Last Thursday night, members of The Bulwark’s paid-subscriber Substack neighborhood have been invited to ask hosts Sarah Longwell, Tim Miller, and Jonathan V. Last something that was on their thoughts. Several wished to know interact with MAGA supporters in on a regular basis life.
“We’re all gonna have different answers,” Last stated, kicking issues off. “I will give you my answer as somebody who lives his entire life in the real world surrounded by Trump people: In my view, the best thing I can do is to—”
“Rub their face in shit,” Miller interrupted.
Last, totally unfazed by Miller’s quip, continued, saying, “Live my life with love and generosity, to sort of show them that people like us don’t have horns.”
Longwell chimed in, “You guys, he’s lying to you right now!” Last protested: “I am not lying to you! Hand to God, that’s how I roll in the real world.” Miller and Longwell rolled their eyes, suggesting Last was much less charitable in non-public. “I get a string of text messages from him,” Longwell stated. “‘These fucking idiots,’” Miller joked.
At its peak, the livestream noticed greater than 3,000 lively viewers, together with fellow Substacker Chris Cillizza, with many chatting it up all through. To Longwell, writer of The Bulwark, the sort of unfiltered neighborhood dialog is what subscribers are really paying for. “I think the alchemy between us has been the parasocial relationships,” she tells me. “People feel like they are friends with us. One of us represents them.”
The media upstart, launched in 2019 by “Never Trump” Republicans, is prospering in a second Donald Trump time period, with the outlet anticipating to succeed in 100,000 paid subscribers by the top of May and 1 million normal subscribers by the top of June. Since The Bulwark publishes little content material behind a paywall, readers are presumably dropping $100 or extra yearly for a Bulwark+ membership to have interaction with the location’s outstanding voices—and each other. “The thing that people really pay for is to go deeper with the community,” says Longwell, including that the location may simply “convert much more aggressively if we put more things behind a paywall. But we like to say you can’t save democracy from behind a paywall.”
The Bulwark has already developed since its earlier incarnation, which got here in the wake of The Weekly Standard’s demise; it’s now assembly a new Trump period—and the resistance rising alongside it—by increasing its capabilities for unique reporting and video. The outlet boasts 1.25 million subscribers on YouTube, although, like different retailers trying to grow audiences on the platform, it’s nonetheless honing its technique, cautious of how an algorithmic tweak can throw issues astray.
Still, even whereas having fun with latest success, Miller says he would commerce all of it to not must stay by means of one other Trump presidency. “I’d gladly not be hitting this milestone and be covering whatever is happening in Kamala Harris’s first 100 days,” he tells me. “But you know, that’s not what the fates had in store for us.”
Early in his profession as a Republican operative, Miller noticed his future self serving as an administration’s press secretary. That’s now “a dream that’s dashed,” he says, as a consequence of his willingness to specific a viewpoint by means of The Bulwark. Miller, who beforehand served as a high aide to Jeb Bush throughout the 2016 presidential marketing campaign, argues that he has since been “exiled by our party”—one thing he discusses usually in content material—although he provides that “the audience appreciates that candor.” (Miller has additionally been keen to acknowledge his own missteps in GOP politics that helped give rise to the Trumpist proper.)
Recently, Miller has been channeling his full vitality into the outlet’s YouTube choices, posting movies on the platform often six to eight occasions a day. The channel options a vary of content material with headlines like “Trump’s Latest Interview Should FREAK YOU OUT” and “MAGA Cultists Are IN FOR IT! Tariff Agony INCOMING!” Many movies embody a thumbnail image displaying Miller with a look of astonishment blended with disgust on his face, and plenty of characteristic discussions with a vary of company, together with Michael Steele, Tom Nichols, Derek Thompson, and George Conway.
Around the time of heightened dialogue round whether or not Joe Biden would drop out of the 2024 presidential race, Miller began placing extra effort into the outlet’s YouTube content material, with Longwell agreeing that they wanted to not solely meet their viewers on the medium, but in addition perceive “that the platform demands a certain way of presenting oneself.” It’s “just the language that people on the platform speak,” Longwell provides, additionally admitting that it was “difficult” at first to translate their written commentary—the presentation of which “looks a lot more like The Atlantic”—for the YouTube crowd, however “engaging in that platform’s language has really helped us grow there.”
Once they noticed regular progress, Miller observed what the platform’s algorithm was rewarding, resulting in the channel’s transition into its present type. “There’s an adjustment to: How are we going to package the content in a way that will do well on YouTube so we can maximize the number of people that see it?” He stays conscious about not going “overboard,” saying that “you don’t want to mislead,” however including that “it’s just the nature of the game.”
While initially identified primarily for commentary, the outlet has invested in a lean however efficient newsroom, one led by Politico, Daily Beast, and HuffPost veteran Sam Stein, who was drawn to what The Bulwark was constructing.
Stein had a want to get again to the “upstart mentality,” which he skilled early in his profession at locations like HuffPost, the place he was the site’s first reporter. “You have more freedom to be punchier and more direct with your reporting and more provocative with your headline writing,” he says. “That was all really alluring.” By the spring of 2024, Stein took issues into his personal arms, reaching out to Miller to inquire if The Bulwark was hiring. “He’s like, ‘No, we’re not hiring. We have enough reporters.’ And I was like, ‘What about me?’” Stein remembers. Miller put him in contact with Longwell, to whom he pitched his expertise at institution retailers as an asset to assist the impartial media enterprise “operate and grow.”
Something that additionally made “the jump attractive is that The Bulwark had a more multimedia dimension to it,” in comparison with Politico, Stein tells me. “The chance to do some video was an added bonus.” (Stein, like Miller, is a acquainted face to MSNBC viewers.) However, Stein expressed a little bit of concern about “overinvesting” in YouTube, given how the information media has been burned earlier than by social media algorithm modifications. “It’s just—we’ve all lived through those episodes where you rely a lot on third-party platforms. We’re highly aware of that,” he says. “I just don’t want to get to a place where something changes and we’re like, Oh no, we overdid it.”
