The Bulwark's publisher, Sarah Longwell, criticized President Donald Trump for "humiliating" himself and the United States with his handling of classified documents and information.

Trump was found to possess a number of top-secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago country club and refused to return them to the government. The Justice Department subsequently indicted him, but in July 2024, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the entire case in a controversial ruling, finding the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional.

This week, the indictment of former National Security Advisor John Bolton was announced after he was found possessing classified information in his home. While Bolton was in the first administration, it drew attention to the Trump administration's cavalier attitude toward such information while also targeting Bolton.

"Is it the fact that the economy is also a big suck, according to large majorities of the American people? So this looks like a distraction?" asked MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace.

"Yeah, it's that latter piece. I mean, boy, I just can't tell you. You ask people how things are going in the country, including Trump voters, and they do not think things are going well. You know, and this is where vibes over substance tend to come in. Like they just — they see the chaos. Right? It's the shutdown. There's the National Guard in different cities. And people will sort of put things on either side of the ledger. Right? They'll say, 'Well I'm glad Trump is securing the border, but I really need prices to come down. And I'm really frustrated with it.'"

She explained that's where the frustration is coming from among Americans.

The Bolton arrest only brings back all of the examples of things like Secretary Pete Hegseth's Signal scandal.

"You've got Trump himself using his janky social media site, Truth Social, to communicate with his attorney general. Our op-sec in America is not clean," Longwell said. "We have a problem. And if they're going to prosecute John Bolton for this, then my hope is that they use that to reestablish some real guidelines for what people are doing, because it appears that nobody is taking these things seriously, and that I can't imagine there isn't a foreign country now who isn't looking at the way that we are handling our classified information and laughing at us."