A bulwark for whom? A metajournalistic analysis of “Never Trumper” media

Founded in January 2019, after the closure of The Weekly Standard, The Bulwark (TB) emerged as the most prominent media voice of the “Never Trump” wing of the Republican Party. This article examines how the outlet navigated the tension between maintaining claims to conservatism while operating as an explicitly anti-Trump platform. Drawing on the concept of metajournalistic discourse (Carlson, M. 2016. Metajournalistic discourse and the meanings of journalism: Definitional control, boundary work, and legitimation. Communication Theory, 26(4), 349–368. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12088) and boundary work (Carlson, M., & Lewis, S. C. 2015. Boundaries of journalism: Professionalism, practices and participation (1st ed.). Routledge), this article explores how TB’s identity as a conservative and anti-Trump outlet was constructed and negotiated among mainstream and right-wing media sources. The analysis traces three distinct phases in TB’s evolution: an initial effort to defend conservatism by opposing Trump; a post-2020 election turn toward confrontation with the Republican Party; and a Biden-era consolidation in which it defined itself by alignment with the Democratic Party. The findings illuminate how media institutions themselves become sites of ideological contestation during periods of partisan realignment, demonstrating how conservatism was discursively re-situated within a media environment increasingly organized around pro- and anti-Trump alignment.