A Conservative Finally Says It: Trump Is Incredibly Corrupt
Bulwark Takes
The Bulwark
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2026
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
Tim Miller takes on a stunning National Review series that details the scale of Trump’s crypto corruption—dwarfing anything ever alleged about Biden—and explains how Trump’s crypto business operated as a pay-to-play system for foreign money, why Republican oversight collapsed, and why it matters that conservatives are finally starting to say it out loud.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody. Tim Mow from the Bullwark here. Andy McCarthy at the National Review is working on what I think is a pretty important series laying at the scale of Trump's crypto corruption and how it dwarfs anything that the right alleged about Joe Biden. I think it's important for this reason. I look at me, never Trump or has a long backstory, maybe some bitterness towards the people at the National Review. |
| 0:21.3 | If you guys don't know, the National Review, it is a long time traditional conservative magazine |
| 0:27.0 | founded by William F. Buckley. In 2016, they published what we thought would be influential |
| 0:34.1 | at the time, a magazine cover called Against Trump. It was a series of essays from conservatives talking why they would be against Trump. |
| 0:40.5 | If we pull up that cover here, we scroll on, you might see a couple names you recognize. |
| 0:43.8 | Mona Sharon, William Crystal. |
| 0:45.6 | So it's a primary war on. |
| 0:47.7 | The election against Hillary war on. |
| 0:50.0 | And the National Review realized that many of their readers and the vast swath of Republican voters did not share their opposition to Donald Trump, they started to get in line. |
| 1:04.3 | And, you know, there are a handful of those, as mentioned, who ventured off into other spaces, created new outlets, created things like this, |
| 1:14.2 | the bulwark, where we actually met what we said about Donald Trump. |
| 1:18.1 | The National Review, that's not really been the case. |
| 1:21.0 | You know, they have had an editor for most of the Trump era named Rich Lowry, who is a kind of pocket protector guy that |
| 1:30.5 | really is trying to overcompensate for his own issues about his masculinity. |
| 1:36.3 | He tries to do talk about tough guy, Trump stuff and traditional values. |
| 1:41.4 | And he doesn't really care, none too much about some of the old mores around |
| 1:46.6 | uh you know the american idea uh and thinks now we should be more of a blood and soil |
| 1:53.2 | tough guy thing he's a guy that wrote that trump was a big middle finger to all of the people |
| 2:00.4 | that um he was jealous of because they achieved more than he did |
| 2:04.3 | from from his elite universities. So, you know, it's tough to have to hand it to him. After 2016, |
| 2:13.0 | folks in National Review never showed a ton of backbone when it came to fighting Trump. |
| 2:18.1 | One of their other editors famously wrote the Trump Maybe column, which I think represents really |
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