this administration, selling out American voters is a going concern.
To wit, check out these two stories from just this Wednesday:
Let’s be clear about what we’re doing here. The Bulwark exists to fight authoritarianism and defend American democracy. We do that with reporting, analysis, accountability, and by building a community of people who refuse to look away or pretend this is normal. If you believe this fight matters, join Bulwark+ and help us do the work.
Sarah Longwell and Andrew Weissmann discuss the FBI raid on Ilhan Omar, Trump’s latest overtures to Putin, and the courts’ efforts to stop his taxpayer-funded campaign ads. Plus, Weissmann explains why simply ordering Trump to stop breaking the rules isn’t enough, and whether DOJ lawyers pursuing politically motivated prosecutions could eventually face disbarment.
A quick note: If you appreciate two people who have spent years confronting Trump without pulling punches, support independent journalism like this by becoming a Bulwark member.
Mike Johnson sure sounds afraid of what might come out when the House—under Democratic control—actually does its job and investigates the corruption of this administration. Democrats should start with the families of Trump officialdom who've been making bank since Inauguration Day. And as the Guilfoyle firing shows, everyone in Trumpland is expendable. Plus: Republicans have got nothing to offer voters but bribery and bigotry, Talarico shows the right way to disarm MAGA lies, the Elon-Putin-Trump Axis of Evil is together again, and George—in his first week back with The Bulwark—passed a cognitive test just like our president.
As always: Watch, listen, hit the like button or leave a comment. We want to hear from you.
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Tim Miller’s Bulwark Daily is available wherever you get podcasts and on YouTube. New shows drop each weekday afternoon. If you like the show, leave a comment and ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ wherever you listen.
(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
Seniors of the Corn
Cedar Falls and Mason City, Iowa “We should have term limits for politicians,” said Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa, during remarks to a group of college students. He then offered his young audience a bit of fan service: “Also, age limits, anybody?”
After some applause, Sand continued: “There is a certain point at which we should just have a rule that says, ‘Hey, I’m sure you’re doing great. We just don’t wanna have another four or six years of crossing our fingers and hoping you’re gonna continue to do great for another four or six years.’”
Age is a political topic on everyone’s mind in Iowa lately, despite the fact that the state’s candidates for Senate and governor are all quite young. The oldest of the bunch, Democratic Senate nominee Josh Turek, is only 47, which puts him close to the generational boundary between his Gen X cohort and Millennials. But Iowans with age-related concerns aren’t thinking about Turek. They’re thinking about Chuck Grassley.
Iowa’s senior senator first won a race for public office during the Eisenhower administration. He offered a rare acknowledgment of his age a few weeks ago while encouraging people to vote for Zach Lahn, the Republican nominee for governor.
Tim Miller gives his take on Elon Musk’s return as the biggest campaign donor of the 2026 midterms, funneling $276 million into Republican groups, including $158 million to help Republicans hold the Senate. After threatening to launch his own political party and breaking with Donald Trump, Musk is back in the GOP’s corner.
Tim looks at how Musk’s spending, Trump’s return to X, the administration’s dealings with Russia, and Ukraine’s loss of critical Starlink access point to a renewed alignment between Trump, Musk, and Vladimir Putin. He also looks at how powerful tech executives, including Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and Marc Benioff, are sucking up to with Trump as the tech industry’s influence over politics and public discourse grows.
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos Getty, Shutterstock)
Bonus: One of our recurring themes is Trump undermining the U.S.-led world financial order, which has been a big part of the Pax Americana. I keep warning about de-dollarization—the possibility that the world will move away from using the U.S. dollar as its reserve currency.
Well.
Tucked away in the news yesterday was a report that Zambia is about to start allowing some sales of copper to be settled in renminbi.
I understand this does not sound exciting! It’s just one small African country, just one commodity, and not even their entire trading volume. But copper is important. Also, there’s this stray remark from the governor of the Zambian central bank, Denny Kalyalya:
“That’s the starting point,” he said. “We also hope that new lending could also be denominated in renminbi. That would help a great deal.”
And it’s not just Zambian copper:
A growing list of African lenders are signing on to connect with China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, Beijing’s yuan-based alternative to the SWIFT international payment system.
Kenya has swapped Chinese debt from dollars into yuan. The conversion will save Kenya $215 million annually in debt service, with interest rates on the new yuan loans dropping to as low as 3%.
Ethiopia is also converting a portion of its debt to China into renminbi. Central Bank Governor Eyob Tekalign said in an interview Wednesday that the process was ongoing, even as talks were concluded for the deal.
If you remember The Most Boring Triad Ever back in June, you will remember how freaked out I am about the United States’ ability to pay its debts—let alone to borrow more money—if people around the world decide they don’t need to conduct international trade in dollars anymore. Not good.
This is how we see around corners. And it’s why we’re going to look up from the news today and talk about a freight train that’s coming down the tracks, not in 2026, or even 2028, maybe. But soon.
America is headed toward single-payer health care.
You like the sound of that? Be careful what you wish for.
Is Donald Trump about to fire the woman who has kept his White House from descending into chaos? Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger cover reports that Trump is considering replacements for Susie Wiles, his retreat from Pete Hegseth’s planned livestreamed execution, and his increasingly alarming efforts to appease Vladimir Putin at Ukraine’s expense.
(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
IN THE CHAOTIC FIRST WEEKS of the second Trump administration, as Elon Musk was gutting the federal government, DOGE staffers realized they had a problem: The Department of Homeland Security was still paying to house undocumented immigrants, despite an executive order that may have prohibited the practice.
Scrambling to explain how these payments could have continued, officials at DHS came up with a scapegoat: Mary Comans, a little-known career civil servant who had served for eight years, under Biden and Trump, as the chief financial officer of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Comans and three other FEMA employees were summarily fired. Top DHS officials then issued a press release accusing the quartet of “circumventing leadership” by making the “egregious” payments—all because Comans and her unnamed colleagues were actually “deep state activists.”
What was not known when this all went down in early February last year was that the higher-ups at DHS responsible for the firings were also secretly working with top MAGA influencers to sully Comans’s name. According to recent court filings, then–DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her adviser (and alleged lover) Corey Lewandowski teamed up directly with
Don’t look now, but more crazy House-GOP leadership drama may be just around the corner. CNN reports that if Republicans lose the house and Speaker Mike Johnson loses his gavel, Rep. Jim Jordan may challenge him for leadership of the conference. Happy Thursday.
Join Bill and Andrew for an extraMorning Shots Live today at 11:00 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.
A visitor to the National Mall walks past the Capitol Building at daybreak on September 16, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by J. David Ake/Getty Images)
On the One Hand, On the Other Hand
by William Kristol
I’m not usually an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand kind of guy. But sometimes life presents you with an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand kind of reality.
So, on the one hand: The upcoming midterm elections look awfully promising for the defenders of liberal democracy. But, on the other hand: The political and governing challenges facing the defenders of liberal democracy in the coming years are awfully daunting.
Last night, Fox News reported that its new poll shows President Trump’s overall job approval at 36 percent, his lowest ever in a Fox News survey. Until now, Fox had shown Trump’s approval holding steady at 39 percent since first dipping below 40 percent in May. And today, of the 36 percent of registered voters approving of Trump’s job performance, 19 percent strongly approve and 17 percent somewhat approve. Of the 64 percent disapproving, 50 percent strongly disapprove, with 14 percent somewhat disapproving. A strong approval to strong disapproval ratio of 19 percent to 50 percent is . . . not good.
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So Trump is in bad shape, and 54 percent of voters now tell Fox they’ll back the Democratic candidate in their House district, with 45 percent supporting the Republican. That 9-point gap is wider than the Democrats’ 7-point lead in the two most recent Fox polls in July and September.
Meanwhile, Republicans are pouring money into states and congressional districts that Trump won in 2024 by 10 points or more. That money may have slowed Democratic momentum, but it hasn’t reversed it, and I think it’s more likely than not that momentum reasserts itself in the final couple of weeks.
So what to expect on Election Day? Despite all the extraordinary features of our present situation, we have seen this movie before. Twice, in fact, in the two most recent midterms with a Republican in the Oval Office.
In both 2006 and 2018, Democrats won the national vote for the House by about 8 percent. They picked up a net gain of 31 and 41 districts, ending up with 233 and 235 seats, respectively. In those two elections, Democrats also had a net gain, respectively, of six and seven governorships. The one marked difference from this year is that in 2018, Republicans had a net gain of two Senate seats, defeating four Democratic incumbents in states that had voted for Trump in 2016. But the dynamic is now decisively in the other direction, with a half a dozen states Trump won by more than 10 points in play. The results should look more like those of 2006, when Democrats won a net gain of six seats to take a narrow majority in that chamber.
And if you want to really go to town on all this good hopium, I’ll add that those 2006 and 2018 midterm victories were followed by decisive Democratic presidential victories in 2008 and 2020. And in both cases the new Democratic president had a Democratic Congress to work with.
So things not just in 2027 but also in 2029 could look pretty good!
But, as we know, in the earlier instances, everyone didn’t live happily ever after.
Politically, Democrats lost the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. Democrats lost the House in 2022—and then everything in 2024.
And in terms of actual governing, while there were achievements in the Obama and Biden years, I think it’s fair to say neither had as much lasting success in reshaping America or the world order in a positive direction as they or their supporters hoped. I don’t say this judgmentally, but simply analytically—even sympathetically. Both faced very difficult challenges, not least in taking office in the middle of a financial crisis in 2009 and a pandemic in 2021. But I think it’s the case that at the end of their presidencies, our governing institutions weren’t stronger, our liberal democracy wasn’t healthier, and the world order of which we were the anchor wasn’t more robust.
The next Democratic Congress and the next Democratic president will face challenges comparable to—even greater than—those faced by Obama and Biden. The next Democratic Congress will have its hands full minimizing the damage over the next two years from an unprecedentedly extreme and lawless administration led by an increasingly willful and manic president, while it tries at the same time to lay the groundwork for winning the presidency in 2028, and to prepare for governing successfully in 2029.
And that next president? Remaking a polity and a civic culture that have been deeply damaged, an economy whose distortions of wealth and power threaten the future of democratic capitalism, and a world order that’s collapsed will be an even more formidable task. And that’s to say nothing of the unprecedented test of dealing with the fundamental and even existential threat of the new frontiers of artificial intelligence.
It’s daunting. But as Thomas Paine told his compatriots 250 years ago, “we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain, too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”
There’s nothing on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand about that truth, and that challenge.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Ukraine Is Hitting Putin Where His Data Lives… Strikes on server hubs are exposing Russian vulnerabilities—but U.S. support is suddenly looking less reliable, writes CATHY YOUNG.
Ramaswamy Campaign Ad Accidentally Featured a Sex Offender… The campaign says it’s recutting the spot, which was meant to be about the plague of high property taxes, reports JIM SWIFT.
Dems Are Already Fighting Over Who Gets Credit for November… The midterms haven’t happened yet, but progressives and moderates are debating what the results will mean for 2028, reports LAUREN EGAN.
Save the date: This Sunday—October 18 at 7:00 p.m. EDT—we’re going live with Pete Buttigieg!
The gang is hitting the road tomorrow for the Bulwark LIVE: Good Fight Tour and we’re live streaming their Charlotte show exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Join Tim, Sarah, JVL, Sam, and special guest Pete Buttigieg on Sunday for a night of politics among friends. Catherine Rampell and Lauren Egan will be there too! As a Bulwark+ member, you’ll be able to tune in from the comfort of your own home and join fellow members in the live chat. We can’t wait to be together with you all! Watch for location details in your inbox or head to the site on Sunday night at 7 p.m. in the East to join in.
Quick Hits
TEAM RUSSIA AGAIN: The low point in U.S.–Ukraine relations under Donald Trump came last year, during Trump and JD Vance’s infamous Oval Office sandbagging of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Things are nearly that bad again now.
Any time Donald Trump speaks personally to Vladimir Putin, he seems to fall hopelessly under the Russian president’s spell: For days afterward, he seems to have adopted wholesale the Russian view of the war, according to which Ukraine—or even the American-led West more broadly—is the primary offender and aggressor.
So it has been since the pair’s call last Friday. Trump has demanded Ukraine halt attacks on Russian energy infrastructure even as Russia pummels Ukraine’s, insisted insanely that Putin wants peace more than Zelensky, floated the possibility of unfreezing Russian assets, and even seemingly cut off some forms of the limited support the United States is still supplying to Ukraine. Russian missiles fell in Kyiv Tuesday without the usual advance warning provided by U.S. intelligence, and the Starshield satellite-internet systems deployed in Ukraine by the U.S. military, which Ukraine uses to pilot drones, mysteriously experienced major throttling on Wednesday.
For days, Zelensky endured these impossible conditions, biting his tongue and agreeing in principle to abide by Trump’s demand for an energy ceasefire even as Russia was plainly ignoring it. Now he is out of patience. “The block [on attacking refineries] is out,” Zelensky told the Financial Timesin an interview published this morning. “We’re done.” How Trump will take that remains to be seen.
TROUBLE IN PARADISE: This week, several stories of remarkable squabbling among Trump’s aides have made it into the press. Yesterday, our old colleague Marc Caputo reported in Axios that former Trump attorney Alina Habba had accused former Kennedy Center leader Ric Grenell, in a remarkable Oval Office confrontation last week, of pocketing a multimillion-dollar donation her billionaire husband made to the institution last year. “POTUS doesn’t want to deal with this,” a senior administration official told Caputo. “Of course, he’s concerned. But if there is missing money, this is a big, big problem.” Grenell called the accusations “absurd” and a “lie.”
And today, Politico reported on a remarkable year-long email squabble between two mid-tier Trump officials: Paolo Zampolli, “a personal friend of Trump’s and a special envoy at the State Department,” and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. Here’s Politico:
The emails stretch over almost a year and show Zampolli and Landau disagreeing over chains of command as Landau admonishes Zampolli to stick to his remit on cultural issues—but devolve into bitter arguments and unproven allegations.
The messages stand out not just for the personal vitriol but because upward of 16 administration officials were included at times on the email chains, with the dispute at least once spilling over into communications with a top foreign official, opening a window into delicate State Department back-channeling to allies about apparent violations of diplomatic protocol.
Donald Trump runs a tighter ship than he used to. His first administration was racked by constant infighting, and therefore leaked like a sieve; such fights have been far rarer, and the leaks far less frequent, since his return to the Oval Office. Until recently, it seems. Read the whole thing.
KATIE ZACHARIA, ESQ.?: In media appearances and on LinkedIn, new White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia has presented herself as a lawyer for years. But as Popular Information first reported this week, this appears to be untrue: Zacharia did graduate from law school, but never passed the bar to be authorized to practice law in any state. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal shed some more light on the subject: Zacharia sat for the bar only once, in California, shortly after graduating law school in 2011. She didn’t pass.
There’s no shame in that; California’s bar exam is notoriously difficult, and the fail rate is high. (Another notable person who famously failed her own first run at the California bar was Kamala Harris.) What is remarkable about Zacharia is how she has been calling herself a “lawyer” anyway ever since—in her work for the Zhong Lun Law Firm in China and, back stateside, as “general counsel” for a Trumpworld nonprofit, Fix California.
“As a lawyer, the procedural steps are absolutely critical to ensure they get this right,” she said on Fox News in August. The WSJelaborates: “A line appeared on the chyron at the bottom of the screen referring to her as a legal and political strategist, and as an attorney.”
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