The Bulwark

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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She spent just $56,000 to defeat one of North Carolina’s most powerful Republicans—and the man who helped gerrymander his own congressional district. Tim Miller talks with Congresswoman-elect LaKesha Womack about her astonishing upset, her path from a near-death experience to Congress, and the last-minute legal controversy she believes was meant to derail her campaign.

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Godzilla Minus Zero has the IMAX screens this weekend in theaters across the country, and if you’re going to this movie, that’s the ideal way to experience it. Note: I didn’t say “see it.” I said “experience it.” Because right from the very first moment, as King Ghidorah screams onto the screen, leveling city blocks with golden beams of fire, you realize you’ve entered into something terrifyingly immersive.

The image is big, obviously, but the sound is bigger, a terrifying cacophony of animal roars, screeching metal, and collapsing concrete. The roaring din is something both Godzilla Minus Zero and its 2023 predecessor, Godzilla Minus One, have emphasized, particularly in the theatrical setting. These are not your friendly neighborhood kaiju from the Godzilla vs. Kong set of films put together by Warner Bros. and Legendary, a series that, among other things, has shown a giant lizard suplexing a giant monkey with pyramids as a backdrop.

From the first moments we see Godzilla in Minus One, on the Japanese island of Odo, he is big, mean, and loud. The sort of angry-loud that makes you involuntarily shrink back in your seat, clap your hands over your ears like Timmy in that jeep in Jurassic Park. In the new movie, Ghidorah is, somehow, even louder. And that’s before he grows two extra heads—hence his name, which comes from “hydra”—with which to screech and breathe fire and, terrifyingly, lift whole towns via some sort of antigravity breath before dropping them thousands of feet straight down.

Minus Zero begins where Minus One left off: It’s two years after the attack by Godzilla, and the island nation is still just picking up the pieces when Ghidorah strikes. Mr. Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) leads the nation’s emergency response, and once again calls upon former kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) to aid in the defense of the people. Helping them is Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), a savant meteorologist who can feel when storms are coming like Roy Hobbs can feel when a fastball’s coming. And, of course, there’s Noriko (Minami Hamabe), whose surprising survival in the first film came with a terrible price.

Modern action films sometimes run into a problem of scale: The bigger the threat, the less terrifying the threat truly is. The Godzilla/Kong movies are just goofy; Galactus in last year’s Fantastic Four seemed relatively lightweight despite his city-sized presence; Superman fought his clone a few weeks before that and I struggled to remember what, precisely, was smashing around Metropolis. One reason these movies, particularly the comic book movies, fail to land is that, oftentimes, it feels like no one is actually in any danger. New York, Metropolis: They’re always magically evacuated, free of civilians.1

Godzilla Minus Zero does not spare civilians. Indeed, one of the main points of this film is the responsibility that comes with choosing to do the right thing in order to save civilians. But for that message to land, we have to see the aftermath of war. Not just the war against the kaiju, mind you, but war in general. Never forget that the Godzilla franchise is one born of the scars the Japanese psyche incurred after the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Minus films add to that legacy by tossing in the wickedness of Japan’s own policy of fighting to the last man, of turning soldiers into suicide bombers and self-immolating pilots.

As such, Godzilla Minus Zero really earns its R-rating: I did not go into this expecting to see multiple sequences of nuclear annihilation and the effect that has on the human body, but see them we do. When Ghidorah isn’t eating people or burning them alive or stomping on them for fun, he’s levitating their houses and smashing them on the ground. All of this happens amid a soundscape that has been turned to 11. It’s an intense film, is what I’m saying, and maybe one you’ll want to leave the younger children home for. Particularly given the surprising emotional heft of the movie, which revolves around the Shikishimas and their daughter, Akiko (Sae Nagatani).

These are not triumphal films, precisely, but they are, ultimately, hopeful: movies about shared humanity and the necessity to keep living, no matter what. Because, hey: You never know when things are going to turn around.

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SPEAKING OF THINGS TURNING AROUND: How about that election in Texas, huh? I was at the vice president’s final stop in the state last week just days before the election; you can read my dispatch here. Needless to say, his last-ditch swing through North Texas did not have the hoped-for effect on turnout.

And if you hit that paywall, I hope you’ll consider signing up for a Bulwark+ membership. We’re doing a post-election flash sale, so take advantage now while you can:

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Tuner (Paramount+)

Navalny (HBO Max)

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (Netflix/Peacock)

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band (HBO Max)

Blink (Disney+)

On this week’s episode of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I talked to Daniel Roher about his recent film, Tuner, and what goes into making your first narrative feature after a hugely successful career in documentaries. Of particular interest in this interview: The importance of hiring Dustin Hoffman for a key supporting role, which helped attract Leo Woodall to the project. And Woodall delivers what I can only describe as an “Oh man, that guy’s a star” performance here. If Denis Villeneuve wasn’t giving him serious consideration for James Bond after this film’s release, he and his casting director were making a mistake.

Tuner had a run in theaters early this year but got a little swamped by coming out around the same time as Obsession and Backrooms. The directors of those films—Curry Barker, 27, and Kane Parsons, 21, respectively—got a ton of attention for being young filmmakers making exciting originals. But any list of exciting younger filmmakers that doesn’t include Roher, 33, is missing a key entry. It’s not just Tuner—though, again, Tuner is really quite excellent, a tight, 107-minute high-concept crime thriller/romantic drama of the sort that they “don’t really make anymore”—but his documentary work as well.

Most notable is Navalny, for which he won the Best Documentary Oscar at the 2023 Academy Awards. It is one of the key texts of our age and a must-watch for anyone who wants to understand the levels of depravity Ukrainians are dealing with in their ongoing war against Russia, even if it’s not a film about the Ukrainian war. No, this is a thriller disguised as a documentary, a taut, fast-paced drama about a guy trying to do the right thing in a country where the right thing gets you poisoned to death by the government. It’s gripping and gutting, a must-watch.

Once Were Brothers is a little less dramatic, focused more on music and the work of the 1970s rock group the Band. It’s a relatively straightforward musical history documentary, featuring new interviews with seminal figures like Martin Scorsese (who directed The Last Waltz, arguably the greatest concert film of all time, about the Band’s farewell performance) and Bruce Springsteen. Not to harp on runtime, but it’s a lean 98 minutes, which is the perfect length for a documentary of this sort: not rushed, not languid, won’t take your whole night but will leave you satisfied. (We talked a bit in the interview about the importance of respecting audiences by keeping runtimes under control, and I have to say that I salute Roher for doing just that.)

And then there’s The AI Doc, which came out earlier this year. I wrote about it a bit here, but given all the talk about, you know, the possibility of Anthropic and the other AI companies figuratively careening us all off a cliff to fiery death via “misalignment”—as devilishly benign a phrase for extinction as one can imagine—it’s probably worth revisiting. Like Roher, I’ve long had an eye on the possibility of accidental AI self-immolation and the fantasies of transhumanism that dominate much of Silicon Valley, so this doc felt like a worthwhile warning to folks who haven’t paid enough attention . . . as well as a reminder that there are, potentially, some positive uses for the tech as well.

When I interviewed Roher, he was in the midst of editing his latest feature, a “romantic caper” starring Matthew McConaughey. It’ll be out next year from Netflix. It is, he says, likely to be about an hour forty-five minutes. I can’t wait to watch it.

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One of my long-running grievances about the response to Man of Steel is that the complaints about civilian casualties incurred during the fight in Metropolis between Zod and Superman led to every comic book movie either emptying their cities or moving the action to barren wastes, as in The Flash or Eternals. It just absolutely kills any sense of stakes or danger.

Elon Musk’s Cybertruck is on its way out, corporate America is lawyering up, and Donald Trump seems strangely subdued after a historic election defeat. Catherine Rampell and JVL discuss the possibility of Trump stepping aside, the investigations Democrats are preparing, and the government insiders who may be sitting on a mountain of evidence of wrongdoing.

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After a crushing midterm defeat, Donald Trump is firing Susie Wiles as chief of staff and replacing her with Stephen Miller. Sam Stein, Andrew Egger, and JVL react to the stunning shakeup, Trump’s search for someone to blame, Miller’s disturbing record, and what his promotion could mean for immigration policy, political retaliation, and Trump’s growing rivalry with JD Vance.

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There’s a little bit of everything in this one: joy, exhaustion, some well-earned gloating, a few wild theories, and even a few tears. And that’s what makes the Secret Podcast special. Join Bulwark+ while our 20% off flash sale lasts for more of these unfiltered conversations with Sarah and JVL.

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Sarah and JVL are still coming to grips with the enormity of this week.

• Feelings!

• These Democrats are good, actually.

• Ways the Democratic Congress will be able to make the world better even with Trump still in office.

• Is Hegseth cooked?

• How long will Rubio wait?

• Can JD outfight Trump?

• Is MAGA trying to force Alito to resign?

All that and we take time to make Susan Collins wear the clown suit she made for herself.

And then, at the end? Well, don’t leave early. This is a top 2 percent episode. Instant classic.

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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!

After ten years of Trump dominating American politics, we’re finally having a very different conversation about the future. There are fights ahead, but as Tim and Michael remind us, sometimes you have to take a moment to celebrate. And we’re thrilled to be celebrating this one with you.

And you’re in luck—we’re having a 20% off flash sale on membership. Come ride with us.

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The MAGA coalition is falling apart, Fox News is flummoxed, and Trump is having to grapple with being rejected by huge swaths of America. Steele only has double birds for Republicans who played along with the 10-year hijacking of the party and are now trying to clean up their act. And in a way, the country gave double birds to the administration over DEI, based on the diverse slate of candidates who’ve won statewide office all over the place. Plus: Texas is the whole enchilada for Republicans, electing the president via the national popular vote is looking more possible, Marco leaving the administration would be consistent with how calculating he’s always been, and Tim’s 2012 autopsy was not wrong, just early.

Michael Steele joins Tim for the (much gloating!) weekend pod.

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show notes:

• Bill in Friday's "Morning Shots"

• JVL on the conspiracy to push Trump aside (gift link)

• Image of the before-and-after of Georgia’s statewide office holders

• Talarico’s early vote total > Paxton’s overall vote total

• The Bulwark store

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I was wondering which would break first, Trump’s spirit or his body.

Today we may have an answer.

The president is an old man. He tries to cover up that fact with hair dye, elaborate combovers, layers of makeup, and other visual f/x. But he’s obviously unwell. Morbidly obese. He falls asleep sitting in public, in meetings, while on camera. His body emits random noises that his underlings pretend not to notice. His voice is weak and strained. His extremities are mottled and swollen.

And yet until this week Trump’s spirit had still been strong. His will-to-power intact. His urge to dominate and ability to take the initiative had dulled, but were extant.

Since Monday it’s different. We may have broken his back, once and for all. Let me lay out the scenario for you . . .

The election is over but the fight for accountability is just beginning. Wage it alongside us.

With our post-election flash sale, you can join Bulwark+ for 20 percent off the normal price. These are your people. Come ride with us.

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