The Bulwark

There’s a difference between reacting to the latest headline and understanding how Washington actually works. Bill and Mike have been through enough political upheavals to recognize the warning signs, and that’s the kind of perspective we want to bring you at The Bulwark. Your membership makes these conversations possible.

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After Trump’s crushing midterm defeat, could Republicans finally decide they’re better off without him? Bill Kristol and veteran Republican strategist Mike Murphy examine the growing turmoil inside Trump’s White House, Stephen Miller’s rise to power, Pete Hegseth’s uncertain future, and the possibility of a Nixon-style collapse. They also look ahead to 2028 and explain why JD Vance may have a much tougher road than anyone expects.

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IT HAPPENED. America thoroughly repudiated Donald Trump and his spectacular failure of a presidency.

But the extent of the repudiation was as surprising as the fact that it happened at all. And it left me wondering where Republican voters were laying the blame. After all, they’ve long been devoted to the guy in the White House who made a series of catastrophic political and policy blunders. Were they faulting Trump at all for the loss? Did they want to see the Republican party do anything differently?

Last week we assembled a focus group of Republicans who voted for President Trump in both 2020 and 2024, and who, except for some local elections, voted straight-ticket Republican in this year’s midterms.

In my conversation with these voters, one thing became abundantly clear in their cacophony of cope: They were not blaming Trump. Instead, they were blaming

The Bulwark exists to expose the fascists’ corruption and fight for liberalism. We’ll remain committed to reporting on all of the investigations, doing all of the accountability. We’re also committed to having some fun.

We’re celebrating sanity’s win on Tuesday with a 20% FLASH SALE on Bulwark+. This offer may end tonight but the our commitment to honest news, smart analysis and good faith will remain. Join us for what comes next. Upgrade today.

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There were so many spectacular Republican failures in 2026 that Tim Miller and Sam Stein decided to turn them into a fantasy draft. From Vivek Ramaswamy and Ken Paxton to the candidates who somehow managed to lose in deep-red states, Tim and Sam compete to assemble the ultimate roster of MAGA losers, reliving the terrible campaigns, astonishing defeats, and self-inflicted wounds along the way.

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The disturbing sexual assault allegations at Cornell have sparked outrage, but are we missing a larger conversation about what’s gone wrong with our sexual culture? Mona Charen and Christine Emba examine the limits of consent as a moral standard, the decline of masculine responsibility, and why growing distrust between men and women may be contributing to America’s marriage and fertility crisis.

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If you value long-form shows that resist the rush to the next topic and give deeply knowledgeable guests room to explain not just what is happening but why it matters, consider becoming a paid member of The Bulwark. Your support gives us the freedom to keep making conversations with this kind of depth. With a paid membership, you’ll gain unfettered access to ad-free and member-only editions like this one.

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Bill Kristol served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush White Houses, while Sarah Matthews worked alongside Stephen Miller in Trump’s first administration. We’re bringing together people with deep experience to help you understand what’s really happening—not just chasing the algorithm. Become a Bulwark member to help us keep doing that work. And you’re in luck—we’re having a flash sale for 20% off.

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Trump’s response to a crushing midterm defeat? Putting Stephen Miller in charge of the White House. Bill Kristol and former Trump aide Sarah Matthews discuss why Miller could become the de facto president, how his appointment could reshape the balance of power inside the administration, and whether Pete Hegseth’s desperate displays of loyalty can save his job as the Iran war drags on.

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Almost nobody thought Jeff Van Drew’s seat was in play. But Zack Mullock pulled off one of the election’s biggest upsets, defeating the Trump loyalist in a supposedly safe Republican district. The congressman-elect joins Tim Miller to explain how he won over Republican voters, why Trump’s ICE crackdown and Iran war became political liabilities, and what Democrats need to do with their new majority.

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Happy Saturday! This week in Overtime, I take you inside an Ohio Democratic victory party where people were crying, kissing, and, yes, breakdancing. Adrian Carrasquillo looks at how anger over ICE helped swing Latino voters toward Democrats. Brendan Hartnett counts who won the House districts with a Cheesecake Factory. And Will Saletan and Joshua Tait get at two questions Republicans would probably rather put off until Monday: How much did Trump cost them, and where does the party go from here?

If you’re a Bulwark+ member, THANK YOU for making all this possible.

We’ve got some big things ahead for next year that we can’t wait to announce. And did you see that Bulwark App got an update this week? And members can now gift articles to friends, even if they are paywalled.

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Joining BILL KRISTOL this Sunday at 1 p.m. EST, is MIKE MURPHY to discuss the historic routing Republicans took at the polls. How will Trump will react over the next two years and how will the remaining Republicans deal with him?

Tune in on The Bulwark’s Substack or YouTube tomorrow at 1 p.m. Eastern!

Happy Saturday! I hope you’re catching up on sleep this weekend. I’m trying to. And if you knocked on doors, made calls, or worked the polls, I hope you get to sleep in a little longer than the rest of us. Thank you for doing the work that makes this whole thing run. See how fellow Bulwark+ members spent Election Day and night in our member chat.

By all means, enjoy a little schadenfreude scrolling this weekend, as a treat. You’ve earned it. Democratic governors-elect are putting together their administrations, and Democrats on Capitol Hill are getting ready to take over both chambers. January is still a ways off, though. Trump has plenty of time to make trouble before then, and we’re still at war with Iran. There’s a lot of work ahead, and we’re glad you’re here with us.

I put on my NPR voice… and joined the fine folks at WVXU, our local NPR affiliate, on Cincinnati Edition to talk about this week’s elections. Be sure to listen!

A holiday tradition returns… The return of the Overtime favorite, our Thanksgiving Cookbook, comes next week. For those of you who are new, we’d love to have your favorite holiday recipe(s). Submit them here.

Discussion Prompt: What’s one thing you think we’ll be talking about by the time the new Congress takes office that we aren’t talking about now?

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REP. ROBERT GARCIA (D-CALIF.), presumptive incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, had a simple message for current and former Trump administration officials in the wake of Tuesday’s election.

“Lawyer up.”

Garcia is betting that the Americans who voted to give Democrats a powerful congressional majority—one that features new senators and representatives from formerly deep red states—want to start seeing accountability for the second Trump administration’s misdeeds and lawlessness. Congressional Democrats will have plenty on their plates come the New Year, but there is a clear appetite among them to turn the passion of electoral anger into real accountability, reining in the deportation chaos and making Trump officials pay for the illegal actions committed on their watch.

Three weeks ago, in a press conference before the election, Garcia made clear that one of his major investigative priorities would be abusive immigration enforcement, ICE overreach, and related problems.

“We’re gonna focus on, clearly, on the corruption of the administration and the Trump family; we’re gonna focus on issues around the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein; and on corporate corruption. But our fourth major investigative area is going to be of the abuses of ICE and DHS,” Garcia said.

The next day on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, Garcia moved ICE one step up the priority ladder. Investigating DHS agencies’ abuses and “serious” allegations that former DHS secretary Kristi Noem and her alleged-paramour-cum-personal-adviser Corey Lewandowski skimmed money off the top of department contracts would be the third oversight priority should Democrats take the majority.

Then the blue tsunami came; the day after, ICE and DHS had become “our second investigation,” lagging only the staggering levels of corruption committed by Trump family members.

The issue’s rising priority not only suits the sheer egregiousness of the abuse but also speaks to palpable anger in the Latino electorate, which swung hard against Republicans in the midterms.

GARCIA’S BELIEF THAT DHS-related issues should be near the top of the new Congress’s accountability agenda is one he shares with other members of his party. Shortly after his “lawyer up” statement, Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), who is seeking to become the chair of the Homeland Security oversight subcommittee, echoed the sentiment. “Noem, Markwayne, Miller, Homan, Bovino, what’s up?” she wrote. “Clear your schedule.”

Ramirez told me the midterms have filled her with a “sense of urgency to legislate and investigate.”

“I think that the voters gave us their vote because it was a rebuke against this administration and a demand for Democrats to prove they were deserving of what they gave us,” she said, emphasizing the party’s mandate to address the rising cost of living. But she added that affected communities—including the families of those killed, as well as people beaten, racially profiled, and denied their rights—are also demanding that the new majority “make [the Trump administration] pay” for its crimes.

“It’s not a conversation of retaliation or tit-for-tat,” she stressed. “It’s about accountability and a sense of justice.”

Ramirez told me her resolve was only hardened during the fourteen hours she spent on Election Day at a polling location, where voter after voter asked her variations on What will you do to make sure this never happens again?

She plans to do many things. For one: systematically build the legal case that ICE and DHS’s abuses of power were encouraged and made inevitable by the actions of DHS and White House leadership—including Stephen Miller, the incoming White House chief of staff, who has advocated for and overseen Trump’s brutal mass-deportation program.

“Every abuse of power establishes a pattern we have seen conducted under the agency, of disregarding the rule of law in leadership, which enabled agents to believe they’re above the rule of law,” she said.

Ramirez is demanding specifics about the events that led to the deaths of people killed by federal agents—people like Alex Pretti, Renée Good, Silverio Villegas González, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero—as well as details about the relationship between campaign contributions and the awarding of detention-center contracts.

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Furious that much of the responsibility for election security was left to the states, Ramirez wants to investigate how DHS transferred congressionally appropriated budgets from FEMA, TSA, the Coast Guard, and the agencies responsible for cybersecurity infrastructure to immigration enforcement agencies in order “to kill, torture, and detain” those they targeted.

Throughout 2025, Democrats delivered strongly worded letters to Noem and former acting ICE director Todd Lyons to force department and agency heads to create and retain a paper trail recording people like Noem’s deadly inaction and incompetence.

“I’m the only Democrat [Noem] met with in her very long time as secretary. I met with her a week before she got fired,” Ramirez said. “Every letter, it all builds up the case we need when they come before us. I don’t want a hearing just for hearing’s sake. I want to create a process to impeach these cabinet members.”

For her part, Noem, who moved to her third role within the second Trump administration last month, chalked up the devastation Republicans experienced during the midterm elections to Trump having simply been “too successful” during his first year back in office:

In the Senate, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) told me he wants to balance accountability with a cautious awareness of where Latino voters had landed, noting that they—and many other voters—believed Democrats had neglected border enforcement while in power.

“We should do everything we can to keep ICE accountable and preserve records so when Trump is gone we can hold people accountable,” he said. But the party, he said, should recognize voters want a secure border and immigration enforcement that doesn’t target “good, everyday people” with community roots, but instead finds and deports criminals.

But while Gallego advocates for the center on immigration, the righteous energy seems to be elsewhere. A video of MS Now’s Joe Scarborough thundering about the treatment of Latinos went viral on Wednesday morning.

“After Hispanics being beaten and brutalized and killed and punched and treated, not like second- or third-class citizens, but treated like animals. Like animals!” he said, as he repeatedly slammed his fist on his desk to punctuate each word. “Last night, Hispanics spoke back. Hispanic Americans. Americans. Americans. Americans. And they used their vote.”

Ramirez concurs. She feels Democrats owe Latino Americans accountability and justice. “For us as Democrats to say we are not going to address it is to say we don’t give a fuck what’s happening to our people,” she told me. “That it didn’t matter that our young kids who felt disenfranchised got to the polls and voted because they thought we were going to end the pain.”

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TUESDAY’S MASSIVE MIDTERM VICTORIES catapulted Democrats to control of the House, the Senate, governors’ mansions, and state legislatures across the country. But the party isn’t content with the once-in-a-generation shift in its favor. In fact, officials are already pondering ways to win more.

Several Democratic officials have told The Bulwark that they remain committed to carrying on mid-decade redistricting efforts that the party started but put on ice over the past year. Calling it a top agenda item, they characterized it as both an offensive effort to win more House seats and a defensive measure in case Republicans continue to push for redistricting in GOP-controlled states.

The states these officials cited as top targets include

Tuesday night was, by a wide margin, the biggest rebuke of Donald Trump and MAGA that we’ve seen yet. It was so big, in fact, that we’re asking much, much bigger questions about how much of the country is up for grabs. Nate Silver, cohost of Crooked Media’s Still Counting podcast and author of the Silver Bulletin newsletter on Substack, joins Sarah to discuss the election results and how they could reverberate far beyond 2026.

Show links:
Silver Bulletin
The Still Counting Podcast
Nate’s Trump approval rating graphic

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