The Trump administration’s posture toward the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz gets more confusing by the day. Over the weekend, the White House was adamant that Operation Epic Fury had wrapped up and a new project to reopen the strait, Project Freedom, was now underway—a transparent effort to dodge the sixty-day deadline for Congress to authorize the conflict. Now, however, the White House is backing away even from its nascent Project Freedom: Yesterday, Trump announced on Truth Social that the project “will be paused for a short period of time” to find out whether a deal is finally possible with Iran. Happy Wednesday.
Mark Hertling and Ben Parker are going live on Substack and YouTube at noon eastern time for a an episode of Command Post on the ongoing operation(s?) in Iran and the boneheaded withdrawal of American troops from Germany.
Cheer Up, It’s Still May!
by William Kristol
Last Friday, in what several readers pointed out was an uncharacteristically upbeat moment, I wrote, “Cheer up. It’s May.”
Well, I don’t want to shock anyone, but I’m going to double down on the uncharacteristic upbeatness. And I think I have pretty good reason to do so. In a special election yesterday for an open seat in the Michigan State Senate in the Saginaw and Bay City area, the Democratic candidate, firefighter and Marine veteran Chedrick Greene, won and won easily. In the previous state senate contest in the district, in 2022, the Democratic candidate’s margin had been less than seven points. In 2024, Kamala Harris carried the district by less than one point. Yesterday, in a race in which both parties invested heavily, Greene romped by twenty points.
So the past year’s trend of notable Democratic overperformance continued, this time in a mostly working-class district in a swing state. The result certainly seems to bode well for November. So Democrats are happy this morning.
But so is President Trump.
In Republican primary elections across Indiana, Trump-backed challengers deposed five Republican state senators who had helped block his wished-for gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts. A sixth race was too close to call. And the incumbents who lost were conservative Republicans, albeit of a more traditional type.
The only real issue in the races was loyalty to Trump. As NBC News noted, in central Indiana’s District 41, for example, where Trump-backed candidate Michelle Davis challenged a 20-year incumbent, one ad from American Leadership PAC on behalf of Davis mentioned Trump’s name four times in fifteen seconds. Davis won, 59 percent to 41 percent.
So Trump is happy, putting up celebratory posts on Truth Social. He’ll be happier still if he succeeds ten days from now in knocking off incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) in the GOP primary, and then if Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) goes down to defeat three days later, on May 19. The first result seems likely, the second quite possible.
But Trump’s joy at once again driving all dissenters from his ranks should be short-lived. If he’s successful, the Republican party will be even more completely and totally his party. Which, given his steadily increasing unpopularity, will presumably further increase the likelihood of voters turning to Democratic candidates for both the House and Senate this November in order to check Trump.
So Democrats have reasons to be happy, too. It’s too bad that decent Indiana Republicans who stood up to Trump have to suffer in the process. But that’s the choice of the Republican primary electorate, and the only solution for now is an even bigger Republican defeat in November.
The issue on which Indiana Republicans wanted their representatives to go along with Trump was partisan redistricting. Last night’s results will supercharge efforts in Southern states to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to gerrymander themselves. It’s true that this may help Republicans pick up a few more Southern House seats this year.
On the other hand, this whole effort should serve to remind voters across the nation of how much is at stake this November. I suspect whatever individual House seats Republicans pick up in redistricting could pale by comparison to the effects of a further nationalization and Trumpification of the 2026 election cycle. Here too, the worse the GOP looks, the better prospects will look for Democrats. And, for now at least, the better things will look for democracy.
I’ll add that the impression that the Republican party is ever more thoroughly Trump’s party will surely be reinforced by the Senate Republicans including $1 billion for Trump’s ballroom in their reconciliation bill, likely to pass on a purely partisan vote later this month.
And the rest of the money in the reconciliation bill—about $71 billion worth—is of course for immigration enforcement. On that topic, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said yesterday that “You ain’t seen shit yet. This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming.” The administration, Homan assured us, will “flood the zone” with immigration officers, and Homan acknowledged that we’ll see not just the arrest of people with criminal records, “You will see collateral arrests increase in these areas.” Polling on the issue of the mass deportation of law-abiding immigrants suggests this too should be widely unpopular.
This is to say nothing about the fact that it looks increasingly likely that Trump’s grand “excursion” into the Middle East will end in humiliating failure.
So 2026 is going to be a rough year for this country, for the rule of law, for our well-being at home, and for our standing abroad. We’re going to have to try to mitigate that damage as best we can. And it’s going to be a rough year for decent people left in the Republican party.
But the compensation will be if November brings not merely a Democratic wave but a full-scale tsunami. That would give us real grounds for hope for the prospect of freeing the nation—and perhaps ultimately the Republican party as well—of the curse of Trumpism.
De-Vancification at ISI?
by Joshua Tait
A conservative think tank that was rebranding itself around JD Vance style pugnaciousness is parting ways with its controversial president.
John A. Burtka IV, better known as Johnny, has resigned as president of the conservative think tank the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The Delaware-based operation was founded in 1953, and its first president was none other than William F. Buckley Jr. It aimed to bring the conservative gospel to college students, networking them together as a band of brothers against liberalism. Over nearly eight decades, ISI developed a reputation for a bookish but socially conservative brand of conservatism. Burtka changed that.
Under his leadership, ISI tilted toward an edgier, post-liberal identity, and, according to critics, a “no enemies to the right” ethos.
Not everyone was impressed. Last November, two ISI board members urged the board to fire Burtka, saying he had—behind the board’s back—dropped ISI’s educational project to focus on hard-right podcasting with Burtka at the center and Vance as the willing figurehead of their new agenda. One of Burtka’s first guests on his podcast was neoreactionary blowhard Curtis Yarvin.
To old-fashioned conservatives, “the battle for the heart and soul of the American Conservative Movement” has long been waged inside foundations and think tanks. But in this case, though, Burtka may have been done in by something other than ideology. In the wake of the announcement, a former board member tweeted: “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.” ISI did not respond to a request for comment.
According to an announcement authored by ISI’s chairman of the Board of Trustees, Mark C. Henrie, and seen by The Bulwark, Burtka resigned “after careful personal and professional discernment.” Burtka, the announcement read, “feels called to a new chapter in his career, one that he hopes will more explicitly engage the role of faith in renewing Western Civilization.”
We suspect—with like-minded conservatives fleeing from there—Burtka won’t be moving to Hungary.
—Joshua Tait is a historian of American conservatism. His book on the conservative intellectual movement is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Man Behind the Tattoo… SARAH LONGWELL explains what Maine Democrats see in Graham Platner through the findings of her focus group.
MAGA Weirdos Are Hunting Random People Again… On Bulwark Takes, TIM MILLER and WILL SOMMER give their take on the Libs of TikTok’s latest campaign targeting a Louisiana doctor and the disturbing evolution of the account growing into right-wing influencer operation.
Reclaim the Constitution... On the Flagship pod, MELISSA MURRAY joins TIM MILLER to discuss how Trump, SCOTUS, and Congress are warping constitutional limits on government power.
Quick Hits
LET’S JUST DO IT AND BE LEGENDS: Apparently, neither the hundreds of millions in dollars Donald Trump has solicited from private parties for his ballroom nor the $1 billion in taxpayer money he’s now asking Congress to pitch in has any cash earmarked for safe disposal of the rubble of the old East Wing. The administration has been simply dumping debris at a public D.C. golf course, East Potomac Golf Links. Yesterday, the AP reported that that debris—which is “so prevalent that it causes golfers to detour around piles of it”—has tested positive for a host of toxic substances, including lead, chromium, PCBs, and petroleum byproducts.
The White House denies there’s a problem: The soil “was tested multiple times, by multiple parties,” an Interior Department spokesperson told the AP, “and this project passed all standards set by law.”
Perhaps the most bizarre thing about the story is that East Potomac Golf Links is the site of another of Trump’s little hobby projects: He is simultaneously elbowing in to seize control of the course from its current managing body, the National Links Trust, in order to overhaul it from an affordable municipal course to a “championship” course. Maybe he can start by clearing away all the toxic metals he put there.
NOT TRIANGULATING: You might expect that an administration this unpopular would cool it on some of the more pointlessly authoritarian stuff. You’d be wrong. On Saturday, the New York Times reports, the State Department revoked the visas of most of the board members for La Nación, Costa Rica’s leading newspaper. Why? Apparently because the paper had done reporting on a sexual harassment investigation into Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves, a Trump ally:
The newspaper said the move was “unprecedented.” The visa decision appeared to be part of a larger strategy by the White House to punish its critics and reward its allies, analysts said.
“In the absence of any explanation for this decision or objective reasons to support it, only one conclusion can be drawn: Its purpose has been to punish La Nación’s editorial stance,” the newspaper said in an editorial on Monday.
“Applying such a measure to nearly the entire board of a media outlet is unprecedented in our history,” it added. “In fact, we are not aware of any similar cases in other democratic countries.”
The State Department declined to comment. Read the whole thing.
EXPLAIN YOURSELF, VIGILGOER: Speaking of not cooling it on the authoritarian stuff: After Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti was killed in January by Border Patrol officers, VA employees around the country held vigils to honor his memory. For that, CNN reports, a number of vigil attendees were probed by federal investigators:
Becky Halioua, a recreational therapist and union leader at the Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia, said she felt “it was important to acknowledge him, as a brother of our organization.”
“It’s scary for me to think about a fellow VA employee being murdered by the same government that they work for,” Halioua told local TV station WRDW, a CNN affiliate, at the time. “That’s terrifying for me.”
Then Halioua learned she was under investigation by that same government. Her supervisor informed her that an internal probe had been launched into whether she violated agency rules regarding employee interviews with the news media, a probe that could result in disciplinary action.
Halioua is not alone, several sources familiar with the matter told CNN. At least three other VA employees have been investigated for their interactions with the press, including at least one other related to Alex Pretti, according to one of the sources.
As part of her investigation, Halioua says investigators emailed her photos of herself at the vigil from news coverage, which also included a brief interaction with a local newspaper. Someone had drawn a line around her image in some photographs, labeled with her name.
Cheap Shots
They want us exhausted and giving up. I refuse to do that. I am simply unwilling to give up our 250 year old experiment to a guy who wears orange makeup and doesn’t even take stairs.
We all work together this November to show the GOP that even trying to rig the game mid game will not work.
And no ballroom. Ever.
Bill: "It’s too bad that decent Indiana Republicans who stood up to Trump have to suffer in the process. But that’s the choice of the Republican primary electorate, and the only solution for now is an even bigger Republican defeat in November."
How many of these "decent Indiana Republicans" voted for Trump in 2024?