Josh Barro explains why Americans feel stuck, and Bulwark Daily takes off again
Borrowing costs, deficits and oil prices fill the first half of Tim Miller's show, and the comment section is still arguing over Trump's first-term economy.
The BulwarkStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 513,527 views a day, 29 times a normal first day on this channel (17,588).
Trump’s Approval Numbers Are Unbelievably Low (w/ Josh Barro & JVL) | Bulwark Daily
Tim Miller brought in an economist's eye for the latest Bulwark Daily. Josh Barro had nearly 270,000 views behind him eight hours after the episode went up, a pace about thirty times a usual first day for the channel.
The argument, as the description lays it out, is that the country is not in a recession but people feel stuck because borrowing is expensive. Barro walks through big deficits, the Fed's rate decisions, tariff refunds in the courts and an oil shock tied to the president's war. The episode says Trump's approval has fallen below what it calls the Bush Line. Halfway through, Jonathan V. Last takes the guest chair to talk about markets pricing in the risk of that war, then turns with Miller to Pete Hegseth's talk of masculinity at the Pentagon, drone warfare, and why shame matters in a liberal democracy, with John Roberts in the frame. The show opens on Sen. Eric Schmitt's staffer and the basketball poster mix-up from the Jack Smith hearing.
The comments came in quickly. In eight hours there were already more than on a usual full first day, and many of them push back on Barro's kind words for Trump's first-term economy, saying those years carried on from the Obama recovery.
The same hearing powered the channel's other fast start of the day: Sarah Longwell and Andrew Weissmann's Illegal News episode, which went past 300,000 views in twelve hours. Next up on the schedule was Longwell herself, live, answering questions about her new book, How to Eat an Elephant.
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- Channel
- The Bulwark
- Subscribers
- 1,780,000
- Channel views, pace per day
- 1,664,640 (on a normal day: 1,840,907)
- Video published
- October 1, 2026
- Video views so far
- 267,883 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 513,527
The numbers
Two long episodes posted on the same day both ran far beyond a usual first day for the channel.
💡 Test your knowledge
Andrew Weissmann, Sarah Longwell's guest on Illegal News, was a senior prosecutor on which special counsel's team?
Weissmann was one of the lead prosecutors in Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation, which began in 2017.
