Philip Bump wasn’t the worst columnist at the Washington Post. That title will probably remain in the hands of former columnist Taylor Lorenz who wound up being ushered out after repeatedly lying to her own editors.
And we can’t forget the insufferable Jennifer Rubin who left the paper in January. But even in a crowded field of partisans, Bump was certainly one of my least favorites at the Post. Over the years I’ve written a few takedowns of his columns.
I also wrote about it Bump’s ongoing skepticism about the Hunter Biden laptop here:
…the worst response this week comes, not surprisingly, from Philip Bump at the Washington Post. Bump has a habit of never letting go of a good talking point, even when the evidence no longer supports him. Here he is trying to argue that the laptop still isn’t reliable and that the media and the skeptics were right.
Other news outlets were not given access to the material at the time of the initial report. (Giuliani told the New York Times he was worried its journalists would “spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”) When The Washington Post finally got access to the material in 2022, we were able to verify some of it as authentic. There was also evidence, though, that the material on the hard drive that went from Giuliani to the New York Post was moved around with some information added. Even Mac Isaac warned that material being attributed to “the laptop” was not on the laptop when he undertook the file recovery process.
This is misleading. Bump writes about information being added to the drive and then goes directly to Mac Isaac warning things being attributed to the laptop weren’t there when he saw it. The way this is written makes it sound like Mac Isaac was worried something false had been added to the drive.
But if you follow that link above it goes to a previous story Bump wrote in 2022. In that story, it’s clear Mac Isaac was talking about things circulating online…
He’s not saying that people added things to the drive. He’s saying some people were claiming things were on the drive that may not have been there. But the critical point is that those claims don’t change the contents of the drive itself. And the contents of the drive have never been found to contain Russian disinformation.
I don’t think Bump is dumb, just dishonest when it suits him. And I wasn’t always negative about his columns. I gave him credit on a few occasions including here and here. But overall he had a lot of embarrassments including the best known one when he walked out of an interview about Hunter Biden’s shady influence-peddling.
Bump is best known for storming out of an interview after being asked to entertain the possibility that Joe Biden was at least somewhat involved in his son Hunter Biden’s shady foreign dealings. pic.twitter.com/YTKkZTI1X1
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) July 24, 2025
Anyway, it appears Bump’s time at the Post is over. He made the announcement last week on Bluesky and no one noticed until yesterday.
Philip Bump is leaving the Washington Post. The annoying resistance columnist announced his decision to take a buyout from the Post last week on Bluesky, the social media app for brain-damaged liberal activists. Few noticed at the time, and even fewer cared. “I am taking some time off before deciding on next steps,” he wrote…
In the days after Bump announced his exit from the Post, several other opinion staffers accepted buyouts, including Catherine Rampell, the columnist who is best known for praising Doug Emhoff as a “modern day sex symbol.” Also leaving the Post is mediocre opinion journalist Jonathan Capehart and editor Krissah Thompson, who had been tapped to lead a “third newsroom” called WP Ventures. Because Capehart and Thompson are black, liberals on Bluesky have been complaining about racism. This includes Karen Attiah, the Post opinion columnist and fitness influencer best known for celebrating the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. “So.. officially, I’m the last Black staff columnist left in the Washington Post’s opinion section,” she wrote. “No words. Literally.”
And don’t forget Ruth Marcus. She left too.
There’s really no mystery about why the Post is offering buyouts to so many employees. It’s not about racism. It’s about money.
The left-leaning publication drew about 2.5 million to 3 million daily users to its site last summer, a fraction of the 22.5 million daily visitors at its peak when Biden took office in January 2021, according to internal data shared with Semafor.
The plummeting site traffic led the business to lose around $100 million on weak subscription and ad revenue in 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported.
To be fair, I think the money is the immediate driver of layoffs and buyouts but there may be something to the idea that the reason the Post is broke is that they completely lost their credibility working as attack-dogs on bogus stories like Russian collusion and then working as lap-dogs when it came to stories about Joe Biden mental fitness. Bump was certainly part of that at the Post. He didn’t ignore Biden’s age but he also did minimize or dismiss any evidence of his decline as late as 2023:
Even by March 1987, only 4 in 10 Americans said Reagan was too old to serve as president. Now, three-quarters say the same of Biden.
There are differences, of course. Biden is older, for one, and while Reagan had his share of gaffes and fumbles, Biden’s have spawned a cottage industry of media attention. His opponents have not only seized on misstatements as evidence of deteriorated mental acuity but elevated noncontroversial occurrences as evidence of his failings.
That link goes to one of the Post fact-checker’s columns about “cheap fakes,” i.e. unedited videos of Joe Biden that Democrats and the Post would prefer people ignore.
JOE BIDEN in Israel: “What am I doing now?” pic.twitter.com/liBEsBsz2f
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 13, 2022
Bump has always been a partisan hack who struggled to deal with evidence that didn’t fit his priors. That’s exactly why the Post kept him around for so long and also why I expect him to get picked up by some other lefty news outlet very soon.
