How Years of American Policy Bumbling Boosted Putin

Plus, big changes to Bulwark programming!

Mar 07, 2025

ANDREW EGGER, SAM STEIN, and WILL SELBER: Playing the Victimhood Long Game
JVL: All Media Will Be Forced to Choose 🔐
JOE PERTICONE: Knives Out: The United States Congress 🔐

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CASEY MICHEL: How Years of American Policy Bumbling Boosted Putin

JUST OVER THREE DECADES AGO, American policymakers faced a dilemma. A pair of new states, emerging from decades of Soviet rule, possessed massive nuclear arsenals. As American policymakers saw it, only one of these states should retain its nuclear arsenal—all the better, Washington thought, to prevent “loose nuclear weapons” from spilling outward. One of the states was busy consolidating a new nation, clearly angling for membership in multiple Western bodies. The other, however, had already exhibited shocking instability: ruling officials had ordered their military to shell opposing parliamentarians; other officials were prepping to launch a devastating war against a separate nation that had declared independence; some officials even floated the use of force to change borders across the entire region if neighboring nations didn’t do their bidding.

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NATALIA ANTONOVA: Ukrainians Are in Shock

WHEN I CONSIDER THE PLIGHT of Afghans who worked with U.S. forces in the past, I know in my heart that my country is perfectly capable of abandoning allies. Our bureaucrats and politicians are known to make deadly mistakes and inhuman decisions.
When it comes to the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine, however, the process cannot be attributed to a mistake—it is gleeful and openly malicious, and carries tremendous ramifications for the role of the United States in the world.

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🎥 PODCASTS AND VIDEOS 🎧

Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller: Neera Tanden and John Fetterman: They're Playing With People's Lives [YouTube: Tanden, Fetterman]
The Next Level: Trump's Economy In Peril [YouTube]
Bulwark+ Live:
Shield of the Republic: Is American Decline an Illusion?

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MICHAEL A. BAILEY and LEE DRUTMAN: Democrats Must Step Aside in Red States

THE CHAOS, INCOMPETENCE, AND CORRUPTION of the Trump administration threaten the American economy, rule of law, and way of life. The only way this ends is through elections.
Yet we face a hard fact: The Democratic party is failing as a national party. The brand is toxic in too many places. The chance that Democrats could win back a Senate majority within the next decade is vanishingly small. Simply counting on Republicans to mess up won’t save it.

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A Programming Note...

Happy Thursday, everyone. A programming announcement: This will be the last weekday Overtime you are getting.

We are moving Overtime to weekends, starting this Saturday. There, my focus will be to bring you the best of The Bulwark that you may have missed from the previous week—as opposed to a daily recap—as well as programming announcements, and everyone’s favorite potpourri miscellany. It will also be a chance for some analysis and commentary on late-breaking Friday night news, unhappily a regular feature of Trump 2.0.

And yes, there’ll be a lot of news to cover, but we’ll highlight The Bulwark’s strong cultural content, too, for sanity’s sake. “Man is by nature a political animal,” Aristotle rightly tells us, but there’s more to life than politics!

From the day we started The Bulwark, the newsletter that eventually became Overtime was The Bulwark’s daily recap newsletter. My section of links was first called “Read This Now.” There wasn’t a lot of original Bulwark content in those early days. I had to fill it with links to other stuff, and as many of us were getting to know each other, I used it to tell you about us, and in turn, I got to know a lot of you.

In our first year, when my Saint Louis Blues won their first and only Stanley Cup, we needed a name for the newsletter to set it apart from the others we were launching. The name Overtime will still fit on Saturdays as we’re all going to be working overtime for democracy. I’ll always look fondly back on that season and the early days of The Bulwark. Wild to think that it was about 1,600 issues and twenty new coworkers ago. That’s a lot of newsletters. Time flies!

Why the change? Overtime has always been a company newsletter: Its purpose is to promote our work and we’ve grown to the point where its evening prime real estate is needed for three new products. The two I can tell you about? I am excited about them:

The Opposition, by Lauren Egan

Charting the Democrats as they try to emerge from the political wilderness.

False Flag, by Will Sommer

Unparalleled reporting and insights into the online culture and right-wing conspiracies that now, more or less, run our country.

You’ll get these two new offerings automatically if you’re reading this email.

As for the third newsletter on its way? Unlike Rick Perry, I know it, but I can’t tell you anything . . . yet. But you’ll love it. Trust me!

A couple of other things worth mentioning. First, since The Bulwark now produces more content each day than an average reader can consume, I will be helping make sure that, going forward, our Morning Shots newsletter keeps you updated on our web content.

Second, we are also going to be ramping up our Chat feature on Substack. You do have to be a paid subscriber to participate: It really is the best way to keep a place troll free, but we’ve never turned down somebody because they can’t afford it. Our Founder’s Lounge has been very successful, and we’d like to create a version of that successful feature for other Bulwark subscribers, so I will be using our Chats to curate focused threads on the news of the day. I’ll also have an Overtime miscellany thread there—so the franchise isn’t going away.

And neither am I. You’ll see more original article writing, me in Morning Shots, and on Bulwark Takes. And, of course in email correspondence and in the comments.

Weekend Overtime is going to have comments. I can’t wait to see you there. And, as always, thanks for reading.

—Jim

🚨OVERTIME🚨

Happy Thursday! Remember! No Overtime tomorrow. It comes on Saturday now.

He’s About to Co-Lead the FBI…But First, a Word From His MAGA Show Sponsors (Mother Jones)

Room 101: A pro-Trump think tank memory holed a commentary item from the before times because a podcast host brought it up to correct the record.

Secretive D.C. Influence Project… Appears to Be Running a Group House for Right-Wing Lawmakers (ProPublica).

The Rad Trads vs. the Jesuits… Interim U.S. Attorney “Eagle” Ed Martin sent a bizarre letter to the dean of the Georgetown law school today, trying to get involved in its curriculum. Despite all publicly available evidence to the contrary, Martin is Jesuit educated. But there is no room for competing loyalty in MAGA, and the radical MAGA Catholics hate the Jesuits. Parking Eagle Ed in any government office building is intrinsic malfeasance, but parking him next to the Jesuit Legal Death Star and giving him legal powers is just too tempting.

Georgetown’s response: Bring it on. For the Greater Glory of God, Eagle Ed? I don’t think so. Resign.

The Wrong Man… How the U.S. Got the Abbey Gate Attack All Wrong (Abdul Rahman Rahmani and Will Selber, GCV)

Your feel good story of the day… Courtesy of Adam Kinzinger.

The *My Fellow Americans* exhibition in Los Angeles (Courtesy Tod Lippy)

My Fellow Americans… Artist and Bulwark+ member Tod Lippy has a new exhibition in Los Angeles that opens tomorrow through March 19. It’s portraits… of Trump voters, and an effort to understand what makes them tick.

Tod tells The Bulwark:

The idea for this series came to me the day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. As a lifelong Democrat, I was desperate to understand how a majority (however slim) of Americans could have voted for him.
I googled the phrase Why I voted for Trump and over the course of several days found 50 people who had publicly proclaimed their support, either in interviews with media outlets or in op-eds they had written for national and regional newspapers. I decided that I would paint portraits of each of these voters.
This was a revelatory process for me. For each portrait, I had to “get to know” the subject intimately—while at the same time learning how to paint, which I hadn't done before—and in that process, I discovered I was connecting with each person in a way that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to pull off otherwise in these hyper-polarized times. I personally think these people have made a grievous mistake enabling Trump to lead our country, but this series is really beyond my politics. It’s about bridging a divide that seems impossible to narrow in any other way, at least for now.

If you’re not out west, check out the series (turns out I personally know one of Tod’s subjects!) and details about the exhibition can be found here.

AOC Campaign Aide… Self-Deports to Colombia (Pablo Manríquez, Migrant Insider)

Pentagon deputy press secretary Kingsley Wilson… is a prolific purveyor of antisemitic conspiracy theories (Matthew Kassel, Jewish Insider)

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

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

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Mar 7

Hey folks, since Overtime is moving to Saturdays, we'll have comments on. Just remember the rules: 2/3 in "Kind, necessary, and true." If it misses the mark, it's gone.

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Victoria

I'm glad for the change, but wanted to say I really, really appreciate the recap in Overtime because it *is* really, really hard to keep up with everything. Overtime has been one of the very few that I feel is worth my time. Thank you!!

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