Trump’s Troop Deployments: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Plus: What You Missed This Week From The Bulwark

Happy Saturday! Overtime is for everyone. If you’re a Bulwark+ member: thank you. If you’re not, there’s no better time to subscribe to Bulwark+ than today. If you like today’s issue, you can share this newsletter with someone you think would value it.

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Don’t Expect Trump to Give Up on Deploying Troops Into American Cities

It Was a Bad Year for the American Military

Scoop: ICE Plans to Descend on Phoenix

When It Comes to Race, Vivek Ramaswamy Is No Moral Leader

How I Failed Escapism 101

The Bulwark on Sunday

Join Bill Kristol and Sarah Longwell as they share their thoughts on possible paths 2026 could take—from a democratic rebound to a far darker slide. The Bulwark on Sunday will start at 9:30 AM Eastern. You can watch on [Substack] or [YouTube] and if you miss it, we’ll post it afterwards!

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MAGA Intellectuals Under the Microscope

The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell

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🚨OVERTIME🚨

Happy Saturday! I was wearing some Bulwark gear at the children’s museum in Indianapolis yesterday and, thanks to that, got to meet a fellow Bulwark member! If you’re looking for an easy way to put The Bulwark out into the world, wearing the merch definitely does the trick. (Just be prepared to talk about it!)

A crowd showed up for a midnight New Year’s Eve fireworks show... It never came. A depressing USA Today story on how AI and social media duped a bunch of would-be fun seekers. A bad omen‽

To understand the Christian right, learn the history of the postwar Christian left... Historian Gene Zubovich joins Matthew Sheffield at FLUX to talk about how liberal Protestants built an America that the radical right has been trying to destroy.

It ain’t Somalis scamming everyday Ohioans... D.J. Byrnes of The Rooster writes about how an Ohio Republican/right-wing ecosystem tried to manufacture a Somali daycare scandal in the Buckeye State, but Gov. DeWine and reality pushed back before it could fully take hold.

2025 Is Finally Over—But Not Soon Enough... Adrian Nguyen leads a conversation with Matt Labash about MAGA media catfights and why they deserve each other, our stuck culture, Drudge as the new Philip K. Dick, AI cannibalism, what inspires us, and much more....

‘To the Wild Sky,’ &c... A New Year’s Day column from Jay Nordlinger with poetry, music, jokes, and so on.

Discussion Prompt: Taking stock of 2025, what’s one thing you from it you’re definitely keeping around in 2026?¹

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.

1. For me, it was skateboarding with my kids. They wanted to get into it! I swear! (Whispers: I enjoy it more than they do.)