Will Saletan lays out the Jack Smith case that never reached a jury
The Bulwark's explainer follows what Trump was told about the 2020 election, from Georgia to January 6, and it led a weekend when three of the channel's videos ran far beyond their usual start.
The BulwarkStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 475,356 views a day, 26 times a normal first day on this channel (18,344).
Jack Smith Reveals the Words That Could Have Buried Trump
A new video on The Bulwark usually ends its first day with around 18,000 views. "Jack Smith Reveals the Words That Could Have Buried Trump" was close to 300,000 within ten hours.
The premise is a trial that never took place. Will Saletan, the political writer who spent years at Slate before joining The Bulwark, sets out the case the former special counsel never got to present to a jury, drawing on Smith's testimony before Congress. His thread is one question: what did Trump know? The video gathers the moments when, as Saletan tells it, Trump's own advisers, Republican officials and Justice Department officials told him the truth about the 2020 election, and argues that he chose to ignore it. From there it moves through Georgia and Pennsylvania to January 6, covering the pressure on officials and what prosecutors would have shown about his refusal to stop the violence once it began.
The comments came in faster than they do over a usual full first day, in well under half the time. Many viewers dwell on how Smith speaks, plainly and looking his questioners in the eye. Several hope to see him testify at a real trial, and a few call Saletan's longer pieces mini documentaries.
It was a crowded Sunday for the channel. Catherine Rampell and Bill Kristol's reading of a New York Times/Siena Senate poll, which shows Democrats running strong in states such as Texas, Ohio and Kansas, ran just as far ahead. So did Kristol's Bulwark on Sunday with Andrew Egger, who had come straight from Springfield, Ohio, where he attended the funeral of a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant and then a Trump rally nearby.
Saletan himself was everywhere. A short cut from the same material went up alongside the explainer, and he joined Mona Charen on her show to talk about the Republican attempt to ambush Smith.
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- Channel
- The Bulwark
- Subscribers
- 1,780,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 14,827,064
- Channel views, pace per day
- 2,679,212 (on a normal day: 1,884,104)
- Video published
- October 4, 2026
- Video views so far
- 290,370 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 475,356
The numbers
Ten hours in, the explainer had already gone far past what a new Bulwark video usually draws in a full day.
💡 Test your knowledge
Before he became special counsel, Jack Smith was chief prosecutor at a court in The Hague that handles crimes from which conflict?
Smith was chief prosecutor of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague before he was appointed special counsel in 2022.
