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Will Bunch

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Articles by Will Bunch

The America-turns-250 column Donald Trump doesn’t want me to write

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Another Jan. 6 coup? Trump is screaming it out loud. | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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America at 250: 50-year sentences for progressive protesters. Freedom for millionaires.

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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In a dark 2026, a Summer of Love breaks out | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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The ‘Minneapolis 15’ ICE-protester indictments are meant to shut you up

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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JD Vance can never become president | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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JD Vance can never become president | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| Flipboard
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 …
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Elon Musk egged on a race riot, then became a trillionaire. What are we even doing?

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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The U.S. welcomed this child of the Vietnam War. Why did he die in ICE custody?

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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The U.S. welcomed this child of the Vietnam War. Why did he die in ICE custody?

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By Will Bunch Verified
| EIN News
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.
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Before the World Cup, a beautiful game for U.S. Ivorians | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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You hate data centers. They think you could be a terrorist or Chinese dupe.

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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From Nazi-hugging Greg Bovino to the Supreme Court, the hood is coming off MAGA

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Is 'thrillionaire' Trump addicted to stock trading? | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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?
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Mikie Sherrill’s state police riot in Newark is a national disgrace

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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They're fighting to stop Izzy Aly from dying in a Pennsylvania gulag

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Is Google a bigger threat to democracy than Trump? | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Chris Rabb and the Democrats’ ‘double wave’ could change America for good

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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The ugly truth behind Trump's 'kinetic' drone strikes | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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The E-Trade presidency: Trump trades stocks while America burns

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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For La.'s 'Cancer Alley,' Black voting struggle is a fight to breathe

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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GOP canceling elections? It’s already happening. | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Did Amazon just deliver a blow to Josh Shapiro's White House dreams?

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Kent State and the silence of American campuses | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Trump finds a ‘Southern Strategy’ to save his dreams of dictatorship

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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SCOTUS gutting 1965 Voting Rights Act is a wake-up call from a dream

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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?
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Are ICE warehouses just another Trump grift? | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Gunfire of the Vanities: Trump dinner shooting defines a violent, unserious America

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Mayday! Can a May 1 general strike save American democracy?

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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New Civil War just dropped...at the Supreme Court | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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?
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Why Yale’s term paper on what’s wrong with college gets a ‘D-’

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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?
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A World Cup in Trump's America is insane. How this fan is coping.

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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Why the ‘Nazi tattoo guy’ is winning in Maine | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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.
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You could bet (literally!!) that greedy U.S. kleptocrats couldn’t get Iran deal

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
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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The fate of the earth depends on removing Trump from the White House, ASAP

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
For an unforgettable 12 hours or so on Tuesday, it felt like the end of the world as we know it. And, apologies to R.E.M., it did not feel fine. That excruciating level of existential angst that I, and probably a lot of you, never want to experience again was triggered by the president of the United States, commander-in-chief of the world’s largest army, and current holder of the U.S. nuclear football, posting that “a whole civilization will die tonight” in Iran.
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In 1968, a moon shot brought hope. Did Artemis II? | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
Happy Power Plant Day to all who celebrate it, which outside of Donald Trump is pretty much nobody. This newsletter goes out less than eight hours before the deadline that America’s weakened strongman has set for Iran to reopen the oil turnpike that is the Strait of Hormuz, lest U.S. bombers “reign” [sic] down destruction on that nation’s bridges and power plants, which would be a war crime. It’s a grim day for humanity, yet there is also cause for hope. Read on.
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The annoying buzz of our AI future is keeping Vineland awake

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
VINELAND — The semi-rural solitude of a cul-de-sac at the edge of placid South Jersey woodlands is what Scott Montgomery craved when he bought a sturdy new colonial 18 years ago, as a peaceful place for him and his wife to raise their three kids. But the world of Montgomery, a 59-year-old government consumer-protection official, was turned upside down last summer. That’s when his son started complaining of a steady noise like helicopters out back.
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Iwo Jima is a thing Trump should read about | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
There are only two kind of days in late March. Either you get a ridiculously balmy afternoon like Thursday’s Phillies home opener, which sends your mind whistling past the graveyard of climate change, or Saturday’s bitter cold that was apparently meant to forge a spiritual bond between local “No Kings” marchers and their Minnesota brethren. You’d be a fool not to welcome the arrival of April. If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.
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What naysayers don’t get about ‘No Kings,’ the biggest protest in U.S. history

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
It was a career-defining moment for young MarlonBrando in The Wild One when a dancing girl asked his 1950s bongo-pounding biker-gang character, “What are you rebelling against?” “Whaddya got?” Brando’s Johnny Strabler would have felt right at home Saturday afternoon with about 300 rebellious souls who lined the busy shopping stretch of Baltimore Pike in front of the Springfield Mall — just one of the more than 3,300 protests from coast-to-coast and around the world that marked the third “No...
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One crazy day that defined the decline and fall of American empire

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
When the clock struck midnight on March 23, the day was already off to a horrific start. Rescue crews were racing in the dead-of-night darkness toward a runway at New York’s busy LaGuardia Airport. There, the cockpit of Air Canada Express Flight 8646 was a crumpled mess after it had collided 22 minutes earlier with a fire truck that had been speeding toward an unrelated emergency.
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Trump will be impeached in ’27. Here’s how. | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
War! Good God, y’all. Since my music brain stopped growing around age 11, Edwin Starr’s “War,” a No. 1 hit from the fall of 1970, always gets stuck in my head every time the United States starts dropping bombs on yet another foreign land, and the tune usually stays there for a long time. Meanwhile, there’s not much new to say about Donald Trump’s folly in the Persian Gulf. The bombs keep coming down. Gas prices keep going up. And what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
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Big Tech says the quiet part out loud. They want you to be stupid.

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” — Dean Vernon Wormer, “Animal House" (1978) OK, so the fictional dean of Faber College could be a bit of a fascist at times, but nonetheless Dean Wormer’s dressing-down of Flounder, the everyman fraternity pledge, did a pretty good job conveying the ethos of Animal House’s setting in 1962, the golden age of college in America.
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It took U.S. years to lose a war in Vietnam. Trump lost one in days.

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
As the U.S.-Israel war-of-choice against Iran ends a second week and our social media feeds fill with incredible scenes of exploding oil tankers and refineries, the rubble of an Iranian elementary school, and shock prices at American gas stations, I can’t stop thinking about a remarkable piece of television journalism from just over 50 years ago.
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Trump’s Epstein scandal somehow got worse | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
“And it’s 1-2-3...What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn...” Those lyrics that feel like they could have been written yesterday were actually penned in 1965 at the start of the Vietnam War quagmire by the San Francisco music legend Country Joe McDonald, of Country Joe and the Fish.
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AI error or not, Iran school bombing is a permanent stain on America’s soul | Will Bunch

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
The numbers — maybe 175 dead, maybe more — are staggering, but what really matters are their names. There was Ehsan Saleminia, just 6 years old; Fatemeh Zahra Karimi, age 7; Zeynab Bahrami, 10; Mohammad Shah-dousti, 8; Reza Barani, 7; Athena Ahmadzadeh, 10; Khadijeh Darvishi, 9; Reza Ranjbar, 6; Mohammad-Ali Karyani Pak, 7; Parsa Mokhtari-nasab, 12 — and dozens more. You can read many of their names here.
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Texas primary exposed GOP scheme to rig the 2026 midterms | Will Bunch

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
A man named Justine Marine had arguably the toughest job in America on Tuesday: “Election navigator” in Dallas County, Texas, where a confusing, Republican-engineered change in voting rules for 2026 left many voters dazed, confused, and miles from the place where they were supposed to be casting ballots.
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Death to prediction markets profiting on war | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
Iranian schoolgirls, U.S. troops, Israeli villagers, random Emiratis, Pakistani rioters and maybe a couple folks in a bar in Texas. The deadly fallout from Donald Trump’s war-of-choice in Iran has spread halfway around the globe and back again. With each passing hour, it feels like more of the entire world is sucked into this war. If only there were a name for something like that. If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.
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A mad king's illegal war on Iran is a cry for regime change...in Washington | Will Bunch

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
It turns out that democracy really does die in darkness — at 1:30 a.m. Eastern time, to be exact. The pilastered chambers of the U.S. Capitol — where 535 lawmakers who, under the Constitution, wield the sole authority to send the nation to war — were empty when the first cruise missiles slammed into Tehran, 6,300 miles and eight-and-a-half time zones away.
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A Rohingya refugee wanted freedom. America left him for dead in frigid Buffalo. | Will Bunch

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
Like most of his Rohingya people — stripped of citizenship by Myanmar’s ruling junta and targeted by a brutal 2017 genocide — Nurul Amin Shah Alam and his family spent the last decade yearning to breathe free. A nomadic quest for liberty took Shah Alam, his wife, and the two youngest of his six children through the crowded camps of Bangladesh, on a boat escape to Malaysia, and finally apparent refuge in the United States on Christmas Eve, 2024.
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Indiana U. won a title and lost its soul | Will Bunch Newsletter

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By Will Bunch Verified
| The Philadelphia Inquirer Verified
Does Donald Trump have to ruin everything? The answer is obviously “yes,” but this one was heartbreaking. Sunday’s OT thriller over Canada that gave U.S. men’s hockey its first gold medal since this senior citizen was a college junior was a howl of joy in what’s been a dire year for America. But then (taxpayer-)Ka$h Patel showed up to party, and soon Trump was on the phone, egging on the boys with misogynistic trash talk about their gold medal compatriots, the women’s hockey team.
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