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Because I’m feeling particularly helpless and angry today. Maybe you are, too. But it’s precisely moments like this when we should strive to be our best selves and show grace.

—JVL

1. Making Sense of It

The killing of Renee Good is, as the saying goes, senseless. There was no need for ICE officers to be on that street in Minneapolis yesterday. There was no need for them to escalate their encounter with Good, screaming obscenities at her, attempting to force open the door of her SUV and assault her. There was no need for them to unholster their weapons. There was no need for them to shoot her three times.

There was no need for the entire apparatus of the federal government, from the DHS press flack, to the secretary of that department, to the president and vice president of the United States, to lie about the events and slander Renee Good as a “domestic terrorist.”

There was no need for Renee Good’s 6-year-old son to wake up an orphan this morning.

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In a sane world—the kind of world we lived in twelve months ago—here is what would have happened:

• Federal officers encountering a vehicle blocking traffic would have asked the driver some version of, “What seems to be the problem, ma’am?”

• If the driver was blocking the street in an act of civil disobedience, a single officer would have given her a clear, followable direction. Either, “Leave this area immediately or you will be under arrest.” Or, “Move this vehicle to the left side of the road, put it in park, and wait for further instructions.”

• If, during the encounter, something went terribly wrong and the officer used deadly force, there would have been an investigation.

• Federal officials in the officer’s chain of command would have said some version of, “There is an ongoing investigation and we will comment once we have all of the facts about this tragedy.”

• The nation’s political leadership would have responded with empathy and calls for calm, forbearance, and unity.

To understand why we don’t live in a world like that we need to talk about Ashli Babbitt, January 6th, and the right’s reaction to her killing.

So let’s start with this: Was Ashli Babbitt a “domestic terrorist”?

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MANY OF US HAVE BEEN raising hue and cry about the irreversible damage Donald Trump has wreaked on the economy. Tariffs! Corporate shakedowns! Destruction of research institutions! Deletion of data! Politicization of the Federal Reserve! Alienation of our allies! Socialization of private companies!

And of course, the collapse of the rule of law.

All of these things should be terrible for the U.S. economy, especially in the long term. And yet to date, the stock market has seemingly shrugged it all off.

In fact, markets look somewhat ebullient. In 2025, the S&P 500 grew a solid 16 percent—far better than the average year, and better than many forecasts, particularly in the wake of Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs.

So what’s going on? Why aren’t investors pricing in all these risks?

Some of it may be that they believe there’s a huge, sustainable Trump boom just around the corner. It didn’t come by the end of 2025, but perhaps it’ll arrive this quarter . . . or next quarter . . . or the end of 2026, per the latest goalpost-moving forecasts from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

But there are other ways to interpret what’s going on. None of them are particularly assuring:

1. U.S. markets actually aren’t doing that great, when compared to our global competitors.

2. The lion’s share of growth here in the United States—in both financial markets and hard economic data—is driven by a single sector: AI . . .

3. . . . which looks an awful lot like a bubble right now.

I find these explanations to be more persuasive than the hope that a new economic golden age is about to dawn. And to understand why, it’s worth recapping why you should worry about the long-term damage from Trump’s policies in the first place.

LET’S START WITH something that should go without saying: Democracy and the rule of law are good for their own sake. But they also matter quite a bit to the U.S. economy.

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A Shot in the Arm

by Andrew Egger

So “No Kings” 2 has come and gone. It was a joyous—er, frabjous—day, as Bill notes. It was a peaceful day, with millions of people in the streets and no significant outbreaks of violence. It was a patriotic day, giving the lie to ridiculous MAGA rhetoric about crowds chock-full of America-hating terrorists.

But it was still only one day.

The marchers have gone home, and Donald Trump remains a president hell-bent on maximizing his own personal power, delivering retribution against his enemies, and bestowing gifts upon his supporters (congrats, George Santos!).

Even amid the joy of the marches, the grim sense of how much we’ve already lost was hard to miss on Saturday. Popping in on smaller protests across northern Virginia, I talked to multiple federal workers who were nervous about appearing on camera, fearing they’d be fired if it got out that they’d come. Ten months—that’s how long it’s taken Donald Trump to rewrite the rulebook to make American citizens fear state retribution for First Amendment–protected political expression.

And yet, there they were, protesting anyway.

Some people have scoffed at such courage as empty posturing. One ordinarily smart GOP strategist I know tweeted yesterday that “the problem with these protests from an action standpoint is that they don’t have an ‘ask’ beyond ‘we would like a democrat to be president instead.’ They are not marching for any legislation (see civil rights protests) or the end of a war (see vietnam, iraq, etc).”

This is nonsense. The “No Kings” protests had one specific and concrete aim: breaking the mirage of Donald Trump’s supposed mass popular mandate. As Trump has launched his all-out war on our structures and institutions, as well as on the checks and balances of our government, he has argued he is justified in doing so because he alone, as the winner of the last presidential election, is the vessel of the popular will. Constraints on anything he might happen to want to do, he says again and again, aren’t constraints on him—they’re intolerable constraints on what the American people elected him to do.

It’s a powerful argument, one designed to sap the fortitude of anyone who might oppose him. It’s a key part of why so many institutions have bent the knee in recent months without a fight. But it’s a lie. MAGA is an organized mass movement, but it is far from a majoritarian movement. An organized resistance, if it can get organized, could dwarf Trump’s cult in sheer size. MAGA put people in the streets around the country for its Stop the Steal rallies in 2020 and 2021; it even summoned enough firepower to sack the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. But it never put millions of people in motion. Trump’s naked greed for wealth and power, his cruelty, his obscenity, his stupidity, his childishness, his arrogance—all these have galvanized the opposition as never before in recent U.S. history. That’s what “No Kings” was about.

Of course, Trump, safely ensconced in his media and personnel bubble, won’t see mass opposition in the streets and decide it’d be prudent to slow down his authoritarian project for a bit, if for nothing else than to take the heat off. I’d be shocked if anyone around him has seen fit to give him any true information about the size and scope of the protest. Even if he got it, it isn’t in Trump’s nature to take constructive criticism. Libs in the streets shouting “no kings” just makes him drool for the scepter all the more.

His troops are in the streets. His immigration dragnets are scooping up citizens and migrants alike. He seems perfectly unconcerned about carrying on without congressional funding for anything in government—he’s just keeping the money spigots he cares most about turned on anyway. Every day he krazy-glues more bric-à-brac to the wall of the Oval Office and sticks another rhinestone in his crown.

We’re in this for the long haul, so buckle up. “No Kings” showed you aren’t resisting alone.

O Frabjous Day!

by William Kristol

You might think that I’m too old and too experienced—dare one say, too jaundiced—to have been moved by the “No Kings” protests. To be honest, I rather doubted I’d really be moved by them.

But moved I was. And as we milled around in the party atmosphere in “downtown” McLean—with inflatable characters prancing and witty signs waving and drivers’ horns honking—I thought of these lines from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky,” in Through the Looking Glass:

“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

Carroll apparently invented the portmanteau “frabjous” as a combination of “fabulous” and “joyous.” The mood in McLean—and apparently pretty much everywhere else on Saturday—was certainly joyous. And it was fabulous that some seven million people assembled peacefully and patriotically to protest Donald Trump and reaffirm their allegiance to the American idea.

That idea was nowhere better stated than by Thomas Paine in Common Sense: “For as in absolute governments the King is Law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

That was the idea that animated “No Kings.” On Saturday, the American people assembled lawfully on behalf of the rule of law. On Saturday, the American people demonstrated their commitment to keeping this a free country. Mike Johnson and all his fellow pro-Kings propagandists hoped for violence, extremism, and evidence of hate for America. But instead they saw peace, patriotism, and loyalty to America.

It was a frabjous day.

It was also an appropriately sober one. Those with whom I spoke on Saturday know there’s a long struggle ahead against the sustained attack on our freedom by those in charge. They understand that defeating this assault won’t be easy. So Saturday featured an unusual and impressive combination of joy and sobriety.

It all seems to have made Donald Trump very unhappy. I won’t dwell on the bizarre AI-generated video with a crown-wearing Trump flying over and dumping excrement on Americans. Nor will I speculate, as a friend suggested to me, whether this was a “textbook example of disinhibition—a key symptom of dementia” on Trump’s part.

But I will note that Trump does seem bothered by the obvious success of No Kings Day. His response was to lash out and double down on authoritarianism. In a Sunday morning interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump asserted, “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act. And that’s unquestioned power.” And late that afternoon, in a press gaggle on Air Force One, after claiming the No Kings protests were “very small, very ineffective,” he returned to his favorite thought: “I’m allowed as you know as president [to use] the Insurrection Act. Everybody agrees you’re allowed to use that and there are no more court cases, there is no more anything. We’re trying to do it in a nicer manner, but we can always use the Insurrection Act.”

It would indeed be a dangerous escalation if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act. But as Andy Craig, a fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies and a writer for the Unpopulist, points out:

The Insurrection Act does nothing except you can then use soldiers as cops. They can enforce laws, but they’re the same old laws. It doesn’t suspend the Constitution. No martial law, no closing courts, no removing state officials, none of that. . . . It means you can use the military to enforce federal laws, but the laws themselves remain the same.

Further expansion of the use of the military within the United States would of course be a bad thing. But the Insurrection Act doesn’t do away with the Constitution and the laws. It won’t accomplish what Trump’s fevered fantasy imagines.

We’ve gone pretty far through the looking glass in Donald Trump’s America. But Saturday gave me increased hope that the Constitution and the law will hold. It helped me look forward to a time when Trump shuffles off the scene and Trumpism has been decisively defeated. That will be a truly frabjous day.

• In a matter of hours, the administration pressured ABC into sidelining Jimmy Kimmel for saying things Trump didn’t like. This capitulation was after ABC paid off Trump for one of his sham lawsuits.

• Now Trump and his allies are talking about doing the same thing to other shows, and saying they’ll “go after” journalists who report critically on them.

• Paramount canceled Stephen Colbert to appease Trump and grease the skids for its merger. And it’s reportedly preparing to hand over CBS News to people who think “woke” kids at Oberlin are a bigger threat than the authoritarian takeover of the federal government.

• The Washington Post is in the throes of a full-scale MAGAfication, purging dissenting voices and drifting more and more toward shameless Trump apologia.

• Facebook and Twitter have gone MAGA, with Zuckerberg promising to bring “masculine energy” back to his platform and Musk turning Twitter into a full-blown white-power conspiracy machine.

But don’t worry—it gets worse.

Just today we got official word that TikTok (the social media platform that dominates the attention of teens in America) is being gobbled up by a consortium of MAGA-friendly tech oligarchs in a deal that Trump engineered through a process that was a flagrant violation of federal law.

This is a full-blown authoritarian takeover of the dominant information streams through which most Americans get their news today.

The Bulwark was founded as an explicitly pro-democracy media company. We built ourselves with the express intention of being able to resist this pressure—in this moment.

We don’t have billionaire owners whose other businesses are susceptible to government pressure. We don’t have corporate conglomerates telling us what we can or can’t say. We don’t have MAGA-brained tech oligarchs buying us out.

We have you. This company belongs to our community. Full-stop. And it’s the community’s support that makes us strong.

The support of Bulwark+ members is what allows us to tell you what we really think, even if that sometimes gets us into trouble, and even if we disagree among ourselves. The community’s support lets us ignore the both-sides nonsense.

As we watch Old Media crash and burn around us, it’s clear how vital independent media is going to be in this era. No one’s coming to save us. The Post, ABC, and CBS won’t fight authoritarianism. We will.

One of the lessons of history is that when authoritarianism is ascendant, the only media you can trust is the media you build yourselves. And only a community has the power to build truly independent media.

If you’re with us, here’s my ask: Join the Bulwark+ community today for a 14-day free trial.

Join Bulwark+ Now: 14-Day Free Trial

Everything we do is possible because of our members—real people who care about democracy and who are willing to stand up and build something new. Before it’s too late.

This is the time. Come ride with us.

Sarah Longwell

Publisher, The Bulwark

Murder is wrong. The murder of Charlie Kirk was wrong. One should not even have to say this obvious truth, but we live in a time when “the restatement of the obvious,” as George Orwell wrote, is our “first duty.”

Charlie Kirk was a controversial public figure, with admirers and critics. I was a critic. I remain critical of much that he said and did. And—I do not say but, I say and—I denounce his killing without equivocation or reservation, and offer condolences to his family and friends.

There are too many murders in today’s America. A month ago, another young man was taken from us, also in his early thirties, also with a wife and two young children. His name was David Rose.

David Rose was the DeKalb County police officer who rushed to the Centers for Disease Control campus in Atlanta when employees there were under attack from a gunman who believed he had been poisoned by the COVID-19 vaccine. David Rose had served as a Marine in Afghanistan, and then decided to serve here at home in law enforcement.

When he graduated from the police academy this past March, Rose, as the class leader, addressed the graduates and guests. “From the very first day,” he said, “we learned that policing isn’t just about enforcing the law. It’s about protecting the vulnerable, standing for justice, and being the person who runs towards danger when others run away.”

David Rose ran towards danger, and gave his life in doing so.

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Officer Rose received some well deserved recognition at the time of his death, though not as much it seemed to me as was warranted. For example, so far as I can tell, President Trump never praised him by name or called his family to offer condolences.

But it’s a free country. And while we all agree that murder is wrong, we won’t all agree about which of our fellow citizens deserve special notice or public praise, either in life or in death. Charlie Kirk was a prominent participant in our public discourse, and an important ally of our current president. So it’s natural that his shocking and awful death has been the focus of so much attention. And not just here in the United States. The man who comes as close as anyone to being Vladimir Putin’s court philosopher, the fascist polemicist Alexander Dugin, weighed in with an essay: “Who Killed Charlie Kirk? From Utah to Ukraine: one global war.”

But let us leave the deplorable Dugin aside. Yesterday was a day on which we Americans quite properly considered the life and legacy of Charlie Kirk. But it was also September 11. One’s thoughts turned to those who were killed on that terrible day. But September 11, 2001, was a day not just of tragedy but of heroism. And so one remembered also those who, in New York and Washington and aboard Flight 93, ran heroically toward danger. And my thoughts turned also to David Rose, who volunteered to try to prevent another such attack on our country, and then, when back home, ran toward danger once again to help his fellow Americans.

“Let us now praise famous men,” as the old saying goes. Let us also praise men like David Rose.

[This essay first appeared in the September 11 edition of the Morning Shots newsletter.]