How ‘Never Trump’ Republicans built a profitable media company by turning on their cameras

• The Bulwark is an anti-Trump media company that’s found success on Substack, where it’s on track to do more than $12 million a year.
• More recently, it’s also gotten a huge boost from YouTube, says CEO Sarah Longwell.
• I talked to Longwell about her company’s evolution — and which politicians are taking advantage of an evolving media landscape.

In some ways, The Bulwark feels like other small publishers in 2025: It’s finding growth and profit by pushing itself out on any platform it can find.

But that wasn’t the plan when the company started in 2018. Back then, it was a nonprofit cofounded by Republicans who couldn’t stand their party’s embrace of Donald Trump, and wanted a place to organize, debate, and push back.

Over the years, the site turned itself into a for-profit and found success selling Substack subscriptions — it’s currently on pace to do more than $12 million a year from those alone, says CEO Sarah Longwell. But it has really caught fire in recent years by embracing YouTube.

“The thing that made the biggest difference was when we decided to turn the cameras on,” she says.

I talked to Longwell this week about The Bulwark’s evolution, and the tension between running a mission-driven company and one that wants to make money. And since Longwell still does political consulting and focus group work, I also talked to her about the state of the art when it comes to political media — and why she thinks Republicans are so much better at it than Democrats.

You can hear our entire conversation on my Channels podcast; edited excerpts of our conversation are below.

Peter Kafka: You were doing newsletters and podcasts early on. What got you into video more recently?

Sarah Longwell: We had gone through the pandemic and had nice, steady growth. We would do our podcasts in our pajamas, drinking coffee.

And we were like, “Oh, if we turn the cameras on, I’m gonna have to put on makeup, I’m gonna have to blow dry my hair. This is a nightmare.”

So we were all a little resistant to it. But Barry, one of our producers, was like, “You guys gotta do YouTube. Gotta turn it on.”

And the other thing we saw is how much our main Bulwark podcast, if you just put the raw audio on YouTube, was also doing pretty big numbers.

So we just said, “You know what? Let’s make a real push into YouTube. Everybody’s turning their cameras on, do your best on the visuals, but it doesn’t have to be fancy. “

What changed once you did that?

I can’t tell you the shift that it made. In visibility —like, literal visibility, but also just the scale of visibility. It opened us up to an entirely new audience — the audience on YouTube that consumes political content, which is massive. We were pretty surprised to find out how many people, not even young people, but older people, how much they were starting to transition away from watching traditional news on their televisions and watching YouTube on TV.

Can a political YouTube channel be a stand-alone business? Or is it always going to be an augment to your core business, and reaching more people on YouTube is good because they eventually become Substack subscribers?

So that last part — no.

One of the reasons we’ve been successful is that we made a choice to make each platform a delivery mechanism to reach new audiences. We want to meet people where they are on YouTube, on Substack, on Apple podcasts.

I think the bigger challenge is, how do you tie it all together?

You are a for-profit media company. Are you profitable?

We are.

You are also a mission-driven company. Do those things ever come into conflict?

You do have to balance. We are mission first, though.

Here’s the No. 1 way that it comes into tension: If we wanted to make a lot more money, we would paywall everything.

If you look at most of the people who are kind of in our genre, they paywall tons of things. The vast majority of our content we give away for free. Because for us, influence matters. And that influence only comes from people being able to access you.

So our appeal to people to become subscribers is not like, “Here, get this piece of content you desperately need.” It’s “Hey, we’re trying to build something that is mission-oriented.”

So if you become a subscriber, it’s less about what you get and more about riding with us, being part of our community, helping us build and get bigger, helping us reach more people who are getting the free content.

You cannot save democracy from behind a paywall.

You’re a professional media person and a professional political person. Who in politics is doing a good job with media right now?

Republicans are straight-up mercenaries. And they understand how to be everywhere, all at once. It’s a comms strategy I endorse and live by.

And so to the extent that Democrats … look, there’s been a lot of discourse about this postelection. Everybody agrees that Kamala Harris’ play-it-safe strategy — not being out in the media and not doing every single podcast — was a big part of the problem.

Now people are used to engaging with anyone through the screens of their phones in a way that [they believe] that person is being more or less exactly who they are. And as a result, the stiffness of a politician comes through. People read it now. They can see the practiced nature.

In focus groups, I know that someone dislikes a politician when they’ll say, “I don’t know. That person sounds like a regular politician.”

People throw around the word “authenticity.” But they just mean “I don’t trust that person. I don’t think they’re giving it to me straight. I wanna hear somebody talk to me straight.”

And I think that is the future, because as technology progresses and we see lots more AI slop and everything else, people are going to be like, “What do I know is true? What feels honest, what feels like something I can relate to?”

That parasocial relationship with people that you feel like you can trust, who are being real with you, is going to become more and more the coin of the realm.

Do you think Republicans are inherently better at this than Democrats? Did they become better?

They’re better. Here’s why: The big grievance among those of us on the right for decades was that we were locked out of mainstream media. That the media and the universities were dominated culturally by the left.

So what did the right do? They went and built their own media ecosystem, first with Fox News. And they built other cable channels. They were just there first, like because they felt shut out from the dominant thing. So they had the tools and the infrastructure way earlier than the Democrats.

But you’re talking about the delivery apparatus, not the mode and tone of how you appear. Until recently, if I watched a Republican politician on Fox News, they looked like and sounded like a politician.

It’s the Donald Trump effect. Of him tweeting, and at first, everybody’s like, “You can’t do that! He’s just tweeting out policy! He’s got to stop!”

And instead, now everybody else is like, “I’m gonna tweet out my policy.” Because they embraced him, they also embraced his communication style.

Which is why when Gavin Newsom does his performance art, as though he’s Trump? Everyone knows that’s fake. Everyone knows it’s a parody because Democrats don’t talk like that.

Donald Trump talks like that. And obviously, lots of other Republicans don’t do exactly what Trump does. In fact, it’s not really working for people when they try to be just like Trump.

JD Vance is a good example of somebody who has a totally different communication style from Trump. But he’s a shitposter on the internet. He engages with people. Goes back and forth, has fights with them. He goes on every single podcast that exists. He talks about his life openly.

When people said they felt like they didn’t trust or know Kamala Harris, it’s because you need to be able to sit for three hours and let people be like, “I want the real measure of you. I won’t absorb you in sound bites.”

Does this just become the dominant political playbook and everyone ends up doing this? Or is this a wave and then we overreact to it and then we move on to something else?

The answer is a little bit of both. Democrats have tried to solve this problem by making more videos, and everybody who looks at them are like, “Those are cringe. Those do not work.”

This goes to a deeper problem that the Democrats are experiencing on the communications front, which is they have to know what they believe.

The Republicans know what they believe. Donald Trump tells them what it is that they believe. Democrats have a long way to go before they figure it out [and can start saying] “I can sit down and talk about anything.”

There’s a couple people who do it well: Pete Buttigieg does it well. Mamdani is doing it well right now. AOC does it well. Oftentimes, people with whom I disagree on policy the most are some of the best communicators, because they know exactly what they believe.

Bernie Sanders, who’s a million years old, is very good on social media.

He just knows what he believes. You ask him a question, the guy knows exactly what he wants to say.

That is the Democrats’ biggest challenge: Figuring out not what the right message is, but what do you believe deeply? Just say it. Say it like you would say it if you were at dinner.