Back in March 2021, with Donald Trump gone from the White House, the Washingtonian put the obvious question to The Bulwark: what’s a website set up to oppose Trump supposed to do now? Near the end, almost in passing, is the detail that stuck with me. Fans, it said, had started a subreddit and a Discord channel so they could hang out with one another. Plenty were paying, too: about 16,000 had joined Bulwark+, the site’s new paid membership.
Five years later, The Bulwark is a profitable business. Rob Walker’s profile in Inc. says revenue topped $20 million in 2025 and is heading for about $30 million this year, while the Wall Street Journal counted more than 140,000 paid subscribers across Substack and YouTube in June. Not bad for an outfit that started as an aggregator, rounding up other people’s links.
But Trump’s second term ends in January 2029, and the Washingtonian’s question is slowly coming back round. Is The Bulwark a club people will keep paying for, or a ringside seat they’ll give up once the fight’s over?
I went through the company’s published numbers to find out. They show how fast The Bulwark is growing, but not whether members stay, a difference worth understanding if you sell memberships.
From a list of links to a paid club
The Bulwark started life in late 2018 as a news aggregator, Sarah Longwell has told members. For a couple of years, it ran as an ad-free nonprofit on donations. As Semafor’s Max Tani tells it, fans kept trying to send the site money, so the founders set up paid subscriptions on Substack, with extra content as thanks. Bulwark+ launched in September 2020, seven weeks before that year’s election, and the company has since gone for-profit.
Tani also called The Bulwark a “media escort” for former Republicans on their way to backing Democrats. It’s the best short description of the business I’ve seen, and it points at the risk. If The Bulwark’s job is helping people move from one political home to another, some of them may stop needing it once they’ve made the transition.
I was never on that journey. In 2024, YouTube kept recommending me videos of Tim Miller, who hosts The Bulwark Podcast. I watched him appear on Piers Morgan’s show and found him charismatic and remarkably sensible. I was surprised and fascinated to learn he was a former Republican, and not a casual one: he’d worked on Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign before breaking with his party over Trump. Yet his views were the same as, or close to, those of the progressives I’ve known all my life.
American politics is famously polarized, all black and white, and in my experience few people sit in the gray. Miller is one of the exceptions. I subscribed to The Bulwark’s YouTube channel and still watch now and then. But I’ve never paid. Then again, I was never a Republican, so maybe I wasn’t quite the audience The Bulwark originally had in mind.
What the numbers actually say
How much of The Bulwark’s money comes from members? I tried to work it out and couldn’t. The published figures measure different things and can’t be added up. That’s normal for a private company. It’s still somewhat maddening.
Some count paying members: about 16,000 in March 2021 and 76,000 Substack subscribers in February 2025, per New York magazine. The Journal’s 140,000 also includes people paying through YouTube, so it isn’t like-for-like.
Some are run-rates, which take what’s coming in at one moment and multiply it out to a full year. Longwell told Semafor in September 2024 that subscriptions were on track for more than $5 million a year, though the report doesn’t say whether that was Substack alone. In November 2025, she told Peter Kafka on his Channels podcast that Substack subscriptions alone were on pace for more than $12 million. The $30 million for this year is a forecast.
The missing years
After the 16,000 of March 2021, the next membership figure I found was in The Bulwark’s mission statement from August 2023, which says tens of thousands of people had joined Bulwark+. For 2021 and 2022, the two years after Trump left office, I couldn’t find any comparable figure. So there’s no telling whether people piled in while Trump was off the scene or mostly arrived with the 2024 campaign.
Between September 2024 and November 2025, Longwell’s subscription run-rates went from more than $5 million a year to more than $12 million, though the two aren’t quite like-for-like. Critics say Trump is the whole story. Ryan Zickgraf argued in UnHerd that Trump has given centrism “drama, a villain, a sense of apocalypse”. Timing is everything in business, and The Bulwark capitalized: it spent those months hiring reporters and pushing hard into video. There’s no telling how much of the growth came from Trump’s return and how much from the spending, but my bet is it took both. Trump brought the attention, and The Bulwark was ready to catch it.
The renewal question
A subscriber total is a net figure: everyone who joined, minus everyone who canceled. A membership can keep growing while people quietly leave, as long as new ones arrive faster. The number that would show whether members stay is the renewal rate, the share of members who pay again when their subscription comes up. Plenty of numbers get announced; this one, as far as I can find, hasn’t been.
Longwell likes to talk about the live shows. In a post celebrating the Journal’s profile, she quoted its finding that they sometimes sell out within hours and need second nights. A sold-out theater proves people want to see the hosts. It says nothing about whether the people in seats 14B and 14C would bother with each other if the hosts didn’t show up.
The fan forums
From outside the paywall, the best evidence of fans caring about each other is two fan-built forums, both still going. In April, Miller read the subreddit’s meanest posts about him on a members’ livestream, which tells you the forum is lively and Miller is thick-skinned. The Discord looks to be The Bulwark (Unofficial), created in December 2020, before the Washingtonian piece. When I checked on 11 October, it had 1,805 members, 96 of them online.
Neither forum says much about paying members. The Bulwark runs its own members’ community inside Substack, with subscriber chats and comment sections, and that 2023 mission statement credits members with creating “the kind of community that’s not supposed to be possible on the internet”. It’s a lovely line that outsiders can’t check, since that community sits behind a paywall.
The real test is likely to come after Trump’s term ends in January 2029. First, do paying members keep renewing? That would prove loyalty to The Bulwark, though not to each other; people renew gym memberships for years without learning anyone’s name. Second, do members and fans keep talking to each other if Trump becomes less of a draw, in the comments and on that Discord? If both hold, it’s a genuine community.
If people keep paying but the conversation dries up, The Bulwark still has a loyal audience, and maybe more community behind its paywall than I can see. My guess is a big loyal audience with a smaller community inside it. If I were Longwell, I’d publish the renewal rate. If it’s good, it wouldn’t prove The Bulwark is a community, but it would answer a lot of the doubts in this piece. If it’s bad, the totals can still look healthy for as long as new members arrive faster than old ones leave.
