It was the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Tim Miller was struggling to understand why Democrats were trying to normalize it all. “If the lesson is that they need to accommodate this more and attack him less, that is wrong, and I hate to pick on Amy Klobuchar, but I have to,” he said on his podcast, which also airs on YouTube. He then played a clip of the senator from Minnesota on MSNBC talking about the car ride she took with Trump and Joe Biden to the ceremony in which Klobuchar recalled “a lot of discussion about the fires in Los Angeles” and “the fact that the Olympics are coming up,” which will be an opportunity for the beleaguered city to get back on its feet. “There was not a moment of silence, and I bet you wish you were in there,” she said. “That was a good discussion.”
Miller theatrically furrowed his brows in confused anguish and widened his eyes in disbelief. “It was a — what?!” Miller said. “You bet I wish I was in there!” He continued: “Where is the Amy Klobuchar that threw a comb at a staffer? I guess is my question. That’s the Amy Klobuchar that I wanted to see in the limousine.”
Miller, a political strategist who worked as a top aide to Jeb Bush during the 2016 presidential campaign, is the most outward-facing member of The Bulwark, the media company founded in 2018 by Never-Trumpers Bill Kristol, Sarah Longwell, and Charlie Sykes after the shuttering of the neoconservative Weekly Standard. The Bulwark began its life as an aggregator and opinion news website but has since evolved into a full-fledged media operation, pumping out audio and video content on a variety of channels along with the traditional takes — kind of like a political version of The Ringer.
And it’s exploding in popularity, expanding its audience beyond anti-Trump Republicans to include swaths of people who are dismayed by the way Democrats are approaching the second Trump administration and frustrated by the way the traditional news outlets are choosing to cover him. It’s resistance media that manages to avoid a lot of resistance-era cringe. “To the extent that Pod Save America is on the left and Daily Wire’s on the right, I do think we’ve really carved out a place for ourselves in the center,” said Longwell, a longtime Republican strategist known for her focus groups.
After several years of breaking even, The Bulwark had its first profitable year in 2024 owing to a combination of paid Substack subscribers, podcast advertising, and YouTube monetization. The Substack, which currently has 76,000 paid subscribers, continues to grow at a rapid clip, amassing between 700 to 1,000 new paid subscribers about every day or two — an impressive number for a small newsroom. Meanwhile, the company’s investment in YouTube content has paid off, bringing in between $150,000 to $300,000 a month. The company’s success is the product of how it delivers what it’s saying as much as what it actually says, making an emotional connection with different audiences across various platforms.
“I am very hesitant to have it just be seen as an anti-Trump outlet because our growth has sustained now for years, and so I think it has more to do with quality,” Longwell said, noting that The Bulwark is a community of people “who are reflecting the severity of the moment.” She added, “The No. 1 comment we hear from people is, ‘You help me stay sane.’”
The Bulwark is taking advantage of a media landscape that has been upended by Jeff Bezos killing the Washington Post editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and CBS possibly settling a frivolous lawsuit brought by Trump in order to secure his administration’s approval of parent company Paramount’s merger with another corporation. Audiences are gravitating toward places that they feel have some semblance of independence from corporate or billionaire interests. “People just feel betrayed by some of the mainstream sources that they’ve been following,” Longwell said. “They feel like a lot of them are trying to curry favor with Trump, and I think just the sheer independence of a place like The Bulwark becomes attractive to people.”
“A lot of the mainstream media outlets are kind of tacking back towards ‘We have to be more neutral in tone, and we don’t want them to come after us,’ and that’s not what people are looking for,” said Miller, who has been struck by how “antiseptic” traditional media’s coverage of the new administration has been. That includes independent organizations like the New York Times, which has been dutifully covering Trump’s latest proposal for the U.S. to take over the Gaza Strip, while Miller and his colleague Sam Stein immediately took to YouTube to offer the kind of unfiltered, exasperated commentary that you’d otherwise only get off the record from journalists or political operatives. “You know, maybe it’s just me, I’m not an expert on the region, but I would say just on the surface, forcibly occupying land that is currently governed by a terrorist organization is probably not the most likely route towards peace,” Miller mused. That video has 351,596 views and counting.
In addition to Longwell and Miller, the core Bulwark universe includes Jonathan V. Last, who serves as editor of the site, and Stein, a veteran political journalist who has been helping build out the company’s reporting arm. “It’s really helpful for those of us who provide commentary obviously to have original reporting to lean on,” said Longwell. Before he departed for Axios, Mark Caputo got scoops for The Bulwark from inside MAGA-world, and now Lauren Egan has been poached from Politico to helm a newsletter on Democratic politics. “We’ve gone very slow,” said Last. “We didn’t just say, ‘Hey, we’re going to stand up a reporting vertical and hire ten people.’ Because I’d say after the trauma of having my magazine closed down on me, the thing I care about most in the entire world is never having to lay anybody off.”
Where The Bulwark has been most innovative is YouTube, offering instantaneous reactions to the news that resemble the emergency pods of sports media. The Bulwark uploaded around five videos a day before the election and this year has increased that output to between eight and ten, in the process adding more than 780,000 subscribers in the past year, including 146,000 since Election Day. Miller is the face of the YouTube operation, where you’ll find a plethora of reaction-face thumbnails of him — the MrBeast face, as Max Tani’s Semafor noted — often clad in a pearl necklace and flat brim.
What does well for them? “Look, I’m not going to pretend — on YouTube, people want to hear bad things are happening to Donald Trump and the Republicans, particularly now,” said Miller. The Bulwark seems to understand how to market itself on YouTube in a way that traditional media doesn’t, packaging their videos in the style of viral creators, e.g., “WATCH: Tim Miller WRECK Trump Apologist LIVE!” or “Tim Gets Piers Morgan to ADMIT Republicans Are HYPOCRITES Over Elon Musk.” Miller said, “People are consuming YouTube as a substitute for news, which has its own issues, probably.” He added, “There’s still a pretty light marketplace for people that are making video for YouTube. I mean, all the main outlets are repurposing their stuff, and that just feels stale; it doesn’t feel like it’s for the platform.”
YouTube has exposed The Bulwark to a broader audience. Longwell notes that the million or so people watching them on YouTube don’t have much overlap with their Substack subscribers. “I think a lot of media economics was predicated on the idea that, well, if you really get into video, that’s the top of the funnel for your print product,” said Last. “At least for us, that has not been the case.”
“I have people that come up to me to talk about the YouTube that really don’t know our backstory,” said Miller. “They’re not coming to us because we were Never-Trumpers who spoke out; they don’t know the Weekly Standard. They just are like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m watching news on YouTube, and I was clicking around, and I saw one of your videos, and I was like, Oh, I like these guys.’”
Still, the Never-Trump ethos is crucial to the whole enterprise, especially at a time when liberal media outlets feel snakebit by the perceived overreach of resistance-style journalism. That Miller and Longwell are former Republican operatives gives The Bulwark some distance from the MSNBCs of the world. “I’ve worked for Susie Wiles. I know these people,” said Miller, referring to Trump’s chief of staff. “That’s different from somebody that comes from the liberal world.”
“Our audience is not here for the ‘yas queen’ stuff; they’re not here for resistance porn,” said Last. “They’re here for something different. I want to say the word heterodox, except that makes it sound like Bari Weiss.”
He added, “One of our superpowers is we don’t really have any ties to anybody.” Which also leaves The Bulwark vulnerable to the kind of lawsuits that Trump and his allies have levied against other news organizations. Is he worried? “I am pretty fucking terrified of lawsuits or, I don’t know, whatever’s coming,” said Last. “If it got to the point where I felt like we couldn’t be saying the true things, and that point may come, then at that point just stop doing it. Find something else to do.”
More From This Series
- Can a Brit Become the Face of Politico?
- The New Yorker’s Anxious 100th Birthday Celebration
- Pamela Paul Is Out at the Times Opinion Section
