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Respect at USS Arizona

By Mark Hertling

The American Battle Monuments Commission is one of the smallest but most sacred institutions in the U.S. government. Most Americans have never heard of it. Yet this agency silently supports hundreds of thousands in its care who are laid to rest among the rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David above the cliffs of the Normandy beaches, near the sands of the Sicily-Rome landing sites, in a grand and expansive park in the city of Manila, beneath the memorial walls at Tunisia and Cambridge, and at dozens of other sites.

I know this organization well, because several years ago I was appointed by the president to serve alongside other commissioners as members of the governing board of the ABMC. It was one of the greatest honors of my life.

Congress created the commission in 1923 after General John J. Pershing recognized that America needed more than temporary wooden battlefield markers to honor those who died overseas in World War I. He understood that the nation owed its fallen who had fought in battles overseas something dignified and enduring. The ABMC stewards that promise, maintaining twenty-six cemeteries and thirty-one large memorials around the globe honoring Americans who died far from home.

The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor is not technically an ABMC site (it’s administered by the National Park Service), but it is an equal to the other sites because of those who rest below the surface. The memorial platform spanning the sunken battleship is not merely a historical attraction; it is the viewing platform of a sarcophagus. Below that white deck lie 1,102 sailors and Marines, entombed inside the ship where they died during the attack on December 7, 1941. Oil seeps slowly from the wreckage beneath the water’s surface. The sight of these “black tears” becomes an emotional memory for those who visit the site.

Which is why the recent reports of FBI Director Kash Patel conducting a “VIP snorkeling excursion” near the wreck has struck so many veterans, military families, and citizens of our nation as deeply inappropriate.

Military memorials and cemeteries are not ordinary public spaces. They carry unwritten rules of conduct grounded in humility and respect for our nation’s fallen. At ABMC cemeteries overseas, visitors are constantly reminded that these places exist first for the dead and for families who mourn them—but they are also for the living who visit to pay their quiet respect.

When anyone, but especially officials, visit these sites, the focus is usually a solemn act of remembrance. Wreath laying is quiet and somber, ceremonies are restrained, and senior VIPs avoid turning such visits into performative moments centered on themselves rather than on the dead.

Perhaps Patel intended no disrespect during his adventure. Intention matters at such places, but so does judgment. Rank, celebrity, or office does not exempt anyone from that understanding. If anything, senior officials should model greater awareness of the symbolism attached to these places. Because memorials are not about the living: They are about those who sacrificed for their country.

During my time with the ABMC, I often became emotional watching visitors pay their respect at the graves of the fallen. Family members would kneel beside a marble cross; veterans would stare at the names and ponder the loss. At Normandy, some would bring sand from the beach and rub it into the carved name on the cross or the Star of David on the tombstone, turning the memorial gold. Most would stand silently for minutes, sometimes hours, unable to speak. The ABMC staff at these sites understood their role was to preserve not only the grounds, but the dignity of those moments.

That same sense of reverence should apply at Pearl Harbor.

The USS Arizona Memorial, like the sites overseen by the AMBC, is sacred ground. It reminds us that freedom was purchased by young Americans who never came home. And it deserves a level of humility and respect from visitors—especially public officials—that befits the sacrifice commemorated there.

General Pershing once said of America’s fallen, “Time will not dim the glory of their deeds.”

It is our responsibility to ensure that spectacle—or officials using the roles they have been entrusted with to gratify themselves—is not allowed to diminish it, either.

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THE BULWARK ON SUNDAY…

This Sunday at noon, BILL KRISTOL will be joined by ROB FLAHERTY to discuss his recent feature-length article, “Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy.” Watch it on Substack or YouTube!

If you haven’t made some time for the piece, spend some time today before tomorrow’s show. It’s going to be an interesting discussion!

Comment Discussion: What would you like to hear discussed by Bill and Rob about the piece and what’s next for Democrats?

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🚨OVERTIME🚨

Happy Saturday! My Cleveland teams may have had a rough Friday, but if you’d told me last Saturday we’d still be talking about the Cavaliers season? I would’ve expressed some doubt. Alas, game 7 it is! Come on CAVS!

As the school year comes to a close, I hope you’re able to enjoy the last days of Spring… without too much in the way of allergies!

Inside The Bulwark… We’re doing a series on LinkedIn where Bulwark staff answer some questions for people to get to know us a little better. Here’s my contribution. Come for the answers, but stay for the surprise doppelganger a reader picked out in the comments. I’ll take it! And follow us there, and be sure to scroll back a little to read the contributions from my colleagues.

California, here we come! We are packing up for our traveling shows next week in San Diego1 and Los Angeles. If you have a ticket and are coming, we look forward to seeing you! And if you see me in my Cleveland Guardians hat, I hope you’ll say hello! If you are local and want to come, we still have some tickets available.

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Tech support questions? Email members@thebulwark.com. Questions for me? Respond to this message.

—30—

Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.

Some of what we learned:

• How Republicans feel about their chances against Jon Ossoff in the fall (not good)

• Why a Trump-like billionaire is overshadowing Trump’s endorsed candidate for governor

• Whether Democratic voters will tolerate a former Republican Lieutenant Governor running as a Democrat

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein joins the show.

By Greg Bluestein:

• Politically Georgia Podcast

• Flipped: How Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican Power

Just announced! We’ve added some chatty friends to our live shows in Cali. Tickets for our Bulwark Live shows in San Diego and Los Angeles in May: https://thebulwark.com/events

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Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Hit that like 🤍 button and share this episode with a friend.

Ad-free editions are available exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Upgrade now to listen without ads and to join the community in the comments.

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As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

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As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

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show notes

• Buy Andrew Weissmann’s book, "Liar’s Kingdom." Use code Liar15 at checkout to receive 15% off and a signed bookplate from Weissmann. Offer expires 5/19/26. Click here.

• "All Roads Lead to the South" for Saturday's National Day of Action for Voting Rights

• Sarah's "Illegal News" podcast

• Tim's interview this week with Comey

• photo from the summit in China and not one woman at the table

• Tim's playlist

• Just announced: San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and our own MAGA culture expert, Will Sommer, will join the gang on stage at Bulwark Live: San Diego on May 20.
  
  And on May 21 at Bulwark Live: LA our friends Jane Coaston, Jon Favreau, Erin Ryan from , The Ringer’s Van Lathan and progressive commentator Brian Tyler Cohen will join Sarah, Tim and Sam on stage.
  
  Grab your seats today at: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bulwark-events

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As always: Watch, listen, hit the like button or leave a comment. We want to hear from you.

Ad-free editions of The Bulwark Podcast are available exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

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Few filmmakers regularly inspire weirder freakouts than Christopher Nolan.

You saw inklings of it with The Dark Knight and his casting of Heath Ledger as the Joker. It’s easy to forget now—for nearly twenty years The Dark Knight has been the go-to descriptor for comic book movie excellence and Ledger’s Joker is the gold standard against which every movie villain is measured—but this was a wildly controversial choice. The pretty boy from the teen romcoms? That guy? As the Joker? Nolan’s gone too far this time!

Now, freakouts over superhero movie castings were nothing new, as veterans of the Michael Keaton wars will remember. But this was just a taste of things to come. For its refusal to regurgitate a pat message about the dangers of climate change, Interstellar was condemned by some because it was “closer to climate skepticism than it is to climate fiction.” The Dark Knight Rises was an “evil masterpiece” advocating a “fascist police state.” Dunkirk was decried as “whitewashing” for not focusing on the Indian and Muslim soldiers in the British military during World War II. Some critics refused to review Tenet since they considered it irresponsible to release a film in theaters during COVID, and I remember more than one critic glibly suggesting Nolan was getting people killed for his own vanity. Oppenheimer, like Dunkirk, was guilty of “whitewashing.”

I will say that I was a little surprised by the source of the inevitable caterwauling about The Odyssey, however, as Christopher Nolan is broadly appreciated by conservative filmgoers and The Odyssey is the sort of classic that the right has long championed adapting for the masses. Sadly, the Very Online Right, spearheaded by its grand leader, Elon Musk, has decided that The Odyssey is bad now. It has too many black people, you see, and there are rumors that a trans individual might be playing Achilles.

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The “Elliot Page is playing Achilles” rumor is the most intriguing element of this whole idiotic kerfuffle, as it seems to have kicked off after an unconfirmed guess as to Page’s identity in the latest trailer was published on a clickbait website. That guess quickly morphed into conventional wisdom in X the Everything App’s more reactionary corners. Achilles might be who Page is playing—and really, if you wanted to show Achilles as a ghost of his former self, Page isn’t a terrible person to choose for that withered form—but it doesn’t really pass the smell test. The line uttered in the trailer (“Who’s looking after your wife and son?”) seems closer in spirit to what the ghost of Elpenor or the shade of Tiresias says to Odysseus during his trip to the land of the dead.1

The reason why Elon Musk has tweeted repeatedly about the casting of Lupita Nyong’o is more straightforward: Musk, a South African émigré, is just mad a black lady is playing Helen of Troy. Never mind she’s not only an Oscar-winning actress but also a renowned beauty, and thus likely a good choice to play Helen (and, in a nifty bit of casting, Helen’s murderous sister Clytemnestra). She’s black. Can’t have that now, can we? It is, apparently, offensive to . . . the Greeks? More offensive than having Will Hunting play Odysseus? Sure, why not.

The whole thing is a pretty perfect distillation of the tendencies of the so-called “woke right,” that cohort’s obsession with racial and gender purity serving as a mirror image for the previous panics over the “whitewashing” of Nolan’s previous historical epics. We can debate about how rooted in history The Odyssey and The Iliad are, but they are, at heart, mythical stories, tales of gods and monsters, of journeys to hell and disquisitions with ghosts. None of the leads—not the American Matt Damon, nor the Brits Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, nor the South African Charlize Theron—is Greek. And just like their more progressively minded predecessors, these are almost certainly completely contrived outrages, an effort to find something in a movie to get mad about while chasing the endorphin rush they got for screaming online about the terrible live-action Snow White movie or the awful Buzz Lightyear.

Social media has many customs, some of them positive. But its primary tradition now seems to be fomenting silly outrages to poke the pleasure centers of perpetually unhappy people.

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Gen. Hertling on the Greatest War Movies

I had a blast taping this video on the ten greatest war films with Mark Hertling and I hope you check it out. I don’t think you’ll be surprised by the top pick on the list—spoiler: it’s the one with the greatest opening twenty minutes in movie history—but you might be intrigued by some of the choices along the way.

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Review: In the Grey

Guy Ritchie has a new movie out, his eighth (!) since 2019. It’s an odd duck of a movie—you can understand why it’s been on the shelf for a while; it has the feel of a movie that’s been taken apart and put back together with a couple of key pieces excised—but still quite charming. From my review:

It also feels like more of a sketch, a doodle, than a proper, fully fleshed-out feature film. Rife with voiceovers that hop us from plot beat to plot beat as Rachel (Eiza González) explains how she will recover a billion dollars owed to private equity powerhouse Bobby (Rosamund Pike) by international criminal Salazar (Carlos Bardem). It’s all quite convoluted and the legality of everything under discussion is so opaque that you just kind of accept that Rachel is able to command the courts over the course of a few days to seize all of Salazar’s assets. Indeed, Ritchie’s stylish enough and the cutting by Martin Walsh is electric enough that you almost don’t realize that Rachel is quite literally narrating everything we’re seeing happen in order to help us make sense of the plot, but that is very much what’s happening.

Ritchie has always been a somewhat vibes-based director, and I mean that complimentarily: Even if you don’t care about diamond heists and bare-knuckle boxers or American pot dealers cornering the market in British weed, his films are a pleasure to look at and luxuriate in because the characters all look so damn cool. In the Grey is no exception. This is a movie of very carefully popped collars and rolled sleeves, of impeccable layering for combat in any clime. It’s a movie in which we are, for no reason other than the fact that it looks cool and screams class, shown step by step how to make a Stovetop Negroni (Negroni Svegliato).

You can read the full thing here.

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Assigned Viewing: Black Hawk Down (Kanopy)

On the podcast with Mark Hertling, I mentioned that Black Hawk Down is one of the best-looking 4K discs I’ve ever seen and this is true. You should pick that up if you’re looking for a reference-quality disc. But the story itself remains so compelling and so tense that it’s worth watching even on streaming. And it has the sort of cast where every once in a while you’re just like “Wait, is that … yup, sure is.” The funniest iteration of this, at least for me, was a couple of years back when I was watching and was like “Wait, is that … the villain from Kindergarten Cop?” And, sure enough, Richard Tyson is in the movie. A veritable treasure trove of “That Guys.”

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Oh, and that the list of people given money would be secret. And Trump could replace the commissioners any time he wanted, for no reason.

The Trump administration is positioning this as a “truth and reconciliation commission.” Which is amazing.

For a decade JVL (and to a lesser extent Sarah) have wanted a truth and reconciliation commission to document accounts of what people did during the Trump era. And now the monkey’s paw has granted their wish.

We get a truth and reconciliation commission designed to help the people who did the Trump era.

As you can imagine, Sarah and JVL have a lot to say about this. Strap in.

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show notes

ICYMI: The gang did a bonus episode this week in meat space.
Read JVL’s Triad newsletter: here.

ON SALE NOW: Bulwark Live is coming to San Diego on May 20 and Los Angeles on May 21.

Just announced! We’re adding some chatty friends to the lineups for both shows. Grab your seats now to join Sarah, Tim and Sam for an evening of politics among friends and keep an eye on TheBulwark.com/Events for more announcements.

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I know we should talk about the amazing summit Our Favorite President just had with the wise and very good-looking—right out of central casting, many people are saying—Chairman Xi.

But sometimes I need to do one for myself. And that’s what today is.

We’re going to talk about how, yes, capitalism is good. Lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, higher standards of living, blah blah blah.

Also: It can kind of suck?

Today I want to tell you three stories about the rotten fruits of capitalism and one story about a plucky, independent media company that has grown up because of space the free market created.

Who’s ready to embrace some contradictions!

1. Youth Hockey

At the youth level, every sport is idiosyncratic. Soccer is the global sport because it requires no inputs, or organization, beyond a ball. You can play it anywhere—a street, a field, a patch of concrete. You can play it with any number of people. You can play it as a game, or merely kick a ball around as an activity, a pastime.

Football is a distinctly American sport because it requires massive inputs. You need a ball, pads, helmets, tremendous amounts of space, and large numbers of players. Football can’t really be played outside of an organized context. Which is why it is the perfect expression of American values.1

Before this week I did not know much about the idiosyncrasies of youth hockey, which include the fact that it is uniquely susceptible to the corporate enshittification that is the hallmark of modern free markets.

Would you like to know more? 🫠

Here’s a USA Today investigation of a firm called Black Bear which is bringing corporate greed to youth hockey:

As a hockey dad, Murry Gunty saw how money and access can determine which kids make it to the sport’s highest levels.

As an investor, he built a business around it. . . .

Gunty, founder of Blackstreet Capital Holdings, used his private investment firm’s youth sports arm, Black Bear Sports Group, to rapidly buy up ice rinks and teams across the Northeast and Midwest and then leveraged that control to steer families into its own costly ecosystem of leagues, tournaments and fees.

The result: higher prices, fewer choices and growing concern from legal experts that one company is consolidating power over a sport long rooted in local nonprofits, turning youth hockey into a pay-to-play pipeline where families must spend hundreds more each year or risk being shut out.

Really, you must read the whole thing. You will be shocked to learn that Gunty went to Harvard Business School and has spent his career in private equity. Some highlights from USA Today:

• Black Bear is the largest owner-operator of ice rinks in the United States.

• It also owns hundreds of for-profit youth teams.

• It also owns the leagues, tournaments, and showcases these teams compete in.

• It also owns the streaming software parents use to watch the games.

USA Today describes how, once Black Bear owns the ice, it uses access to extort the customers it doesn’t own. For instance, at one rink in Michigan it threatened to raise rink rates for an independent youth team unless the team switched its uniform supplier to a vendor who gives kickbacks to Black Bear.

Yay capitalism!

Traditionally, youth hockey in America was run by community-based nonprofit groups. Black Bear’s business model is to buy the ice and then either purchase or kill the existing nonprofit teams and replace them with Black Bear-owned, for-profit contraptions. Here’s a case study:

Christine George, president of the nonprofit North Hills Amateur Hockey Association, knew little about Black Bear in May 2021 when it bought Pittsburgh Ice Arena, the home rink of the association’s youth teams. . . .

[I]n 2022, Black Bear approached the association’s parent-run board with a proposal to buy its teams for $1.

Branovan pitched the idea as a boon for players, who would benefit from Black Bear’s professional coaches and marketing support, multiple board members told USA TODAY.

Giving control of the region’s oldest youth hockey organization, founded in 1964, to a for-profit company was a nonstarter, said Amanda Rose, a board member. But as she and other parents learned, the proposal wasn’t so much an offer as a demand.

After the board refused to sell to Black Bear, Branovan in December 2022 told parents that the rink would no longer rent ice time to most of the association’s teams.

Its five elite Tier I teams—the top level of youth competition—could stay. But players on its lower-level teams, called the Pittsburgh Vipers, would have to either join Black Bear’s new in-house teams or find another rink.

“It was almost like a hostile takeover,” Rose said.

It’s a huge piece and kudos to USA Today for doing tremendous reporting work. Do not miss it.

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2. M&A

If you run a restaurant, you have two choices for supplies: Sysco or Restaurant Depot. In March, Sysco agreed to buy Restaurant Depot for $29 billion.

One restaurant trade group, the Food Away from Home Association, says this will be a good thing:

“It will increase the portfolio of products that are available at Restaurant Depot,” said Charlie McConnell, VP of industry insights, research and education at the trade group. “It might allow Sysco to introduce some of their private label into Restaurant Depot, which will be a cost-savings for independent restaurants. And it increases the negotiating power with Sysco’s suppliers so they can use that leverage to lower their costs of goods.”

I mean, anything is possible, but . . . c’mon bro. The point of reducing competition is never to make things better for consumers.

Capitalism tends toward monopoly the way systems tend toward entropy. That’s physics. It’s inevitable.

Which is why to be in love with capitalism you also have to be committed to robust government regulation. Unchecked capitalism always—always—leads to its own demise. The free market tends toward monopoly and then monopolists tend toward rent-seeking.

As the saying goes: Capitalism is too important to be left to the capitalists.

Government plays a number of roles in a free-market system, but two of them sit above all others:

(1) Ensuring the rule of law.

(2) Preserving competition.

What we have blooming in America is the worst of all worlds: A two-tier system in which there is a command economy run by the head of state at one level and then a lawless race to consolidate at the level beneath the sovereign’s notice.

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3. Worse on Purpose

In looking at the Sysco–Restaurant Depot merger I came across this essay from a site called Worse on Purpose. It explains how increasing consolidation in the sector has made eating out both more expensive and worse. You should read the whole thing.

Worse on Purpose does a lot of these investigations: They dig into the private equity dealings, or mergers and acquisitions, which deliberately destroy brands to extract money for corporate ownership. It’s like reading a business-school version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Here is its history of why your backpack now sucks:

VF Corporation started as Vanity Fair Mills. Bras and underwear. They paid $762 million for a company called Blue Bell and picked up JanSport in the deal. That acquisition made them the largest publicly traded clothing company in the world.

Then they went shopping.

In 2000, they bought The North Face. Same year, they bought Eastpak. In 2004, Kipling. In 2007, Eagle Creek. By the time they were done, VF Corporation controlled an estimated 55% of the US backpack market.

More than half. One company.

Every time you stood in a store in the 2010s and compared a JanSport to a North Face to an Eastpak, you were comparing three labels owned by the same parent corporation. Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure.

Competition is what kept these brands honest when they were independent. If JanSport built a shitty bag in 1985, you walked across the aisle and bought an Eastpak instead. That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above: hit the margin target.

The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.

Because I am a backpack snob,2 this is a transformation I have absolutely noticed over the years—in order to get a good pack these days, you have to go to a mission-first company like Patagonia or an indie shop like Hyperlite.

So I knew what was happening: Big brands were reducing their denier count and using off-brand zippers. (Some day I will write an entire newsletter about YKK.) I didn’t realize the business case for this enshittification. Corporations had started to think of backpacks not as goods, but as services:

A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. . . .

A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. . . .

The “expensive” bag costs less. But VF Corp doesn’t want you to do this math, because the $35 bag creates a repeat customer every eighteen months. The $200 bag creates one transaction and zero follow-ups. From a shareholder’s perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product.

That’s the business model. Repeat failure, repeat purchase, repeat revenue. The quality decline isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy.

And here’s where anti-competitiveness is the key: VF Corp uses size to dominate supply chains and access to retailers. Big Backpack needs scale because preventing competition is how it builds a moat around its business of enshittification.

Oh, and if you’re the sort of person who is dying for 2,000 words of me talking about YKK zippers while we all fight against the dying of the Republic, come be part of Bulwark+. This is the place for you.

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4. The Bulwark

All three of those stories are really the same story: Youth hockey, restaurant supply, Big Backpack.

They’re the story of how corporations use leverage to create anti-competitive advantages and how anti-competitiveness is bad for consumers—and eventually bad for the macroeconomy.

But let me tell you one last story.

This week The Bulwark went over 1 million free subscribers on Substack. This is very nice and I’m proud of it, I guess. To be honest, my inclination toward toxic competitiveness makes me want to downplay the milestone.3

The Bulwark exists at two levels. The first is as a business, and here I view us as disruptors attempting to bring more competition to the marketplace. Five years ago that amazing Rob Flaherty piece we published yesterday would have run at one of the giant media conglomerates. But we got it. We drink their milkshake.

Now I’m a realist. I understand that we will never beat the New York Times. But by giving them competition, we can force them to be better.4

Building an independent, new media competitor as we have at a moment of transformation has—and I truly believe this—made a difference. The Bulwark has forced legacy media outlets to change, in some small way, their approach to Trump’s authoritarian attempt.

We are the embodiment of the principle of free-market competition. We are, as someone said about us early on, something like the capitalist wing of antifa.

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But at the other level, The Bulwark isn’t a business at all. We’re a mission that created a community.

If defeating Trumpism meant that The Bulwark’s revenues declined by half, every single person who works here would take that deal, on sight, no questions asked.

We are a group of friends on one side of the keyboard, or the camera, talking to another group of friends on the other side. We’re not playing roles. We’re not looking for angles. We’re you. And you guys are us.

And on that level, passing a million subscribers is a big deal, because it means our circle of friends has expanded and—more importantly—our collective power to work toward the mission has grown. A million subscribers means more people hashing out ideas in the comments. It means more hands to pick each other up when we’re down. It means more people to stand up and step forward—like our boy John Duresky—and more comrades to support them.

To the extent that I’m proud of hitting a million subscribers, what I’m proud of is that I get to stand with you guys. It has been the honor of my life.

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THE NEW HEAD of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be David Venturella, a former executive of the GEO Group, which I think of as the Coca-Cola of immigrant detention—the ubiquitous, hugely profitable, default option wherever you go. (That would make CoreCivic, America’s second-largest provider, the Pepsi of private prisons.)

Trump’s appointment of a veteran of the prison-industrial complex is a shocking display of how intertwined private industry and government bureaucracy have become over the last sixteen months. It also shines a light on the state of the Department of Homeland Security and hints at the authority (or lack thereof) of its new leader, Markwayne Mullin.

But first, let’s chat about Venturella.

This isn’t one of those things where, as part of a long career, Venturella held an executive post a dozen years ago.

No. From 2012 to 2023, Venturella was a senior vice president of a company that holds $1 billion in ICE contracts. According to the SEC, even after retiring from the GEO Group, Venturella continued to advise on new and existing contracts, serving as a paid consultant until January 2025. What ever could have happened in January 2025 that led Venturella to give up this gig?

And, how unusual is this?

Well, ethics rules bar federal employees from working on contracts awarded to their former employers. But the Washington Post reports the Trump administration conveniently granted Venturella a waiver. Within two weeks of leaving his consulting role at GEO Group, Venturella joined ICE as a senior adviser. At the time, ICE reassured the press that Venturella would have “no role in reviewing, approving, or recommending contracts.” If that state of affairs was ever true, it’s over now.

Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), a staunch critic of ICE and of Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, said that only a few years ago it would have been “unimaginable” for a former private prison executive to oversee the awarding of contracts to his former employer.

“Private detention centers that contract with ICE will now run ICE. That’s probably the easiest way to explain it,” Ramirez told me. “This administration is trying to push and push and push and see how far they can go. And what they’ve proven is they can go pretty damn far. You’re talking about a private prison company profiting off of the pain of immigrants now having their employee be the new head of ICE.”

Ramirez added that Venturella’s appointment tells Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration donors—like GEO Group and CoreCivic—they have the green light to maximize their profits, minimize expenses, and worsen conditions at detention centers because, at the end of the day, their people are now calling the shots on contracts.

Readers who have seen the vast corruption of the Trump administration may resign themselves to thinking this is all unsurprising. After all, elections have consequences. The New York Times reported Venturella favors quieter immigration enforcement than the carnival of horrors Noem, Corey Lewandowski, and little angry Greg Bovino brought to town. But here’s one story about him worth telling.

Last summer, Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent and longtime Trump friend (who actually introduced him to Melania), needed a favor. In order to win custody of his son, Zampolli wanted his Brazilian ex-girlfriend, in jail for fraud charges, to be deported. No biggie. Zampolli reached out to the Trump administration, and an ICE official scrambled to get it done. The official called the Miami ICE field office telling them it was important to someone close to Trump.

That ICE official serving as Trump’s hatchet man that day was David Venturella.

Homan Up, Mullin Down

A private-prison insider taking over ICE is further evidence that in the second, more brutal, Trump administration, the mass detention and deportation machine will continue to hum.

Still, it’s worth taking a step back to see where the agency finds itself now. With Noem, Lewandowski, and Bovino out, Border Patrol agents are no longer making headlines for spraying constitutional observers and protesters with chemical agents. The steady stream of corruption allegations that dogged the agency under Noem has slowed—for now.

“Dozens of civilians I still talk to—they’re thankful that the Kristi Noem, Chief Bovino, Corey Lewandowski vein of activity is going to be investigated and reviewed because of how harmful it was to carrying out the mission,” said Jason Houser, who served in the Biden administration as chief of staff at ICE.

Following the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, DHS had already drawn back from its indiscipline and violence amid invasions of (blue) American cities—before Markwayne Mullin’s installation as DHS chief. During his confirmation hearing, Mullin laid out the new goal: Get ICE out of the headlines.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said. “My goal is for people to understand we’re out there, we’re protecting them, and we’re working with them.”

He sang a similar tune on Fox Business last week. “We’re not going into New York like another Minneapolis,” he said. “We’re going to go after the felons.”

That approach, while jibing with Republican leaders’ strategy of quietening down about “mass deportations” because of the policy’s abysmal poll numbers, runs afoul of Trump’s feverish base that wants millions of deportations, skulls cracked—U.S. citizen, visa holder, or not—and legal immigration severely cut (with certain exceptions, of course).

But while Mullin is in the hot seat, it is in fact Tom Homan, the border czar known for Cava lunches and cartoon bags of cash, who has been empowered in the post-Noem era. To those alleging that President Trump is getting weak on mass deportation, Homan bellowed: “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

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In conversations I had with former DHS officials who served in both the Biden and Trump administrations and remain in contact with their old colleagues, it became clear that employees who believe in secure borders and interior enforcement are worried about how that mission squares with election-year politics.

“There is nervousness about the fact Congress is giving them hundreds of millions to carry out a mission that is now being pulled back a bit, of mass arrests and mass detentions,” Houser told me, echoing others I spoke to.

One thing Mullin had taken a keen interest in, though, was the appointment of the new head of ICE.

Instead of Venturella, Mullin had “weighed in pretty heavily” in favor of a different candidate, a former DHS official told me. Mullin particularly liked Vic Regalado, the controversial sheriff of Tulsa County, Oklahoma. Regalado had no experience in federal immigration enforcement, but he has posed for pictures with Eric Trump and cast doubt on the 2020 election results. He also spoke at a “Health and Freedom Conference” at Rhema Bible College in Oklahoma, which, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, ended with a ritual mask-burning ceremony. Because of course it did.

The Daily Beast’s PunchUp Substack also called Regalado “Mullin’s favorite.” But while the Daily Mail wrote last week that others had “big dogs” in the fight, Mullin had only a “chihuahua.”

Homan liked Venturella.

Peter Mina, a civil rights lawyer who spent a career working at DHS and ICE including a stint in the second Trump administration, said Regalado would have been a “ridiculous” pick and a “lightning rod.”

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Let’s unpack this. Mullin wanted someone from outside DHS and outside ICE. It seems likely he also wanted someone from his home state—which he represented in the Senate before becoming secretary of homeland security—to be his guy at the department’s most prominent agency. Regalado fit those criteria, and he had some additional political advantages: As a Latino, he could have helped the administration defend against charges that ICE engages in racially discriminatory practices. As a wackjob, he would have driven the president’s critics nuts—which in this administration counts as a policy win. But his lack of experience would have ultimately made his appointment inadvisable. The last thing the administration needs right now is inexperience at DHS causing more bad news stories. (Well, maybe second only to revelations of more connections between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.)

Maybe Homan and the powers that back him—especially Stephen Miller—still had fresh memories of a different DHS head with too much power causing them problems with her lack of experience and poor decision-making. So the first time Mullin wanted to put his stamp on the agency, they overruled him.

But as it is with the Trump administration, one near terrible pick gives way to an insidious one. As Rep. Ramirez told me, people should be outraged.

“The intentionality is to normalize the corruption and therefore normalize the pain,” she continued. “The idea you would have the very same people that are getting maximum contracts now controlling the contracting process—if that is not just the ultimate level of corruption, I don’t know what is.”

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The Worst Grift Yet?

by Andrew Egger

I have to admit: Amid the daily carousel of Trump outrages, I’d sort of lost track of his absurd $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for failing to prevent the years-ago leaking of his tax returns. It wasn’t that I thought Trump’s lickspittle Treasury Department wouldn’t be willing to settle with him on his terms, or that I thought he’d be ashamed to take the money. There was just something about the ludicrousness of the story—the size and scope of the shameless attempted robbery of taxpayer money—that made it tough to get my brain around it. The corruption literally boggled the mind.

Well, I’d better start getting my brain around it quick. Multiple outlets reported this week that Trump and the IRS are close to finalizing a settlement in the case. And according to ABC News, that settlement is expected to hinge upon the funding of a truly insane new pot of government money: “a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.”

ABC News’s sources cautioned that the deal wasn’t yet finalized. But the fund under discussion would be the next step in the evolution of Trump’s unimaginable presidential graft. The members of the commission overseeing disbursements would serve at Trump’s pleasure, and he’d be able to remove them without cause at any time. The commission would have no obligation to disclose its decision-making process for how to disburse the money. And while Trump himself would be barred from directly receiving payments, “entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”

This story is one that piles intolerable outrage on intolerable outrage. There’s the baseline obscenity of the lawsuit in the first place. Even if Trump hadn’t been reelected president, $10 billion was always a ludicrous ask in damages for the leak of his tax returns—a leak perpetrated by an outside contractor, not one countenanced in any way by the IRS. (That contractor, Charles Littlejohn, was caught and is serving a five-year prison sentence.)

There’s the obvious conflict of interest. The IRS has fought other lawsuits brought on the basis of Littlejohn’s leaks, arguing it isn’t liable for the misdeeds of a contractor. But the idea that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s IRS would fight as hard to keep money out of the hands of Bessent’s boss was laughable from the start.

Then there are the extraordinary steps the White House and IRS have taken to prevent the federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, from weighing in on that obvious conflict of interest. Williams, who has been scrutinizing the question of whether the two parties are in fact on opposite sides in the matter, gave the parties a May 20 deadline to submit briefs explaining in what sense they actually are in conflict. If the government were really interested in defending its own interests, this imminent prospect of a judge throwing out the case on procedural grounds would strengthen its resolve to fight.

Instead, the New York Times reports, it is treating that date as a settlement deadline: “White House and Justice Department officials have in recent days been exploring ways to potentially settle the suit before that deadline.” Far from straining to protect public funds in an adversarial legal process—the government’s responsibility even if the lawsuit were completely just—the defendants appear to be bending over backwards to avoid anyone coming to those funds’ defense, even the judge.

And then, of course, there’s the unbearable rottenness of the purported settlement fund itself: the shamelessness of Trump keeping a backdoor way to profit from it personally, the utter absence of any oversight controls that would even allow him to plausibly argue that the money will be spent justly, and the completely topsy-turvy travesty of creating a slush fund for January 6ers and other MAGA villains in the first place. The whole thing reeks to high heaven. Should it come to fruition, it would be not merely a miscarriage of justice but a sacrilege against it.

What’s to be done? The terms of the deal, ABC notes, are not yet totally set. In theory, there is time yet for America to spit this obscenity out of its mouth. Every member of Congress that retains a modicum of self-respect and love for the country should be shrieking from the rooftops about this. And not merely shrieking, but threatening action. If this sort of looting of the public coffers at the president’s behest and for his personal gain and that of his allies isn’t an impeachable offense, then the term has truly lost all meaning.

It’s a mark of how bad things have gotten that I’m not holding my breath. But I grimly console myself that he is not going to get away with this shit forever. America has had enough of this guy, and everyone is starting to see it. His scrambling efforts to line his pockets more and more, to pillage everything that isn’t nailed down, before he’s sent packing once and for all—happily, this can only sharpen the rage of the electoral vengeance that’s coming for him.

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Trump Chooses Decline

by William Kristol

“Decline is a choice,” Charles Krauthammer famously said. Donald Trump has chosen decline for the United States, and his trip to China was confirmation of that fact.

The Trump administration’s own National Security Strategy, published late last year, announced that “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” As Eric Edelman remarked at the time, “This resignation from the role of chief maintainer of the global order is what marks the real break from eighty years of American foreign policy.”

So Trump agrees with Xi Jinping’s statement that we are living through “great changes unseen for a century.” And Trump seems more than willing to accept that in the “new positioning” Xi says these changes require, America has to step back from any claims to leadership. The “constructive China–U.S. relationship of strategic stability,” which China’s Foreign Ministry said Xi and Trump agreed to, would be a relationship between “partners” or equals.

But China is a rising power and the United States a declining one, as China sees it. This era of partnership and stability would therefore be a way station on the path to Chinese global dominance.

And so China conceded nothing at the summit. Xi was a polite host, but he clearly felt no need to be generous or even forthcoming. There appears to have been almost nothing in terms of concrete concessions on trade, and no help at all on the war with Iran.

In fact, the New York Times reported yesterday that

Iran has allowed some Chinese vessels to pass through the Strait of Hormuz following diplomatic overtures from China’s government. . . . Fars and Tasnim, two semiofficial Iranian news agencies, said Iran had approved the passage of some Chinese vessels under rules set by Tehran for managing traffic in the waterway. Fars reported that the crossings had begun on Wednesday night, following a diplomatic outreach by China’s foreign minister and its ambassador to Iran.

In other words, China was demonstrating it can work with Iran in the current situation. And China shows no interest in using any leverage it has with Iran to restore free passage through the strait, or to get Iran to agree to remove its enriched uranium, or in any way to help Trump deal with the quagmire he’s gotten himself into.

But Trump seems not to be resentful. Instead, he’s full of admiration for his bigger brother in the new strategic partnership. As Trump said to Sean Hannity yesterday,

If you went to Hollywood and you looked for a leader of China to play a role in a movie . . . you couldn’t find a guy like him. Even his physical features, you know, he’s tall, very tall. Especially for this country [China], because they tend to be a little bit shorter. You look at the military, the military today was incredible. That military marching was incredible.

Trump also told Xi he was “very impressed with China.”

Trump’s other takeaway from the summit, based on a Truth Social post from Air Force One early this morning, seems to be that “China has a Ballroom, and so should the U.S.A.!”

China has a leader who looks good. China has incredible military marching. China has a big ballroom. In an era of “great changes unseen for a century,” we have a child as our president. That’s one way to choose decline.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• BULWARK ON SUNDAY… This Sunday at noon, BILL KRISTOL will be joined by ROB FLAHERTY to discuss his recent feature-length article, “Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy.” Watch it on Substack or YouTube!

• Putin Is Still a Liar. His Peace Talk Is Still Bullshit… If he wanted to end the war, he could, argues NATALIA ANTANOVA.

• SONNY BUNCH reviews In the Grey, the stylish new thriller from Guy Ritchie.

• Republicans Just Handed Black Voter Organizers Their Best Message Ever… On Bulwark+ Takes, JOSHUA DOSS joins SAM STEIN to discuss why black voters are abandoning the Democratic party, and how Republican redistricting may have accidentally handed organizers their most powerful message in years.

• The Top Ten War Movies… A special episode Bulwark Goes to Hollywood episode with MARK HERTLING joining SONNY BUNCH.

Quick Hits

CRISIS ON OUR DOORSTEP: Cuba, the New York Times reports, is out of oil. The country’s longstanding energy crunch became catastrophic this year when the U.S. decapitated the Maduro regime in Venezuela, shut off Venezuelan energy exports to Cuba, and then blockaded oil to Cuba from everywhere else for good measure. Here’s the Times:

The governments in Havana and Washington have been engaged in secret negotiations for weeks. For Cuba, the goal is to end the energy blockade. For the United States, the talks are focused on ending the government’s grip on the economy and ending political repression. . . .

In recent months, many Cuban cities beyond Havana have been hit with prolonged daily blackouts. The lack of oil has forced people to rely on charcoal or even wood to cook, and some people have taken to the streets, banging on pots and pans to express their frustration.

Read the whole thing.

SNORKELING WITH THE HALLOWED DEAD: Sometimes an AP headline requires a little unpacking. Other times they speak for themselves, as here: “Emails show FBI Director Kash Patel’s Hawaii trip included ‘VIP snorkel’ at a Pearl Harbor memorial.” Here’s more:

With few exceptions, snorkeling and diving are off-limits around the USS Arizona. The battleship, now a military cemetery reachable only by boat, has stood as one of the nation’s most hallowed sites since Japan bombed and sank it in 1941. Marine archaeologists and crews from the National Park Service make occasional dives at the memorial to survey the condition of the wreck. Other dives have been conducted to inter the remains of Arizona survivors who wanted to rest eternally with their former shipmates. . . .

It was not clear how Patel’s snorkeling session was arranged. A Navy spokesperson, Capt. Jodie Cornell, confirmed the outing but said the service was not able to track down who initiated it.

Participants in Patel’s swim were told “not to touch/come into contact with” the sunken ship in any way, Cornell said. She added that the snorkelers were also briefed about “the historic significance of the Memorial as the final resting place/tomb for hundreds of service members.”

We knew Kash had a bizarre habit of going where he isn’t wanted. But randomly inserting himself into a gold-medal U.S. hockey celebration doesn’t hold a candle to randomly inserting himself into an ocean tomb of American war dead. Read the whole thing.

TRUMP MOBILE RETURNS: Two-bit Chinese smartphone fans, rejoice: The Trump phone is—apparently—real after all. Trump Mobile has not been deaf to the bellyaching from would-be customers who handed over their $100 months ago for a “deposit” on a phone that never materialized, or to all the recent ridicule from media wags (like us) for whom the whole thing looked like the beau ideal of a two-bit MAGA scam. On Wednesday, the announcement went out on Trump Mobile’s long-dormant social accounts: “The T1 Phone has arrived!!” they blared. “Phones start shipping this week!!!”

The first trouble sign was obvious immediately: Across all social media platforms, Trump Mobile had turned comments on the post off. The company, it turned out, wasn’t expecting its customers to be eager to share their excitement about the news. (Don Jr. and Eric Trump, who headlined the company launch event last June and were heavily featured in early Trump Mobile marketing materials, are nowhere to be found this time around.)

Nor did the launch video include many specifics: The phone is a “powerful device,” it said, that “gives you the confidence of a phone that’s ready whenever you need it.” It’s gold, has a headphone jack, and comes with a charging cable and a phone case “right out of the box.” Watching the hype video was like watching an ad for a car that plays up that it comes with tires, seats, and an engine.

The actual specs listed online are a bit more specific, suggesting the phone ships with a Snapdragon 7 chipset and Android 15—a last-gen chipset and last-gen operating system, in other words, on what the company is describing as a cutting-edge “flagship” phone. It’s hard to imagine customers being thrilled at getting what is, it’s increasingly clear, a cheapo Chinese-made smartphone with Trump’s name slapped on it, in place of the premium phone they were promised. But the fact that they’re getting a phone at all may at least make Trump Mobile harder to sue.

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Cheap Shots

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The hardest-working Guy in showbiz is back.

Since 2019, Guy Ritchie has directed eight feature films and created a pair of TV shows for two separate streaming services. Even more remarkable is the varied nature of the work: big-budget family-minded fantasy fare (Aladdin and Fountain of Youth), Brit crime callbacks to his earlier work (The Gentlemen, both the movie and TV spinoff), hard-bitten crime dramas with a nasty edge (Wrath of Man), period piece war films (The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and The Covenant), and something like corporate espionage spy thriller comedies (Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre).

In the Grey belongs mostly to this last category—it is about a lawyer/fixer named Rachel (Eiza González), whose two guys Friday, Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Sid (Henry Cavill), help enact her various schemes to collect enormous debts from the fabulously wealthy—though it combines some elements of nearly all these pictures. It has a heavy, string-based score like the one Christopher Benstead introduced into Ritchie’s work to great effect in Wrath of Man; pulse-pounding small-arms action and chase sequences à la The Covenant; and regular onscreen collaborators like González, Gyllenhaal, and Cavill.

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It also feels like more of a sketch, a doodle, than a proper, fully fleshed-out feature film. Rife with voiceovers that hop us from plot beat to plot beat as Rachel explains how she will recover a billion dollars owed to private equity powerhouse Bobby (Rosamund Pike) by international criminal Salazar (Carlos Bardem). It’s all quite convoluted and the legality of everything under discussion is so opaque that you just kind of accept that Rachel is able to command the courts over the course of a few days to seize all of Salazar’s assets. Indeed, Ritchie’s stylish enough and the cutting by Martin Walsh is electric enough that you almost don’t realize that Rachel is quite literally narrating everything we’re seeing happen in order to help us make sense of the plot, but that is very much what’s happening.

Ritchie has always been a somewhat vibes-based director, and I mean that complimentarily: Even if you don’t care about diamond heists and bare-knuckle boxers or American pot dealers cornering the market in British weed, his films are a pleasure to look at and luxuriate in because the characters all look so damn cool. In the Grey is no exception. This is a movie of very carefully popped collars and rolled sleeves, of impeccable layering for combat in any clime. It’s a movie in which we are, for no reason other than the fact that it looks cool and screams class, shown step by step how to make a Stovetop Negroni (Negroni Svegliato).

Your patience with this sort of thing will vary. Mine wasn’t terribly taxed, but then In the Grey clocks in at just under 100 minutes, including credits, so it doesn’t outstay its welcome. And I do just find González, Cavill, and Gyllenhaal delightfully charming; I’m glad she, in particular, has entered into Ritchie’s pantheon of regulars.

That said: This is a very strangely structured movie. It almost feels as though it’s been truncated, abbreviated. The constant voiceovers, the plot threads that are introduced but never really tugged on, the backstories that are so aggressively unexplored it almost seems like Ritchie is daring you to ask for more information. What’s the deal with Rachel and Bobby and their simmering animosity? What, precisely, does Bobby’s trillion-dollar investment firm do? What illegal business is actually being run by Salazar? We only ever see his above-board properties. One senses that a third of this movie has just been stripped clean in an effort to efficiently move us into position for the big third-act action sequence.

As such, I have a hard time offering a full-throated recommendation, as I did for recent Ritchie efforts like The Covenant, The Gentlemen, and Wrath of Man. This is a decidedly more niche product. But it’s a niche I happen to enjoy.

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Hey everyone, so: This posted in the Takes feed over the weekend. (You can watch the video on Substack here or YouTube here.) I Just wanted to make sure this episode got into the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood feed in case you don’t subscribe to the Takes feed (though you should!) and also to give everyone a heads up that Mona Charen and I will be doing an episode of her podcast on A Man for All Seasons. You can watch that movie for free on YouTube, so long as you don’t mind ads.

IF I WERE TO SIT DOWN AND CATALOGUE all of the abject lies Vladimir Putin has told over the span of his political career, it would take months to account for them all.

The latest lie? Just last weekend, Putin stated that Russia’s war against Ukraine is coming to an end. Some people believed that meant he was ready to make peace. Then, just a few days later, his barbarian army—there is no other way to describe a military so deeply unprofessional and as thoroughly committed to horrific war crimes—launched one of the biggest drone attacks against Ukrainian civilians since the war began.

Recall that when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin’s government foolishly believed that Russian troops would be greeted as liberators and Kyiv would fall within days.

Ever since, Putin and his barbarian horde have been scrambling to adjust the calculus.

Having failed to anticipate Ukraine’s fierce resistance, Putin has sought to hoodwink President Donald Trump to do his bidding, and he finds an unwitting ally in Vice President JD Vance. However, Trump is reliably unpredictable and has, at times, expressed frustration at how the war against Ukraine refuses to end. For their part, the Kremlin doesn’t like dealing with unpredictability, preferring to be the crazy party in any political relationship.

So it suits Putin to buy time by making repeated overtures toward peace. Such overtures are meaningless and will remain meaningless for some time. At best, Russia is hoping for a pause to re-arm and re-build before returning to its campaign to destroy the democratic nation of Ukraine.

Just how obvious of a liar is Putin? He used to say that he couldn’t take Kyiv in three days because then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson talked the Ukrainians out of surrendering (which, if you actually follow this conflict, the Ukrainians did not need to do) while pushing to prolong the war. Tucker Carlson helped spread this particular lie during his infamous softball interview with Putin.

Today he tells his people that the real reason is that French President Macron got on the telephone and talked him out of it.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Putin’s opportunistic lying is concerned. For example, late last year, Putin literally phoned Donald Trump to balefully claim that Ukraine tried to bomb his Valdai residence.

The CIA immediately backed up the Ukrainians’ denials of this. Yet the lie was calculated to appeal to Trump’s emotional side; it’s Putin playing innocent all over again, as he did with invoking Macron and Boris Johnson. “See? I’m trying to play nice. I could destroy these pesky Ukrainians at any second, but I’m really, really trying to play nice.”

Putin’s lies are bold, aggressive, and in-your-face for a reason.

It’s hard to imagine how anyone still thought Putin’s word was trustworthy after the 1999 apartment bombings by “Chechen terrorists,” after the campaign “against ISIS” in Syria, and after Russian-aligned forces shot down a civilian airliner over Russian-separatist-controlled Ukraine using a Russian missile system because something something Ukraine’s fault.

The Putin regime is so completely authoritarian that forcing people believe obvious falsehoods is part of how it projects its power. The ultimate message is: We will do and say whatever we want.

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Putin is a classic barbarian. Despite his proclivity for expensive European suits, Putin is a savage who belongs beyond the bounds of civilization. We already know he has no qualms about murder on a mass scale. Putin’s frenemies in China and India believed he was willing to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine strongly enough that they talked him out of it.

The real question we must ask is whether Putin thinks that Western powers are weak enough that, if the Chinese and Indian leaders changed their mind, he could get away with it.

I can’t imagine the bombastic and impulsive Trump standing by if Putin deploys a nuke. Yet with Vance whispering in his ear, the United States meekly demurring while Putin saber-rattles with the nuclear arsenal is a possibility the Kremlin can plausibly entertain.

When Democrats were in power, Putin counted on their cautiousness, and it served him well, with the Biden administration taking Putin’s repeated nuclear threats seriously and likely slow-walking military aid with Putin’s fictitious “red lines” in mind. The stakes are higher for him now since, if stories of Russian domestic discontent are to be believed, Putin is facing additional pressure at home. MAGA chaos and conservative Russophilia risk letting him get away with it.

The possibility of a nuclear strike remains remote, but we shouldn’t be fooled. Putin’s signaling is no plea for peace. He’s just trying to buy time for Russia’s military while framing Ukraine as an “aggressor” to manage Trump.

The only way real peace to be achieved is through Ukrainian perseverance and the collapse of domestic (or elite) support for Putin at home. Peace will never arrive because Russia’s dictator—disconnected as he is from reality—suddenly has a change of heart.

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As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

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As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams, and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members.

Add Bulwark+ Takes feed to your player of choice, here.

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IN ECONOMICS, THERE’S A CONCEPT called the “winner’s curse.” It means that the person who ends up winning an auction has often overpaid for the prize. It’s a good way of characterizing the fate of the newly confirmed Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh.

Warsh has been auditioning to lead the Fed for over a decade now, muscling out competitors and massaging his public image. The main way Warsh finally got the gig was by pledging to cut interest rates, which was Donald Trump’s litmus test. Unfortunately for Warsh, he will not be able to deliver on that promise for reasons that are clear to everyone except, perhaps, Trump. This means that Warsh is hurtling toward a reckoning with his benefactor.

This is all related to the scary little chart right here:

Yesterday, for the first time since 2007, rates on new 30-year Treasury bonds surpassed 5 percent. And look, I realize that was possibly the most boring sentence you will read today.1 So let me explain what it means, why it matters to the economy, and why it suggests Warsh is very, very cooked.

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IT STARTS WITH TRUMP’S economic policy agenda.

Inflation had been drifting downward in recent years, at least roughly until “Liberation Day” in April 2025 when Trump announced global tariffs. The rate of price growth soon started ticking back upward.

Then the Iran war happened. And, as was evident in new reports this week on consumer and producer prices, inflation has been supercharged. With consumer prices reaching 3.8 percent growth in April from a year earlier, we’re likely seeing only the earliest glimmers of the war’s effects on prices for energy, food, manufactured goods, and so forth.

Even worse, this one-two punch of tariffs and war threatens to reset expectations for how bad inflation will get. What this means is that instead of these shocks being temporary (dare I say “transitory”), we could be at the start of a vicious cycle in which companies that are fearful of getting surprised by higher prices in the future raise their own prices preemptively today. If everybody does this at once, you get more inflation. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Companies and consumers aren’t the only ones who worry about inflation. Anyone who lends to the government worries about it, too: They don’t want the interest they receive on those loans to get eaten up by inflation. They want to make money!

This brings us to the infamous 30-year bonds. This week, there was an auction for Treasuries, which are the debt instruments the U.S. government sells so it can pay its bills. And buyers demanded higher interest rates on that government debt as compensation for the very real risk that inflation will run higher for a while. They demanded it both for shorter-term Treasuries and longer-term ones, as well. That’s why you saw 30-year bonds selling at their highest yield in nearly two decades.

If those bonds stay around 5 percent (or higher), a few things can happen.

First, obviously, is that the debt load the government carries becomes more expensive. U.S. debt was already on an unsustainable path, given how much we spend vs. how much we collect in tax revenue. Higher interest rates make carrying that debt even more painful. The government already spends about as much on interest as it does on Medicare. If you’re worried about a fiscal doomsday clock, things like this bring us a few ticks closer to midnight.

Second is that financial conditions for the rest of the economy will remain tight.

Rates for mortgages, business loans, credit cards, car payments, and similar are all sensitive to what happens to rates for government debt. To be clear, most of the time, private debt rates are not mechanically pegged to the rate for a specific Treasury instrument. But in practice, they’re closely related, since Treasuries are supposed to be the safest, least-risky form of debt out there. Everything else gets benchmarked against them.

The more expensive it is to finance a home or a car, the angrier voters will be. This, in turn, will also make Trump mad. And all of this will hem in the Fed, which looks less credible if it’s slashing interest rates while markets are freaking out about inflation.

THIS BRINGS US to Warsh’s quandary. Warsh has said he intended to cut interest rates (specifically, the short-term rates that the Fed has the most control over). But with inflation rising, that objective is increasingly undesirable, or impossible—or both.

Markets have already communicated this: They don’t currently expect any additional cuts through at least the end of 2027. If anything, rate hikes are more likely, particularly next year.

And regardless of what markets are communicating, Warsh himself is primed to believe we need higher rates, too. He is widely known as an inflation hawk2—someone whose concerns about inflation push them to err more on the side of higher interest rates than making risky cuts.

But let’s assume he nonetheless still wants to deliver the rate cuts Trump expects. Guess what? He can’t.

For starters, Warsh will be only one of twelve votes on the Fed committee that sets interest rates, and the rest of the committee is making it clear they’re not interested in more cuts. So Warsh has no good options here.

He could try to convince the rest of the committee to cut rates. But he will almost certainly fail.3

Alternatively, he could watch everyone else vote to keep rates steady (or to raise them), and be a lone vote for cuts. That is, he could throw the rest of the Fed officials under the bus and proclaim to Trump that he really, really wanted to deliver rate cuts, but no one else would cooperate.

I cannot overstate how cuckoo that would be.

The chair’s job, for decades, has been to build consensus. Most of the time, the twelve-person voting committee votes unanimously, with the policy decision more or less pre-negotiated by the chair in advance. There are occasional dissents,4 but the idea of an open dissent by the sitting Fed chair is almost unheard of. The last time it happened was 1939.

Today, it would signal a significant breakdown in leadership. Warsh would look at best ineffectual, and at worst like the sockpuppet Democrats accused him of being when he refused to answer who won the 2020 election. It would be an act of self-humiliation.

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There is another option. Warsh could vote like the hawk that he is in his heart. He could put his name down for either steady or higher interest rates alongside his Fed colleagues. But in that case, he’d face Trump’s wrath—and, possibly, the same type of smears, threats of (illegal) termination, and bogus criminal investigations that Trump has flung not only at Warsh’s predecessor, Jerome Powell, but also at his fellow Fed governor Lisa Cook. For all we know, Trump’s henchman and housing appointee Bill Pulte has already begun amassing an oppo dossier on Warsh in preparation for precisely this scenario.5

If that were to happen, at least Warsh would have someone there to guide him through it. Cook remains on the Fed, awaiting a Supreme Court decision about her fate (though Pulte has recently insisted that if he can get an indictment against her it would prove legally sufficient to fire her from the post). Powell persists on the Fed Board, as well; he chose to stay on after his chairmanship ended as a bulwark for institutional independence. Perhaps just in case, ahem, anyone else at the bank goes wobbly.

Maybe Warsh thinks he can manage Trump. Maybe he thinks his marriage to the daughter of a close Trump ally6 will shield him from the full force of Trump’s rage and retribution. But other onetime confidants with even closer ties to MAGA’s paterfamilias have been shredded for less.

Congrats on your new gig, Mr. Chairman. Good luck to you.

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Ramparts

— The Goodyear tire plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina announced that it will close in 2027; roughly 1,700 people will lose their jobs.

— Perhaps another indicator of a softening labor market: Some big companies are cutting back on their paid leave policies. At one time there was something of an arms race, at least in the tech industry, to provide better and better fringe benefits, including family-related benefits (also fertility benefits, backup childcare, and much else). As the AI-pocalypse comes for tech and other professional services, we may see some of those benefits disappear.

— Speaking of victims of AI: Princeton just chucked its 133-year-old tradition of not proctoring exams and relying solely on a quaint notion called “students’ honor.” The reason: the sordid temptations of Claude.

— And speaking of the victims of AI and college students: The job market sucks for new grads. Or maybe for young people of all educational attainment levels? And why is it seemingly worse here in the States? New Gallup polling finds the United States is one of the few countries where younger workers are more pessimistic about their finances than older workers are; in fact we have the “largest gap of any country in job market perceptions between younger and older adults.”

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Rep. Robert Garcia and Catherine Rampell join Tim Miller.

show notes

• Catherine's newsletter, "Receipts"

• A grimacing, sweaty Trump getting framemogged by Xi

• Ezra Klein's town hall with Katie Porter's answer to CA's housing crisis

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Valar Dohaeris

Each House speakership ends up having its own unique character—forged through a combination of successes and failures. Nancy Pelosi, for example, is remembered for ruling her majority with an iron fist; she also regularly defeated internal party challenges and cleared the pathway for landmark legislation like the Affordable Care Act. Paul Ryan and John Boehner passed some substantial bills, too, and both departed Congress for lucrative second acts. Kevin McCarthy was not so lucky. He failed to quell a rebellion that resulted in his tarring and feathering (not literally) on the House floor. He has not found his way into the sort of plum position his predecessors have enjoyed since their speakerships ended.

Mike Johnson’s speakership is somewhat different from all these. His overriding project has been to cede whatever power and decision-making he can to the White House, and this has, in turn, given shape to an unusual legacy, one defined by impotence.

In recent months there has been a strange spirit of bipartisanship among frustrated House members, who have relied on the previously rare tactic of discharge petitions to circumvent Johnson. The latest such bill directly pushes back on the Donald Trump administration in a policy area the MAGA movement finds particularly divisive: aid to Ukraine.

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