Goldberg, who prefaced his comments to me by expressing support for a lot of The Bulwark’s work, still believes there are stark differences. “If you wake up every morning trying to argue about why Trump is bad and the people who like Trump are evil, you’re just as obsessed with him as the people who wake up every morning wanting to prove that Trump is a glorious statesman and everything he does is great,” Goldberg said, adding that Never Trump and pro-Trump publications are two sides of the same Trump-obsessed coin. He compared The Bulwark to ThinkProgress, a now defunct progressive news site that was a project of the Center for American Progress. “I’m not saying what [CAP] did was necessarily corrupt or bad, but it was very difficult to tell where the activism let off and the journalism began because they were both pointing in the same direction,” he said. “[The Dispatch is] not part of that game, and we explicitly don’t want to be part of that game.”

“We’ve talked about ourselves as beyond Trump, a post-Trump outlet—if people need to frame it in terms of Trump,” said Hayes, before acknowledging that “our environment now is a lot less post-Trump than I would say we imagined.” Alternatively, The Dispatch’s post-Trumpism could also be defined by the past, a return to the issues that conservatives obsessed over before 2016 shattered the status quo and scattered the movement. “We basically believe in fiscal conservatism. We’re worried about debt and deficits, we worry about spending, and we worry about a lot of the things that we were worried about five and 10 years ago,” noted Hayes. Goldberg emphasized that The Dispatch is “trying to build something bigger and more long-lasting” than Trump, which is why he believes there “is an enormous number of people on the right—including, sadly, some friends—who would like to see us fail, because we’re trying to demonstrate that you didn’t have to go that way. You didn’t have to throw in with Trump.”