I’m a member of an encrypted group chat I probably shouldn’t be in anymore.

To be clear, I’m in a lot of chats I’ve muted or routinely ignore because I don’t have time. My life is fully focused now on countering corruption. So if it doesn’t have to do with that, I scroll past it. The college-friends thread has been neglected and so has the one of former Capitol Hill staffers. For some people, “group chats” have become the modern equivalent of the early 2000s email chain letter. An ignored nuisance.

But I recently took a renewed interest in this one. It’s a collection of CEOs and venture capitalists who discuss everything from robotics breakthroughs to American politics, and I was added years ago while advising companies on emerging tech and national security. I took a look at the chain, for the first time in a long time, because I was curious to see how these people were reacting to the Trump administration’s growing crackdown on AI companies.

I stumbled on something even more interesting.

Before I get to that, I’ll note that many of the people in the chat were pro-business Democrats who once groaned about Joe Biden’s executive order requiring developers of the most powerful AI models to share safety-test results with the government. Innovation-killing federal meddling, they called it. Trump ceremoniously threw out that Biden-era order on his first day in office. But since then, the Trump White House has undertaken far more heavy-handed moves than its predecessor, like blocking specific AI companies from releasing their products or labeling them a “national security risk.”

So I wanted to see: did Trump’s crackdown strike these techno-optimists as a big-government takeover?

Weirdly, as I scrolled through the chats from earlier this year, I saw that they seemed to welcome the new restrictions. Executives who fretted two years ago about Biden so much as talking about AI policy now praised Trump’s “foresight” in intervening in the marketplace. For a few of the group-chat participants, the motive was transparent. They’re deeply invested in rival firms or were delighted to watch a surging competitor brought to heel. Others, I’ll grant them, harbor genuine worries about the pace of progress.

But for most, it’s something else. Something darker.

What was striking to me was the general about-face. Plenty of these executives and startup vultures were as anti-Trump as it got during the president’s first term. They cheered for the tech-sector resistance or helped lead it, back when companies refused to enable a surveillance state or lend their tools to Trump’s agencies after those bureaucracies appeared to have been coopted to pursue the president’s political enemies. Now, many of these seem entrepreneurs are holding their tongues… or worse, applauding the ruler they once openly reviled.

I scrolled back through months of discussions I’d missed, since auto-disappear was not turned on. The tycoons and wannabe tycoons posted selfies from the White House, articles about “exciting” developments in the Trump administration like an explosion in defense-tech spending, and even favorable comments about the president’s garish America 250th celebrations. If anyone brought up controversies, they seemed to dance around criticism of the president or reached for comically cautious language. “Concerning,” one wrote in April of Trump’s threat to annihilate the Iranian people in a fiery genocide if their leaders defied him. Yes, concerning.

The more I scrolled, the more I felt like the chat was from a parallel reality. A space alien reading it would conclude the Trump administration was broadly celebrated, marred only by the occasional errant remark from its figurehead. Otherwise, all was well and good for the American people, their businesses, their allies, and the world writ large. (Except token costs. Token costs, the group-chat members fretted, were eating up a lot more of their budgets than expected.)

You’ve watched the public version of this yourself. You saw Tim Cook fawning over Trump in the Oval Office. You saw Bill Gates yucking it up with the president at a White House dinner. You saw Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg (men whose companies once took strident moral stands by defying this president) beaming through tech-summit photo ops. This isn’t even lobbying anymore. Lobbying, at least, was a professional necessity across administrations. This is more like the groveling pursuit of lapdog friendship with the president and his sycophants… a pursuit in which they’re thrown small morsels of mutual affection and expected to sit and drool and wait for more, while the White House wreaks havoc in the economy, raises prices, and creates chaos in global trade.

So let me go back to the Stockholm Syndrome group chat.

Why — in a private chat no less — were so many of them dancing in lockstep to the regime’s music when I knew, knew, they were registered Democrats and former anti-Trump diehards? The answer is a phenomenon rare in America but endemic to autocracies. It’s social fear. Many of these people are afraid of what happens if they say how they really feel. They’re afraid of being found out or snitched on, e.g. that a true believer in the mix, or a rival angling for advantage, will report their disloyalty to a White House that keeps blacklists of people and of insufficiently aligned companies.

I learned this early in Trump’s second term, when big-tech CEOs conveniently forgot they knew me the moment I landed on that blacklist. Despite the fact that some of them were my clients. The fear went beyond major companies. I realized how far the rot had actually spread when my legal defense fund couldn’t find a catering company to hire in a major city to serve soda at a fundraiser. When they found out the purpose of the event (to raise funds for an enemy of the president), these small businesses declined, fearing the possibility of ICE enforcement against their employees.

But a lot has changed since then. Popular defiance against Donald Trump has surged. Celebrities and news organizations have found their voices. Millions of Americans have filled the streets. Even MAGA diehards — from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie to Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Tim Pool — have broken with the president in ways once unthinkable.

Yet business leaders seem like the last corner of society still holding out. They’re evidently the most tightly gripped by the president’s Darth Vader chokehold and wary to create daylight with a man who’s created a novel carrot-and-stick system for U.S. companies. While scanning the missives in the group chat, I felt like I was reading the text exchanges of Susan Collins clones, each cheerfully looking the other way until an atrocity forced out a murmur of “concern,” then moving briskly along.

History knows what to call these people. Germany’s industrialists convinced themselves that flattering the new regime was shrewd risk management. Today, they’re remembered as regime collaborators (and some ended up at Nuremberg). Russia’s oligarchs have similarly learned that obedience buys no safety; it just gets them a shorter leash. And when they stray, sometimes they get thrown out of windows.

The lesson is that the compliant never get total protection. They just get used. And then when history shines a light backward, they get remembered for it.

As the defiance to Donald Trump grows in this country, I wasn’t expecting much bravery from America’s business leaders. But I certainly had not anticipated the level of enduring cowardice. It’s not even that I want them all to join the resistance again. In the group chat, a few of those folks harbor true MAGA sympathies. Fine. But I want the rest to publicly pick a side and stop being so mealy mouthed or, worse, offering up fake praise for a man who they believe is an autocrat. At least then they’d stand for something.

Before you get too excited, I’m not going to “Jeffrey Goldberg” these people. They can learn the hard way what capitulation looks like. Not long from now, the most craven among them will start getting subpoenaed for donations to Trump’s ballroom… or get questions from the press about no-bid contracts they secured with Trump’s agencies… or experience the eventual release of emails showing them sucking up to Trump aides who might one day land in federal prison.

I’ll let karma run its course. In the meantime, I might post this essay in the thread. Then I’m leaving the chat.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.

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The deadline came and went, and yet, there was no deal. But somehow, America’s allies are the ones catching hell for it.

Former CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr joins us as Trump scales back military exercises with South Korea while cozying back up to Kim Jong Un. Is this retaliation for not bailing him out with Iran, or is he just hoping Kim calls him back this time?

And Kim isn’t the only one leaving him on read.

Back home, SCOTUS rejected a Trump appeal with little more than a sentence of explanation. Then we head to Colorado, where Trump’s revenge campaign may have left behind a damning paper trail.

Plus, for “Who’s Joining the DEFIANCE,” a veteran heads to Dearborn, Michigan, after seeing what MAGA creators had been telling him about the city.

Along the way, he finds support outside the red-pill pipeline and starts his journey to the DEFIANCE.

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THIS WEEK ON THE ANT HILL

• TUES, AUG 18 — TRIVIA TUESDAY — Test your knowledge of defiance throughout history, and we’ll give a shoutout to everyone who gets all five right AND a $15 discount on any swag in our swag store!

• WEDS, AUG 19 — MY DEFIANCE MISSION — On Mission Wednesdays, we highlight the defiance actions Members are taking in their own communities. Tell us your story here. Every action counts!

• THURS, AUG 20 — SHOW US YOUR ANT-ITUDE! — We wanna see your DEFIANCE swag, your original artwork, your unique ways of shouting out your defiance to the world in creative ways. Send your pics to our editor here.

• FRI, AUG 21 — THE DEFIANCE BOOK CLUB — We are super psyched to launch the DEFIANCE Book Club this month! Our first selection: Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum. Visit your library or favorite bookstore and pick up a copy today. More details every Friday!

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GROW THE DEFIANCE

DEFIANCE Members are absolutely crushing it, spreading the word about our club for the courageous to their friends. There is strength in numbers, and that’s exactly what defiance requires. Here’s how you can help build our numbers—and get a shoutout on the Daily with Miles and Xander:

1. Go to https://www.defiance.news/leaderboard

2. Use the buttons provided to share your personal referral link on X, Facebook, or email. Or, copy the link (circled in the example below) to share it via text or other social platforms.

Nine years ago, I helped write Donald Trump’s first National Security Strategy. This weekend, he shredded what was left of it, and he may have invited the next Pearl Harbor in the process.

Writing that document back in 2017 was an awkward assignment from the beginning. For one thing, the president never actually read it. It was ostensibly the master plan for how his administration would conduct itself in the world, and Donald Trump didn’t so much as edit the first page. So since he was incapable of offering up a strategic vision, the strategy document itself described how we hoped Trump would operate, not necessarily how he intended to. His aides couldn’t know his intentions if he didn’t appear to have any — at least not beyond the grievances of a given week.

Still, the strategy said the right things. It pledged that America would remain a champion of liberty, deepen our alliances, and confront the ambitions of rival powers in the most strategically vital places on earth, especially where China, Russia, and North Korea had nefarious plans.

On Taiwan, we committed “to provide for Taiwan’s legitimate defense needs and deter coercion.” On Eastern Europe, we warned that “Russia is using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment” to the continent. On the Korean Peninsula, we vowed to “remain ready to respond with overwhelming force to North Korean aggression.” Those are the words you’d expect from the White House. They were also, at best, the wishful thinking of nervous aides trying to paper over a president who seemed impulsive at beast and, at worst, ready to forsake America’s global responsibilities and cast our lot with a small band of autocratic thugs instead of our fellow democracies.

That’s part of why I quit and wrote A Warning. I wanted Americans to see where Trump was headed, especially on foreign policy and especially in a second term, when all the adults would be gone. I cautioned that a Trump unbound would treat our friends as enemies and our enemies as friends. What’s more, I warned that flipping the script would put the United States in unnecessary mortal peril by exposing us to surprise attack and stripping us of our greatest legacy and strongest protection: leadership of the free world.

It’s happening now. If you want a yardstick to measure how bad it is, just look at each of those same strategic crossroads named in the original Trump national security strategy (again, the one that we wrote and he merely rubber-stamped). The president is abandoning our friends in all the places where we are needed most, and he is leaving behind vacuums to be filled by his dictator buddies.

Start with Korea. On Sunday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” our joint military exercises with South Korea, complaining that our ally wouldn’t join his war with Iran and insisting the drills send a signal that is “inappropriate and hostile” to our friends in North Korea, which he called “unthreatening and respectful.” Ah yes, Mr. President, they are so “unthreatening” that during your first term we had to urgently plan for the possibility that the hermit kingdom might launch a nuclear attack on the continental United States because Kim Jong Un was so “respectful.” By the way, Trump announced America’s pull-back from its longtime ally days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile in a show of force against the South.

Then look at what else is happening in the Pacific. This weekend, the Navy pulled the USS George Washington out of Asia to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a single American aircraft carrier, while China grows more aggressive toward Taiwan by the month. In fact, Taiwan has been holding emergency drills practicing what to do if Beijing orders an invasion. So why is America pulling back vital resources? Because Trump has no real interest in deterring China, where he has marveled enviously at Xi Jinping’s power and toyed with the idea of a “grand bargain.”

Instead, his ego has America mired in an open-ended war with Iran that is grinding down our ships, draining our missile stockpiles, and running our sailors ragged. So he’s sending more ships into that quagmire. (And Tehran, according to the Wall Street Journal, spent the recent “ceasefire” preparing a wider war, with one regime adviser boasting that “the main war has not yet begun.”)

Finally, take a look at what’s happening in Europe. Satellite imagery revealed this weekend that Russia is building a network of secret drone bases within striking distance of NATO, with storage for a thousand attack drones at a single site. German authorities just found a suspected Russian drone rigged with explosives at the Leipzig airport. And Western planners are quietly admitting they have no real plan for NATO’s nightmare scenario, a coordinated Russian and Chinese strike on two fronts, at the very moment Trump has hollowed out the alliance that exists to prevent such a surprise attack. The response from the White House to these provocations has been near-total silence.

Our enemies are gobsmacked by what’s happening. Under Donald Trump, we’ve walked out onto thin ice and handed our foes a sledgehammer. They must be fist-pumping in foreign briefing rooms.

Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.

Before America entered the Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote something that would come to be viewed as prophecy:

“How heavily do the destinies of this generation hang upon the government and people of the United States… Will the United States throw their weight into the scales of peace and law and freedom while time remains, or will they remain spectators until the disaster has occurred; and then, with infinite cost and labor, build up what need not have been cast down?”

We know the answer our grandparents gave. The question has come around again.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.

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Bloomberg dug into thousands of glowing public comments backing the proposal, and wouldn’t you know it, some of them came from dead people?

I guess Trump found them after all and apparently put them to work.

Wel…

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Newly released files show that federal authorities opened a terrorism probe in Minnesota that ended up targeting ordinary protesters whose weapons of choice were wooden spoons and cookware.

This winter, young climate activists in Minnesota stood outside hotels where ICE agents were being housed, banging pots and pans. The protesters kept agents awake at night, and they also urged the hotels not to do business with DHS. The group called these clever pop-up activations “wide awakes,” launched amidst an immigration crackdown that saw the murder of U.S. citizens, illegal detentions, and widespread government misconduct. In short, it was the kind of activity Americans have engaged in since the founding, somewhere between a picket line and a cowbell.

What the activists didn’t know is that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was spying on them under the auspices of a broader federal inquiry, justified partly on grounds of “domestic terrorism.”

According to newly released government documents reported by the New York Times, DHS opened the secret investigation out of its St. Paul office in late January, four days after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was filming officers during the immigration crackdown. Rather than investigate the agents who killed Pretti, federal authorities set out to probe the protest movement itself, including labor unions, community organizers, and a climate group called the Sunrise Movement, which we featured on DEFIANCE Daily just a few months ago.

What followed was expansive surveillance. According to the Times, this included the seizure of some of the groups’ financial records, the infiltration of Signal chats, and in-person spying on organizers who were putting together the types of protests with which the Sunrise Movement and area residents made headlines. Indeed, undercover agents infiltrated activists’ internal meetings at libraries, public parks, and in churches, recording not just what people said but who they were.

At one training session in a church meeting room in Roseville, Minnesota, agents wrote down attendees’ license plate numbers, matched the plates to their owners’ names, scraped their social media, and compiled what they called an “intel work-up” on each person. In the course of such monitoring, DHS put together dossiers on ordinary teachers, veterans, and union members who were challenging the president’s violent, anti-immigration agenda.

In another instance, investigators scrutinized three years of wire transfers from the nation’s largest health care workers union under the heading of “domestic terrorist financing.” Prosecutors then showed a grand jury a PowerPoint asserting that eighteen organizations, including the AFL-CIO, the Democratic Socialists of America, a state teachers’ union, and a small Minneapolis bike shop called the Grease Pit, were part of a conspiracy against ICE. No such charges have been filed against those organizations.

Internally, DHS branded one leg of the effort as “Operation Puppet Master.”

In June, the investigation produced an indictment of fifteen people and was announced with great fanfare by the Trump administration as a takedown of “antifa” — the group the administration has designated as the leading terror threat to the United States. The alleged offenses included throwing ice chunks at ICE vehicles. While such infractions may or may not result in actual convictions, observers were quick to point out that the case was a far cry from DHS’s post-9/11 efforts to thwart bombings, mass shootings, airplane hijackings, and other nefarious plots from actual terrorist organizations like al Qaeda and ISIS.

(The federal judge overseeing the proceedings has already ruled that the activity at the heart of the supposed conspiracy, following ICE vehicles and reporting where they go, is not grounds for arrest.)

What’s just as alarming as the terrorism allegations is that investigators went beyond looking into mere individuals and conducted surreptitious monitoring of left-leaning organization — groups that helped organize tens of thousands of Minnesotans to stand up for their rights. None has been accused of a crime. Yet the groups were evidently subpoenaed, surveilled, and infiltrated by federal agents.

The Times report quotes Harry Jacobs, one of the federal prosecutors who resigned in protest from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota that oversaw these investigations, blasting the Trump administration’s misconduct:

“The government’s power to investigate is extraordinary, and with that power comes a responsibility to exercise care and restraint…An investigation should begin with a legitimate basis to suspect criminal conduct, not with a chosen institution or group. Prosecutors must follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, rather than select a target and work backwards to build a case.”

Evidence now appears to show DHS doing exactly that. The paper trail paints a picture of agents who targeted left-wing groups because of their viewpoint on Trump’s immigration crackdown, without evidence of criminal conduct, and who then went on a fishing expedition within those groups to find possible infractions they could try to prosecute.

I spent years at DHS and have worked with almost every head of the department, under Democratic and Republican administrations. Until Trump’s first term, few of them would’ve been caught dead overseeing an investigation like this. The responsible agents would’ve been suspended or fired. The conduct would’ve been reported to Congress. And departmental leaders would’ve seen it, rightfully, as a chilling violation of free speech. No longer. In story after story, we are witnessing the slide of DHS down a slippery slope into becoming the warden of a burgeoning police state.

The Times piece invoked a similar episode in our history, known as Cointelpro. That was J. Edgar Hoover’s program of infiltrating and cataloguing left-wing activists, which was so notorious that Congress spent decades building guardrails to prevent other such flagrant violations of civil liberties from happening again. Those guardrails have now failed. And anyone tempted to treat Minnesota as a one-off should look at the paper trail.

This all flows from a presidential directive signed by Donald Trump last year, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which ordered a whole-of-government campaign against what the administration labels “domestic terrorism,” including groups with “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-Christian” views. Prosecutors and agents across the country are now under pressure to enforce NSPM-7 and make it their top professional priority. One of my oft-repeated concerns is that the extent of this major abuse of power is being kept classified, as terror investigations are treated as the most sensitive national security cases.

What we don’t know yet is how far the rot has spread. Minnesota is just where the documents leaked into public view. The real question (the same one I asked last week about the warrantless tracking of James Comey), is how many other groups and how many other ordinary Americans are being secretly catalogued right now for constitutionally protected speech? The government will not volunteer the answer. We know that. And we only know about Operation Puppet Master because defense lawyers pried the records loose from the administration.

So let me tell you what we’re doing about it. This month, DEFIANCE.org launched the real Anti-Weaponization Fund, built to support the targets of exactly this kind of presidential revenge, and as of this writing we are actively exploring how to team up with other pro-democracy groups to protect protesters’ rights and counter these violations in court. The lesson readers should not take away is that protesting is dangerous; it’s that protests are working, so well in fact that they’re terrifying the regime. Indeed, when the federal government assigns undercover agents to a pots-and-pans demonstration, it’s telling you that it really can’t stand the noise.

Thankfully, federal judges are getting fed up with an administration that is increasingly abusing DOJ and DHS powers. I have faith in the justice system in the long run. I have faith that the wrongly accused will be vindicated. But I won’t rely on faith alone. That’s why every week at DEFIANCE.org we do something about it.

The current president of the United States wants Americans to think twice before joining a group chat, attending a training at a church, or banging a pot outside a hotel in protest of his administration. The answer to him is more noise, not less. So while this story continues to unfold, my advice to you is: keep on banging.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.

TODAY’S FEATURE: THE DEFIANCE BOOK CLUB

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It’s not the service members who risk their lives and comfort for this country.

It’s not those who simply wish to build a life and live in peace.

It’s not even the loyalists who serve him time and time again, no questions asked.

It’s just T-R-U-M-P.

For starters, Trump loves cosplaying as a great milita…

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Donald Trump’s corrupt “anti-weaponization fund” is dead (for now). The billion-dollar program he devised to hand your taxpayer dollars to pro-Trump criminals never got off the ground. But today, we’re launching an actual one — to thwart his campaign of retribution.

We’re calling it the real Anti-Weaponization Fund, and its purpose is straightforward: when the president of the United States illegally wields his power to destroy someone’s life, we’ll have resources to help fight back. The effort was first announced last night, and it’s being funded by DEFIANCE.org.

I know what the destruction from a presidential grudge feels like, because I’ve dealt with it more than once. When I came forward from inside his first administration to speak out, he tried to ruin my life. I rebuilt it in the aftermath. But when Donald Trump returned to office, he signed an order directing federal agencies to investigate me for “treason” — for speech the First Amendment plainly protects. It took him almost nothing. The squiggle of a pen and a short press conference. That was enough to swing a heavy wrecking ball into my life once more.

The blacklist did its work fairly quickly. As most of you know, my small business collapsed, as colleagues and clients fled. Some of my closest friends went quiet, afraid that association with me would put them in Trump’s crosshairs, too. And the ordinary rhythms of our life — whether it was family gatherings, dinners in Washington, D.C., and the simple assumption of safety — were soon replaced by a low, constant hum of dread. Then there was the false quietude of fear. Or maybe you’d call it the silence that comes after an explosion.

People I loved reached out to me and my wife and whispered to us that we shouldn’t poke the bear. We shouldn’t fight back against Trump, regardless of the consequences we were already suffering. It will blow over, they said, so don’t make it worse for yourself. What many of them were actually saying was: Don’t make it worse for us. I understood and heeded them, for a while. But that kind of silence is corrosive to anyone with a conscience. The loneliness gnaws at you, and after a while it curdles into something a lot worse; it becomes a kind of silent shame — that you took advice to do the thing which you knew was wrong. Staying quiet.

Then something happened. My wife and I broke. The quiet drove us mad, especially at ourselves. We felt betrayed by our own concessions — and the unnatural act of laying low when everything inside of us said that what’s right is to fight back. To defy. We took a deep breath and stood back up.

When we did, we were genuinely surprised to discover we were not alone. Yes, a lot of people in our social circle scurried away, stopped calling, or stopped responding to texts. But we discovered another universe of support we never knew existed. It poured in from all corners of the country, from people we’d never met and likely never will. Complete strangers. Their encouragement did more than buoy our spirits. Some of them gave us the means to stand our ground and bring legal challenges against the administration, some of which are still to come. (For instance, the amazing folks at Whistleblower Aid offered the support of their legal defense fund.)

My story has become a mere footnote in the scope of Trump’s sprawling and unprecedented revenge campaign. He has gone after members of Congress and business executives and foreign leaders and regular folks who have challenged his conduct. He’s made a sport of wielding federal authority for personal grievance.

In the months after he attacked me, one of my good friends who never wavered, Xander Schultz, called me with an idea: we should find a way to help others who are in the president’s crosshairs. We should build an organization to gather around the targets of Trump’s revenge machine at the precise moment the intimidation is designed to paralyze them. Then, we could be a lifeline… give them the financial support… offer encouragement to be brave instead of being compliant.

In the end, we went bigger. We launched DEFIANCE.org to crowd-source courage for all Americans — giving anyone and everyone an opportunity, every single week, to fight Trump’s corruption in ways big and small. That’s what we do now. Each Wednesday, we announce a real action to counter his abuses of power.

But we never lost sight of that original idea. And this week, we’re bringing it to life in an early iteration.

Which brings me back to the real Anti-Weaponization Fund. Trump used that term to describe a scheme to loot the Treasury for his allies. Thankfully, that fund is moribund because of congressional pressure and public outrage. But we’re taking the term away from him and using it to describe our effort to counter the weaponization of government. His weaponization of government.

Here’s how it works. When the president threatens or opens an investigation into someone, files charges, or strips a person of their job, license, or security clearance (because they did their job, exercised their rights, or stood up to abuses of power), our team will reach out. First, to tell them what I needed to hear in my darkest stretch: you are not alone. Then, as resources allow, we’ll help them secure legal, security, and/or other assistance to defend their rights. We are partnering with legal defense organizations and other pro-democracy groups equipped to take up these cases. And we’ll mobilize our community in their defense, including by collecting messages of encouragement for those targeted people.

We’ve already been doing this informally by helping provide advice to folks whose rights are threatened. Now we want to formalize it. This is just a first step. We’re a small organization, so we won’t pretend we can bankroll every case that Trump’s retribution machine generates. Far from it. But that’s what crowd-sourcing courage is all about — filling the gaps where it’s needed most. We plan to help affected individuals by getting them the timely backing to defend their rights.

Like autocrats before him, Trump’s strategy depends on the cruel calculus of intimidation. He needs his targets to feel isolated and intimidated just enough to give in. If he does that, then he doesn’t need to prosecute all of his enemies. Because the others will self-censor or fold when they see what happens to the first group. Every time someone capitulates, the next abuse gets easier. On the other hand, every time someone stands up, the machine grinds a little slower for all of us.

I’ll never forget the strangers who came forward when we were at our lowest. They changed the trajectory of our lives, and they’re the reason I get to write these words today as a free man still in the fight. The Anti-Weaponization Fund is part of how we pay that forward.

You can chip in to support the fund here. If you don’t have financial resources to help, that’s okay, because we’re also inviting anyone to send notes of support to people in Trump’s crosshairs. We’ll rotate that list regularly, and we’ll get the messages directly to them to make sure they know other people are in their corner, whether it’s high-profile targets or ordinary Americans persecuted for protesting a lawless regime.

In America, we don’t submit to kings. But we must go further. We must resolve to stand beside the people who stand up. If we do that, no one will be left bowing down.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.

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The beating heart of DEFIANCE.org is our Weekly Mission Briefing. Every Wednesday at 5p ET, we take real action to counter Donald Trump’s abuses of power.

Presidential revenge is no longer a threat. It’s a program. Security clearances pulled by t…

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Donald Trump is carrying out a far more sweeping renovation of the White House than was previously known. You are paying for it. And he might be breaking the law in the process.

While you were out buying the groceries Trump promised to make cheaper, his administration quietly assembled nearly a billion dollars to gild the president’s mansion, most of it from taxpayer funds. According to confidential contracting documents reviewed by the Washington Post, the White House has stockpiled money for at least $927 million in construction on the grounds, the most expensive overhaul of the property in its history in raw dollars. And Trump didn’t ask Congress for it.

To do it, analysis shows the Trump administration secretly raided funding from other agencies and accounts, including $415 million that was appropriated by Congress in part to recruit and train the Secret Service agents who take bullets for presidents. Instead, that money is being redirected to buy him a ballroom and pay for other renovations that haven’t been fully disclosed to the American people or Congress.

The mechanics of how the White House is doing this are just as damning as the number. The administration apparently routed the funds through the “Executive Residence,” the small housekeeping office that employs the White House curators, calligraphers, and carpenters. Its maintenance account normally receives about $2.5 million a year from Congress. Since Trump took office, his aides have stuffed $875 million into it, including $500 million in transfers from the Secret Service and the White House Military Office, money donated from corporations and wealthy individuals connected to the president, and another $70 million from sources the documents don’t identify.

Why launder the money through the housekeepers? I’ll tell you. Because that office is exempt from ordinary federal disclosure rules. The contracts are typically confidential. In theory, this is partly to protect the president and the White House complex against threat actors. But it’s definitely not so the commander-in-chief can put together unauthorized passion projects with taxpayer funds and avoid public criticism. That’s why last Friday, a federal appeals court ruled against part of Trump’s scheme, finding that the White House evaded accountability by trying to build the ballroom without congressional approval. Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court.

I spent years working on the House Appropriations Committee, so let me explain the legal architecture that Donald Trump seems to be treating as a suggestion. The power of the purse belongs to Congress. It’s the first power the Constitution grants, in Article One, and it means the executive branch cannot take money lawmakers appropriated for one purpose and spend it on another, not without explicit approval. When Congress declined to fund Trump’s ballroom, that was basically their answer. They didn’t also say, “But you can take the money from other places!” The president evidently didn’t like his restrictions.

By moving Secret Service training money into a redecorating account, he may be committing the same species of offense he was impeached for the first time. Remember when Trump defied Congress’s direction on funds for Ukraine — and dangled the money as a quid-pro-quo, with demands that Ukraine investigate his political rival, Joe Biden? That, of course, wasn’t an “authorized” purpose of those funds. It was a high crime, one for which he was then investigated and impeached.

Trump clearly didn’t learn his lesson. He’s back at it again.

One thing I can say with certainty is that the investigations into this will be sweeping. House Democrats are already sending document-preservation letters to the companies financing and building one part of this project — the ballroom — and if voters hand them the gavel in November, they will almost certainly expand that investigation into all aspects of the Trump administration’s spending schemes. Right now, he appears to be moving money into special accounts to allow himself to do an extreme home makeover that no one gave him the power to carry out.

As they say, follow the money.

But when I read the Washington Post report, I felt like another message needed to be delivered to Trump and his family. They needed to be told to stop treating our government like their own cheap casino, and they also needed to be notified that their attempt to literally etch their legacies into our buildings, cities, and society will fail.

So let me tell Trump, right now, what he needs to hear:

Everything you are doing is temporary.

You are a mere renter behaving like an owner, which you are not. And the moment you are gone, the demolition will begin.

We will take down the ugly drapes and the gold trim.

We will take down the gaudy flourishes in the Oval Office and the embarrassing Walk of Fame along the colonnade.

We will unpave the Rose Garden and let it bloom again.

If the ballroom ever rises, we will tear it down the same way you tore down the East Wing, except we will do it legally.

We will take your face off the $1 coins, pull them from circulation, and melt them down while we remove your signature from paper currency.

We will strip your name from TrumpRx and Trump Accounts, pull the banner-sized portraits off federal buildings, and cancel the planned triumphal arch before a single stone is laid.

If we’re too late, we’ll tear that down, too.

And when it’s all said and done, we’ll erase your likeness from every place it didn’t belong, from the park passes all the way down to the stationery.

You are wasting your time and wasting our money… because we will undo the entirety of your corrupt legacy. Do you understand?

Autocratic rulers stamp their names and faces onto the state because they know their legacy cannot survive on the merits. And many of them would rather die infamous and reviled than fade into obscurity. In that same spirit, Donald Trump is trying to make himself permanent by fusing his noxious brand with the republic so that removing him feels like removing America. Well, it won’t work. This country has defied better-built cults than his (ask the British monarchy), and the statues always come down.

To show him what that will look like, we made a video earlier this year imagining January 21, 2029, the day his name starts coming off of everything. I’ve included it below. If this looks like a mere movie trailer to you, don’t worry. The full-length, documentary film will be a masterpiece.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.

TODAY’S FEATURE: MY DEFIANCE MISSION

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Now, the security operation to secretly move Trump off Air Force One makes sense.

The elaborate cover story afterward? A little harder to explain.

Especially from a president who never misses a chance to tell us how tough h…

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The Trump administration is laying the groundwork to seize ballots in contested midterm races. While they’ll likely lose in court, losing is actually part of the plan.

Earlier this year, the president’s agents did an obvious dry run for how to steal future elections. On January 28, the FBI raided the election hub in one of the most contested 2020 battlegrounds — Fulton County, Georgia, where Trump was previously indicted for pressuring officials to “find 11,780 votes” that didn’t exist. The president himself said the raid would help him find out who “really won” the 2020 election, despite the fact that those ballots had been counted three times, each time confirming that Trump lost. (Also, it goes without saying that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to run an unauthorized “recount” of an election because the president is a sore loser.)

But here’s what should spook every U.S. state: it worked. After Trump’s DOJ sued Fulton County for its 2020 records and failed, it decided just to go seize them. The FBI quietly went to a magistrate judge earlier this year and sought a warrant to raid the county’s election offices. Their filing rested largely on fraud claims debunked years ago and identified no concrete evidence of a crime. But the judge signed it anyway. Then FBI agents barged in and carted off 656 boxes, including the county’s only copy of its 2020 ballots. And Georgia wasn’t a one-off: the administration has gone after 2020 ballots in Arizona’s biggest battleground county, too.

Election-watchers are rightfully worried this tactic will be used in the heat of the 2026 midterm elections. And here’s how the Trump administration might do it:

Since last year, DOJ has demanded that nearly every state hand over its complete, unredacted voter lists, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. For states that have complied, the Trump administration has evidently been running the data through DHS databases to weed out “illegal aliens.” But the databases are notoriously faulty, and there is limited oversight over who might get purged, raising fears that legitimate U.S. citizens in key battlegrounds would be dropped from the voter rolls.

A dozen red states complied and handed over their lists. But thirty states and D.C. refused and were sued by the Trump administration. The good news is that DOJ has lost every single one of these cases so far in federal court (twenty-one times already) with judges ruling that no federal law gives DOJ the right to demand states’ unredacted voter files. A normal Justice Department would have dropped the other cases after losing just five times.

So why are Trump’s lawyers still fighting?

Because they’re creating a pretext. In my opinion, the Trump administration is preparing the rationale for its future warrant affidavits to go seize ballots in these “non-compliant” states. This will be their logic: We asked X state to let us verify its rolls to weed out fraud; it refused; the courts blocked us; therefore, no one can say whether noncitizens decided this election. So to investigate any fraud claims, we need to go get the ballots themselves.

The result would be chaos-by-design. Picture FBI agents carting boxes out of election offices in two or three states with razor-thin margins, races that decide control of the House and Senate. While the ballots sit in federal custody, certification of a victor will be difficult if not impossible. In the meantime, voters will rightfully fret that Trump’s agents are meddling with the results. MAGA candidates on the losing end will refuse to concede, citing the “ongoing investigations.” And the White House will make sure the fog stays thick enough to hand GOP leaders in Congress a pretext to delay seating new members, which will be the final step in preventing a peaceful transfer of power if Democrats win either chamber.

So where is this likeliest to happen?

If you overlay the refusers (the states that declined to hand over their voter rolls to Trump’s DOJ) with this fall’s top battleground races, then thirteen light up as high risk: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. These states are home to some of the most important House and Senate toss-up races. Depending on how the results look after Election Day, the Fulton scheme could hypothetically be carried out in any of them.

These thirteen are the likeliest targets, but they aren’t the only states at risk. There are battleground states that actually cooperated with the DOJ’s voter roll demands — including Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Florida, Nebraska, and North Carolina — that could be hit, too. Here the pretext would simply be flipped around: We ran the voter lists they gave us, and we found anomalies. So we have to go investigate.

Would these seizures hold up? Especially if the investigations are all conveniently conducted in places where it might help a losing MAGA candidate contest the results? In the end, probably not. Warrants require probable cause of an actual crime, the ballots belong to states themselves under state law, and the refusing states have already beaten this Justice Department twenty-one straight times. More importantly, there is almost certainly not going to be evidence in these places that illegal voters have somehow voted in such numbers that they’ve influenced the outcome.

But the Fulton County scheme proved a major weakness in the system. An initial FBI raid just needs a single magistrate judge’s signature. After that, getting the ballots back can take months of litigation. With the ballots in the custody of the feds, they’ll have the upper hand to claim possible “fraud” because they’ll control the evidence.

In the end, Trump’s team doesn’t care about losing in court. All they care about is fighting the battle in the court of public opinion for two months — between the election on November 3, 2026, and January 3, 2027, when the next Congress is supposed to be seated. That’s long enough to diminish confidence in the results and to create enough justification for Speaker Mike Johnson to secure support from his caucus not to hand over power. Indeed, under the law, the House majority has the final say over who gets seated in the chamber.

This is no conspiracy theory. Trump tried to do this once before in 2020, albeit in a far more fly-by-night fashion. He ginned up stolen-election claims out of nothing. He went to courts across the country. Of course, he lost more than sixty of those election cases, but that almost didn’t matter. His goal was to create enough uncertainty in the court of public opinion to give Republicans air cover on January 6, 2021 to refuse to certify the results. (It nearly worked, were it not for Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with the plot… and a violent mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol and discredited the whole effort.)

The real difference this time is that nobody gets to be surprised. Fulton County was an obvious rehearsal. Every single state must be on guard. Attorneys general should consider sending public letters to the chief judges of every federal district in their states putting them on alert. The letters should ask that any warrant application having to do with ballots or election equipment be heavily scrutinized and challenged, or elevated to a district judge. These frontline judges are the last check before the FBI trucks roll in, and after what happened in Fulton County, all of them need to know that they might be served bogus claims from the FBI for seizing America’s votes.

In the meantime, every at-risk state must have their emergency motions pre-drafted and ready to file within hours (fortunately, many already do). Secretaries of state should harden the chain of custody for ballots so an FBI seizure can’t feed on ambiguity. Local prosecutors must know their election-interference statutes front and back and be ready to prosecute lawbreaking feds (at DEFIANCE.org, we’ve helped many of them gear up to do precisely that). Finally, states should keep coordinating as a bloc, pre-bunking the “uncertainty” narrative before the Trump administration decides which races it wants to contest.

When he came for their voter rolls, most states told Donald Trump “no” and beat him every single time in court. The law is on their side. This fall, they need to be ready to say it again when the feds come for their ballots — with the paperwork already filed, before the FBI is at the door.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.

TODAY’S FEATURE: TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE ON TRIVIA TUESDAY!

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On paper? Harmless. Wholesome, even.

Then reporters got to Ohio.

MAGA hats everywhere. Some creative interpretations of state residency. Athletes who seemed about as clear on the rules as the rest of us.

Let’s just say the “Patriot” part was doing a lot more work than the “Games.”

Then there’s ICE.

The administration is finally putting body cameras on agents. Great. Except now we get to the part about who sees the footage, and when. At the same time, DHS’s longtime top statistician just quit after key immigration data stopped being published, while the administration keeps arresting and deporting people without giving the public the proper numbers to track it.

But we do have some good news.

After Todd Blanche signed a piece of paper supposedly killing Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund, Democracy Forward took one look a at it and decided to expand its lawsuit.

Its president and CEO, Skye Perryman, joins us to explain why, and to talk about her new book, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom, and Reimagine Democracy.

Honestly? This book was born for the Defy-Ants.

And for our favorite segment, “Who’s Joining the DEFIANCE,” the Trump administration tried threatening one local official into doing ICE’s bidding. Lucky for us, they picked the wrong guy.

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Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have decided to make the midterms about preventing communist “radicals” from taking over America. That’s going to backfire spectacularly.

The morning after Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Trump pronounced him a “Communist loser,” and by that evening the president was in Las Vegas declaring communism “the greatest threat” America has ever faced. The GOP’s first general-election ads are wall-to-wall “red menace.” (Never mind that El-Sayed calls himself a capitalist.) The plan for November is to run against Karl Marx and to peg every opponent of Trump as a commie.

But that might not go the way Republicans want. If Americans are looking for a militant radical who wants the government to control the economy, silence dissent, and glorify the supreme leader, they can find one. He currently works out of the Oval Office. If Democrats are smart, this will be their theme in the midterms.

Donald Trump himself is a communist, or at least as close to the rulers of past communist regimes as anyone we’ve ever seen hold power in America. I don’t say that in jest. I say it as a former Republican who spent two-and-a-half years inside Trump’s first administration, watching his rule trend away from democracy and toward something darker yet familiar to any student of history. If you strip away the flag pins and look at how Trump actually governs, you find something closer to a Soviet general secretary than to any American president of either party.

Let’s start with what happened this week. On Tuesday, the White House sent Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook a letter announcing that the president is once again “considering removing” her over mortgage fraud allegations, just weeks after the Supreme Court blocked his first attempt. Everyone watching knows what’s really happening. Trump has said out loud that America “should have the lowest interest rate in the world,” and Cook (who says inflation is too high and rates may need to rise) is standing in his way. He already installed a loyalist as Fed chair, and now he wants to purge the board’s dissenters so that he can effectively control the printing of money.

When a ruler seizes the central bank so he can personally direct the flow of money, it’s what’s known as state control of the economy. Every country that’s handed its leader such power (from Weimar Germany to Venezuela) got pretty much the same result. Hyperinflation and savings accounts worth nothing. The Soviets called it “Gosbank.” If a Democratic president so much as flirted with doing this, I promise you that my former GOP colleagues would be lighting their tighty-whities on fire on the Capitol Lawn and screaming, “Communism!” And rightfully so. The move would be a terrifying subversion of our democracy.

But the Fed is just one front. This administration has Hoovered up $27 billion in shares of thirty private companies, including a large chunk of Intel, a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, and various other holdings with almost no public transparency on the process, the purpose, or the ongoing relationship. We’re witnessing the partial nationalization of industry. If you add in the tariff regime Trump imposed by decree, the Defense Production Act that he’s using to force companies to make certain products, and the deals dictating what companies may sell and to whom… then all of a sudden, you have a president starting to command the means of production.

My fellow conservatives used to warn about the dangers of a “command economy.” They wrote screeds against it; I wrote screeds against it. We elected Tea Party congressmen out of fear of it. Now, MAGA candidates are running as full-fledged champions of it, promising to see Trump’s strongman agenda through. After all, the president is only partway done transforming the U.S. government into his own, personal brand of communism. He needs a compliant Congress to finish the job.

The parallels don’t stop at economics, of course, because Soviet-style rule was never mainly about economics. It was about intimidation and power. On that score, the resemblance is uncanny.

Show trials to deter dissent? Ask James Comey, indicted over a photograph of seashells after the government wiretapped him without a warrant, or the dozens of protesters charged under a Civil War-era conspiracy statute. Loyalty purges? Kash Patel has spent a year and a half cleansing the FBI of agents who ever investigated Trump, while Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon sheds generals who fail the fealty test. National security blacklist? I’ve written about being on that list myself, and it’s starting to make 1950s McCarthyism look quaint. State pressure on the press? Just count the lawsuits against news organizations, the banned outlets, the leak hunts where staffers are forced to surrender their phones, the reporter arrests, or the subpoenas served to journalists. Federal judges have now ruled against this administration on First Amendment grounds in seventy-five separate cases, a number with no precedent in American history (and plenty of precedent elsewhere).

Then, there’s the cult of personality. The U.S. Treasury is minting a $1 coin with Trump’s face on it, despite a federal law that prohibits depicting a living person on U.S. currency, and his signature will appear on all American paper money, a first for any sitting president. His portrait hangs banner-sized from federal buildings. The drug-discount program is called TrumpRx. The investment accounts for children are called Trump Accounts. The ballroom, the monuments, the renamings of federal buildings are all gratuitous proof that the man is stamping his likeness onto the state itself, which is what personalist regimes do when the leader and the government are meant to be understood as the same thing.

Even Trump’s political promises have a “five-year-plan,” communist ring to them. The best healthcare in the world! Higher wages! Lower prices! On day one! Groceries down! Energy down! Cleaner cities with everything gleaming! In gold! Most were pledges no leader in a free economy could actually make, because in a free economy the leader doesn’t control such things. Yet Trump promised them anyway, the way Soviet general secretaries promised record harvests. And like the general secretaries, he’s failed on essentially every count, which is why the propaganda has gone into overtime to convince struggling Americans how wonderful their lives are.

Someone will object that Trump believes none of Karl Marx’s actual communist philosophy. And that’s true, I suppose. He has no ideology beyond himself. But that puts him in familiar company. The communist regimes of the twentieth century all started with do-gooder ideas, and in nearly every case the ideology burned off on first contact with reality. What was left were strongmen who discovered that the only way to force their vision on a people was, well, force. They destroyed the rule of law in the name of the common man, but it was really for their own benefit. All of their subordinates stopped believing in the cause and began believing only in the leader — because loyalty was required.

Does that sound familiar to you?

So when Republicans spend the next three months warning about the radical left remaking America into a communist hellhole, listen to them carefully. Think about what they’re describing… out of control spending… seizure of private industry… destruction of capitalism… weaponized government… forced compliance with the regime’s social agenda… attacks on the courts… suppression of free speech. Every item on that list is happening now, and none of it was done by a democratic socialist from Michigan. After you’re done listening, let those MAGA sycophants know who is actually trying to run a communist country.

In the end, there’s another name for the system Donald Trump is building. We know it isn’t capitalism, which has been fully corrupted under his reign. It certainly isn’t constitutional democracy; he’s spent two years making sure you know that. The truth of what he’s building deserves to scare the American people more than communism ever did, because it isn’t across an ocean threatening to invade. It’s already here, and it answers to one man. Call it what it is: Trumpism.

Once you’ve reminded his enablers that Trump is a communist, don’t just shame them for their willful blindness. Do something about it. Defeat them at the polls.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.

TODAY’S FEATURE: TUNNEL TALK

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Maritsa Georgiou of The Grounded Podcast joins us as co-host as we break down the court ruling that blocked Trump’s White House ballroom, why he suddenly wants to call it a “military facility,” and what his South Lawn helipad says about a president who can’t stop redesigning Washington in his o…

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BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, TAKE TWO. It was just weeks ago that the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s first attempt to eradicate Constitutionally protected birthright citizenship. That victory was thanks in part to you, the DEFIANCE. Back in December, on one of our Weekly Mission Briefings, our members voted to support the Democracy Defenders Fund as it pressed the fight against Trump’s worst abuses of power—and we won that round. But Trump hasn’t given up. Yesterday, he signed two new executive orders aiming to limit birthright citizenship. One narrows citizenship for specific categories of people, including children of those with foreign embassy connections; the other targets so-called “birth tourism” by restricting visas for visitors hoping to give birth in the U.S. If there’s any question about who and what are behind the latest move, this video should clear things up…

In the video, Stephen Miller says the new order will be limited to, among others, “terrorists.” But remember: the Trump administration’s definition of “terrorist” has often been synonymous with “anyone who disagrees with us.” And the presence of Miller just about always means white nationalism is the guiding force, not national security. The 14th Amendment says anyone born in the country is a citizen, and courts have upheld that for over a century. Trump says he thinks this version will hold up. The ACLU says otherwise. And we’ll keep fighting, too.

WHEN PROSECUTORS ARE THE PROBLEM. The federal government’s use of conspiracy charges against ICE protesters is escalating fast. An NPR review found the Justice Department has charged more than three dozen people in at least 10 cases using a Civil War-era conspiracy statute, plus nearly 50 more under other statutes in Michigan, Texas, and Minnesota. Legal experts warn the government is casting an ever-wider net over ordinary civil disobedience. In Chicago, one such case, known as the “Broadview Six,” collapsed, but the fallout keeps growing. Normally-secret grand jury transcripts are being released after a judge found prosecutors improperly dismissed skeptical jurors and “vouched” for their own case. U.S. District Judge April Perry stated she had “never seen” such prosecutorial behavior, adding, “Trust has been broken.” U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros now admits “mistakes were made,” but is fighting off calls for a special prosecutor to investigate his own office. Know-your-rights groups are on top of this expansion of the administration’s First Amendment crackdown and have been ramping up efforts to defend protesters.

THE BLANCHE NOMINATION ROLLER COASTER TAKES ANOTHER DIVE. Just yesterday, in our reader poll, we asked you whether Todd Blanche would be confirmed as attorney general, and 82% of you said yes. It seemed like the right call at the time. But this morning, Blanche’s path to AG is looking unclear again. Senator Lisa Murkowski announced this morning that she’ll vote no, because she’s worried the “anti-weaponization fund” could be quietly revived if he’s confirmed (and she’s right to worry). “The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this administration,” Murkowski said. “I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.” With Susan Collins already a no and Mitch McConnell still “recovering,” Blanche can’t afford to lose another vote. His nomination hinges on Senator Bill Cassidy, one of the more prominent GOP critics of Trump’s DOJ.

THE LEAK THAT MADE HIM FURIOUS. According to a Washington Post report, Trump’s frustration with the Iran war boiled over at Camp David last weekend, where he confronted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over munitions shortages he thought had “been fixed.” The shortages in long-range missiles and air-defense interceptors are reportedly part of why Trump pulled back from his latest apocalyptic threats against Iran. His response to the story breaking wasn’t to address the shortage (he insists the U.S. has “massive amounts” of munitions). It was to go after whoever talked: in a late-night screed on Truth Social, Trump vowed that the “leakers” of these “treasonous statements” are being “hunted down,” promising “long term jail sentences.” So the big question is, who is the leaker? Could it be someone high up in the administration with political aspirations of his own? Social media suggests JD Vance or Marco Rubio. We don’t know that, of course, but it’s interesting that someone is trying to get the truth out there, whatever their reasons are.

THE $110 BILLION THAT WASN’T. A new GAO report tears apart DOGE’s signature claim to fame: $110 billion in savings that Elon Musk’s team touted on its public “Wall of Receipts.” Investigators found DOGE took credit for lease cancellations that were already underway before it existed, claimed contracts were terminated that weren’t, and loaded its database with unverifiable numbers. DOGE originally promised to cut $2 trillion in “waste, fraud, and abuse.” When GAO tried to check its work, the agency didn’t even respond to questions. This group may now be disbanded, but its foot soldiers will not escape accountability.

DIPLOMACY FOR SALE. This should shock exactly no one. A new Washington Post analysis finds that Trump is relying on wealthy donors and political loyalists to fill ambassadorships more than any recent president, with professional diplomats making up less than a third of sitting ambassadors. Meanwhile, more than half of ambassador posts sit vacant altogether. For Egypt’s ambassadorship, long held by career diplomats, Trump nominated Nick Oberheiden, a defense attorney with no prior diplomatic experience or public ties to Egypt, who donated roughly $1.3 million to political committees supporting him. And the kicker? Oberheiden once represented January 6 rioters. Because of course. His confirmation is pending.

WATCHLIST UPDATES. Here’s the latest on some of the other stories we reported on this week.

• Trump’s BBC Lawsuit. Yesterday morning, we told you that Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC was threatening to force him to hand over his financials as part of discovery. Later in the day, Trump won an 11th-hour reprieve, blocking the BBC from accessing his business records for now. His lawyers are now trying to amend the lawsuit to drop claims of financial harm entirely, which would moot the BBC’s need for the records altogether. The court hasn’t ruled yet on whether that amendment works.

• Pirro Still on Thin Ice. On Wednesday, we told you all about the clash between Trump and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro over her dropping vandalism charges against several defendants over that shoddy Reflecting Pool renovation. Trump’s still not over it. On Thursday, he told NBC News: “She said there was no vandalism. There was tremendous vandalism. So, she made a terrible mistake. I don’t understand why she did such a stupid thing.” Trump vowed in May the Reflecting Pool renovation would “last 50 years,” rushing the no-bid, multimillion-dollar project to be done by July Fourth. Seems like the mistake was his.

• A Tariff Refund Request. In yesterday’s issue, we told you that consumers have had it with tariff refunds making their way to corporations but not to them, even after it was regular Americans who largely paid the tab for Trump’s illegal “liberation day” tariffs. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker agrees. He’s demanding $1,700 direct payments for families in his state, saying, “There is no portal to request a refund for a mother in Rockford buying groceries for her children.”

BONUS ACT OF DEFIANCE: IRS WORKERS PUSH BACK. The union representing career IRS employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, has asked a federal judge to block Trump’s tax audit immunity deal, arguing that it would force career auditors to choose between following an unlawful order and following the law. The union’s filing doesn’t mince words: Todd Blanche “cannot tell the public the slush fund is dead while preserving every legal mechanism necessary to resurrect it at a moment’s notice.” Not only is the IRS being used to protect the president and his family, it’s reportedly being weaponized to go after foes. Weeks ago, the agency’s top lawyer resigned after clashes with the White House over targeted investigations against particular taxpayers, which is forbidden under law. Fortunately, if the Trump team had planned to weaponize the IRS in secret, they’re not getting their way. These two stories show the sunlight is beginning to pour in.

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THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.

TODAY’S FEATURE: THE DEFIANCE BOOK CLUB

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COURIER Newsroom’s Tara McGowan joins us as co-host as we break down Trump’s last-minute attempt to stop the BBC from accessing his financial records in his $10 billion lawsuit. We also tackle the mounting concern surrounding America’s depleted missile …

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NOTE: Miles is out of pocket this week for much-needed rest with family. This week, we’re sending our Members-only daily news update (THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST) to all subscribers. If you want to continue to get all-access, please consider becoming a DEFIANCE.org Member today at DEFIANCE.org/join

THE COPS-WATCHING-THE-COPS ARE DISAPPEARING. As federal judges keep hammering Donald Trump’s Justice Department for all types of misconduct, the two internal offices meant to police the DOJ seem to be fading away. Nearly half of the Office of Professional Responsibility’s (OPR) staff has left since Trump’s second term began, shrinking from 29 employees to 16. To be clear, OPR is the top DOJ office responsible for monitoring prosecutors’ conduct. Trump isn’t too concerned; he fired the OPR’s director outright and never named a replacement. As a result, the office opened just seven new investigations last fiscal year, which is a 20-year low, even though misconduct complaints hit 1,666, the highest total since 2005. The Inspector General’s office is suffering too, having lost 99 employees over the past year. One former IG official said the office has started avoiding “the high-profile stuff.”

REWRITING JANUARY 6. The last chapter of January 6 accountability just closed for good, as U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta reluctantly dismissed the seditious conspiracy case against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and others. Trump’s pardons and commutations had already gutted the case, and Judge Mehta didn’t hide his disgust. He wrote that the dismissal “diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy…to buckle.” While that chapter may be closed, a dozen former federal prosecutors are seeking another kind of accountability. They sent senators a letter this week urging them to stop confirming judicial nominees who can’t bring themselves to call January 6 an attack on democracy or acknowledge that Joe Biden won in 2020.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SUE FOR. Remember Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC over its January 6 documentary? It just got a lot more interesting. A federal magistrate judge ruled this week that because Trump’s suit claims both financial and reputational harm, his business records are fair game. That opens the door for the BBC to dig through the finances of more than 400 companies held under the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust. Trump’s lawyers are now scrambling to amend the complaint to claim only reputational harm, hoping that gets them out of turning anything over. The trust also asked the judge to pause her order, arguing that once records are disclosed, they can’t be “un-disclosed.” The BBC isn’t buying it, calling the move a transparent effort to dodge discovery. The judge is also letting the BBC subpoena dozens of people in Trump’s inner circle to probe his actual thoughts and intentions on January 6. Stay tuned.

FOLLOW THE MONEY. The Todd Blanche attorney general confirmation process has proven yet again that Republican “resistance” is a paper tiger. Blanche’s assurances to Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis to earn their votes kept fully intact the audit immunity shielding Trump, sons Eric and Don Jr., and the Trump Organization from any IRS review of tax returns filed before May 19, 2026. Tax experts say that shield could save the Trumps hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars. In other words, it was all a rhetorical fiction to get Blanche confirmed, and Trump becomes the only person on EARTH with a sweetheart deal with the IRS to avoid getting audited. Meanwhile, Trump’s 250th-anniversary celebration group, Freedom 250, which he personally chairs, raised an estimated $50 million from corporate giants, but only three companies (Chevron, United Airlines, and RTX) actually disclosed their contributions as federal lobbying law requires. Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, GE Aerospace, Northrop Grumman, and more than a dozen others simply didn’t respond when asked. You may think they’re all getting away with it. But our friends in the real political resistance on Capitol Hill would call these “investigative targets.”

WHO GETS THE REFUND? The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs back in February, but his illegal tariffs are still costing Americans. So who’s pocketing the $100 billion in refunds that have flowed out of government coffers since the SCOTUS ruling? Corporations, of course. And consumers, who footed most of the tariff bill through higher prices, are still waiting for their cut. Some defiant shoppers are suing to get it. Five Below, Sony, and Nintendo have all faced class action suits filed by consumers who say retailers have kept price hikes in place while receiving refunds.

SERVE THE COUNTRY, LOSE YOUR FAMILY. An AP investigation has found that more than 50 parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops have been detained by ICE since Trump took office, with at least six already deported. Marine Cpl. Jose Manuel Vilchis-Valle’s mother was detained at what she thought was a routine immigration appointment and deported to Mexico within a week, despite living in the U.S. since the 1990s with no criminal record. A new administration policy states plainly that military service “does not exempt aliens from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws.” And it’s not cheap: a new Economic Policy Institute calculator finds Trump’s mass deportation campaign will cost the average taxpayer $2,358—a combined $268.9 billion that could otherwise fund Medicaid for nearly 12 million more people or public housing for 9.7 million more households. Unfortunately for Trump, the cruelty will keep backfiring; his numbers are already in the sewer over the economy. Now he’s getting rid of a swath of America’s working class by deporting them. Prices will go up, and eventually, MAGA will go down.

BANKS SAW IT COMING...BUT LOOKED AWAY. A new Senate Finance Committee report released by Senator Ron Wyden found that more than a dozen bankers at JPMorganChase, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank flagged suspicious transactions from Jeffrey Epstein as far back as 2002, and mostly sat on that information until after his 2019 arrest. The report covers thousands of transactions totaling more than $1 billion over nearly two decades. JPMorgan dropped Epstein as a client in 2013 over trafficking concerns but didn’t report the suspicious activity to the government for another six years. Committee Democrats want the Justice Department to investigate why suspicious activity reports were not filed about Epstein in a more timely manner—the same DOJ, of course, that foot-dragged the congressionally ordered release of the Epstein files and “over-redacted” them so heavily, a judge is now reviewing them. In other words, it won’t happen without a mighty push from the defiant.

BONUS ACT OF DEFIANCE: NEW MEXICO WON’T LOOK AWAY. Some of that push is coming from New Mexico, where Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Todd Blanche and the DOJ this week, demanding the unredacted Epstein files tied to the state’s criminal investigation into Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. Torrez says the DOJ has stonewalled New Mexico’s probe, after asking the state to pause its investigation back in 2019 and promising to share information once theirs wrapped up. That never happened, and Torrez wants to know why. Trump’s DOJ has decided Epstein’s associates and enablers have had enough scrutiny, but New Mexico has different plans.

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