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Articles by Will Bunch
Is Trump-touted Freedom Fuel from Venezuela? | Will Bunch Newsletter
What a difference three words can make. For weeks, the American body politic has watched the strange relationship between Donald Trump and his ever-present 35-year-old aide Natalie Harp in a state of puzzled silence. Then Georgia Democratic Sen.
We need to care about Trump’s CIA murdering fishermen on the high seas
One of the worst things about Donald Trump’s America in the 2020s — I know, I know, it’s hard to pick — is the return of all the horrible stuff that you foolishly thought our flawed nation was done with after the reckonings of the 1970s. The American quagmire in Iran makes Vietnam look practically wise in comparison.
We need the truth about Trump's alleged 'ballroom' | Will Bunch Newsletter
Do rich guys have to ruin everything? Apparently so. There came a time about 15 years ago that my soccer obsession got to the point where I felt I needed to pick an English Premier League team to root for, in addition to the U.S. national teams and the Union. Long story, but I went with Liverpool, in a city that many consider the Philadelphia of the U.K., and it’s been a good ride, including a couple of trophies.
Should Democrats campaign for more English lit majors?
There is one war that Donald Trump is actually winning — unfortunately. Clearly it’s not the ongoing fiasco in the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump and his MAGA culture warriors keep gaining new territory here at home in their all-out assault on knowledge, with America’s college campuses as the prime battleground.
In the American prairie, a stealth plan to end the GOP Senate majority
South Dakota is a prairie state that voted more than 63% for Donald Trump in 2024, so it’s not the first place you’d look to find a wave of discontent over GOP rule. But deep under the state’s expansive corn and soybean fields grow the invasive roots of political rage. There’s the trade war that’s dried up demand for farmers’ crops while driving up the costs of essential items like fertilizer. Disdain for Trump has slashed the flow of Canadian tourists who once flocked to Mount Rushmore.
Why we're still fighting over COVID-19 | Will Bunch Newsletter
Today’s newsletter is all about things I thought I was done writing about: COVID-19, Kamala Harris, and the World Cup. Regarding the latter, FIFA strongman Gianni Infantino walked off the pitch after last month’s final like the hero in Steve Miller’s “Take the Money and Run”: He got the money — an ungodly $15 billion in revenue — thinking he got away. But instead, just like Icarus, Infantino flew too close to the sun.
The smell of death surrounds Donald Trump’s regime from Guatemala to Pittsburgh
Ooooh that smell Can’t you smell that smell Ooooh that smell The smell of death surrounds you — Lynyrd Skynyrd, “That Smell” The United States government might wash its hands of any responsibility for the more than 700,000 human beings who’ve been deported since Donald Trump returned to the White House some 18 months ago, but it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to determine who’s to blame for the blood stains that have been left behind.
This quaint Pa. borough is a ‘speed trap’ nabbing immigrants for ICE
MOUNT HOLLY SPRINGS, Pa. — Still hailed for its trout fishing, this bucolic central Pennsylvania borough in the shadow of South Mountain was a big draw for tourists at the turn of the 20th century who flocked here to cool off in its mineral-spring waters. In 2026, this tiny municipality about 25 miles southwest of Harrisburg is developing a much less welcoming reputation.
Trump wants smarter computers, dumber people | Will Bunch Newsletter
Occasionally I get to share good news in this space. Wu Shaoping — the Chinese dissident who fled to America but was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a central Pennsylvania traffic stop — was freed from ICE’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center Friday night, not long after my column dropped and a couple ofmembers of Congress pressed for his release. His asylum case is still pending. I’ve learned there’s actually a lot more to this story — stay tuned.
Corey Ruiz police killing reveals an America numb to violence
It all felt familiar, painfully so. Late Thursday afternoon, news began to spread on social media that a Black man had been gunned down by police officers in a street corner in Madison, Wisc. Over the next couple of hours, we learned that the shooting victim had died, and that a neighborhood bystander had captured much of the encounter, including the three fatal gunshots, on video.
Wu Shaoping escaped China’s repression, only to get busted by ICE in Pa.
Seven years ago, the walls were closing in on Wu Shaoping in his native China. Like a fireman who rushes into a burning building, attorney Wu had watched China’s repressive Communist Party arrest scores of human-rights lawyers under a crackdown that began in 2015 and responded by joining their dangerous cause, representing practitioners of Christianity or the Falun Gong sect.
Will U.S democracy die from embarrassment? | Will Bunch Newsletter
If the summer of 2026 came with an Official Cliché™, it would have to be “glass half empty, half full.” Things could be better. Things could be worse. It’s people — many of whom are quite wonderful — doing our best in a world run by institutions that are rotten to the core. You’ll find no greater example than the World Cup that wrapped up Sunday with a well-deserved trophy for Spain.
The other Graham Platner crisis for Dems | Will Bunch Newsletter
A journalistic mentor of mine back in the 1980s told me that Harry Truman, pressed for a comment on the passing of a political enemy, finally said, “It’s a damn shame when anybody dies.” Of course, like most perfect quotes, HST probably never actually said this, yet I find occasion to think of these words often. On Saturday night, South Carolina GOP Sen.
American Caligula: Trump’s assassination paranoia threatens us all
America’s current plight was nailed recently in an analysis by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Jeffrey Frankel, who dedicated an entire paragraph to the notorious despot who was bankrupting the world’s greatest superpower, “building luxurious villas and hosting huge parties.” Frankel described how this strongman “blamed his troubles on his predecessor … He reveled in gold coins. He insisted that people worship him as god. He grafted busts of his head onto statues of gods.
ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They want you to be apathetic. Don’t be.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke up at 5 a.m. Tuesday and started his day like almost every other one for the last 35 years since he came to Houston from Mexico and built his own American Dream brick by brick — sending his three sons to top universities on the foundation he’d constructed through years of backbreaking labor.
Climate denial is what history will remember about July 4, 2026 | Will Bunch Newsletter
Over the last decade, I’ve grown used to waking up before dawn and writing about a soul-crushing defeat from the night before. Usually it’s on a Wednesday, but somehow Donald Trump is always involved. Monday’s 4-1 demolition of the U.S. men’s national soccer team by Belgium pretty much confirmed that I won’t live to see Americans win the World Cup in my lifetime, so it’s time for acceptance. But these last three weeks have been a blast, and the party isn’t over.
The America-turns-250 column Donald Trump doesn’t want me to write
It was right after birthright citizen Folarin Balogun tapped in another game-winning goal for U.S. men’s soccer in the World Cup Wednesday night that I had a moment of clarity of where things are in America as our nation turns 250. I’d gone to Union Yards, the outdoorsy beer hall adjacent to Chester’s soccer palace Subaru Park, not only to catch the game but also a vibe that I’d wanted to turn into this column.
Another Jan. 6 coup? Trump is screaming it out loud. | Will Bunch Newsletter
What amazes me about the fact that America turns 250 on Saturday is that I’ve been alive now for 27% of U.S. history. When I was 17 and watched the Bicentennial parade of tall ships down the Hudson River from my dad’s conveniently located Manhattan skyscraper office on July 4, 1976, I thought I was celebrating ancient history. I was wrong. In a big, diverse world, the United States remains a young adult among nations. Like most young adults, we have a lot of issues.
America at 250: 50-year sentences for progressive protesters. Freedom for millionaires.
A few months back, the Donald-Trump-fried chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, urged broadcasters to air patriotic programming for America’s 250th birthday — including regular on-air recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. I couldn’t find any reports about TV or radio stations that have actually done this. Maybe they’ve figured out that the bit at the end — that stuff about “liberty and justice for all” — has been rendered into utter baloney by Carr’s strongman boss.
In a dark 2026, a Summer of Love breaks out | Will Bunch Newsletter
Some newsletters have a theme, and this week’s focus is a rare one: good news. Let’s start with the subject of a recent column: Izzy Aly, the 40-year-old Egyptian national from Orlando who’d been in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody for nearly six months, amid allegations of neglect around his worsening health. Today, I can happily report that Aly is a free man: released from detention and back home in central Florida.
The ‘Minneapolis 15’ ICE-protester indictments are meant to shut you up
In the tumultuous five-plus months since masked federal immigration agents descended on her hometown, the Rev. Jen Crow of the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis has already been arrested at an airport sit-in, organized a vigil after the murder of her neighbor Alex Pretti, and held trainings at her church for volunteer observers.
JD Vance can never become president | Will Bunch Newsletter
One of my many New Year’s resolutions back in January was never to write what I call “Captain Obvious columns” about the Donald Trump scandal du jour that’s all over your social media feed. So you’ll have to imagine the column I didn’t write about Trump’s tacky UFC cage match that desecrated the White House, and the role of bread and circuses (or just circuses...where’s the bread?) in the inevitable decline and fall of decrepit empires. If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.
JD Vance can never become president | Will Bunch Newsletter
6 hours ago Donald Trump threw himself a great big birthday party over the weekend, targeted to appeal to the famous white working-class voters who have formed the core of his base since the moment he came down that golden escalator. He transformed the White House lawn into a makeshift Colosseum and held a …
Elon Musk egged on a race riot, then became a trillionaire. What are we even doing?
The images coming out of Belfast — the city in Northern Ireland made famous by decades of ethnic violence that came to be known simply as, “the Troubles” — were horrific enough. The sight of cars and homes ablaze and hordes of masked, young men roaming the city streets brought back painful memories for old-timers.
The U.S. welcomed this child of the Vietnam War. Why did he die in ICE custody?
Tuan Van Bui’s bad luck arguably started the day he was born in 1970 in the city then known as Saigon — the child of a Vietnamese woman and one of the thousands of U.S. soldiers who fought in Southeast Asia for nearly two decades.
The U.S. welcomed this child of the Vietnam War. Why did he die in ICE custody?
Tuan Van Bui’s bad luck arguably started the day he was born in 1970 in the city then known as Saigon — the child of a Vietnamese woman and one of the thousands of U.S. soldiers who fought in Southeast Asia for nearly two decades.
Before the World Cup, a beautiful game for U.S. Ivorians | Will Bunch Newsletter
This should be a moment for sports fans to be insanely happy. The finals are underway in both the NHL and NBA, and the match-ups and the games so far have never been more compelling. Soccer’s World Cup — always the greatest show on Earth — starts Thursday (see below). Yet something seems off. If you wanted to attend Monday night’s Knicks-Spurs Game 3 at Madison Square Garden, it would have cost about $4,500 — not courtside, but in the last row.
You hate data centers. They think you could be a terrorist or Chinese dupe.
A year or so ago, many Americans had never heard of a data center. Today, these massive warehouse-type structures with an insatiable thirst for electricity and water are fast becoming the new “third rail” of U.S. politics. Sarah Longwell, the focus-group guru and TV pundit who writes for the Never Trumper site The Bulwark, said what she’s hearing from everyday voters is stunning.
From Nazi-hugging Greg Bovino to the Supreme Court, the hood is coming off MAGA
It was only a few months ago that then-U.S. Border Patrol honcho Greg Bovino, the trench-coat-wearing commandant of immigration agents spreading terror through American cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, was shocked, shocked that anyone would dare compare his masked goons to Nazi Germany’s notorious Gestapo.
Is 'thrillionaire' Trump addicted to stock trading? | Will Bunch Newsletter
I literally had to sort through more than a half-dozen column ideas this week, including: What is the deal with Donald Trump’s health? His “annual” physical (now twice a year) at Walter Reed Medical Center last week included news that the president has a visible scar on his right ear from the 2024 Butler shooting (he doesn’t) and that those massive bruises are caused by shaking hands (they aren’t, if you believe reputable doctors). So what else aren’t they telling us?
Mikie Sherrill’s state police riot in Newark is a national disgrace
When Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016 and the United States began its decade-long spiral into authoritarian madness, there arose a popular meme: Whatever you think you would have done to stop the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, or to end American racial injustice in the 1960s, is what you are doing right now.
They're fighting to stop Izzy Aly from dying in a Pennsylvania gulag
Meetings of Clearfield County’s commissioners are said to be typically as placid as the thick oak forests and cold mountain streams of this isolated slice of Pennsylvania North Country, some 25 miles west of State College. Not so on Tuesday night. Protesters from the county and from as far away as Pittsburgh carried signs like “ICE = American Gestapo,” and there was an uproar when a prominent community activist was not allowed to speak because she lives just across the county line.
Is Google a bigger threat to democracy than Trump? | Will Bunch Newsletter
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said many memorable things, but none so profound as this: “I have decided to stick with love,” he said. “Hate is too great a burden to bear.” I wonder what MLK would have thought about the final broadcast of Late Night with Stephen Colbert on CBS.
Chris Rabb and the Democrats’ ‘double wave’ could change America for good
It was anything but a normal campaign rally when New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the fiery leader of a movement to push the Democratic Party farther left — stepped up to a North Philadelphia church podium Friday night to endorse fellow progressive Chris Rabb for the city’s open congressional seat. AOC was carrying the flaming torch of a movement that is changing that party today, and could change America tomorrow.
The ugly truth behind Trump's 'kinetic' drone strikes | Will Bunch Newsletter
You may have noticed there’s a lot of stuff happening right now that’s bad. Or dumb. Or both. Today is a day people can actually do something about it: Primary Day has finally arrived in Pennsylvania. OK, there aren’t a ton of marquee races — Democrats in the Philly-based 3rd Congressional District are the exception — and it’s bad that Pennsylvania doesn’t let independents (like me) vote in primaries. But voting is a fundamental American right they are trying to take away from folks.
The E-Trade presidency: Trump trades stocks while America burns
Last month was a nerve-racking time for investors in the massive military-tech contractor Palantir. They’d expected big returns on the Miami-based firm’s close ties with Donald Trump’s warfighting regime, only to instead see shares plummet amid Wall Street fears the firm is falling behind its rivals on artificial intelligence, or AI. The plunge was very bad news for one particular high-profile Palantir backer who’d purchased as much as $630,000 in its stock in the preceding weeks.
For La.'s 'Cancer Alley,' Black voting struggle is a fight to breathe
If you view the world through cable TV news and its talking heads, it can be too easy to see America’s rapidly escalating wars over gerrymandering and racial politics as a numbers game: which party gained how many seats, and which party lost out.
GOP canceling elections? It’s already happening. | Will Bunch Newsletter
I lived much of the first half of my life in greater New York, and all of the second half in greater Philadelphia. One cool thing aboutthese last 36 years has been watching Philly shed its civic inferiority complex — until this weekend, when basketball’s Knicks and its bottomless bowl of cash-for-tickets New York fans invaded our city while their team embarrassed our 76ers. The past is never dead. Rinse, Repeat. If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.
Did Amazon just deliver a blow to Josh Shapiro's White House dreams?
There are many hurdles facing Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro if he truly hopes to make the transition from a popular governor, seemingly cruising toward reelection this November, to a Democratic presidential contender in 2028. But the tallest barriers are always the ones that you never saw coming.
Kent State and the silence of American campuses | Will Bunch Newsletter
Yogi Berra famously said it ain’t over until it’s over. I turned on the NBA playoffslast Tuesday expecting to watch funeral services for the 76ers, and somehow they jumped out of the coffin. The Flyers weren’t supposed to sniff the postseason, either. My friend and former Daily News colleague Julie K. Brown was robbed of her Pulitzer Prize for exposing Jeffrey Epstein, until they gave her one. Keep the faith. Things can only get better. If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.
Trump finds a ‘Southern Strategy’ to save his dreams of dictatorship
James Comey, the former FBI chief who was the nation’s top federal law enforcement official for three-and-a-half years, should have known not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I don’t mean strolling an Atlantic beach with his phone camera right after someone arranged some dump-Donald-Trump protest art, seashells that spelled out “8647″ — although that wasn’t great timing, either. No, the place I’m talking about is the former Confederacy.
SCOTUS gutting 1965 Voting Rights Act is a wake-up call from a dream
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” — The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech Is a dream a lie that don’t come true?/Or is it something worse?
Are ICE warehouses just another Trump grift? | Will Bunch Newsletter
Too Early Spring is the title of a classic short story by Stephen Vincent Benét, but it might also serve as an epitaph for my two favorite sports teams, soccer’s Philadelphia Union and baseball’s Phillies, each saddled with the worst record in their respective leagues, dead in the water with the calendar still reading April. To paraphrase those modern poets, Bananarama, it looks like a cruel, cruel summer. If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.
Gunfire of the Vanities: Trump dinner shooting defines a violent, unserious America
The plots to assassinate Donald Trump are becoming the stuff of American ritual now — incredible scenes of confused people running every which way, helmeted men with heavy-duty machine guns popping out from nowhere, and the muddled early news reports.
Mayday! Can a May 1 general strike save American democracy?
It’s a tough assignment to share a bill with “The Boss,” rock’s Bruce Springsteen. In late March, Ezra Levin — cofounder of the pro-democracy Indivisible movement leading the No Kings anti-Donald Trump protests — took the stage in St. Paul, Minn., where Springsteen performed his ICE protest song “Streets of Minneapolis,” to blast out some unexpected news to the throng of as many as 200,000 people.
New Civil War just dropped...at the Supreme Court | Will Bunch Newsletter
The calendar is deep into April, so why does it still feel like Groundhog Day? What can one write that’s new about the same stories — the on-again, off-again stupidity and deceit around the Iran War, Donald Trump’s descent into madness — that just keep happening over and over?
Why Yale’s term paper on what’s wrong with college gets a ‘D-’
By Yale’s sad standards, the Ivy League university’s new, high-profile report on why Americans have lost all faith in higher education deserves a grade of at least an ‘A-.’ Why?
A World Cup in Trump's America is insane. How this fan is coping.
Bouakary Coulibaly grew up in a part of the world that is out-of-its-mind for soccer — the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, sometimes still known by its anglicized name of Ivory Coast. Some 36 years since moving to the United States, where he’s an entrepreneur, reggae musician, chef, and a cabdriver on the streets of Philadelphia, Coulibaly still vividly remembers how every kid in the poorer neighborhoods of his native Abidjan starts kicking a soccer ball as soon as they can walk.
Why the ‘Nazi tattoo guy’ is winning in Maine | Will Bunch Newsletter
There’s a moment in the 1981 journalism thriller Absence of Malice (which I wrote last week about rewatching) in which Sally Field’s cursed reporter says of the story she’s covering, “There is no other story.” That’s pretty much how I feel about the rapidly declining mental state of the American president, but I can’t write the same column over and over.
You could bet (literally!!) that greedy U.S. kleptocrats couldn’t get Iran deal
It should not have come as any great surprise that Vice President JD Vance and America’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — real-estate developers Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — flew home from talks in Islamabad early Sunday with no permanent U.S.-Iran peace deal. In fact, you could have bet on it.
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