The Bulwark Podcast
Episodes
Catherine Rampell and Michael Steinberger: Trump Wants to Cook the Books
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
POTUS is firing or censoring the statisticians who collect data on health and climate, as well as the kind of experts who could verify his lofty claim...
Will Sommer: Conspiracy Theorists Are Behind the Wheel in the Republican Party
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The people running the Republican grassroots are nativist populists, and it’s a space where opposition to Israel thrives, along with a heaping servi...
Bill Kristol: A Weekend of Tragedy
15 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the shooting at Brown University, to the Oct. 7-style slaughter in Australia, and the shocking murder of Rob Reiner and his wife—it’s been on...
Alyssa Farah: Trump's Big L in Indiana
12 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Despite death threats and harassment, Republicans in Indiana delivered the biggest political setback to Trump since officials in Georgia wouldn’t he...
David French: MAGA Is Bleeding Numbers
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Republican disunity is being obscured by affection for Trump, but just below the surface, MAGA is being pulled apart at the seams. At the same time, t...
Neera Tanden: America's 'Daddy' Is in a Rut
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Big boss Trump, who claims the power to run the whole government via executive order and pushes all our allies around, suddenly is a man with no agenc...
Mark Hertling: Trump (Still) Hates Europe
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Heaping scorn and disdain on Europe, Trump called its countries decaying and its leaders weak, but the U.S. likely needs Europe more than they need us...
Bill Kristol: This Is Not Democratic Government
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
ICE and Border Patrol are kidnapping people in the suburbs near New Orleans based on racial profiling—it’s like the South of 70 years ago. Mini Gr...
Tommy Vietor: The 'Peace' President
05 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump is overseeing extrajudicial killings off the coast of Venezuela but nothing was going to stop him from getting a peace prize—even if it’s a ...
Sam Stein: We Got Ourselves a Mad King
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump’s use of his pardon power is downright crazy, and that’s not even counting his rescue of a convicted drug kingpin. He’s also sabotaging hi...
Jonathan Lemire: A Bubble-Wrapped Trump
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump’s rallies have been his signature event, but since he returned to the White House, he has stopped doing them. And his allies are worried he’...
Olivia Nuzzi Breaks Her Silence
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There are no shortage of scandals plaguing Washington D.C. right now. One that has captivated much of the political and media professions involves Ol...
Project 2025 Is Coming Back To Bite Trump
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As a candidate, Trump knew to steer clear of Project 2025. But as president, he embraced its deeply unpopular policy goals and it has been driving dow...
Bill Kristol: A Kleptocratic, Autocratic Cabal
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Not only are the opportunities for personal financial gain for Trump and his White House cronies driving the administration’s foreign policy decisio...
George Packer: Trump Was a Symptom
28 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Americans were already losing touch with basic decency before Trump came along—and he exploited that indecency, distrust, and division to win power....
Andrew Weissmann: Just Release the Damn Epstein Files
26 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump needs to quit the games and his defamatory accusations about who's in the Epstein files, and just release the 300 gigabytes of data from the Eps...
Michael Weiss: Trump's Ukraine Cluster**ck
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A troika of foreign policy amateurs—Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and JD Vance—are trying to impose a Russia-drafted peace plan on Ukraine. While ...
Bill Kristol: The Cracks in Trump's Power Are Showing
24 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Unrest has broken out in MAGA, and Mike Johnson looks like he’s losing control of the House—which means that Trump could be losing control of the ...
Adam Kinzinger: Trump Has Never Seemed this Scared
21 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As a man who’s not used to losing, Trump is going through a bit of a rough patch since his party turned against him over the Epstein case. He’s fl...
Susan Glasser: Our Grotesque, Corrupted Oligarchy
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tim Cook and the other tech titans who dined with bone saw murderer MBS—and who’ve given millions to Trump to knock down our history for his gilde...
Kamala Harris: This Is Our Country
19 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Before a live audience in Nashville Tuesday, the former MVP served up some stirring words about fighting back against what is happening under Trump. B...
Jonathan Karl: The White House Chaos Is Worse This Time
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The White House leaks may be more contained in Trump 2.0, but the slavish loyalists who POTUS has surrounded himself with do nothing to keep him withi...
Bill Kristol: Fight on All Fronts
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Not a lot of people predicted that Trump would fold and let Congress vote on the release of the Epstein files. But his retreat shows that Democrats ha...
David Frum: This Is Shame-Faced Trump
14 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our commander-in-chief and breaker of mores can only muster the energy to beg Republicans to stop talking about Epstein. Where is the blustery guy who...
Alex Wagner: Team Trump Can't Get its Epstein Story Straight
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump's involvement with Epstein is simultaneously a "hoax," but he was also a "perfect gentleman" when he spent hours with one of Epstein's underage ...
Mikie Sherrill and Michael Fanone: Full-Time Criming and Corruption
12 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
New Jersey’s governor-elect credits her big win last week to an affordability message—and ignoring the pundits. But Sherrill also tied rising cost...
Chris Hayes: Trump Has Become 'The Establishment'
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
While Trump won the first time as an anti-status-quo hero, the low-trust podcast cranks like Rogan and Tim Dillon who put him back in the White House ...
Will Saletan: Sorry, but the Democrats Won the Shutdown
10 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The very online crowd is very upset, but Dems did fight like Republicans. This was a longer shutdown than anything the Tea Party pulled and real pain ...
Jessica Tarlov: Republicans Are in the Barrel
07 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our economy may be in the early days of stagflation, Democrats are winning the shutdown fight, and Republicans aren't getting help from the tariff kin...
Jonathan V. Last and Carol Leonnig: The Danger of a Weakened Bully
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump took it on the chin in Tuesday's elections, SCOTUS sounds skeptical about his tariffs, and his plan to 'gerry-rig' the midterms looks like it is...
Dave Weigel: Now That's a Landslide
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The huge Democratic wins in Virginia, New Jersey, NYC, and California spoke loud and clear—and make Trump’s 2024 supposed ‘landslide’ margin o...
Andy Beshear and Terry Moran: The Power of Normal People
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With Trump slashing SNAP benefits, Gov. Beshear is asking the people of Kentucky to look out for their neighbors so they don't go hungry—since the a...
Bill Kristol: Fake News on '60 Minutes'
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
CBS News heavily edited its ‘60 Minutes’ interview with Trump, not only removing his lies about 2020, but also conveniently cutting the part about...
Catherine Rampell: Who Are the Socialists Now?
31 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s hard to find a better example of seizing the means of production than our government seizing an equity stake in a company—which Trump keeps d...
Heidi Heitkamp: How Trump’s Trade Chaos Hurts Farmers
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
President Trump meets with Xi Jinping and agrees to an embarrassingly one-sided trade deal, as the “China Hawks” in the administration cower. Mean...
Abby Phillip: Governing by Troll
29 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the jump, the administration has been all about the memes, owning the libs, and pissing people off. But Abby says she wants Trump’s supporters ...
Sam Stein and Francis Fukuyama: A Coming Deportation Blitz?
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
While the inhumane and aggressive tactics unfolding in Chicago are repelling many Americans, they are having the opposite effect among Trump's top aid...
Bill Kristol: Diaper Tantrum
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump was so embarrassed by Canada using Reagan’s warnings about tariffs that he had a little hissy fit and decided to punish Americans for buying C...
Ryan Holiday: Life Is Too Short to Be a Bootlicker
24 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Members of the administration, like Stephen Miller, who spend hours every day kissing Trump’s ass look so pathetic—but since the time of the ancie...
Ben Wittes and Anna Bower: Trump's Reparations Demand
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The convicted felon was legitimately prosecuted for hoarding classified docs at Mar-a-Lago. And he was justifiably investigated over the numerous cont...
Jon Favreau: Foundational Freedoms
22 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the promises of this country has been the freedom to walk down the street without being harassed by the government. But even being an American ...
Michael Weiss and Karine Jean-Pierre: Low Energy Trump
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Putin’s friend in the White House may be back in his safe space with his kindred spirit in Moscow, but Trump is finding that he has limited leverage...
Bill Kristol: Trump Hates America
20 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly seven million Americans peacefully took to the streets out of their love for this country, and Trump in response acted out like a toddler obses...
Peter Hamby: The Mini Dictator Wants What He Wants
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The administration under sticky fingers Trump is now pretending it cares about the sanctity of classified documents, while it seems that Marco Rubio i...
Anne Applebaum: The Loss of 'Democratic Faith'
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. has been a model for other aspiring democracies since 1776. At the same time, the idea of America as the leader of the democratic world has a...
Heather Cox Richardson: An Attack on Our System of Government
15 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Republicans in Congress know that what they’re doing is deeply unpopular—on healthcare, supporting troops in the streets, and on redistricting. Th...
JB Pritzker and Franklin Foer: Like Living in an Authoritarian Regime
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After a court temporarily blocked the deployment of Guard troops in Illinois, ICE agents began ramping up their operations around Chicagoland. They ar...
Bill Kristol and Ty Cobb: Recapturing America
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peaceful protesters in Chicago and Portland have been so clever and effective at ridiculing the masked Stasi agents in their cities that the political...
Jacob Soboroff and Sarah McBride: Democracy at the Ground Level
10 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The administration may be trying to lay the groundwork for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act by invading Chicago but the real human stories are bre...
Sam Stein: A Bunch of Violent Keystone Cops
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
ICE and other armed federal agents are doing their best to incite violence in blue cities so they can help Trump realize his unfulfilled dream from 20...
Casey Newton: Lawlessness and Danger in Tech's Brave New World
08 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump's TikTok deal looks like classic crony capitalism as well as open theft. But China has bigger fish to fry with trade than its TikTok algorithm—...
Jake Tapper: Trump Is Making the Country Less Safe
07 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new kind of McCarthyism has settled in at the Justice Department, where career prosecutors—including those handling tough national security cases—...
Bill Kristol and Jane Fonda: The New 'Fierce Urgency of Now'
06 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
ICE is intentionally provoking violence in the nation’s cities and then glorifying it with their crack video team. Meanwhile, the rhetoric coming fr...
Tom Nichols: All The Circuit Breakers Are Gone
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
President Trump’s loyalty purges continue. Prosecutors are fired from the U.S. attorney’s office in Eastern Virginia, including people who had not...
Symone Sanders-Townsend: The White House’s Goal Is Enacting Pain
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Trump administration is turning up the heat now that the government has shut down, cancelling billions for green projects, targeting funding for i...
Ken Burns: You Have To Be A Bulwark
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A government shutdown begins, as a standoff over spending enters what could be a painful phase. And President Trump kicks off the week warning his mil...
Van Lathan and David Jolly: How To Beat Middle Finger MAGAism
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Pete Hegseth convenes the military’s top leaders to complain about fat troops and generals and plug his book. Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk’s assassinat...
Bill Kristol: Trump Wants Troops in Portland
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
President Trump orders the National Guard to be deployed to Portland, Ore., after declaring it a war-ravaged city. And reports surface that the admini...
Adam Kinzinger: We Can’t Be Intimidated
26 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
President Trump’s quest for revenge escalates, as a grand jury indicts former FBI Director James Comey days after Trump forced out a prosecutor who ...
Ezra Klein: Protecting People Means Winning Power
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The White House readies plans for mass firings in the federal government as Democrats weigh the stakes of forcing a government shutdown. The Justice D...
Angie Craig and Glenn Thrush: Don’t Be Called Weak Sauce
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A government shutdown creeps closer as President Trump cancels a meeting with Democratic leaders. Former Vice President Kamala Harris embarks on a pre...
Bakari Sellers: The Danger of RFK Jr.
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The injecting-bleach president is getting some super-strong pseudoscientific information to scare mothers and blame them for autism while conveniently...
Bill Kristol: Where Is the $50,000?
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We thought Tom Homan was just an extreme border hawk and ideologue. Now we know this powerful law enforcement official, who's depriving immigrants of ...
Thomas Chatterton Williams: How MAGA Learned to Love Cancel Culture
19 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Cancel culture lives on, but it's taken new turns, especially among some of the loudest opponents of woke culture who simply can not abide one word of...
Brian Stelter and Jonathan V. Last: Worst Case Scenario
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The administration wants people to believe that Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air because he supposedly crossed a red line when it came to Charlie K...
Susan Rice: A Cancer in the Body Politic
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This country has been dealing with an increase in political violence for nearly a decade, and leaders from across the spectrum need to do everything t...
Joe Manchin: The Man in the Middle
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The former senator and former Dem has some not-very-nice things to say about Schumer and Obama—as well as progressives—who he blames for hounding ...
Bill Kristol: What Does 'They' Mean?
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The administration is threatening to take away money and power—and maybe even freedom—from some vague Trump opponents because of the Kirk assassin...
David Frum: Leveraging Violence as a Tool of Power
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump and the people around him want to use the Kirk assassination to suppress their political opposition. And Trump is clearly laying the groundwork ...
Erin Ryan: The Murder of Charlie Kirk
11 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This country has too many guns and too many crazy people. And the social media oligarchs are fanning the flames of violence by constantly trying to pi...
Stephanie Ruhle and Tom Saenz: Why Aren't People Freaking Out?
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If Zohran Mamdani, as NYC mayor-elect, held a dinner with finance bros and threatened them with a huge wealth tax if they didn't sweet-talk him and sa...
James Bennet: Trump Is Still Hacking the Media
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
More than 10 years in, journalists still have not figured out how to cover Trump. He understands the media environment better than a lot of reporters,...
Bill Kristol: Escalating the Authoritarian Project
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In seven months, Trump has accumulated an astonishing amount of unchecked power. No one inside his administration is challenging his will, and Trump i...
David French: Maybe the Tariffs Are the Problem
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last month, Trump fired the "woke" job numbers person after she released weak employment data. Now, we have even worse jobs numbers—and burgeoning s...
Mark Hertling: Performative and Deadly
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The lethal U.S. military strike on a speedboat in the Caribbean was more about putting on a show than countering the drug trade out of South America. ...
Lina Khan: The Impunity of the Elites
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The economic populists at the Nat Con conference may be talking a lot about elites screwing over the little guy, but the Trump administration itself h...
Stuart Stevens: Say They're Not Patriots
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Democrats need to learn to fight like Republicans. So when senators with serious foreign policy chops vote to confirm a middling weekend talk show hos...
Jonathan V. Last: Burning Things Down
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Red States are flexing their muscles and imposing their will on the other states through their coordinated redistricting efforts. And if they deploy t...
Tom Nichols: America's Problem Child
29 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump is like a dysfunctional 8-year-old whose parents are always in the principal's office arguing that their son is a good boy. The media, CEOs, and...
Sam Stein and Talmon Smith: Brain Drain
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The resignations of senior leaders at the CDC is a calamity. People with decades of expertise in infectious disease are leaving the agency because the...
Jake Sullivan: Trump Is Making China Great Again
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A year ago, China was globally isolated and its economy was struggling. But once Trump was back in office pursuing his own personal and political gain...
Susan Glasser: An Exercise in National Humiliation
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Some rando far-right social media suck-up, who Trump rewarded with an appointment to his administration, is pushing mortgage fraud investigations of A...
Bill Kristol: March to Dictatorship
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump and his people have used the summer months to up the despot game—sending armed troops into the streets, taking over the police in D.C., and pr...
Tommy Vietor: Trump's Security State
22 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The fears of jack-booted thugs and the military in the streets that filled the fever dreams of numerous people on the right since the 90s have come to...
Garry Kasparov and Jerusalem Demsas: Democracy Can't Defend Itself
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
While Trump keeps working hard on his own monetization and glorification—and delivers a Watergate practically every hour—the pro-democracy coaliti...
Adam Kinzinger: Don't Feed the Dictator
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Russia is losing the war in Ukraine. More than 1 million Russian troops have been killed or injured, and it's been estimated that it would take anothe...
David Kirkpatrick: Trump's Self-Enrichment
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Back in the day, Trump used to puff up his wealth to get on the Forbes list. Lately though, he doesn't talk about how much money he has, especially no...
Bill Kristol: Authoritarian Takeover
18 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Militarizing the nation's capital is not a distraction, and Democrats really need to stop using that term. Trump is trying to seize power, intimidate ...
Hakeem Jeffries: More Is More
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
While Donald Trump delivers chaos, cruelty, and corruption—and Republicans play the facts-and-hypocrisy don't matter game— Democrats have to do mo...
Michael Weiss: Helsinki in Anchorage?
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At the Alaska summit, Putin will likely be angling for a sequel of the Helsinki meeting, the infamous tête-à-tête in 2018 where Trump got rolled an...
Jason Calacanis: Anarcho Capitalism
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tim Cook groveling to Trump with a golden trophy and a dash of MAGA identity politics is probably a sign that we are not currently living in a healthy...
Amanda Carpenter: Fake Emergencies
12 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Trump keeps creating all these phony crises—an 'invasion' at the border, immigrants in the interior, crime in D.C.—so he can put on a show of forc...
Bill Kristol: The Lawless Administration
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Crime is down in D.C., but Trump is using the pretext of an attempted carjacking of "Big Balls," the former 19-year-old DOGE employee, to take over th...
Lis Smith: Dems Need to Burn Down the Party Establishment
08 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There's a direct line between when the Democratic Party got nationalized and when it started getting wiped out in red states. Dems need to embrace het...
Anne Applebaum: What USAID's Absence Looks Like on the Ground
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The United States, through USAID, not only supplied a big chunk of the world's humanitarian aid, it also provided almost all of the logistical support...
Zerlina Maxwell and Josh Barro: We Are in a Bad Place
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Gerrymandering has always been partisan, but what's happening in Texas is straight-up racial politics. Republicans are targeting and trying to disenfr...
Chuck Todd: Is the Economy the Biggest Political Threat to Trump?
05 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Voters in the seven swing states that elected Trump in 2024 thought he'd make the economy better. His perceived strength on the economy is the corners...
Bill Kristol: This Is So Third World
04 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The boss only wants to hear good news: that's the takeaway from Trump's high-profile firing over the weak job numbers. So if a government worker has s...
Dan Osborn: Connecting with Working People
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Osborn, the populist independent who ran a surprisingly close campaign for a Senate seat in Nebraska last year, is back for another run in the 2026 mi...
Marc Elias: An Election War Machine
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Texas Republicans are busy gerrymandering their already gerrymandered congressional map, and other red states are looking to do the same—all aimed a...