The Never Trump movement might be in its last throes, but a news publication it birthed is booming
Analysis by Oliver Darcy, CNN
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The Never Trump movement might be on life support, but one of the outlets that it gave birth to is flourishing.
The Bulwark, a clear-eyed conservative news publication that stands in firm opposition to Donald Trump, is not only thriving online, but is in the midst of a “growth spurt,” publisher Sarah Longwell told me on Thursday.
The outlet, which features notable investors such as James and Kathryn Murdoch, aims to expand with new hires in the coming weeks. The first of them? George Conway, the conservative attorney whose sharp legal analysis and unsparing political commentary launched him from a well-known D.C. politico into a household name during the Trump administration.
Conway will join The Bulwark as the host of a new podcast, “George Conway Explains it All (to Sarah Longwell),” breaking down the president’s legal cases in plain, easily digestible terms. The program, co-hosted by Longwell, will air once a week and the first episode will drop Thursday night.
“The legal questions surrounding Trump are going to be an enormous part of what happens in 2024,” Longwell noted to me. “And I am not a lawyer. And I was constantly asking my friends who are lawyers to explain things to me. And I was like, George, how about we just do a podcast where you just explain stuff to me?”
The Bulwark, which now boasts nearly 30 staffers, is “very close to breaking even,” Longwell said during our phone conversation. The outlet generates about $3.6 million alone on newsletter subscriptions, she said, and also draws on a separate dual revenue stream made up of advertisements and live events.
Since its founding in 2018, the outlet has swelled in size. It now houses 10 podcasts (including Charlie Sykes’ hit show, which ranks in the top 25 news programs on Apple Podcasts), five newsletters, and has recently poured resources into a YouTube channel, which has amassed nearly 150,000 subscribers and more than 21 million video views.
Think of it like this: For the left, there is Pod Save America. For the reality-dwelling right, there is The Bulwark.
The success of the outlet might strike some as odd, given that the Never Trump camp has, at this juncture, lost the war for the soul of the Republican Party. It’s a reality that Longwell acknowledged. She described the publication’s audience as a group of Republican “expats,” “high information” Democrats looking for honest commentary from a conservative perspective, and others “trying to make sense of this political moment.”
“Part of what Never Trump was, was a way to separate Trump from the rest of the Republican Party,” Longwell said. “As Trump has absorbed the Republican Party, there is less of a mission over how to save it. But that doesn’t mean that there is not a desperate need for a voice in the center that is unapologetically pro-democracy.”
The Bulwark’s growth also comes at a time in which most news publishers are pulling back, with the start of 2024 bringing news of brutal layoffs from coast-to-coast. Longwell said the conservative publication has found success by “building a community” willing to pay for a subscription, even though most of the content is available outside its pay wall, for free.
A key part of what gives The Bulwark an advantage in this political moment, and inspires such loyalty, is that its writers intimately understand the conservative movement, given they all were a part of it at one point in time. Longwell described the outlet’s personalities as “sherpas” helping those whom are perplexed by the GOP’s radicalization under Trump make sense of the moment (to the greatest extent that is possible).
That also means that those at The Bulwark don’t have a cloudy vision and are willing to call out lies and misdeeds for what they are. While some in the establishment press might worry about being perceived as out-of-touch liberals, those at The Bulwark have no such fears.
“A lot of people talk about the false equivalence the media supposedly has to do to tell ‘both sides.’ And it leads journalists to make these false equivalencies,” Longwell said. “When you’ve been a part of the conservative movement and seen how much it has changed, you have no temptation to say these things are equivalent. You’re like, ‘These guys have lost their minds! They have abandoned their principles!’ I think we have been more unrestrained in our coverage because we’ve seen it from the right.”
When asked whether the mainstream press is failing to call balls and strikes properly, Longwell said she believes everyone is doing their best to “navigate this particular unprecedented moment in their own way.” But she did contend that she believes “we are under-reacting as a country to this political moment.”
“And part of that is because a bunch of institutions, in an attempt to behave, in their minds responsibly — they don’t know how to say how dangerous this moment is and still feel like they are maintaining their institutional objectivity,” Longwell said.
“We,” Longwell added, speaking of The Bulwark, “are quite certain about how to handle this moment. This is really black and white. Just say the things that are true, that are right and wrong.”
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