The Bulwark

Hwang Jung-min (left) and Jung Ho-yeon in Hope. (Courtesy Neon) HOPE IS A MOVIE THAT’S VERY COMFORTABLE with tossing audiences into the deep end and letting them sink or swim on their own. Writer-director Na Hong-jin never feels the need to stop and explain what’s going on; this is an admirable quality in a filmmaker, albeit one that leads to some real whiplash in this particular movie.

Sam Stein and Will Sumner riff on the upcoming GOP convention in Dallas, noting the striking number of Republicans skipping it—including senators in tough races—amid grumbling over a $25,000 lawmaker price tag. They dig into a strangely dull itinerary heavy on tax policy and light on fireworks, then break out the popcorn for two culture-war campaign ads: Elon Musk's anti-trans attack on Sherrod Brown and Ken Paxton's bizarre, fully AI-generated Bible-themed hit on James Talarico.

Tim, Sarah, and JVL discuss Trump's Labor Day Weekend with his favorite person, Corey Lewandowski's possible ‘light extortion,’ and whether Trumpworld will circle the wagons around him. Plus: why the GOP's midterm convention shows Trump losing his fastball, ABC News's bizarre framing of Rudy Giuliani's Islamophobic comments about Zohran Mamdani, and John Fetterman's total lack of interest in doing the job of a U.S. senator. Watch, listen, and leave a comment.

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) MOST PARENTS HAVE STRAIGHTFORWARD IDEAS for what to give their teenaged son for his birthday: a pair of new sneakers, or headphones, or a game to play on his Xbox. Not Maryam Tahmasebi. She just wants her son to be able to celebrate outside the detention center our country has trapped them in. Her aspirations for him have been reduced to this. She just wants him to be free.

From politics to sports, business, and tech, the rich are breaking the rules, looking out for their friends, and still getting rewarded in the end—maybe with the help of a little trip to the White House with a POTUS gift in hand. For the midterms and beyond, Adam is bullish in his new book about the Dems' prospects to win on a grand scale and pass the kind of policies that help regular people. Part of the trick is cooling it on the purity tests over fraught issues like Israel.

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock) House Speaker Mike Johnson is a big touter. He loves specifically to tout the successes of the 119th Congress under his stewardship, regularly promoting to anyone with a recorder or camera the number of bills passed out of his chamber and the significant items—tax cuts and border enforcement funding, mainly—that have become law. “I have been saying for months . . .

(Photo Illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) THE ADVANTAGE—AND PERHAPS THE BURDEN—of looking back across a quarter century is knowing how little we understood then about how profoundly those few hours would change the country, the military, my family, and millions of other Americans. I wish I could tell that version of myself what I know now. I was one of a very few Americans whose 9/11 story began before September 11, 2001.

(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock) Whenever I write about the age of nuclear proliferation that Donald Trump is inciting, I say something like: There will have to be an independent European nuclear deterrent and, as the biggest economy in Europe, Germany will have to own a piece of those nukes. What could possibly go wrong? In response, I always get an email from some well-meaning German reader saying, What are you talking about?

Andrew Egger and Bill Kristol discuss Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic social media posts, his proposed triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery, and the GOP’s Trump-centered midterm convention in Dallas as the elections draw closer. They also consider the expanding Senate battlefield, looming Supreme Court decisions affecting voting, and what a possible wave election could mean for Republicans.

(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photo: Getty) THERE’S ONE QUESTION I’VE GOTTEN more than any other from media and political types about the focus groups during the Trump era: What do swing voters think about [whatever the latest Washington scandal happens to be].