Then it’s MAGA Losses of the Week, featuring shrinking Trump event crowds, Kid Rock ticket strugg…

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Back home, Florida officials warn “Alligator Alcatraz” is becoming too expensive to sustain, with the federal …

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Our Members-Only Meeting is TONIGHT.

👉 **Please register HERE to join us on the Zoom on Weds, May 6 @ 5pm ET / 2pm PT.**

We look forward to taking stock of everything that happened in April — and what comes next, including your monthly chance to weigh in on what we should focus on as a Club.

This meeting is Members-only and will NOT be livestreamed on Sub…

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From helicopter joyrides to private civilians sitting in on Pentagon meetings, we get into what’s being said behind closed doors and how it’s affecting the chain of command.

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Trump is also struggling to stay on message, and now his own words are being used against him in court, with judges citing his posts as evidence of political retaliation.

And in I…

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This week my family lost someone you’ve never heard of. But there’s a good chance you’ve felt her, even without knowing her name.

I’ll call her Anne. She lived in a Midwestern state that has been getting redder and redder, in a small town, in a subdivision where the neighbors fly the flags celebrating a man who’s spent the past year making lists of Americans like me. Those are the people standing behind the bully. Smirking. But deep down, I know many of them are doing it just because they’re afraid to be standing on the other side of the bully.

Anne didn’t tolerate bullies. She had no time for the hand-wringing and avoidance that comes along with the repellant force of such a character. Life was too short.

I was a kid when I watched her bury her husband. It was the first funeral I really remember, and I cried. I’m sure it was for our family’s loss but also because it might have been the first time I was aware of the impermanence of all of this. Anne was undefeated by that awareness.

After her husband died, she went ahead and built the house they’d been planning together on a plot of land they’d bought. She did it alone. She raised her children there. If you met her in those difficult years, you’d hardly know that she was struggling or that she’d been diagnosed with a debilitating disease. She didn’t complain about any of it.

For her, it seemed, there wasn’t much time to lament. Only to live. Imagine seeing that example as a young boy. It certainly had an impact on me.

I flew out for the services this week, and I noticed something strange about the feeling I had on the plane. I wasn’t dreading the funeral. I was eager. I was carrying a thank-you that had been gathering pressure in me for the better part of a year, and I’d wanted to deliver it in person, even if it was only to her ashes and not her face.

Here’s why.

Last spring, the president of the United States signed an executive order directing a federal investigation into me for treason. My wife and I spent two months largely saying nothing. I want to be honest about those two months, because they’re the part of this story I’m least proud of and the part most worth telling.

We were afraid. Despite having fought against this man before, we weren’t ready for our lives to be upended again. We have a young daughter. We’d worked so hard to rebuild after speaking out against him years ago. And we listened to people we love who told us, gently and repeatedly, not to draw more attention. “Please,” they implored, “just let it pass by. He’ll focus on someone else, and you can forget about it.”

For a while, we obliged. But we couldn’t forget about it.

Self-censorship is a kind of suffocation. We told ourselves it was prudence, but all the while we felt the compounding pressure of our own better judgment pressing down on our chests. Or to put it another way, it was like someone had forcibly placed duct tape over my mouth. I could remove it. But I didn’t. I was just supposed to stand there and smile. People wanted me to assure them I’d keep it there and that it felt just fine. Probably because they had it on their mouths, too.

When you’re little, you learn that silence is supposed to be unobtrusive. Surely shutting yourself up can’t harm anyone else. After all, no one has a right to my voice but me, right? But in moments of peril, silence can be a very loud and obtrusive sound. Indeed, all around us was crashing noise. While we kept our mouths shut, our business imploded and friendships shattered and a cacophony of cruel threats rolled in against me, my wife, and daughter. Louder than anything we’d ever heard.

Those eight weeks of silence started to gnaw at me. “Laying low,” as friends and colleagues urged me to do, was hardly a private accommodation. I felt like I was delivering a public sermon on obedience, wordlessly. I was living proof that criticism had become criminal in America and that we should all just adapt to the new social order with our acquiescence. I didn’t mean to preach that message, and I started to feel embarrassed that I was.

Anne didn’t preach sermons like that. There was no time in life to sit in your own misery, lest it consume you. If she’d submitted to the silence of grief when she lost her husband years ago, her children would’ve been neglected. Then carried by them, that sadness would’ve spread beyond their walls. So she didn’t do that. She raised them to be resilient.

From the morning the executive order was signed, Anne assumed I would fight back, because she couldn’t imagine me doing otherwise. She already had been. Despite a disease that made walking hard and a community that made dissent even harder sometimes, she did both anyway. Anne attended local Democratic meetings, spoke out on social media, and rallied people to the first of the No Kings gatherings.

She was not cowed by those down the street who flew flags for the bully.

In June, as we were haltingly breaking our silence, Hannah and I went to a family reunion. I’d just announced I was taking legal action against the president. I hadn’t seen any family since then. Anne was the first to meet us in the doorway the moment we arrived. Her gait was obviously unsteady, so I knew she wasn’t doing well. But she beamed. She pulled me in for a hug, and I braced for some version of what took you so long to speak up, mister! because I deserved it.

Instead she said, I’m so proud of you. She seemed to assume I’d made a decision, when in fact I hadn’t fully made it yet. I was testing the waters of fighting back. Then she hobbled across the living room, picked up a stack of papers from a side table, and brought them back to me.

They were postcards. Dozens of them. Handwritten notes from people in her town and the towns around it, addressed to me, expressing solidarity, and urging us not to back down. The cursive of strangers turned out to be more affecting than the silence of my friends — friends who’d been in our wedding, who we’d known for decades, and who’d explained, with unsaid regret, that they’d need to keep their distance now to protect themselves. They couldn’t afford for their businesses to be targeted by Trump or to lose their security clearance, and so on.

These postcards were from people who owed me nothing and who had every reason to keep their heads down. They’d signed their names anyway. The president had warned that my associates would be investigated, too. Yet here were a bunch of folks I’d never met, willingly making themselves “my associates.” They’d tied themselves to me on paper and under their own signatures — and on postcards whose messages are readable by anyone in the open mail!

These strangers hadn’t arrived at such conviction on their own. Anne and her friends in a local Democratic group had gone person to person, asking neighbors to do a small brave thing by writing their name on a card in solidarity with a target of presidential revenge.

We just want you to know you are not alone, she said, handing me the stack. It was the first time in two months I’d believed those words.

I want to say something about how courage actually moves through a country, because I think we describe it wrong. We talk about it as if it were a personal virtue, something a person either has or lacks, summoned from within at some very decisive moment. That’s almost never the case.

Courage is like a moral bonfire. The big, old logs don’t get it going. The award-winning professor waits to see what the university does. The university waits to see what its peers do. The law firm waits for another law firm. The senator waits for a poll. We saw them all just sitting there last year, didn’t we? Meanwhile, down at the bottom of the stack, there’s a pile of unseen kindling. One small piece catches first. The rest follow.

Sometimes that twig is a sick woman who’s already lost more than most of them ever will and who’s knocking on doors and asking her neighbors to sign their names and in the process showing the big, old institutions what a conflagration really looks like.

This is the inversion at the heart of resistance movements, and we keep failing to notice it. The institutions with the most resources to defy are the slowest to do it. The individuals with the least to spare seem to be the ones to go first.

Thomas Paine saw this in the winter of 1776. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country. He wrote that in a pamphlet about the men with property, reputations, and the most to lose by losing the war. Paine saw them cowering. The institutions and many elites lost their nerve while farmers stood in the snow at the Delaware.

The phenomenon is obvious once again. The sunshine patriots are always the ones we expect to lead. But the real patriots are almost always the ones we didn’t see coming. Maybe they learned, with the passing of a husband or a degenerative condition, how precious life really is and how silence and inaction are tantamount to death.

Anne was one of those real patriots. She had no platform or fancy title. She had a disease that was killing her and a clock that I discovered — much too late — had already run out. Yet she spent some meaningful portion of what remained of her life nudging others to be honest with themselves and to be a little brave.

I think she did this because she understood, in a way our institutions still do not, that silence isn’t safety. Silence is the medium through which the threat travels. The only thing that interrupts it is someone (usually someone with no particular reason to go first) actually just straightening their shoulders and going first.

After June and the postcards, Hannah and I had many conversations. We resolved not to be silent again. Once we signaled plans to fight back, messages began to arrive from everywhere. Letters and emails. Direct messages and encouraging posts. I started keeping them on the coffee table in my office, where I’d see them in the morning and again at night.

For every friend who’d quietly stepped back, a stranger somewhere else stepped forward. They’d been watching, waiting, and looking for a sign that it was okay to speak out. Anne had been that sign for the people in her town. The people in her town, in their own handwriting, became that sign for me. I, in turn, became a sign for someone else I hope. This is how it works. This is the only way it’s ever worked.

I didn’t get to tell Anne any of this. When I heard she’d gone into hospice, I put a time on my calendar to search for flights so I could spend some time with her. She died two days later. I’ve been carrying around this thank-you since, and last night, I decided the only honest thing she’d want me to do with it is to give it to you, because if you’re reading this, there’s a real chance you’re reading it because of her, through some chain of events you can’t trace.

I realize that if there’s a thing to do with grief, whether for a person or a country, it’s to refuse to let the silence consume you. After accepting any dire situation, you move forward and go write the card you’re supposed to write or sign your name where it’s needed. You haven’t time to waste, so you say the obvious true thing out loud, especially in the rooms where it’s least convenient. You do it before you’re sure it’s safe.

Anne went first. I saw that as a little kid. She lived unafraid because she knew, more viscerally than most, that there wasn’t time to be anything otherwise. Time is precious. And she spent hers on us.

You are not alone.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Our most recent episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

Todd Blanche went on Meet the Press this Sunday looking like a man who knew he had a problem. The indictment of James Comey over an Instagram post looked shaky. But the bigger problem (which he didn’t seem to grasp) is that he might be the one engaging in illegal activity.

The acting attorney general was sent out onto the news shows this weekend to defend the indictment of James Comey for a photograph of seashells on a North Carolina beach. He seemed nervous. The case has been mocked, even by GOP senators who’ve suggested that Comey engaged in obviously First Amendment protected speech.

Yet Blanche’s over-eager pitch (repeated several times in mere minutes) was that there is “more” here than the public can see.

“This is not just about a single Instagram post,” he told host Kristen Welker. “This is about a body of evidence.”

If that is true, it took a long time. The FBI had been looking at the case for eleven months, along with the Secret Service. Blanche didn’t offer any indication of exactly what kind of evidence he had to show the FBI director intended to make an assassination threat against the president. He simply stressed that the additional evidence will come out at trial. (As many legal commentators have pointed out, if there is more evidence, it must legally be shared with Comey well before any trial.)

The real issue isn’t how flimsy the James Comey case is. It’s whether Todd Blanche understands that a much bigger case is being assembled. The one against himself.

You see, in the ugly history of attorneys general who turned the Justice Department into a weapon, none of them believed that a reckoning was coming. John Mitchell didn’t believe it as he sat at the head of the Committee to Re-elect the President for President Nixon, despite approving wiretaps and hush money and the architecture of a cover-up. But he believed it on June 22, 1977, when he became the first former attorney general in American history to walk into a federal prison. He served nineteen months. Twenty-five other men around him went to prison, too. They were on the right side of the law, they thought, because they were the law.

That confidence — that the law cannot reach you because you are the one wielding it — is the oldest and most dangerous delusion in Washington. It’s the delusion under which Todd Blanche is now seemingly operating.

To be clear, the initial prosecution against Comey was already a disgrace. After President Trump publicly demanded on Truth Social that his attorney general charge Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff (“JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”), DOJ put together a shoddy case within days. It was taken to court by a lawyer Trump had sent from the White House. Career prosecutors had refused to bring the case. And when the judge asked DOJ lawyers in open court whether that was true, the lawyer admitted he’d been instructed by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office not to answer.

That’s how the public trail first leads to the man now running the Justice Department. But it doesn’t stop there. The second prosecution of Comey was reportedly moribund, too. Yet it was suddenly resurrected as soon as Blanche took over at DOJ, following the ouster of Pam Bondi, who was reportedly fired in part because she wasn’t moving quickly enough to prosecute the president’s enemies. That timing is damning.

Even right-wing commentators seemed to understand why the case should never have seen the light of day. Eugene Volokh of the Hoover Institution has called the post “clearly not a punishable threat.” Jonathan Turley, the Fox News legal analyst, called the indictment “facially unconstitutional.” And Jimmy Gurulé, a former GOP official at the Justice Department, wrote that every DOJ lawyer who played a role in returning it should be ashamed.

“Shame” might be the least of their problems. In fact, Blanche and others may be creating serious legal trouble for themselves, now and into the future.

There is a federal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242, passed by Congress in 1866 to protect freed slaves from Reconstruction-era officials who used state power to terrorize them. It makes it a federal crime for any person, acting “under color of any law,” to willfully deprive another person of any right secured by the Constitution. The Justice Department’s own Civil Rights Division confirms it applies to prosecutors as readily as to police officers. The right not to be prosecuted in retaliation for protected speech is among the most clearly established constitutional rights in American law.

No federal prosecutor in 2026 can credibly claim he didn’t know that bringing a case to silence a critic of the president violates the First and Fifth Amendments. So is that what happened?

Consider what a future prosecutor will see when he or she opens the Blanche file:

Donald Trump returned to office with an axe to grind against James Comey… he appointed his personal defense counsel to a top DOJ job… meanwhile, career prosecutors came under pressure to prosecute Comey yet declined to do so, and documented the reasons in a memo to DOJ leaders… the president sent a message to DOJ leaders on social media, ordering them to prosecute Comey… an interim U.S. Attorney was installed to resurrect the case because no one else would sign the indictment… a Department lawyer was instructed by Blanche’s office not to answer a federal judge’s direct question about the genesis of the case… then, months later, Blanche takes over DOJ… another Comey case is resurrected… after the president’s reported anger about the speed of prosecutions against foes…. on a charge no serious First Amendment lawyer supports… and Blanche goes out to publicly tout it.

That sure sounds to me like a bad act pattern. Perhaps even the architecture of “willful deprivation of rights under color of law.” And those are just the publicly available facts.

Of course, it’s widely believed Donald Trump will issue blanket pardons to his team before leaving to try to protect them from being investigated for such crimes. He’s said as much to staff. Hell, I was personally on the receiving end of one such assurance in Trump’s first term. The president wanted us to commit a crime at the border and said if we went to jail he’d pardon us.

But a presidential pardon won’t protect Trump’s lieutenants from Congressional investigations, state crimes, or civil actions. After January 6th, John Eastman was disbarred for “egregious and deceitful conduct.” Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C. And many more of Trump’s co-conspirators have faced similar proceedings. Trump’s symbolic pardons didn’t save them from state charges, shield their law licenses, or protect their reputations, and they will not save the next generation of Trump henchmen who tell themselves the same lie.

The people currently running the Justice Department genuinely seem to believe there will be no consequences. Historians have long noted how power, in the hands of those unaccustomed to losing it, has a way of feeling permanent. And Trump’s team continues to act as if they’ll never have to leave the building.

Todd Blanche and his lieutenants should ask themselves whether they wants their names in the same paragraph as John Mitchell’s. They should ask whether the law licenses they spent decades building survive the moments future bar committees open files with their names on them (perhaps that’s why DOJ is actively trying to restrict the ability of state bars to open ethics investigations into DOJ lawyers). They should ask, above all, the question every prosecutor in American history has eventually had to answer: whether the man giving the orders will still be there when the bill comes due.

The answer is obvious. Trump won’t be there to protect them. And they should act accordingly.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Our most recent episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

A Supreme Court ruling weakens the Voting Rights Act. Defense officials won’t rule out troops at polling places. And Republicans push a massive ICE funding bill through a workaround that avoids a filibuster.

It’s all part of the same play.

Plus, Pam…

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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 corruption and abuses of power.

We’re laser focused on protecting our elections. The Supreme Court made a bombshell decision yesterday that could supercharge Trump…

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Yesterday, after he was charged with crimes over an Instagram post, an arrest warrant was issued for the former FBI director. It accidentally revealed the secret reason Trump wants him charged again.

Last fall, something truly unprecedented happened. And a teeny-tiny (yet crucial) detail casts a whole new light on what’s happening right now with ex-FBI leader James Comey.

At 6:44 p.m. on Saturday, September 20th, the president of the United States posted a directive on Truth Social urging his Attorney General to accelerate the prosecution of his critics. That list included Comey. In less than a week, the Justice Department followed suit. Two felony charges were announced against Comey in a case that shocked the world.

Trump should have been pleased. But something happened that clearly infuriated him.

Not long after the charges were announced, news outlets revealed that an FBI agent declined to “perp walk” Comey — in other words, to have him arrested in front of the cameras and taken to be fingerprinted and photographed. Higher-ups had requested “large, beefy” agents in “full kit” be recruited to go pick Comey up. Yet the agent reportedly found the instruction inappropriate, since Comey had only received a summons from the court and not an arrest warrant. As former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade noted, it would have been a violation of DOJ policy to go seize Comey in dramatic fashion, given the circumstances.

Comey voluntarily went to the courthouse without spectacle.

For that, the FBI agent was promptly fired. In an expletive-laden social media post, FBI director Kash Patel didn’t deny that the employee had been canned for refusing to “perp walk” the former director. Indeed, Patel seemed to use the episode as a warning:

“Follow the chain of command,” he wrote, “or get relieved.”

I wonder: had Kash Patel received an angry phone call? Perhaps from someone who wanted to see an enemy in handcuffs? Someone who wanted to watch a foe forced to get a mugshot like he’d been forced to do? Someone who was infuriated when no mugshot appeared on cable news?

Which leads me back to James Comey’s indictment yesterday.

It’s been reported for months that DOJ has been trying to find some other reason to bring charges against the FBI chief-turned-critic. Finding nothing else to go on, the Department evidently decided to charge him with threats against the president on the patently ludicrous theory that Comey’s Instagram post — of seashells on a beach formed into the numbers “8647” — was an assassination threat. “86” is slang for “throw out.” “47” means “47th president.”

Most of the coverage the past twelve hours has focused, rightfully, on how idiotic the case is. Even Trump’s legal commentator flunkies have cast side-eye at the case.

But what’s missing is any discussion of the arrest warrant. To me, that is what gave it all away.

Arrest warrants don’t come out of nowhere. After prosecutors put an indictment in front of a grand jury, they have a choice. If the grand jury approves the charges, prosecutors can seek a “summons” or an “arrest warrant” from the court. Typically, if a subject isn’t a high risk, they’ll simply be summoned to appear. But if there’s a worry that the subject might flee or cause harm, an arrest warrant will be issued.

None of those conditions apply here. Comey isn’t a flight risk; he showed up voluntarily at his last arraignment only seven months ago. And the suggestion that he’s a danger to the public is laughable on its face. Nonetheless, an order to arrest him was sought by DOJ and sent to the U.S. Marshals, who are presumably working on how and when to carry it out. The obvious upshot of such a warrant is this: Comey will be publicly arrested, ceremoniously fingerprinted, and most crucially, placed in front of a camera for a mugshot.

After that, I suspect Donald Trump doesn’t care whether DOJ wins or loses the case. He doesn’t care that Comey’s social media musings are quite obviously First Amendment protected speech, or even that his own allies have made similar posts against former presidents. What Donald Trump cares about is that he’ll get a mugshot of James Comey.

But it won’t stop there. As I’ve said for the past year, Trump’s goal is to build a kaleidoscope. He won’t cease his revenge campaign at least until he’s secured arrest warrants and mugshots for as many of his foes as possible. He wants to create a montage of mugshots, in fact, much as was done to him and his henchmen. Like the one below.

The only difference, of course, is that Trump’s hand-crafted montage will be built on false allegations, defamation, and outright lies. Lies so heavy that they will sink every case to which they’re tied. And if we don’t decry them loudly enough as a country, those lies will be heavy enough to sink the Constitution, too.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Tuesday’s episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

At the same time, the White House escalates its pressure campaign against Jimmy Kimmel, with federal regulators now moving toward a sweeping review of ABC’s broadcast licenses.

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Last night, Rachel Maddow devoted the majority of her show to the growing national movement to block Trump’s prison camps from taking root in American communities. She also did something she almost never does.

She put two guests on at once.

If you don’t watch her show religiously, that probably sounds like nothing. But the format on Maddow’s broadcast is one-on-one, and it has been for years. She’s said so on air herself. The rare exceptions are a person and their lawyer. Otherwise, it’s her and one other human being, usually in long form, working through a single thread until it’s understood. Which is cool. I like that.

So when she opened her segment last night by telling viewers, “I’m about to break one of the informal rules that we have on this show,” I knew folks would be intrigued. Hell, I was intrigued. And I was sitting there in the chair waiting to come onto the show!

It turns out Rachel wanted to know why a conservative ex-Trump official and a progressive data scientist would be teaming up. So she brought us on at the same time. Rachel welcomed me and co-founder to talk about the new effort we launched: GTFOice.org — “Get the Facilities Out, ICE!” — a new nationwide rapid-response network to block Trump’s prison camps. This is a team effort — Michael’s org, DEFIANCE.org, and (SAM).

Michael and I told her why we decided to collaborate. This topic far transcends partisan lines. No American — regardless of ideological stripes — should be “okay” with DHS developing enough detention capacity to imprison the entirety of Salt Lake City or Knoxville. I’ve spent almost two decades helping to build DHS. So believe me when I say that kind of sprawling prison system is vastly more capacity than DHS needs for immigration, and it has ominous overtones of a police state.

Little did Rachel Maddow know, SHE helped inspire this effort.

After we saw her coverage about Project Salt Box, we reached out to try to get them to team up with us. We’d already been working with brave patriots like and his team at SAM to block some of these facilities. But we decided to take it to the next level by creating a near-real-time notification network so that people around America can help “crowd cancel” these facilities.

If you’re playing catch up on all of this, I’ll catch you up. The long and short of it is that the administration is implementing a roughly $40 billion plan (funded by the largest immigration enforcement appropriation in American history) to build out a constellation of detention facilities. These are usually converted warehouses in towns most people couldn’t find on a map like Ashland, Virginia; Social Circle, Georgia; Surprise, Arizona; and beyond. The whole operation has been secretive, unorthodox, and creepy. Unlike any “construction” effort I ever saw in government.

Americans are now hearing about this on programs like Maddow with regularity. A community gets a letter, or a Washington Post reporter calls for comment. Then a real estate broker lets something slip. And a town of five thousand people learns that the federal government intends to lock up ten thousand human beings in a warehouse a mile from the elementary school. Sound repressive and dictator-y? It is.

Almost every time this has happened now, two things have proven true. One is that the communities, almost without exception, say no. They don’t want Trump’s secret prison in their neighborhoods, even if they voted for him. The other is that when they organize fast enough, they win. In city after city, we’re seeing folks rise up and get these project stopped by acting quickly enough.

Unfortunately, in places where they don’t get notification in time, DHS has managed to buy the warehouse and take steps to retrofit it to stuff human bodies inside — many of whom will be whisked away without adequate judicial review into horrible conditions and “disappeared” from America indefinitely.

That’s why we launched GTFOice.org. We want communities to know right away when something like this is happening. We ALSO want you to know, even if you don’t live in the area. Why? Because sometimes we need to turn up the volume in these places. A dozen locals making angry phone calls might not be enough. But when tens of thousands of voices from across America cup their hands and yell at a lazy city council or county commission, “Wake up and smell the corruption!” they tend to listen. Then they scramble and do something about it, or the real estate developer who sold the warehouse to the government says to himself, “I don’t really want all this attention. I’m out.”

Mission accomplished.

This is what crowd-cancellation looks like when it’s directed at something that actually warrants it. I’ve spent a lot of my political life watching people get crowd-canceled for things that did not deserve the term. This deserves it. And in the communities where it’s been done, it works. Just last week in Arizona, partly thanks to the amazing work of to put that prison camp on the map, Attorney General Kris Mayes formally announced a lawsuit against DHS. ICE issued a preemptive stop-work order at the targeted facility, and the construction firm walked. That’s how it’s done, my friends.

Donald Trump and his henchmen cannot do this without our consent. They can try, and they are. But every facility requires a property owner willing to sell, a county willing to permit, a workforce willing to staff it, a sheriff willing to coordinate with it. Each of those is a point where a community can refuse. Each of those is also a point where the federal government (which under this administration vastly prefers to do things the easy way) will move on to the next site if the first one becomes too hard.

When we spoke with the other day, he enlightened us that this is why Auschwitz was delayed in opening. Actually. Bureaucratic resistance and permitting and local ordinances slowed down the opening of the never-to-be-forgotten Nazi concentration camp. That foot-dragging probably saved lives. But knowing what we know today, we need to engage in relentless foot stomping the moment anything even has the echoes of such a place. And we won’t stop until they do.

Maddow ended the segment the way she started, by saying she’d rarely done this kind of joint interview before, and that our cross-partisan partnership was a big part of what made the work interesting. I’d put it the other way around. The partnership is what makes the work possible. No single organization, ideological persuasion, or person can do this alone. The administration is building the national infrastructure of repression, and only collective defiance will stop it.

Sign up at GTFOice.org.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Monday’s episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

Within hours, the administration moved to justify a controversial White House ballroom project tied to anonymous donors and potential taxpayer funding.

At the same time, the response to the incident r…

Read more

A deranged man attempted to attack the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend. Now the president may be preparing to use the event — and the fear it generated — to stage an assault on his critics and our rights.

Before the chaos erupted Saturday night, there was an eerie omen.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that “shots will be fired tonight” by the president at the dinner. She meant rhetorical ones, aimed squarely at the free press hosting the evening. But a lone gunman had other ideas, and Trump’s planned performance was interrupted before it could begin.

In the thirty-six hours since, the world has rightly focused on who the suspected shooter was and whom in the Trump administration he was targeting, including the president and members of the Cabinet. Those questions matter enormously. And we should universally condemn political violence as a scourge on our democracy.

But Donald Trump had a target that night, too. However figurative, he was preparing to open fire himself. The president seemed eager to stand in front of the assemblage of reporters and go after their profession, which he’s dubbed “the enemy of the people” — and against which he’s wielded federal powers in order to silence critics and curb constitutional protections. Now, with the horror of a genuine attack to exploit, he may well expand his arsenal.

I wrote a warning on social media as Trump’s motorcade was still rolling toward the White House Saturday night:

“The WHCD shooter will be used to justify things that have nothing to do with the WHCD shooter. Mark this moment.”

The president didn’t make me wait long. Minutes later, he stepped up to a podium and declared that the attack was precisely why America needs to get out of the way and accept his pet vanity project: a $400 million ballroom. That effort itself has become a symbol of alleged bribery and the naked corruption of executive power. Then, on Sunday, the Justice Department moved to steamroll legal challenges to the ballroom, citing the Correspondents’ Dinner attack as justification (ignoring the fact that the White House has no say in where the annual dinner is held).

The cynicism here is quite breathtaking, though not surprising. It’s also a preview of what’s to come. But first, to understand why the Correspondents’ Dinner was set to be a remarkable moment, you have to zoom back out to the extraordinary events that preceded it.

Donald Trump has leveled the gravest threats against the First Amendment in modern American history. In just over a year, he’s opened treason investigations against critics and threatened similar probes against his predecessors; issued executive orders against universities and law firms that might oppose him; decimated public media, cutting funding to NPR and PBS for producing journalism he dislikes; weaponized federal regulators to hand control of critical news institutions (like CBS and CNN) to allies committed to “reforming” them into obedience; wielded the threat of revoking broadcast licenses against other networks who report unfavorably on his actions; filed lawsuits against newspapers that have done investigative reporting on him and his administration; designated political opponents as domestic extremists using national security powers and opened probes against them; put in place the architecture to conduct IRS reviews of left-leaning nonprofits; brought criminal charges against civil society organizations — including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) — that have taken anti-Trump positions; sent security forces into American cities and directed them to confront protesters; and killed American citizens in cold blood, only to falsely accuse them of being domestic terrorists.

And that barely scratches the surface.

Trump was apparently preparing to defend and expand upon his agenda — “shots will be fired,” his press secretary said — from the Correspondents’ Dinner podium. Then a gunman tried to get into the room. While the president wasted no time in redirecting Saturday’s near-miss tragedy toward his own purposes, including double down on his ballroom, the deeper concern that Trump will use this incident to further crack down on Americans engaged in entirely lawful, constitutionally protected dissent.

This is what he did after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), directing federal counterterrorism teams to investigate “potential federal crimes relating to” groups involved in “recruiting or radicalizing” individuals for what it describes as “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights,” along with their funders and leadership. The order effectively characterized “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalist” views as terrorism indicators. The language is staggeringly broad and could be used to reach virtually any organization the administration wishes to target.

The recent criminal charges against the SPLC are a proof of concept. The SPLC built its reputation investigating actual domestic extremist groups, including organizations with long histories of inspiring violence against Americans. Yet in an apparent effort to get revenge against them — the SPLC has been a harsh critic of Trump and his allies — the administration has accused them, grotesquely, of supporting the very movements the organization spent decades exposing. The case is a harbinger.

Trump and his lieutenants are expanding their dragnet to retaliate against political opponents. We don’t have to speculate about “if” that crackdown will continue. Only “how.” We’ve had more than a year to watch a sweeping, methodical assault on every institution that tries to keep him in check. Now, he’s poised to exploit another tragedy to consolidate power.

In the immediate term, we cannot cower or permit Donald Trump to paint millions of peaceful Americans as the shooter’s accomplices. He was laying the groundwork for that well before Saturday night’s event. In fact, before last year’s No Kings protests, Trump and his allies began widely characterizing the demonstrations as gathering organized by domestic extremists, implying that anyone who attended must hate America or was in cahoots with terrorist facilitators.

On Sunday night, in an interview with CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, Trump was asked about the Correspondents’ Dinner suspect. The exchange should be read carefully:

“He had attended a No Kings protest in California,” O’Donnell remarked.

“No Kings, yeah,” Trump replied. “The reason you have people like that is you have people doing ‘No Kings.’ I’m not a king. What I am — if I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”

The headlines have already focused on the second part, i.e. Trump’s barely concealed resentment at having to engage with the press at all. “If I was a king, I wouldn’t be dealing with you.” That line is revealing enough. He also later called O’Donnell “a disgrace” for reading passages from the shooter’s manifesto.

Clearly, as he always does, Trump is squandering the opportunity to unify the country in opposition to political violence.

But the line before it is the one that should draw your focus. Trump just told the country that peaceful protests are what’s producing gunmen. “The reason you have people like [the shooter],” he said, “is you have people doing ‘No Kings.’” That sentence is a warning. The president is preparing to label us — and our exercise of dissent against him — as the real threat.

Shots fired, indeed.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Friday we spoke to veteran White House correspondent Brian Karem ahead of the WHCD. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

Meanwhile, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner becomes a flashpoint as journalists boycott and tensions with the press rise. Brian Karem, veteran White House reporter, joins to explain why he’s sitt…

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This week, the United States officially became a nearer-term threat to NATO than any of its actual enemies. That’s because Donald Trump is planning to attack the alliance for being disloyal to him.

The headlines this morning about America’s most important alliance were almost darkly comedic.

European intelligence services warned that Russia could be prepared to strike NATO countries within a year, and the Polish prime minister sounded the alarm that it could happen even sooner — within months. You would think that might be the gravest threat to the alliance that has protected the Western world for more than 75 years. Alas, you’d be wrong.

Today, Reuters reported that the Trump administration has its own plan to attack NATO — from within. An internal Pentagon email is allegedly circulating options to strike back against NATO allies for refusing to join Trump’s war in Iran, including a proposal to suspend key countries from the alliance altogether. Although these plans don’t seem to include physical attacks against NATO, Trump’s threats to violently seize territory in Greenland are still fresh in the alliance’s memory.

Specifically, Trump’s Pentagon is considering ways to retaliate against those countries that refused to provide basing, access, and overflight rights for American strikes in Iran. The options reportedly include suspending countries like Spain from NATO itself and removing other nations from important positions within the alliance. Additionally, the memo proposes other retaliatory measures for individual countries, such as reconsidering longstanding U.S. diplomatic support for British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.

The email frames all of this as a corrective against what it calls a “sense of entitlement on the part of the Europeans.” The Pentagon press secretary confirmed the spirit of the document without denying it, declaring that “they were not there for us.”

This is a remarkably ignorant statement. NATO’s founding logic is collective defense — the bedrock guarantee that an attack on one is an attack on all. What the Trump administration is now proposing, in effect, is a conditional inversion of that principle: we will support you… but only if you supported us first… in a war of our choosing… on the terms we set… and on which you had no say. In my view, that’s a bit closer to the logic of a protection racket than an actual alliance.

What makes this doubly dangerous is the moment in which it’s happening.

European intelligence services have reportedly concluded that Russia is rebounding from its Ukraine war and eying possible attacks against NATO. Although Russia suffered an estimated 1.2 million permanent casualties, it has managed not only to replace those forces but to improve them. Moscow believes it’s stronger from the combat experience, drone warfare expertise, and development of new hypersonic missile systems. In light of this, European spy agencies warn there is a real risk of Russian aggression, including unintended and hard-to-control escalation.

Here’s the scarier thing. Those agencies assess that Russia wouldn’t need to defeat NATO militarily to succeed. The objective of a limited conflict, the report states, would be to pull the alliance apart politically by fracturing it and demoralizing it — with the goal of demonstrating that “collective defense” is a fiction. In other words, a NATO that cannot agree on who the enemy is, or whether to show up when called upon, is a NATO that has already half-defeated itself.

Donald Trump is making the implosion of NATO a self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s already shown that Washington is worse than a fickle anchor of the alliance. It’s a vindictive one, doing deep damage to the compact from the inside. In fact, the report from European intelligence explicitly notes that the unpredictable course of current U.S. policy may be influencing Moscow’s cost-benefit calculations for an attack. That’s diplomatic speak for how Trump is doing Putin’s work for him.

None of this is entirely new. Trump has described NATO as a burden since his first term. When I was in the administration, we were on pins and needles, worried that on any given day the president wouldn’t announce America was “out” of the alliance. Top officials regularly intervened to dissuade Trump from doing something America would regret for decades. Of course, no one around him would do that these days.

The president told news outlets just weeks ago that withdrawing from the alliance was something he was actively considering. And now he’s plotting to expand his revenge presidency across the Atlantic. Trump has spent the past year going after political opponents and institutions here at home in the name of “retribution.” Now he wants to intentionally harm our longest-standing allies for being insufficiently loyal to him personally.

European spy agencies are warning that Russia is rebuilding its military to directly challenge NATO, seeing the West as fractured. And they’re right to make that assessment. The Pentagon email suggests that the fracturing is well underway — not from Moscow, but from Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already been speaking like a foreign enemy of NATO, rather than a friend — mocking the alliance as a “paper tiger.”

But this is not a eulogy. Congress still holds tools that Trump cannot “executive-order” away, including the ability to codify American commitments to NATO allies in statute, to condition defense spending on alliance obligations, and to make clear in law that the United States government is larger than one vindictive president. Republicans in Congress have so far refused to do any of that. Which is one more reason Democrats need to win in November.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Last night, former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi joined us to break down DOJ’s major “revenge indictment” this week against a civil rights group.

Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

Online, a network of AI-generated MAGA accounts is exposed, designed to fake support and drive influence ahead of the midterms.

And the DOJ targets the Southern Poverty Law Center in a controversial indictment now raising major questions about motive and evidence.

Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI counterintelligence chief, joins to break it down.

Get more from Miles Taylor in the Substack app

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When we launched DEFIANCE.org, the goal was to fight back against Donald Trump’s corruption — and to get the word out to others. Because courage is contagious. And you proved it. Our flagship podcast, DEFIANCE Daily, has now broken into the top 20 news podcasts.

I want to share a few reflections with you this morning, as I sip this “healthy” / mushroom coffee my wife is urging me to drink.

As of this week, Goodpods — which ranks all of the biggest podcasts in the world by listens, ratings, comments, subscriptions, and shares from millions of shows on its platform — ranked DEFIANCE Daily #17 in Best News Podcasts in this month’s rankings. That puts us alongside Serial, the BBC’s Global News Podcast, and NPR Politics.

Whoa!

We didn’t get here with a corporate backer or a big media machine. Nope. We got here because of you all. You listened, shared, subscribed, and told someone else about what we’re doing. That really matters, my friends. In a moment when democratic institutions are under siege, every listener is basically an act of defiance. Indeed, when we share, it signals that people are paying attention and refusing to look away.

You’ve heard me say it a lot, but I’m awed by the strength of this community. Last year was scary for a lot of us. America was trending toward capitulation. But folks started defying, one by one. Now it’s a nationwide movement. (So much so, even MAGA influencers are desperately trying to join “the defiance” in this country — Megyn Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, you name it — defying Trump has gone from terrifying to almost fashionable!).

I want to make something else clear. We’re doing this for the cause. DEFIANCE.org isn’t a for-profit enterprise. We’re a nonprofit focused on combating Donald Trump’s abuses of power. We got to this point by being completely Member funded, in addition to spending our own personal funds to build this movement.

So if you’ve been thinking about joining as a paid member, now’s a really good time. You can help us expand our efforts and it contributes directly to our real-life, no-BS weekly actions we announce to protect democracy. At the very bottom, I’ve pasted the link to last night’s episode, where we announced GTFOice.org, a nationwide rapid-response network to stop ICE prison camps.

You can become a Member today at DEFIANCE.org/join or here on Substack. Two different ways to join; same Club. And 100% of proceeds to go the pro-democracy fight.

If you’re already a Member, consider forwarding this to a friend.

The president is personally trying to shut me up. In the past year alone, Trump has stripped me of my security clearance, threatened to cancel me from the cable news networks, and put me under federal investigation. Guess what? I’m not going off the air. I won’t bow to a wannabe dictator in the Land of the Free. Ever.

That may increase the risk to me and my family. But we’ve decided this is the right thing to do. This country has given us everything. We won’t let one man take it away.

Thank you for being part of this. The fight isn’t over — but today, we celebrate.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

Subscribe now

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Last night, we announced a major effort to shut down ICE prison camps across America. We’ll send a recap later. But for now, you can watch the replay below, see the press release here, or read the article in The Daily Beast here.

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, on our YouTube channel, or on my X account. Or you can watch the replay at DEFIANCE.News.

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.