We start with Kalshi, the prediction market taking bets on pretty much anything, which played judge, jury, and bookie this week. It hit George Santos (yes, that George Santos) with the company’s first-ever lifeti…

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The bell is tolling for Donald Trump’s authoritarian movement. A shocking survey finds that Americans are more pissed off about government corruption than they’ve ever been — including both Democrats and Republicans.

Indeed, a recent Gallup poll revealed that a whopping 89 percent of Americans now say corruption is widespread in our government, notching the highest number ever recorded in two decades of asking the question. That’s up a staggering sixteen points since the year Trump got re-elected to the presidency.

For anyone trying to figure out how to bury the MAGA movement, this is your answer.

For the first time since Gallup began comparing countries, the United States ranks dead last among all 38 advanced economies on perceived government corruption. The average is under 60 percent. Again, we are at 89 percent, keeping statistical company with a basket of less-than-clean governments like those in Lebanon, Peru, and even Nigeria, where national fraud and embezzlement are so systemic that the country spawned the infamous “Nigerian prince” email scam (Remember that one? The con where a supposed royal offers you millions if you’ll just wire a small fee first? Those are our peers now).

America is the country that once lectured the world about clean government. Hell, I traveled the world delivering such lectures. Now, we’re statistically the most “corrupt-feeling” democracy in the developed world, according to our own citizens. If Donald Trump was worried about cementing his legacy, he doesn’t have to fear any longer. With this, he’s achieved something historic that no other president before him has achieved.

But MAGA leaders should register panic because it turns out that the concern is fully bipartisan. Ninety-one percent of Democrats say corruption is widespread. Ninety percent of independents. Eighty-three percent of Republicans. In an era when our political parties barely agree on how to read a map (actually), they agree on this. By a supermajority, Donald Trump’s own voters believe the government is rotten. He promised he’d drain the swamp, yet they can see the gold-leaf ballroom rising on their televisions, built with their money, while the First Family’s crypto ventures mint billions and while Trump himself is minting literal coins with his face on them.

You don’t have to convince MAGA voters that Washington is corrupt. They already believed it. What’s changed is that they’re starting to see who is really doing the corrupting. So let’s keep bringing them the receipts.

Consider this the opening paragraph of Donald Trump’s political eulogy. To win the day against a wannabe dictator, you don’t need nuanced sniping about healthcare budgets or business-as-usual debates over unfair policies. This ain’t a fight about ideology, which instantly splits a country in half. This is a fight about corruption, which now unites nine in ten of us. Do you see how significant this is?

It’s why I built DEFIANCE.org in the first place. History tells us that corruption-fighting brings people together, and I can see it starting to happen against my former boss Donald Trump. I’m not a registered Democrat. I’m a life-long conservative. Yet I run this organization with an avowed socialist. Why? Because neither of us can stand the corruption.

In less than a year, our members have raised seven-figure sums to fight back, and we’re doing it in targeted places where we can have outsize impact: exposing the Epstein cover-up and putting the files on wheels… backing the watchdogs and the whistleblowers… and treating anti-corruption as a tool of persuasion, like our support for the group Leaving MAGA, which helps disillusioned Trump voters find their way out with dignity instead of shame.

How we do it matters a great deal. On the off-ramp away from the pro-dictator movement, the sign doesn’t read: “You were wrong.” It says “You were robbed.” And believe me, that’s what brings people over to the pro-democracy side.

Next month, we’re going to take this messaging further. In October, DEFIANCE.org will release a micro-documentary on corruption in Trump’s America, built to give each voter, organizer, and dinner-table conversation the receipts in one place, or at least a lot of them. So stay tuned for that.

But back to the eighty-nine percent. I don’t want you to think of it as a survey result. I want you to start seeing it how I see it, as a coalition waiting to be led. Trump captured it for a while. He did. “Drain the swamp!” However, his opponents should be able to recapture it in far, far bigger numbers. A supermajority of Americans believe the government has been stolen from them, and they’re right. The man who stole it is plastering his name and face on the buildings.

Our job between now and November is mind-numbingly straightforward. Let’s give the 89 percent somewhere to put their anger. If we do, that will be the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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DEFIANCE DAILY

In case you missed it, last night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch our next episode tonight at 5 pm ET!

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

TODAY’S FEATURES: THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST AND THE DEFIANCE BOOK CLUB

IF YOU’RE ALREADY A DEFIANCE MEMBER, THEN MARCH RIGHT IN. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE, SO YOU DON’T MISS A THING.

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A new Justice Department opinion says states must report undocumented immigrants to DHS or risk losing federal funding for programs like TANF — fundin…

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Yesterday, Donald Trump’s Justice Department put a gun to the head of every governor in America. The hostages are hungry children.

DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a new legal opinion declaring that welfare and food assistance will be withheld from poor families in states that don’t comply with the president’s immigration agenda. Under the new guidance, states are being ordered to report anyone who is believed to be in the country illegally to the Trump administration or risk losing the money.

Specifically, states accepting federal funds through TANF (the program that provides cash assistance to America’s poorest families) or SSI (which supports low-income seniors and disabled people) are now obligated to have all state agencies report signs of illegal immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security. That means Trump is effectively requiring every DMV, public hospital, and school district to participate in his mass deportation campaign. And if they don’t — if they decline to convert their workforces into a deportation intelligence service? Then DOJ can pull the plug on $16.4 billion a year that feeds and houses needy families in all fifty states.

I’ll be honest with you. I was writing about something else this morning when I saw this come across the wires. I set everything down to focus on this. It’s among the most grotesque things I’ve ever seen Donald Trump do. And that’s saying something, especially for someone who sat through meetings of him talking about blowing the legs out from under innocent people to prevent them from reaching the border… or grinning about how he’d try to impale wall-climbers… or demanding the reinstatement and expansion of family separation.

The extortion being put in place here is worse than the headline. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for TANF or SSI benefits. They never have been. The families receiving these benefits are mostly American citizens, and the majority of TANF recipients are children. So the administration is not threatening to cut off benefits to people here illegally; it can’t, because they don’t receive any. Instead, they’re literally threatening to take food away from American children (and rent money away from their parents, disabled veterans, and elderly widows) in any state whose governor refuses to become an ICE informant.

You thought Trump wouldn’t take away food from children and throw old ladies into the streets — threatening them like a gangster in a B-movie? Well, folks, that’s what this is, dressed up in acronyms. I don’t know how much more plainly I could put it.

If this feels familiar, it should. During last year’s government shutdown, the Trump administration announced it would pay zero food stamp benefits to the 42 million Americans who rely on them, breaking with every prior administration of both parties which tried to find money to keep food stamps going even when the government shut down. When a federal judge ordered Trump to fund the program, the administration fought the order all the way to the Supreme Court. Rather than feed people! And when some states went ahead and issued full benefits to hungry families, the administration ordered them to undo the payments, threatening financial penalties against states that had already put grocery money on poor families’ cards.

The administration was accused, correctly, of using the stomachs of children as leverage in a political fight. Of course, Trump officials indignantly denied doing any such thing. Yet we now know for sure that the denials were always false. We have the proof. Because they’re doing it again, and this time they’re admitting to the leverage in writing.

Apparently, Trump’s team learned that “starving children” was a powerful threat. Sure, they were accused of being ghouls. But in the end, they got their way after Democrats helped pass a budget bill. And they liked it. So children’s stomachs are back on the negotiating table, except now it isn’t for a temporary standoff to end a federal shutdown. They’re making it a permanent policy, an ongoing threat against any state that refuses to do Donald Trump’s bidding by becoming a deportation machine.

You won’t snitch? Well, your kids won’t eat.

The administration insists this new move is merely a “clarification.” For nearly thirty years, under a 1998 legal opinion, the reporting requirement in welfare law applied narrowly, to the specific agencies administering the programs. In other words, if states knew that someone was illegally getting the welfare benefits and in the country illegally, they needed to report it. Every administration of both parties agreed with that reading — including Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, and, notably, the first Trump administration. Now with Trump eager to crank up deportation numbers, the DOJ has “discovered” that Congress secretly meant to deputize every single state employee in America into an illegal immigration informant.

DOJ’s own spokesman gave away the game this week, saying the goal is to ensure “DHS receives the information it is legally entitled to.” Aha, so this was never about welfare, was it? It’s about feeding the deportation machine with data instead of feeding kids. Trust me, I won’t forget that admission.

I ran point on federal-state coordination at DHS. I can tell you that what makes this country’s immigration system function at all is trust between Washington and the states, and that trust has already been detonated by the Trump administration. Now it’s being escalated into hostage-taking territory. And it has a constitutional problem the size of the Kool-Aid man: in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government cannot use the threat of yanking massive existing funding streams to coerce states into new obligations. Chief Justice John Roberts himself called that “a gun to the head.”

Conditions on federal money must be clear when states accept it. They must be related to the program’s purpose and non-coercive. A surprise reinterpretation — three decades later! — converting a welfare program into a surveillance dragnet enforced by the threat of mass child poverty, fails pretty much every part of that test. But I’m no lawyer.

A federal judge in Minnesota already smacked down the Trump administration earlier this year for trying to weaponize DOJ investigations as a way to “coerce Minnesota officials” and “harass and retaliate against them” for declining to join Trump’s deportation crackdown. I suspect judges will have something to say about this, too.

Whatever happens in the courts, my ask this morning is this: do not let the eventual legal fight obscure the moral one. Any government that will starve its own children to catch undocumented people has just told you everything you need to know about its values. This is the same administration that deployed undercover agents against pots-and-pans protesters, that detained the parents of active-duty Marines, and that put ankle monitors on Haitian grandmothers.

We are fighting a man who is not just “bad.” As my former boss John Kelly once said, after he served as Trump’s White House chief of staff, we are fighting someone who is “a very, very evil man.”

So here’s my message to governors in every state who will get briefed this morning on the news: do not blink. Refuse, sue, and win, as states have been winning against this administration’s blackmail all year. Fight like hell. This is not only an obviously righteous cause, but Donald Trump has also just given you the most powerful moral high ground on which to stand. He’s weaponizing food assistance and trying to turn nurses and teachers into 1930s German snitches.

And for the rest of us, the assignment is pretty simple. History warns that a country gets just as much cruelty as it’s willing to ignore. Don’t ignore this one. Keep it in their faces. Then use your ballots to throw the faces of every enabler out of public office.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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DEFIANCE DAILY

In case you missed it, Tuesday night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch our next episode tomorrow night at 5 pm ET!

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

TODAY’S FEATURES: THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST AND SHOW US YOUR ANT-ITUDE

IF YOU’RE ALREADY A DEFIANCE MEMBER, THEN MARCH RIGHT IN. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE, SO YOU DON’T MISS A THING.

REMINDER TO MEMBERS: OUR BOOK CLUB CHAT TAKES PLACE TODAY! The DEFIANCE Book Club will be meeting on in our Members-only chatroom to discuss chapters 3 and 4 of Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum @ 2:30pm ET. See you there!

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Our Members-Only Meeting is TODAY.

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If Donald Trump’s movement is defeated at the polls in November, Americans will owe thanks — at least in part — to a faceless person whose identity may remain a secret forever.

Sometime in the last few weeks, an anonymous employee of the United States Postal Service reached out to a small nonprofit called Whistleblower Aid. We can surmise how it went. Like many people who reach out to the watchdog group, the worried civil servant probably crafted a short message hinting at damning revelations but was careful not to put too much in writing. Then a lawyer got assigned to do an intake interview. In that first conversation, I suspect Whistleblower Aid staff were wide-eyed at the significance of what they were being told: the Trump administration was moving forward with an illegal plan to monitor the mail-in ballots of American citizens, against a judge’s orders, and in a way that could compromise the U.S. voting system.

That’s when the machine kicked into high gear. The lawyers would have worked quickly and quietly to prepare a formal whistleblower complaint documenting the explosive allegations. In the meantime, we know that they decided to put in place extraordinary security measures to protect the person’s identity. For good reason. In this administration, the punishment for telling the truth can be career-ending… or worse.

This week, that bombshell complaint landed in Congress. The disclosure, delivered to Senator Richard Blumenthal, alleges that the president’s team at the Postal Service has been quietly building a system that could deny huge numbers of Americans the ability to vote by mail in November, and that officials kept working on it even after federal courts ordered them to stop.

The details are shocking, even to election experts who suspected this might be the case. As part of Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting, the Postal Service has devised an Orwellian barcode tracking system, effectively allowing the president to track individual Americans’ mail-in ballots. Ostensibly the system is to allow federal authorities to identify and remove “noncitizen” voters from the mix. But according to the whistleblower, the system was so rushed and poorly designed that it will put the votes of ordinary American citizens at grave risk.

According to the disclosure, the system was designed in a way that might throw out hundreds or thousands of legitimate ballots at a time. Postal workers would scan a sample of a few hundred ballots out of batches of ten thousand or more, and if a single barcode fails to scan or match, the entire batch would get kicked back to state election officials to start over. The whistleblower’s attorneys call the process “entirely unforgiving,” warning it could trap ballots in repeated verification cycles and prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of them.

One third of Americans vote by mail. It doesn’t take a lot of complex math to realize what might happen if this kind of machinery seizes up weeks before an election. In fact, it almost doesn’t matter whether the disenfranchisement would be intentional or merely the product of staggering incompetence. Either way, it could upend the vote nationwide. What’s more, the whistleblower alleges the Postal Service defied court orders to keep building this flawed system, even after the Trump administration was told to halt all activity.

Last night, we spoke to the whistleblower’s attorney about the significance of these revelations. You can watch that conversation below.

But more than anything, I want to focus on the human being at the center of this. Over the past ten years, I’ve learned a thing or two about what he or she is probably experiencing right now. I’ve made the decision to blow the whistle on this president and, believe me, it’s not a cakewalk. I won’t forget the gut-sick nights wondering what would happen if it all went wrong or the moment I hit “send” and understood that there was no going back, even if it cost me my career, my future, or my life.

This person made the decision to sound the alarm against far stronger headwinds than I ever faced.

When I came forward, there were at least still guardrails in the system. This whistleblower emerged from the suffocating censorship of a government that has been systematically stripping away all of those protections. We’ve documented how Trump is moving to punish federal workers who expose illegal activity, gutting whistleblower safeguards for tens of thousands of employees after firing 17 inspectors general and decapitating the very office meant to shield truth-tellers. And we’ve written about Trump’s plan to bring a “catch and kill” system into the federal government, a proposed government-wide gag order that would bind two million civil servants to lifetime silence about what they witness on the job.

For the president, this crackdown is having the desired effect. According to a survey of federal employees, the share of government workers who feel they could report illegal activity without retaliation has collapsed — from 72 percent to 22 percent since Trump returned to power. That means a majority of federal workers went from feeling like they could tell the truth to feeling like they had a gun to their heads. In my entire career, I’ve never seen anything like it. The fear is palpable inside federal agencies.

Yet this person came forward anyway.

My reaction is twofold. First, we owe this individual the thanks of a grateful nation, even though we may never get the opportunity to say it. Anonymity is his or her right. While some of us ended up shedding ours and meeting the onslaught of retaliation, I don’t necessarily recommend it. Our system should protect anyone who makes disclosures about illegal activity and who wants to remain anonymous.

Second, their courage is exactly why the rest of us have a job to do. Whistleblowers won’t continue fighting corruption solely on their own volition and sense of patriotic duty. If the administration keeps intimidating them with gangster-like tactics, the intimidation will eventually snuff out even the bravest in government. Those would-be whistleblowers need to know that if they step forward, there will be support — lawyers, security, and institutions ready to catch them when they leap.

This is why DEFIANCE.org has partnered with Whistleblower Aid, which is representing this whistleblower… why we continue to support groups like Justice Connection, Democracy Defenders Fund, and so many others working on the front lines to protect people prepared to reveal illegal activity inside the Trump administration… and why we launched the real Anti-Weaponization Fund to defend truth-tellers against Trump’s revenge campaign. We’re doing this work for moments like this. If we really want to restore the rule of law in America, Donald Trump’s abuses of power must be exposed from the inside, and the people willing to do the exposing deserve an army at their back.

The disclosure is already doing its job. It’s giving fresh ammunition to the legal fight against Trump’s unconstitutional mail-voting order, which a federal judge has temporarily blocked and 23 states are challenging in court. And it makes it far more likely this scheme gets stopped before Election Day.

Somewhere out there in America, a public servant looked at a plan to sabotage your vote. Over their own self-doubt and the daunting consequences of self-sacrifice, he or she decided their oath to the Constitution mattered more than their own safety. That’s what saving a democracy actually looks like, friends. It’s rarely the famous people swinging their fists at the dictator. It’s almost always someone like this.

Wherever you are, patriot, let me just say on behalf of all of us: thank you.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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P.S. If you want to fight back, consider contributing to the Anti-Weaponization Fund. This month, we will be announcing new grants from the Fund to make sure more government whistleblowers are protected against Trump’s retaliation… and that people who come forward in defense of democracy have the support they deserve.

DEFIANCE DAILY

In case you missed it, last night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch our next episode tomorrow night at 5 pm ET!

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

TODAY’S FEATURES: THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST AND MY DEFIANCE MISSION

IF YOU’RE ALREADY A DEFIANCE MEMBER, THEN MARCH RIGHT IN. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE, SO YOU DON’T MISS A THING.

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Now, a whistleblower from inside USPS is confirming their fears.

In a breaking disclosure, they describe chaos: employees working on the system called it a “sh*t show,” while USPS allegedly pressured them to keep working …

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The Chief Justice of the United States wrote last night that the president’s ballroom is “likely unlawful.” Five of his colleagues read those words, looked the other way, and effectively allowed the president to continue hammering at the crime scene.

That’s pretty much the whole story of Monday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision, which deserves to be remembered as one of the most cowardly acts in the modern history of the Supreme Court. In an unsigned order, the five-justice majority lifted the lower courts’ pause on Trump’s East Wing project without having to take a position on the legality of the president building an unauthorized, billion-dollar ballroom. Instead, they took the easy way out, ruling that the National Trust for Historic Preservation and its board member, Alison Hoagland, didn’t have the standing to sue.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, was not willing to play along, and his dissent says what the majority would not: “The President ordered the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a new, privately funded state ballroom in its place. Construction of the ballroom has proceeded apace for the better part of a year. That construction is likely unlawful.”

The chief justice observed that Congress “has not passed any law resembling ‘express authority’” for the project, and the routine appropriation “of a couple million dollars for ordinary Executive Residence maintenance and repairs likely does not authorize the President to use hundreds of millions of dollars” to build a 90,000-square-foot palace where a historic wing once stood.

Then he let it rip: “The White House is not just any building, and — when it comes to historic preservation — Hoagland is not just any person. In failing to appreciate as much, the Court misconceives the plaintiff’s injury, allowing the Executive’s likely infringement of the Legislature’s power of the purse and authority to regulate federal property in the District of Columbia to continue. Today’s decision is no victory for the separation of powers.”

It’s extraordinary that the top judge in America assessed that a crime was in progress, but his colleagues looked the other way so as not to anger the criminal.

Just imagine a man kicking down the door of a clubhouse that belongs to the whole neighborhood. Six cops arrive. The sergeant takes one look and says, “That’s illegal! Stop that man!” The other five look down at their feet and mumble about how the person who called 911 didn’t own the building or live in the neighborhood. So they turn back to their cars, holster their flashlights, and drive off. The break-in continues. That’s basically Monday’s ruling.

This dissent is quite something coming from John Roberts. He’s among the most institutionally cautious men in Washington, a chief justice who’s spent two decades avoiding confrontation, sometimes painfully so. When Roberts says the Court just permitted a violation of Congressional authority, he’s describing his own colleagues as accomplices.

In response, the conservative majority strained themselves to say they weren’t making a judgment about whether the construction was legal, but everyone else can see this is a cop-out. If they’d wanted to let the judicial system reach an ultimate ruling on the legality of the ballroom, they would’ve let the case proceed on the merits in the lower courts, where, as the National Trust noted, every judge who reviewed the project had found it “patently unlawful.” Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee, ruled against Trump in March. The D.C. Circuit affirmed, rejecting the administration’s “bold assertion that the Executive can act with utter lawlessness, destroying treasured national landmarks and harming the interests of individuals, and that no court can stop it.” An earlier panel reminded the president that he is a “temporary tenant, not the owner” of the White House.

What’s worse, the Supreme Court is now opening the door to fresh abuses of power on federal property all across America. By concluding that not even the National Trust for Historic Preservation has standing to sue, they’re signaling to Trump that there’s likely no one who can stop him from doing whatever he wants with federal property. Indeed, Trump’s Justice Department argued outright that nothing could be done if the president tore down the Statue of Liberty. Last night, five justices effectively agreed.

In effect, the Court has invented a brand new category of presidential lawbreaking. Who’s to say Trump won’t next seek to behead the statue at the Lincoln Memorial and put his stone head atop it? Or carve his face into Mount Rushmore? Or give away chunks of our national parks to real estate developers? Oh wait, he’s already doing that, surely buoyed by the belief that the high court won’t stop him.

Trump understands the get-out-of-jail-free card he’s been given. Within hours, he was crowing that the “magnificent Ballroom and Military Complex” will be finished by summer 2028 “at no cost to the American Taxpayer.” That, too, is false. The Washington Post has documented how nearly a billion dollars — most of it taxpayer money — was secretly cobbled together by the White House for the project, including hundreds of millions raided from the Secret Service’s budget.

By the way, I used to oversee the Secret Service’s budget on Capitol Hill and then from DHS headquarters. The White House can shift money between accounts only for purposes Congress already approved, and Congress did not appropriate Secret Service funds so Trump could build a ballroom. Nothing about this cash swap is ordinary or above-board. It’s the federal budget equivalent of money laundering.

Roberts closed his dissent by quoting Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Then he added a line that should be carved over the Court’s own marble facade: “All the more reason to ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

History won’t forget the five cowards who let Trump go forward with something that was “likely unlawful.” They turned their backs on a crime scene because they were too scared of the criminal. But a few years from now, we’re going to make sure they remember. I’ll be the first to invite them to a ceremony on the White House lawn where, one day, Trump’s illegal ballroom will eventually be demolished.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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DEFIANCE DAILY

In case you missed it, last night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch today’s episode at 5 pm ET!

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

TODAY’S FEATURES: THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST AND TRIVIA TUESDAY

IF YOU’RE ALREADY A DEFIANCE MEMBER, THEN MARCH RIGHT IN. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE, SO YOU DON’T MISS A THING.

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So Trump is turning to Venezuela for a bailout.

Over the weekend, he announced what he called the “BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY,” promising it would bring down gas prices. The…

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Republicans have decided to make their midterm convention entirely about Donald Trump, even calling it “Trump-a-palooza.” So we’re bringing to town what defines the man more than anything else: the Epstein Files.

As NBC News reported today, the Trump-Epstein Bookmobile (co-created by DEFIANCE.org and the Institute for Primary Facts) will make its first tour stop in Dallas next week, while Republicans gather at the American Airlines Center for the first midterm convention in the GOP’s history. Vice President JD Vance keynotes on night one; Donald Trump closes on night two. Parked nearby will be a truck and a pop-up exhibit containing every single publicly available page of the largest sex-trafficking investigation in American history… the investigation that the Trump administration fought hard to cover up.

If the GOP wants this week to be all about Trump, then let’s have the convention attendees see for themselves the scandal that epitomizes his corruption. And let’s make sure they hear from the survivors of Trump-Epstein abuse, who will be flying into Dallas to be there.

The convention is already shaping up to be a bizarre symbol of cultish loyalty to one man. Trump insisted upon the two-day pep rally, even though GOP candidates are worried about associating with him, given his historically weak poll numbers. House GOP members who are running for re-election are being told to fork over $25,000 just to attend, which they are angry about because the president has yet to open his war chest to help them in their races. It doesn’t get Trumpier than that. The whole event apparently exists to celebrate him, to tell the stories he wants to tell, and to paper over his misconduct with confetti.

Well, the president can count on one thing next week: there will be paper. We’re going to make sure of it.

As the celebratory balloons drop on the convention floor, Americans will be reminded of the paper trail of corruption. Nowhere is this more visible than with the Epstein Files. Todd Blanche, the man who spent a year burying these files, is now the attorney general. A federal judge is not-so-subtly threatening his lawyers with contempt for continuing the coverup and failing to comply with the law to release all documents, like the FBI interview notes concerning a woman who alleges Trump sexually assaulted her when she was thirteen. The “released” files remain riddled with redactions that shield the powerful while, as survivor Dani Bensky has pointed out, the DOJ managed to expose survivors’ own names across multiple data dumps. Meanwhile, New Mexico’s attorney general is suing the Trump administration for obstructing the state’s criminal investigation into what happened at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch.

Every institution that was supposed to deliver accountability has been captured, stalled, or intimidated. So the survivors are delivering it themselves, one city at a time.

When we unveiled the Trump-Epstein Bookmobile on Capitol Hill in July, on the eve of Blanche’s confirmation vote, I wrote that no matter how the Senate voted, we would not stop. And we won’t. This is not an issue that will gradually fade away in the manner that Trump hopes it will. This is going to haunt him throughout the rest of his presidency and — if I have anything to say about it — for the rest of his days on this earth until justice is served.

We’re proud to partner with our friends at the Institute for Primary Facts on the project. They are the workhorses that got all 3,437 bound volumes of the Epstein files printed and all 17,000 pounds of them put on shelves for thousands of visitors to see earlier this year at a pop-up museum in New York. As survivor Jess Michales puts it: “Go walk the shelves and see for yourself. No spin needed.” After that, we decided to put them on wheels.

Dallas is only the beginning. From there, the Bookmobile will roll onto other locations in Nebraska, Iowa, and beyond. Locations are being announced today with more to come in the weeks ahead. The tour will hit roughly two dozen states, and at every one of them survivors will be at the forefront, meeting Americans face to face regardless of their political persuasions in order to enlist their support in exposing the ongoing coverup. Lara Blume McGee, one of the survivors, calls it “a memorial to every survivor who was told their pain was inconvenient to powerful men.”

Everyone at Trump-a-palooza is about to be made aware that the “inconvenient pain” is now printed evidence.

My former boss Donald Trump thinks he can outrun his own corruption and evade the Epstein survivors. He cannot. That’s why we put the files on the road. The convention itself lasts only two days. But these documents will be criss-crossing America for two months, then through the midterms, and then as I noted they will follow him into whatever comes after his presidency, until every remaining page is released and every enabler is named. Because of such efforts, the investigation will be reopened one day.

If you’re anywhere near Dallas next week, come and see it. I’m really proud of this effort and everyone who made it possible. If you’re not in the area, you can track the tour, vote for where the truck goes next, and sign the petition for the release of the remaining files at TrumpEpsteinBookmobile.com. And if you’re one of the delegates paying $25,000 to hear Trump speak, the exhibit is free. We saved you a spot.

Republicans want the country to remember one man this fall. Fine. We’ll help them out. We just want to make sure the country remembers all of him.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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DEFIANCE DAILY

In case you missed it, Friday night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch today’s episode at 5 pm ET!

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

TODAY’S FEATURES: THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST AND TUNNEL TALK

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Just visit their websites, and you’ll see it there!

Republicans have spent this week finding increasingly awkward ways to put some distance between themselves and Donald Trump. And in Kentucky, one Trump-endor…

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Something notable happened this week. Victims of Donald Trump’s retribution campaign (including recently targeted individuals, institutions, and nations) each found his self-destruct button. And they pushed it.

I have spent the better part of a decade as close as you can possibly get to Trump’s revenge machine. First, I witnessed it from inside his administration, regularly working to stop Trump’s efforts to break the law (I, for one, had no keen interest in going to prison for him); then I experienced it as one of his targets.

If there were such a thing as a PhD in revenge studies, I’d have earned it twice over. Probably thrice. But in any event, I can give you the entirety of my dissertation in a single sentence: nothing on earth scares Donald Trump like an opponent who fights back.

I’ve analyzed just about every case you can think of. I spent years warning about it and, in Trump’s second term, monitored his weaponization of presidential powers to carry out his personal grievances against tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of individuals, institutions, and nation states. There’s no comparison in American history whatsoever. We don’t even need to invoke the names of “other” presidents known for vindictiveness, because Trump is in a league of his own.

In all the cases I’ve scoured, something remarkable tends to happen the moment a target stands their ground. Trump starts to come apart. He overcorrects. He crashes the clown car into the median. And when it’s all said and done, he defeats himself.

It’s taken the rest of the country (and the world) a long time to learn this lesson. Most have not followed the sequence. Being targeted by the most powerful man in the world is scary, which is why you’ve seen a lot of people capitulate to or settle with Trump. In the cosmic battle between what is right and what is easy, they’ve acted like there was never an option. They just did the latter.

But this week, it became clearer than ever that Trump’s victims are no longer coming to the negotiating table. They’re flipping the table over.

We saw an individual do it. Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump has twice tried to fire on trumped-up mortgage fraud claims, didn’t resign quietly. She sued, won at the Supreme Court, and this week her lawyers answered his second removal attempt by pointing out that Trump himself (along with his Treasury secretary and his attorney general) signed the very same kind of contradictory “primary residence” mortgage paperwork he claims makes her unfit to serve.

“Surely the President does not believe himself ‘unfit for office,’” her counsel wrote. Trump reached for a weapon and basically handed it to his target.

We also saw an institution do the same. When military news publication Stars and Stripes broke the story of the mental health crisis aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the Pentagon’s response was to move to fire the paper’s leadership and seize control of a newsroom that has served American troops since the Civil War. Trump had been But the journalists didn’t throw in the towel. This week, they sued on First Amendment grounds, and in the process, they basically ensured that the story about the USS Lincoln and the administration’s censorship campaign will continue to get a thousand times more attention than if the Pentagon had let it go.

And finally, entire nation-states are fighting back. Canada spent months watching Trump pile tariff upon tariff on them and other countries around the world. The quiet and thoughtful northerners spent a lot of that time trying to peacefully resolve the situation with characteristic Canadian courtesy. This week, Ottawa decided they’d had enough. They called Trump’s bluff, slapping counter-tariffs on twenty billion dollars’ worth of American goods.

Trump’s flailing and petulant response? He signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” If he thought cartography revisions would somehow get his leverage back, he was wrong. Even the map companies were ready to defy him. “We’re not changing it,” wrote the company MapQuest on social media, pasting a map screenshot of Lake Ontario with the body of water renamed Lake Are We Doing This Again?. “Name it whatever you want at your leisure.”

The clown car has hit the median. Again.

Contrast this with the first year of Trump’s second term, when his targets were far more likely to settle with him. We will not soon forget the white-shoe law firms that pledged a billion dollars in free legal services to escape Trump’s executive orders… the universities that wrote nine-figure checks to make his threats go away… the television networks that paid millions to settle lawsuits their own lawyers considered frivolous… or the allied nations that raced to accept lopsided trade deals rather than endure his tantrums. The president felt emboldened that his extortion was working, and as a result, every capitulation bought the next target a worse deal.

No longer. The targets have enrolled in “revenge studies” themselves. And now that they’ve figured him out, Trump is genuinely terrified.

If you doubt it, I’m just going to point you back to what I think is the most revealing story of the week. Jared Kushner requested a meeting with Hakeem Jeffries, and I can tell you firsthand that a meeting like that doesn’t happen without the president’s knowledge. The focus of the secret summit was reportedly on seeking “common ground,” during which Kushner urged Jeffries to also sit down with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

You don’t need a PhD to know what’s going on here. Trump is trying to cut a deal with Democrats to blunt the scrutiny he knows is coming. The meeting surfaced just days after reports that Democrats are planning to put Trump-family corruption at the center of congressional probes if they win the House. The same Donald Trump who called Jeffries a “low IQ individual” and a “THUG” who is a “danger to our Country” is suddenly striking a softer tone and dispatching family members to make nice.

That ain’t strength, folks. That’s fear.

So how do you scare the living daylights out of Donald Trump? You fight back. I made the case yesterday that Democrats should lean into this moment and put a real fighter — a major national figure — in the role of Speaker of the House. When the gavel changes hands, the investigations that follow should be the most sweeping congressional probes in American history, because the gravity of Trump’s crimes demands nothing less. In 250 years, we’ve never seen corruption on this scale from an American president.

If the Democrats do that right, I can promise you one thing. The political opposition won’t actually need to “defeat” Donald Trump.

He will defeat himself.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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In case you missed it, last night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below!

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

TODAY’S FEATURES: THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST AND THE DEFIANCE BOOK CLUB

IF YOU’RE ALREADY A DEFIANCE MEMBER, THEN MARCH RIGHT IN. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE, SO YOU DON’T MISS A THING.

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Instead, the Federal Reserve governor Trump has spent months trying to fire just turned his case against her right back on his own administration.

Her attorney Abbe Lowell went through the mortgage allegations Trump says make Cook unfit to serve and pointed out an inconvenient fact: some of the people standing al…

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Nothing in the Constitution requires the Speaker of the House to be an elected member of Congress. If Democrats take back control, they should bring a bulldog into the job.

If you read Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, you’ll find a surprising clause. It says that the U.S. House of Representatives chooses its Speaker and its other officers. That’s it. It doesn’t require the person installed in that post to represent a congressional district, have notched an electoral victory, or have been on the ballot anywhere, for that matter. Hypothetically, it could be anyone.

Republicans already know this. That’s why they flirted with naming Donald Trump the Speaker of the House while he was out of office, as a way of ratcheting up pressure on the Biden White House and giving the disgraced ex-president an official public platform. Indeed, after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was thrown out by his own conference, Trump said he’d been asked about taking the job temporarily and would “do it if necessary.”

He didn’t, obviously. But there’s no doubt the move would’ve shocked the political system. As they look past the midterms, Democrats should consider turning the tables.

They’re now weeks away from an election that most serious forecasters think they will win. Jared Kushner has already taken a meeting with Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, which tells you that Trump himself is terrified about losing and being investigated by a Democratic majority. Unfortunately, the conversation inside the Democratic Party has been almost entirely a conversation about whose turn it is to be Speaker, rather than what type of figure is needed to fight a wannabe dictator.

I’m not saying Democrats should throw Hakeem Jeffries overboard. In fact, I would expect — in the scenario that I’m about to propose — that they’d still make him House Majority Leader, the number-two who runs the day-to-day in the House. But what I’m urging Democrats to do is think outside the box.

The moment a new Congress gets sworn in on January 3, 2027, they should hand the job of Speaker of the House to an outsider. The role will be more important than it’s ever been. That individual will be the face of the entire pro-democracy movement in America. They will lead the most sprawling congressional investigations in American history into the most corrupt administration the nation has ever seen. And quite frankly, we’ll need someone who’s not only seen as a leader of the body but also as a potential leader of the country.

Democrats need to put their most formidable communicators forward for the post. That includes looking at the roster of possible presidential contenders.

So who takes the gavel? There are a lot of names being floated for 2028 who might be interesting choices, though many already hold public office. Gavin Newsom, for instance, would be the biggest thorn in Trump’s side, but you wouldn’t want him to resign as Governor of California to take over leadership of the House. Others are already in competitive races, like Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia and State Representative James Talarico in Texas.

Which leads me to the person I think is the obvious choice: Pete Buttigieg. He holds no office and would have to give up nothing. He is one of the best communicators the party has produced in a generation. And he has spent eight years dismantling hostile interviewers on live television (including in right-wing media) in exactly the tone these hearings will require.

Picture him presiding over the investigations into Trump’s weaponization of the federal government to get rich and get revenge. We need a speaker who can expose the corruption (the ballrooms, foreign jets, and reflecting pools… the crypto empire… the federal contracts for favored companies… the shady foreign deals) and reveal Trump’s breathtaking weaponization of government (the withholding of aid to Blue States… hijacking of the electoral process… sham investigations… retaliatory actions against foes). With a figure like Buttigieg at the helm, these investigations would go beyond Washington beltway drama and take on historical significance.

I get that this sounds unconventional. But we’re in a radical moment in American life during which a man, Donald Trump, is actively and aggressively dismantling democracy’s guardrails and setting fire to the Constitution. This is not the a moment for conventional thinking. For me, it’s unbearable to watch the Democratic Party spending every day warning (correctly) that this is a five-alarm fire for American democracy… and then responding in routine, procedural ways.

Republicans looked at this same constitutional power play a few years ago and instantly saw an opportunity that would’ve rocked the political system. I’m glad they didn’t exercise it to install Trump as Speaker. But they were onto something. They understood that the Speakership isn’t really about legislative mechanics right now. The role is a statement about who leads the political opposition and who holds the microphone to speak for a nation on the brink.

Democrats are about to be handed that microphone. And they should give it to someone like Buttigieg.

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 FEATURES: THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST, READER POLL, AND SHOW US YOUR ANT-ITUDE.

IF YOU’RE ALREADY A DEFIANCE MEMBER, THEN MARCH RIGHT IN. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE, SO YOU DON’T MISS A THING.

REMINDER TO MEMBERS: OUR BOOK CLUB CHAT OPENS TODAY! The DEFIANCE Book Club will be meeting on in our Members-only chatroom to discuss chapters 1 and 2 of Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum @ 2:30pm ET. See you there!

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After sitting down with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and other voices on the right, Hunter has faced plenty of criticism for giving them his time.

But as he tells Miles and Xander, in his eyes, it’s all part of the DEFIANCE.

Then we g…

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) doesn’t need to send agents to polling places to start interfering in the election. They’re already doing it from their desks.

Asked this year whether the administration intended to put immigration agents in the middle of the midterms, senior officials gave a consistent answer. ICE “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” a top DHS official told a dozen Senate Democrats, and the department’s leadership assured lawmakers it had “no plans” to station immigration officers at voting locations, while pointedly declining to rule it out. (Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee later learned DHS attorneys had told a federal court the department might possess thousands of documents on the subject.)

Evidently, all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place. While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.

Last night, The Washington Post revealed that hundreds of federal immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including the specialists who vet immigration applications for fraud and security threats, have been pulled off their day jobs and reassigned to monitor voting lists for supposed noncitizen voters. This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the Department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections.

Despite this effort being carried out in the dark, the Trump administration expects Americans to trust that they are merely hunting for “illegal” registrants. Yet the operation raises urgent questions about potential abuse, oversight, and whether DHS agents will play a larger role in unlawfully purging American citizens from voter rolls.

The newly disclosed effort adds to an already sweeping undertaking by Trump’s lieutenants to influence the midterm elections. Since returning to office, Trump has converted the Justice Department’s Voting Section from a shield for voters into a weapon against them. His administration has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia to extract voter roll data, ordered federal agencies to build “approved” lists of voters, and as we speak, is still moving ahead with plans to control the delivery of ballots in the mail.

Thousands of DHS agents and a growing number of federal prosecutors are being marshaled away from their actual responsibilities and pointed at America’s elections by a president simultaneously trying to seize control over who is allowed to cast a ballot. Nothing in American history looks like this. At all. Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.

Again, the Trump administration continues to assert that all of its efforts are focused on the phantom menace of “noncitizen voters.” But the pretext is collapsing under its own weight. Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claim they’ve found roughly 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in the United States. But when Nevada pressed the department on Mullin’s claim of 16,000 in their state, DHS admitted it had confirmed just 185… then refused to hand over the names so the state could investigate.

I dealt with this in the first Trump administration, when the White House sent us on a foolish odyssey at DHS to expose this (non-existent) nationwide voter fraud conspiracy it keeps talking about. There wasn’t any evidence of such a conspiracy. It was tin-foil hat stuff. But I realize now the point was never to find the fraud. The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose. That’s what they’re doing now.

But unlike 2020, when Trump brazenly sought to steal an election, we saw this coming from a mile away. While this year has seen some of the most unprecedented Executive Branch efforts to interfere in the democratic process, it’s also seen unprecedented efforts to protect our elections.

That’s one of the reasons I launched DEFIANCE.org. I’m not putting up with it this time. We’re not going to let Trump spin up another “Big Lie” and spring it on the American people. We’re going to fight like hell before the fighting even begins… and that’s what we’ve done:

In just the past few months, DEFIANCE.org has teamed up with Freedom Trainers to prepare everyday Americans to protect the vote, and we created and funded the Fight Against Federal Overreach, a coalition of locally elected prosecutors now training on exactly what to do if the administration sends ICE agents to the polls. We’re backing lawsuits against the administration’s illegal orders, including the Campaign Legal Center’s fight over the mail-in ballot executive order, and partnering with Keep Our Republic to raise the alarm about Trump’s potential misuse of emergency powers. We seeded Justice Connection’s DOJ and FBI whistleblower effort, so the people watching federal power being abused from the inside have a safe way to come forward. We put the Epstein Files on the road to keep Trump’s corruption in front of voters, funded nationwide May Day protests to prepare for possible mass walkouts after the election if it comes to that, and supported Leaving MAGA to help more people defect. And because the true aim of an operation like Trump’s is to convince eligible voters that showing up isn’t worth the risk, we’re funding the opposite: get-out-the-vote drives with Voto Latino in the very communities being targeted for suppression and with groups like Powered x People in critical battleground states.

The answer to intimidation is a margin of turnout so large that no manufactured fraud number can explain it away. That’s what we call the TOO BIG TO RIG coalition. And tonight at 5pm ET, we’ll announce another nationwide effort to protect our elections.

This week’s revelation from the Washington Post shows that Trump is already deploying his DHS agents to muck around in the vote. They may have reassigned hundreds of desk workers to the case. But I like our odds. Our team is an army of poll workers, lawyers, state officials, local prosecutors, and the voters themselves — and there are millions more of us than them.

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 FEATURES: THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST AND MY DEFIANCE MISSION

IF YOU’RE ALREADY A DEFIANCE MEMBER, THEN MARCH RIGHT IN. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE, SO YOU DON’T MISS A THING.

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