In August, a day after Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for president, a conservative-against-conservative argument erupted on social media. Steve Hayes, the editor and CEO of The Dispatch, called out his fellow conservatives for “fluffing” the progressive Harris and “embracing” the “nutty” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “What a mess the modern conservative movement is,” he sighed.
The pile-on was swift.
Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, was first. “Honestly, what are you talking about Steve?” she wrote. The problem with the conservative movement, she said, was the capitulation to Donald Trump, not the opposition against him. Hayes shot back: “It’s possible to oppose Trump without lionizing Kamala, right?” Longwell objected. “Watching your tedious rationalizations about why you’ll stand on the sidelines instead of taking a stand against the worst threat to American ideals in our lifetimes has been so deeply disappointing,” she wrote.
They went back and forth, as others chimed in. Tom Nichols, one of Longwell’s employees at The Bulwark, attempted to play peacemaker. He and his fellow never-Trumpers “come from the same church,” he suggested, “but different pews.”
Three months later, the debate enters a new phase. Efforts to keep Trump from office failed, and for the next four years, those who wished to build a post-Trump conservative movement must now resort to the role of conservative critics of a Republican White House.
It is somewhere they’ve been before. Hayes’ and Longwell’s publications both spawned during Trump’s first term, serving as something of a haven to Trump-averse conservatives. They centered a niche corner of the conservative media market, alongside anti-Trump political action committees — like the Lincoln Project — that expanded into podcasting and YouTube, and a string of avowed never-Trump columnists on the pages of major newspapers.
As Trump returns to the White House, they face a new question: Is there still room for Trump-skeptical conservative media?
Uncertain path forward
The path forward is unclear, said Matt Lewis, a conservative opinion columnist for The Hill. “I think there’s a lot more fear now,” he said. There used to be more acceptance of the idea you could be a conservative and disagree with the Republican Party, he explained. “Now, I think, there really is a sense of ‘you’re with us, or you’re against us.’”
Trump’s initial rise in 2016 was accompanied by a near-instantaneous takeover of the conservative media. At the time, Jonah Goldberg — then a columnist at National Review — compared it to a remake of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” where conservative pundit after pundit acquiesced to Trump. That was before Trump entered the White House; afterward, the process only hastened. The conservative media was “pulled by a tractor beam” — Trump’s supporters — “that demands positive coverage of the president regardless of how far he wanders from the ideas they once enforced,” Eliana Johnson wrote for Politico. “Producers and editors have been faced with a choice: Provide that coverage or lose your audience.”
A precious few decided to gamble for another audience. After the Weekly Standard shuttered in 2019, its top brass gathered up other never-Trumpers and formed a pair of offshoots: Bill Kristol, Longwell and Charlie Sykes started The Bulwark, and Hayes and Goldberg started The Dispatch.
By most measures, the gamble has paid off. The Bulwark was one of “the breakout media successes of the 2024 election,” Semafor’s Max Tani reported, thanks to a massive surge in popularity on its YouTube channel: in September 2023, the channel had 50,000 subscribers; now, it has over 800,000. And The Dispatch now has over 45,000 paying subscribers — plus 600,000 free subscribers — on its email list, Hayes said.
In an email to readers Monday, Hayes acknowledged his publication faces a new challenge ahead. “Though the incoming president is the very same man who held the office when we first launched, we’re looking at a very different Washington,” he wrote.
Hayes’ approach to covering that Washington, though, is unchanged, he told me. “There’s a temptation, I think, by some across the media to sort of put on a jersey — a Joe Biden jersey, or a Kamala Harris jersey — or become sort of part of the formal political Trump opposition,” he said. “That was very much not what we do. We are a media outlet. We want to be doing journalism. We don’t see ourselves as political activists.” Putting on “blue jerseys or red jerseys,” he said, “gets you quickly to a point where that erodes trust in journalism in general.”
His plan for a second Trump term is straightforward: “We’re going to report the heck out of it,” he said.
After Trump won, The Bulwark has doubled down on reporting, too: This week alone, the outlet scooped stories about Trump’s private conversations with Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Kash Patel’s problematic appearances. The publication is driven by more overt activism, Matt Lewis noted: “A lot of the prominent people at The Bulwark come from party activism,” he said. Longwell still runs a polling and consulting business, which shares Washington office space with the publication; Tim Miller, the outlet’s breakout YouTube star, is an alumnus of Jon Huntsman Jr.’s and Jeb Bush’s presidential campaigns. The duo told Semafor they split time in 2020 between The Bulwark and attempting to recruit a Republican primary challenger to Trump. Longwell was not available for an interview; Miller did not respond to multiple emails.
The two publications march forward in a media environment that could see a decrease of conservatives willing to challenge Trump. “I think that some percentage of Trump critics will find other work,” Lewis said, pointing to Trump’s calls for retribution and his labeling the media “human scum” and “the enemy within.”
Hayes is unfazed. “We think that we can give people this well-rounded analysis … of what’s happening in Washington,” he said, “at a time when you can make an argument that Washington has never been more confusing.”