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

Right now, children are being held inside the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in South Texas. Infants experiencing alarming weight loss. Kids denied crayons. Families drinking foul-smelling tap water. No attorneys. No judges. No childhood. This administration is counting on you to look away. We’re not going to give it that victory.

So here’s what we did about it this week…

FIRST, we heard from Dr. Anita Patel, a pediatric critical care physician who has spent more than a decade caring for children navigating this system. She was unambiguous: detention doesn’t just traumatize kids — it makes them sick. And the medical community has been unified on this for years. Children don’t belong in detention. Full stop.

SECOND, we were joined again by Mary Corcoran of the Save America Movement — who has been on the frontlines of the fight against Trump’s detention expansion. Mary walked us through SAM’s ongoing work exposing detention center conditions, why Dilley is the right target right now, and what’s coming next in their activation there.

YOU MADE THIS POSSIBLE.

YOUR MISSION, IF YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT

NEW - If you ever easily want to see your actions in one place, go to DEFIANCE.org/actions

As a DEFIANCE.org Member, you’re already refusing to let democracy die on our watch. But if you want to do even more this week, here’s what you can do…

1️⃣ Sign and share the GTFO ICE petition to Free the Kids
Add your name and join the list that will receive further instructions and updates as this fight develops.

👉 Sign here: GTFOICE.org/freethekids

2️⃣ Email your congressperson and tell them to Free the Kids
We’ve made it easy — click the link and a pre-drafted email will populate. Then find your rep’s contact info and send it.

👉 Pre-drafted email here

👉 Find your rep: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

3️⃣ Go to Trump’s social media and tell him to Free the Kids
Find a Trump post wherever you live online. Leave a comment. Add your badge. If you’re feeling spicy, let him have it.

👇 Badge below

🖥️ IF YOU MISSED IT
You can watch the full Weekly Mission Briefing at the top!

As always — stay loud, stay brave, and stay together.

Best,
The DEFIANCE.org Team

WHAT’S COMING UP

• Every weekday — DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET, you can 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.

• ADD US TO YOUR CALENDAR — You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.

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In a breathtaking move, the Trump administration is preparing to hold back hundreds of millions of dollars in public safety funding (money states use to fight terrorism, cyber attacks, and mass shootings) from Blue States unless they go along with the president’s attempt to control the midterm elections.

Under rules just issued by the Department of Homeland Security, 20 percent of every state’s homeland security grants will be frozen until governors fork over their voter rolls and overhaul their elections to Trump’s specifications. The primary target is Blue States that have so far refused to participate in Trump’s election-takeover schemes. Now they are being told to comply or their citizens’ lives will be put at risk.

And that’s only half the story of accelerated intimidation from the Trump White House over the midterms. The House of Representatives is returning to Washington this week with one overriding assignment from the President of the United States: pass the SAVE Act, by any means necessary. Although they face long odds, if MAGA Republicans find some way of succeeding, democracy itself will be on life support.

Speaker Mike Johnson has already announced the plan. Having failed three times to get the bill through the Senate, he now intends to jam it into a budget reconciliation package, which is basically a procedural cheat code designed to dodge the Senate filibuster. Never mind that the Senate parliamentarian has already ruled the bill doesn’t qualify. Never mind that even MAGA hardliners like Anna Paulina Luna are calling the maneuver “Kool-Aid.” Trump wants it done before the midterms, and he’s holding hostage everything from a bipartisan housing bill to the nation’s foreign surveillance powers until he gets it.

Why the desperation? Because the SAVE Act isn’t about fairness and “election integrity.” It’s the biggest piece of the Trump election-takeover machine. To understand what that machine is supposed to do for him in the midterms, we need to step back and revisit its biggest parts.

Part one is the SAVE Act itself. If passed, the bill would require Americans to produce documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or birth certificate, in most cases) just to register to vote. Sounds harmless until you remember that roughly half of Americans don’t have a passport, that millions of married women have birth certificates that don’t match their legal names (including my own wife!), and that the citizens least likely to have these documents on hand are young people, poor people, and voters of color.

If you had any doubt about whether this was meant to be a historic, sweeping tool of voter suppression, then you need only listen to what the president had to say on July 4 in his speech to the nation. He admitted it. He openly claimed it would give one side a decisive advantage for a century.

“We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms — if we are foolish, stupid and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster, as we should do, and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.”

Part two is Trump’s mail-ballot executive order. In March, Trump signed an order directing the federal government to compile lists of “approved” voters and instructed the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists. It’s really difficult to overstate the insanity here. The president’s hand-picked Postmaster General would get to decide whose ballot arrives and whose doesn’t, i.e. who votes and who doesn’t.

DEFIANCE immediately provided funding for a legal consortium that sued to block the obviously unconstitutional order. And in June, a federal judge stopped the order’s key provisions, and concluded that the Constitution gives presidents no such power over elections. But of course the administration is already appealing, and there’s a catch. As of now, the injunction protects only the 23 states and D.C. that sued. In other words, half the nation is still operating under Trump’s illegal edict that allows him to reach into mail carts, pluck out votes, and refuse to deliver them.

(By the way, if you’re still processing this, you’re right in thinking it’s one of the most brazenly unconstitutional things an American president has ever proposed to do.)

Part three is the president’s effort to seize the voter rolls. The Trump Justice Department has been demanding that states hand over their complete voter files, including names, birth dates, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers. Then, they’re running that information against federal databases to check “eligibility” to vote. Most states have refused this demand because, again, the Constitution says that states and not the federal government administer elections. The president doesn’t get to create his own “eligibility” list. So the DOJ sued twenty-nine of those states for their refusal.

Now they’ve decided to put a gun to the heads of noncompliant states by putting the literal lives of their residents at risk. I’ve been warning for years and years this would happen — that Trump 2.0 would use federal money as a tool of coercion. Days ago, DHS announced new rules freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in homeland security grants until states surrender their voter rolls and remake their elections to Trump’s liking. I can tell you, firsthand, that those are the funds used to protect you against terrorist attacks, cyber attacks, mass shootings, weaponized drones, and more.

I will say it again. If you live in a Blue State, Donald Trump and his team are threatening to put your life in danger if your state doesn’t give him control over elections. And by the way, if your governor caves and complies, that voter information will be fed into a database that a federal judge just said “trampled on the privacy rights” of American citizens. Don’t take my word for it. Maine’s secretary of state said this whole scheme “endangers American lives and democracy itself.” For good measure, the DOJ has warned state election officials they could face criminal prosecution, too, if they don’t go along with all of this.

Take a step back. I want you to look at what the whole machine, put together, would actually do. You've got the administration attempting extortion at one end and dangling handcuffs at the other, with a gun to the head of any state that hesitates in between. Under that kind of pressure, a dozen states have already caved.

So let’s play out an example of what that means. Ohio is one of the states that has capitulated on the voter lists. And if all of the other above elements are operationalized, Donald Trump could easily tip the scales in the state and influence who controls the U.S. Congress. I’ll walk you through it.

In February, Ohio’s Secretary of State handed the personal data of nearly 8 million Ohio voters over to Trump’s DOJ. Ohio is not among the states protected by the court injunction against the mail-ballot order. And Ohio happens to be hosting one of the most consequential races in America this November that could decide control of the Senate. Republican appointee Jon Husted is running against Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown in a genuine toss-up, currently separated by less than a single percentage point.

Now suppose the administration wins its appeal, and the Postal Service’s ballot-gatekeeping scheme goes live. Then the federal government — which is already armed with Ohio’s complete voter file — gets to decide which mail ballots get delivered in that election, and they’ll do it based on flawed databases that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has already warned are incomplete and error-prone.

This could be a race decided by a few thousand votes. And in this scenario, a federal agency run by Trump will control the ballot delivery. So ask yourself: what stops them from quietly withholding a few thousand mail-in ballots in Cleveland, Columbus, and Youngstown as “unverified”? Who gets to decide what thresholds are set? Who gets to control the appeals process, if any? You know the answer. Trump’s people do.

Here’s the truly insidious part: how would you ever know what really happened? If your ballot never arrives at your house, you might assume it’s lost in the mail. If it does arrive and you fill it out, how do you know it will get delivered to the local vote counting location? If you somehow manage to find out that your ballot was withheld, what can you do about it? If there are voting irregularities in Democratic-leaning cities and counties, who’s able to track down which ballots Trump’s team is holding onto at the Post Office? By the time lawyers and courts untangle such a mess (months later, if ever), Republican Senator Jon Husted has already been sworn in.

It’s even worse if Trump gets the SAVE Act passed. Then the mail-in-ballot corruption would just be a sideshow. Because tens of thousands of eligible Ohioans could be blocked from registering to vote altogether or purged for paperwork “mismatches” before voting even begins. At that point, Trump and his team don’t need to “steal” anything, per se; they can just use the SAVE Act’s draconian provisions to block voters from the polls who might be showing up to support the political opposition.

I spent my career in national security watching how autocrats abroad hollowed out elections. Very, very rarely do they try to cancel elections. Doing so is a gift to the opposition. It’s the clearest evidence democracy has been killed. Instead, autocrats keep the voting open and try to manipulate it in their favor to preserve some semblance of legitimacy. I will tell you, right now and unequivocally, that is exactly what Donald Trump is trying to do.

Here’s the good news. The machine he’s trying to build keeps failing. The pro-democracy movement in this country is stronger than I expected, and we’re challenging every part of it. DEFIANCE.org has been providing emergency support to these efforts. Three federal judges blocked pieces of Trump’s plan in a single week in June. Republican secretaries of state in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Utah told the DOJ to pound sand. And in the Senate, even a handful of Republicans (Senators Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, Tillis) have so far refused to let the SAVE Act pass.

That’s where you come in, friends. This week, as House Speaker Mike Johnson tries his reconciliation gambit to ram through the SAVE Act, then on the other side of Capitol Hill, every senator must be asked: do you want to be remembered as someone who defended the American experiment at its 250th birthday… or as someone who gave away our ballots to the president and forfeited democracy for good?

The founders had a phrase for voting without the power to change anything. Taxation without representation. We fought an entire revolution over it. The least we can do is fight in the courts, in Congress, and in every state capital now. So call your senators. Then keep calling. Defiance isn’t a fad or mood. Right now, I assure you, it’s your most important duty as an American.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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Donald Trump built today’s Republican Party in his own image. Now, even Republicans are starting to question whether following his instincts is worth the political cost. From plans to restore Turkey’s access to America’s F-35 program despite bipartisan national security concerns, to growing frustration over the $…

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If you doubt that Donald Trump is in the pocket of gun lobbyists, consider this from his first administration: we couldn't release a report on protecting kids from school shootings without first clearing it with the NRA. This week, that fact got a lot more eye-popping.

First of all, I say what I’m about to say as a gun owner. I have a concealed carry permit, I maintain my firearms responsibly, and I believe the Second Amendment is a serious individual right worth defending. So it should tell you something that I’m spooked by what the Trump administration is planning to do. Their changes to federal gun policy, it seems to me, are much more about getting rich than gun rights. And the moves represent the culmination of a tidal shift that began in the first administration.

Let me start with the news here, since you might have missed it over the holiday weekend. In fact, I suspect it was timed for that reason, i.e. to be overlooked.

Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) proposed a rule that would let gun dealers mail guns directly to people’s homes for the first time. This would replace the current system, where online-bought weapons must be routed through a licensed store for an in-person background check. It would be one of the most consequential changes to American gun policy in decades. Indeed, the ATF’s own projection is that nearly 3.3 million buyers a year would eventually order their firearms by mail, like a phone case or a pair of shoes.

And who stands to cash in?

Among others, the president’s eldest son. Donald Trump Jr. sits on the board of GrabAGun, an online retailer that bills itself as the “Amazon of guns,” and he holds a stake in the company. GrabAGun’s chief executive could hardly contain himself, telling investors the firm was “uniquely positioned to capitalize on this potential opportunity.” The company insists Don Jr. had no hand in the rule, and the White House says it has no record of any conversation with him about it.

These assurances (if they were ever worth anything) are worth a lot less in the wake of Trump’s apparent “complaint” that his sons can’t seem to avoid conflicts of interest because it’s just too hard. (“If they buy an energy efficient truck, they have inside information,” he told a CNBC reporter, making the case that his powers as president are so broad that his children, necessarily, are doing business in areas where he’s able to influence the outcome.) And so, whether or not it was done for self-interested purposes, a policy that could enrich the First Family is now sailing through an agency the family controls.

That regulatory change is one of roughly three dozen rollbacks the administration has teed up, from narrowing background checks on some gun sales to loosening restrictions tied to mental illness. Even the ATF itself was worried about the latter proposal. The agency flagged that the mental illness rollback could contribute to mass casualty events, a warning that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche reportedly dismissed. Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division (an office that once spent its days on voting rights and school desegregation) has brought seven lawsuits against states and cities to chip away at their gun-safety laws. Lawyers who spent careers in that division say they’ve never seen anything like it.

Now I’ll tell you why the writing was on the wall. Back in Trump’s first term, I watched him put the gun lobbyists in charge of policymaking, over the objections of public safety professionals and his own appointees.

Let me take you back to Valentine’s Day 2018. That’s when a young man walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, with a rifle and murdered seventeen students and staff. The country was raw in the aftermath. Parents were writing to Washington by the thousands demanding action, and the White House needed to show it was doing something. So it created a Federal Commission on School Safety and divided the work among four departments: Education, Health and Human Services, Justice, and — my old shop — the Department of Homeland Security.

The man who took the reins was a colleague of mine named Josh Venable, who was then a Trump appointee and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s chief of staff. To some in Trump’s orbit, the Commission was just a box to check, basically a way to look busy on gun safety in order to buy time and stave off criticism. To Josh, I remember, it was the most important assignment he’d been given, though he wasn’t necessarily bullish on the prospects of success.

“It was set up for disaster from the get-go,” he told me later. And he was right, though not for the reasons either of us would’ve guessed.

For months, Josh did the unglamorous work of dragging four rival bureaucracies toward a single document. It was supposed to be a report chock full of real, actionable recommendations for preventing massacres in our schools. It can be hard to get factions within a single agency to agree on anything, let alone four different federal departments. But against long odds, he succeeded. All four agencies signed off on a set of recommendations for making classrooms safer and stopping the next Parkland.

That’s when the trouble started.

The draft contained a seemingly modest suggestion. The authors said that the government should study — just study — whether the minimum age to buy a firearm should be raised to twenty-one, the same as the drinking age. To be clear, it didn’t recommend actually raising it. It recommended taking a look at the data. But as we later found out, Trump was terrified of losing the support of the NRA, an organization that would bristle at the mere mention of the subject. So White House staff demanded the gun lobby be allowed to review the report before it went public.

Then, they went further. Word came down from the West Wing that the report should not use the word “firearms” at all. Think about that for just a moment. This was a document commissioned because a gunman had slaughtered children in a school, and the White House wanted the guns edited out of it altogether. It was, as Josh and I later joked darkly, like writing a report on flood safety that never mentioned the rain.

My colleague refused to play along. Josh was already frustrated over Trump’s reluctance to meet with the parents of Parkland shooting victims (in one instance, the president had shown up late to a sit-down with the victims’ families, leaving a bad impression); meanwhile, the president showed comparative eagerness to satiate the NRA. Josh didn’t believe gun lobbyists should hold a private veto over a supposedly independent report on mass shootings when the teachers, school chiefs, and mental health professionals who’d contributed were extended no such courtesy.

“If you want me to do that, I’m done,” is how he put it to me.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos backed him at first. But it didn’t last long. As the pressure climbed, Trump’s education chief apparently began to waver. And when the president personally intervened to insist the NRA get its say, Josh says that she folded. So he resigned.

He was long gone by the time the commission released its findings, which underwent a series of rewrites in his absence. Unsurprisingly, the final report reached the conclusion the gun lobbyists had wanted. Existing research, the report declared, “does not demonstrate that laws imposing a minimum age for firearms purchases have a measurable impact on reducing homicides, suicides, or unintentional deaths.” That was the opposite of what the government’s own experts had advised. (The Parkland shooter, for the record, was under twenty-one and had bought his rifle legally.)

I remember the day that report landed, because I was supposed to brief Trump on part of that report in the Oval Office. My job was to tell him how DHS could help harden school buildings against attacks. As always, he was distracted. He spent the meeting shifting the conversation back to the border wall (“I want it to be a work of art,” he mused at one point)… whether it could be painted black to burn the hands of anyone who touched it (“How much would that cost?” he asked)… if Congress would fund it (“If they don’t give me the money, we shut the whole fucking border,” he fumed)… and whether there were ways to put more pressure on Mexico to pay for it (“Let’s stick it to the Mexicans!” he declared).

Meanwhile, someone else was waiting down the hall. The parents of school-shooting victims were at the White House to meet with the president. Once again, he was late. Delaying something he didn’t want to do.

Looking back, it seems that none of this was ever really about guns, or the Second Amendment, or even protecting kids. It was about who held the most leverage over Donald Trump in a given moment. In 2018, that was the NRA. In 2026, it’s a gun industry that’s figured out they can go much further with Trump in a second term. The real prize isn’t blocking safety recommendations or regulations; it’s going on offense by expanding the profit-making possibilities, from shipping firearms straight to American mailboxes and hollowing out background checks.

You don’t have to be a Second Amendment critic to find this alarming. I’m not. Personally, I think responsible gun ownership and sensible public safety were never enemies. Most gun owners I know support background checks and think keeping firearms out of the hands of people in acute crisis is just plain common sense, not some kind of evil “confiscation” of personal rights. In fact, most Americans writ large agree with those perspectives when asked in surveys.

You’ll see the results soon. Trump’s gun-selling bonanza isn’t about upholding the Constitution. To any sensible observer, you can see it’s about cashing in. After future mass shootings, we’ll be able to ask ourselves more honestly: at what cost?

Gun owners should be the first to express concern. Public policy made behind closed doors like this — with lobbyists hand-editing government reports and cheering on changes that will enrich the president’s family — can be corrupted in both directions. The Second Amendment isn’t for sale. Yet another president could come in and erase all of these changes and upend markets and suddenly cause folks to be in possession of firearms that are later deemed illegal. Every time a new president comes in, we shouldn’t have a “different” Second Amendment.

The pendulum swings are getting wilder. And right now, the inertia isn’t in favor of life and safety. It’s in favor of making a buck.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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A storm rolled through DC and forced organizers to evacuate Trump’s Freedom 250 celebration. The stranded MAGA faithful ended up taking shelter at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. They were not thrilled about the detour. Some tried to storm back into the event, twice.

Tha…

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Donald Trump’s pro-fascist coalition is done “alluding” to their true beliefs. Over the weekend, they wore them proudly through the nation’s capital (albeit while hiding their faces behind masks).

Lately, it’s been said that metaphor and symbolism are dead. For instance, instead of draining the swamp, Trump created a new one with an algae-infested reflecting pool. But some of those “on-the-nose” caricatures of the second Trump administration have more profound consequences for American life. Like the fact that one of the main images Americans saw this weekend on Independence Day was hundreds of bigoted extremists marching through our nation’s capital.

On the 250th anniversary of America, while tourists streamed toward the Mall for a presidential “Salute to America,” the masked men in matching khakis chanted among them, ominously: “Reclaim America!” They carried the Confederate battle flag, the banner of the men who took up arms against the United States in defense of their way of life (namely, the institution of enslaving Black Americans). And they carried the emblems of Patriot Front, a white supremacist organization born from the ashes of a deadly far-right rally that has come to tell us a lot about our president.

Although many of the marchers were tied to convicted violent extremists, they had no fear of entering the nation’s capital and commandeering the celebrations this past Saturday. How could that be? Let me tell you. I was there at the beginning.

* * *

In August 2017, I was leading the Trump administration’s terrorism prevention efforts in the United States. When the “Unite the Right” rally converged on Charlottesville, it was obvious to those of us in the counterterrorism world what we were looking at. The rally was engineered to provoke violence. And under the law, the definition of terrorism is not complicated. Terrorism is violence intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”

When a young neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer, the attack clearly met the definition. The violence was meant to send the protesters a message that the alt-right was “united” and that their extreme views would be literally forced upon fellow Americans. Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions (no one’s idea of a squishy moderate) said publicly that the attack fit the legal definition of terrorism.

At the time, I was in early conversations with the White House about how serious the domestic terrorism problem had become. At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we saw the light blinking red. We briefed Trump and his team about the spike in cases DHS and our FBI colleagues were seeing from far-right militant groups in particular. Charlottesville seemed to validate everything we’d been warning about.

Then Donald Trump spoke.

I won’t forget watching John Kelly (my former boss, newly installed as White House chief of staff) drop his head in exasperation, as he stood off to the side and listened to the president praise the “very fine people” on “both sides” of a terrorist attack. Kelly understood what was happening. He knew that the president wasn’t confused and wasn’t misspeaking. Trump was protecting people who liked him.

Imagine, for a moment, a president standing at the Flight 93 memorial (the site I wrote about on Friday, where ordinary passengers on 9/11 charged a cockpit to stop another attack) and musing that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the struggle aboard that plane. The country would have recoiled in horror. Yet that’s what Trump did after Charlottesville. It was so crass and shocking that most people refused to believe it.

For months afterward, I fought with the White House over the national counterterrorism strategy. My colleagues and I submitted what I considered the “dream draft.” We put forward a document that named the surging threat from domestic terrorist organizations, gave our agencies the top cover they needed to pursue these violent extremists, and positioned us to win the budget increases from Congress that we needed to go after the bad guys. We’d be ready to fight the scourge.

The document sent back to us was revealing. Nearly everything about “domestic terrorism” had been redlined — struck from the document entirely — except a few throwaway sentences that lumped the danger together with “animal rights extremism” and “environmental extremism,” as if the DHS-FBI caseload was buckling under the weight of complex, coordinated attacks planned by PETA members and climate scientists. Meanwhile, in the real world, armed militia groups were drilling, plotting, and carrying out violence in service of a white supremacist worldview.

Trump didn’t see them as terrorists. He saw them as supporters.

Two years after Charlottesville, a gunman walked into a Walmart in El Paso and shot dozens of people, killing 23, in the type of terrorist attack we’d been worried about. In his screed, the shooter parroted the president’s own immigration rhetoric, casting his massacre as a response to the “invasion” at the border. He shared the president’s stated goals. And in the moral universe the president was constructing, he felt empowered to carry out Trump’s agenda by force.

Look at the progression since then.

“Stand back and stand by.” When a debate moderator handed Trump a clean opportunity to condemn white supremacist violence on live television in September 2020, the president instead addressed the Proud Boys (then a street-fighting gang with a rap sheet of political violence) by name and issued what they immediately celebrated as marching orders. Within hours, the phrase was on their merchandise.

Then there were the armed men who answered the call to hold “Stop the Steal” rallies across America. In the weeks after the election, the same militant networks we in the national security community had been forbidden from naming mobilized on the president’s behalf, brandishing rifles outside vote-counting centers, menacing election workers into hiding, and storming statehouses. It was the operational debut of a movement that had spent four years learning steadily that it did, indeed, enjoy the president’s protection.

Are we surprised that Trump’s presidency culminated in a domestic terrorist attack on the United States Capitol? Violence — intended to intimidate or coerce — was deployed to overturn an American election. This was the same textbook definition I’d cited after Charlottesville, now playing out beneath the Capitol dome. More than 140 police officers were assaulted. And the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a charge prosecutors reserve for those who wage war on their own government.

Far from condemning the attack, Trump spent the years afterward transforming its perpetrators into icons of the conservative movement. He opened rallies with a recording of jailed rioters singing the national anthem. He called them “hostages” and “political prisoners.” Meanwhile, he turned their prosecutions into the founding mythology of his own comeback.

Among his first acts upon returning to office was to pardon them en masse. Roughly 1,500 people, including the seditious conspirators themselves, were released in a single stroke of the pen on day one. In one of the most audacious acts of corruption in all of American history, he has since pushed to use taxpayer dollars to turn those individuals into millionaires with a DOJ slush fund pegged at $1.776 billion, the nation’s founding year rendered as a payout (in case anyone still doubted whether this president believes terrorists are patriots).

Here is the kicker, and it’s a bitter one, folks. The second Trump administration has finally done what I spent years inside the first one begging it to do. They’ve elevated domestic terrorism to the top of the national agenda, and they’ve begun to aggressively investigate violent groups that threaten Americans. Great news, right?

Except they haven’t followed the data. They’ve followed the president’s directives by putting his political adversaries at the top of the target list. The administration insists “antifa” is the gravest terror threat facing the United States, even as FBI officials, testifying under oath before Congress, cannot say where this supposed organization is headquartered or who leads it. The counterterrorism enterprise I helped run, which was purpose-built after 9/11 to protect Americans from politically motivated violence, has effectively been repurposed to protect one man from political dissent.

To put it another way, Donald Trump has turned the terrorists into princes and the protesters into terrorists.

Which brings me back to Saturday’s parade.

The cowardice of their face masks notwithstanding, Patriot Front is not some mystery organization. It was founded by a man who marched at Charlottesville, in the same organization as Heather Heyer’s killer. The group rebranded itself when that attack made the old name inconvenient. Since then, its members have been arrested for conspiring to riot at a Pride celebration; a federal court has held the group liable for millions of dollars for the beating of a Black musician on the streets of Boston; and its manifesto calls for a whites-only ethnostate. In the days after bad floods in Texas, its leader boasted that the group was distributing aid with priority for “European peoples.”

These men marched through Washington on July 4th despite the government’s crusade against “domestic terrorism.” How? Well, they’ve read the target list, and they know they won’t be investigated. They understand better than many Americans do that the words “terrorist” and “patriot” have been surgically swapped. In this inverted American republic, extremists with a history of violence who hold Confederate flags are the ones who get to lead parades on the Fourth of July, while stay-at-home moms holding protest signs at NO KINGS rallies get investigated by the feds.

Two hundred fifty years ago, the men we call patriots pledged their lives to the proposition that no ruler stands above the law and no citizen is below its protection. This weekend, we saw men in the white masks claim the opposite, proudly carrying the banner of Donald Trump’s pro-fascist movement. Don’t let their costumes fool you. They weren’t hiding from the Trump administration. They were hiding from you. After all, it’s your democracy they’re attacking.

But there’s something the militant men of Trump’s authoritarian takeover don’t realize. For all their boasting about helping the president regress our nation to “better” days, they don’t seem to know much about history. It never ends well for the masked men and the bigots. In time, like their Confederate heroes before them, they’ll be forced to trade their far-right fame and banners for everlasting shame.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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Read Part I here - Restraint.
Read Part II here - Dissent.
Read Part III here - Separation.
Read Part IV here - Allegiance.

V. Sovereignty

You’ve waited to know about the fifth pillar. But I owe you a confession. There isn’t one. Not in the way I’ve been describing them so far.

I let you believe there were five columns holding up the American republic, because that’s how it looks from the promenade, craning your neck at all that marble. However, the thing I have been calling the fifth pillar is not quite a pillar. Rather, it’s the understructure. I count it as part of the five. To show you why, I have to take you somewhere the marble cannot follow. I have to take you onto an airplane, alongside a man whose story I’ve retold for many years

* * *

“Let’s roll.”

Those were Todd Beamer’s final words after he set down the phone at thirty-five thousand feet.

Todd was an account manager for a computer company, and his early-morning business trip came on the heels of a five-day vacation in Italy. He and his wife had just returned the night before. Rather than take off immediately on his work trip, he decided to spend the evening at home. He had dinner with his wife, who was in the second trimester of pregnancy, and put his two sons to bed.

The next day, Todd was midair on the way from Newark to San Francisco when his plane was hijacked.

About forty-five minutes into the flight, four men stormed the cockpit. They slit the throats of the pilots and took over the aircraft. One of them made an announcement over the intercom. In broken English, he told the passengers: “Ladies and gentlemen. Here the captain. Please sit down, keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit.”

The attackers herded passengers into the rear of the jet. Then, they banked back toward the East Coast.

In his seat, Todd fumbled with the corded airplane phone. The kind that used to be installed on the back of headrests to make in-flight phone calls. He was connected with Lisa Jefferson, a call center representative for the in-flight phone company. He calmly described the scene for her to relay to the authorities. Their plane had been hijacked by men with knives. One appeared to have a bomb strapped to his body. Down in the galley, the pilots were lying motionless on the floor. A fellow passenger had been killed, too.

Lisa promised she wouldn’t hang up, though Todd wasn’t the only one on the phone.

His seatmates were calling friends and loved ones. They learned that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been struck by hijacked airplanes. As they started to put the pieces together, the passengers and remaining crew huddled quietly near Todd’s seat to discuss the situation. Should they wait and see what happened? Try to retake the plane? Forty ordinary Americans discussed their situation and did something so simple and so profound that we’ve almost forgotten how it came to be.

They took a vote.

They didn’t want to be the next aircraft flown into a target. So they took a vote and agreed to retake the cockpit. And that was that. Strapped into a doomed airplane, thirty-five thousand feet over Pennsylvania, with the most powerful government on earth utterly unable to reach them — no court could rule for them, no Congress could act for them, no president or army could save them in the minutes they had left — forty citizens did not wait to be governed. They decided together to act.

Still on the phone, Todd informed Lisa that they planned to wrest control of the plane back from the hijackers. He asked her to do him a favor. If he didn’t survive, he wanted her to call his wife with a message: “Tell her I love her and the boys.” Todd didn’t know whether she was having a boy or a girl, but he hoped it was a little girl. Four months later, his hopes were answered without his presence.

Todd recited the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23. The operator followed along with him.

“…Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me…”

When he was done, he set down the phone. Without hanging up. Lisa was still listening, as Todd rose and addressed his fellow passengers.

“You ready?” he asked them. “Okay. Let’s roll.”

They rushed to the front of the plane. A few minutes later, after a struggle in the cockpit, United Flight 93 crashed into an open field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes flying time from Washington, DC. All souls onboard perished.

* * *

As I was considering the “pillars” of democracy, I thought about that vote.

It was the foundation of everything, laid bare. If you strip away the rule of law, the earnestness of the dissenter’s alarm, the separation of powers, and the sworn allegiances of those who should protect us from a mortal menace — all four pillars gone, which is essentially what happened that morning — then what remains is a bedrock notion. The whole cathedral of American liberty has been held up by a simple foundation: a free people, governing themselves, even when nothing and no one is left to help them.

This is what’s called “popular sovereignty.” Determinations about our destiny belong to us, the populace, not any leader. We merely cede them our power, temporarily, to make decisions on our behalf. No document or branch of government can wrest that power away from us. The plain, unkillable fact is that in America, authority runs upward, from the people. What the people grant, only the people can withdraw.

This is why it’s not strictly a pillar. A pillar can be toppled. This week, I’ve shown you four of them starting to buckle, or crumble altogether, and how in recent times, we’ve never seen the supports so weakened. But the ground itself can’t be toppled. You can’t knock down the earth. Sovereignty can only be surrendered. In the worst case, it can be handed over by a people, if they’ve decided once and for all that they’d rather binge watch the destruction than govern themselves.

“What do we mean by the Revolution?” John Adams once asked Thomas Jefferson, decades after the conflict that created the United States of America. “The war? That was no part of the Revolution. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected... before a drop of blood was shed.”

In other words, the Revolution was not the battles. It had already happened by that point, among ordinary people. When they stopped believing they were subjects and started knowing they were citizens, they broke free.

By the same token, the survival of democracy won’t be determined by the president jailing his critics, sending his soldiers into our cities, or stamping his face on our money. Those are terrible acts, to be sure, but they’re the consequences of a bigger choice. A self-governing people already made the decision to return that man to the nation’s highest office. An autocrat is downstream of the abdication. That also means our renaissance, if we have one, will flow from the same place. Us, not the marble.

Alexander Hamilton said it floridly, in 1775, when he was barely twenty years old.

“The sacred rights of mankind,” he wrote, “are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

Do you see what he saw?

Even just a ray of it, peeking through the dark woods? The rights aren’t in the parchment. The parchment documented what was already true. Our self sovereignty. That truth is the foundation of our democracy. This is why the pillars can collapse entirely (and they might) — the whole building can come down in a heap — and it still won’t be the very end. The rights will remain, because they never lived in the stone. I’m not saying a collapse would be easy to recover from. Only that it would be feasible.

Someone will tell you this is the worst it’s ever been. They’re wrong. Earlier in this series, I re-introduced you to Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in the 1830s. Let me return to him for one moment. Before he was the conscience of a nation, he was a fugitive who was hunted, homeless, and with no law to shelter him and no court to hear him. I highlighted the passage, below, in my copy of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and paste it here in order to transport you into another moment that was far worse than now:

“Trust no man!” I saw in every white man an enemy, and in almost every colored man cause for distrust. It was a most painful situation; and, to understand it, one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances. Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land — a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders — whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers — where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey! — I say, let him place himself in my situation — without home or friends — without money or credit — wanting shelter, and no one to give it — wanting bread, and no money to buy it, — and at the same time let him feel that he is pursued by merciless men-hunters, and in total darkness as to what to do, where to go, or where to stay, — perfectly helpless both as to the means of defense and means of escape, — in the midst of plenty, yet suffering the terrible gnawings of hunger, — in the midst of houses, yet having no home, — among fellowmen, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts, whose greediness to swallow up the trembling and half-famished fugitive is only equalled by that with which the monsters of the deep swallow up the helpless fish upon which they subsist, — I say, let him be placed in this most trying situation, — the situation in which I was placed, — then, and not till then, will he fully appreciate the hardships of, and know how to sympathize with, the toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave.

This might be one of the tamer descriptions of the mass horror that spread across our land. How can someone tell you that today is worse than what our nation experienced in yesteryear? How can such a cynical mind claim that we are “hopeless” in the age of Trump, when we crawled out of that hellhole? Why cannot we climb out of this one? A free people, including that formerly enslaved man, worked their way up and out of a horror that makes our present trial look small.

We have stood on far shakier ground than this, and we did not run or surrender the foundation.

I will close by sharing a personal philosophy. It’s been said in other ways through time, though here’s how I conceive of it: Nature destroys everything it creates, but it creates from everything it destroys. Perhaps we’ll lose the whole building. That would be quite a trial. Yet from the rubble, a free people can always, always, always build again. If we choose to. That’s the promise beneath each personal ruin in our own lives or a once-in-a-century national catastrophe. We’re not doomed. We’re never doomed. We retain the option to rebuild.

And this is the choice the 250th sets up. There’s no fifth pillar to protect us from the discomfort of a hard decision. We can look at what has been done to the law, the voice, the structure, the oath, and be so revolted that we resolve (in the same place revolutions begin) to withdraw our consent from a man who would be king. Or we can accept our station as the drowsy subjects of a declining power, scrolling past our own destiny.

The forty people on Flight 93 didn’t have to decide what kind of Americans they were. They decided in minutes what most of us have been given years to weigh. Every institution had failed them, in ways they would never even know, and they cast the last vote available to a free people. They voted to act. In doing so, they saved the very house where the people’s government still sits today and where it’s being corrupted by a wannabe dictator.

Their vote is now ours. It comes due every single day, in a thousand small and unglamorous decisions about whether to keep the faith. When a free people find that democracy’s pillars appear at risk of collapsing, they must decide whether to fight or flee. There’s only one right answer in my view. It’s the kind of resolve that was delivered by a man named Todd, who turned to his fellow Americans and asked if they were ready. They nodded. His two-word instruction is now passed from those forty souls to all three hundred and forty million of us, on the eve of our 250th year.

Let’s roll.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

Feel free to forward this to others on the occasion of the 250th.

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According to House investigators, donors who thought they were supporting America’s official 250th birthday celebration may have instead been routed to Trump’s parallel Freedom 250 operation, raising questions about potential wire fraud, donor deception, and pay-to-pl…

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Read Part I here - Restraint.
Read Part II here - Dissent.
Read Part III here - Separation.

IV. Allegiance

You stayed. Good. Against your better judgment and mine, you’re still on the promenade, looking up at a structure that we’ve decided no honest inspector would certify. We’ve walked past three failing or fallen pillars now, including the restraint that’s supposed to bind the ruler in the United States of America, the dissent that sounds the alarm if the ruler strays, and the separation of powers that should enable someone to respond to that alarm once it’s sounded.

Notice something in common. Whether those columns have stood, albeit barely, or crumbled has been decided by mere individuals. There’s no invisible hand guiding our democracy into the future. There are only fallible people. A president deciding whether or not to show restraint. A public servant weighing whether to disclose wrongdoing. Or a judge deciding to defend his or her prerogatives, despite knowing that an honest ruling will be met by one man’s unyielding vitriol. If you strip away the marble and the parchment, the whole republic rests on individuals — put to the test.

A question will soon stalk an even greater number of them. When an order is unlawful, do you keep faith with the Constitution, or with the man? In our 250-year history, most Americans were never confronted with this question. Until now. Some have already been forced to answer, but it will likely be put to millions of them before the current regime ends. As such, no one should be watched more closely than the government workers who — even if they’re too afraid to dissent — must still decide whether to obey. Is it scarier to defy the law… or to defy the man?

This is our fourth pillar. Allegiance.

If the leader of a democracy decides he’s now a tyrant, it doesn’t make the system a tyranny, not right away. Like the emperor who has no clothes, he may see himself as one thing but be seen as another. Perhaps an aging fool. So long as it’s only him (and maybe his most committed courtiers), the danger of a self-styled despot becoming the real thing has limits. He’s an “insider threat” to the rule of law, to be sure. But that’s no guarantee of the law’s demise. If the masses of appointees and civil servants and soldiers side with the tyrant, on the other hand, then the whole polity is on hospice.

America is unique in this respect as well. For thousands of years of human civilization, you swore fealty to the king or the emperor. As we’ve discussed, loyalty flowed upward to whoever wore the crown; to break it was the highest crime there was. The American Revolution’s most radical act was to sever that cord. Here, for the first time, allegiance would run not to a man but to a document and an idea. The soldier and the official would swear oaths to “support and defend the Constitution,” and to no person at all.

By giving power away, one man made that real. In 1783, at the height of his fame and the apex of his power, with an army that adored him (and at least one officer who floated the idea of making him king), George Washington walked into the Maryland State House, resigned his military commission, and went home to his farm. He did the thing no victorious general in probably two thousand years had done. He handed the power back. Later, he would walk away from the presidency, as well, refusing another term when he could have held office for life.

When King George III heard that Washington intended to surrender his command, the king said that if he really did it, “he will be the greatest man in the world.” In the world George III knew, that was unthinkable. Power was something you clung to until death. Washington’s allegiance, however, ran to the republic. By letting go of his authority, he taught a new nation that the office is a trust and not a throne. His most recent successor did the very opposite.

You can find no more symbolic bookends for America’s 250 years than this. One man at the nation’s outset, ceding his power out of restraint. Another, in our present time, so unwilling to give it up that he’s already attempted to subvert a democratic election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. And he may be preparing to do it again. We know where his loyalties lie; it’s why the first pillar crumbled.

The allegiances of ordinary men and women may determine our future. The damaged pillars have shifted their weight over to the people who carry out the work of state. How should they declare their allegiances? The right answer is self-evident. The soldier’s oath runs to the Constitution and not the commander. Every service member is trained on the rule written in blood at Nuremberg. “I was only following orders” is not a defense for an unlawful act. Allegiance to the law comes first in every corner, command, and cubicle of the military and civil service.

Don’t most schoolchildren repeat this while holding their hands over their hearts? Is it not an elementary concept? Not anymore, it appears.

In November, six members of Congress recorded a ninety-second video. Every one of them had served in the military or in intelligence, including a Navy combat pilot, a CIA officer, and an Army Ranger. They spoke directly to the men and women serving now, and merely repeated the notion written above. An oath is sworn to the Constitution, they said in their video, adding: “You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders.” This is hardly radical. It’s printed in the training manuals of every single soldier in the force.

Yet for saying it out loud, the president of the United States called them traitors and declared their words “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.” He called for them to be arrested and tried. He reposted a message from one of his followers that read: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD.” And his Justice Department sought to bring charges against those elected Members of Congress for restating a 250-year-old idea of “allegiance.” (As of this writing, the only reason charges haven’t been filed is that a grand jury of everyday Americans told corrupt prosecutors: “NO.”)

In the United States of America, on the eve of its semiquincentennial, allegiance to the Constitution has been rebranded as treason. Allegiance to the man has been rebranded as the “allowed” form of patriotism. Is there a cleaner portrait of civic perversion?

John Dickinson, dubbed the “penman of the Revolution,” watched the English system trend this direction before he came to the American colonies. Men can become so hungry for “the smiles of their prince,” he wrote, that “they will gratify every desire of ambition and power at the expense of truth, reason, and their country.” Sound familiar? Dickinson named the surest sign that a nation’s elite had transferred their allegiance from the constitution to the ruler. Disputed elections. The growing pattern of contested votes and controversies around the manner of voting were “one of the greatest proofs of the corruption of the age.” Also sound familiar?

We don’t know the final state of this pillar. We only know that the marble column has been marked for destruction by the president. He’s brought forth a new pledge of allegiance. In the coming years, in so many ways, he’ll demand throngs of public servants recite it at every level of government. He’ll demand that they break laws for him, defy courts, and perhaps, put an end to idea of “free and fair elections” for good. How these people respond will tell us everything.

Contrary to the pencil sketches of history, no democracy has ever been destroyed by a single man. Nor could it be. Such an act of political subversion demands the collective efforts of a mob, and they needn’t be radicalized. They need only be a mass of people, willing to go along with the edicts, however reluctantly.

Federal, state, and local public servants are who we’re watching. This pillar is bearing the entire weight of the building now, with everything near it fallen or cracked and leaning down upon it. And what they do will tell us whether this pillar of democracy stays up — or, if enough of them stop keeping the faith — whether the entire roof of the republic comes down.

But wait! You say.

What about the fifth pillar? Isn’t there one more marble column to prevent the collapse? That’s what I want to cover next. There’s something beneath the first four pillars that I haven’t told you about. Something the entire structure has been standing on the whole time. Tomorrow, on the eve of our 250th birthday, we reach the foundation, and we find out whether it can bear what the pillars may not.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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Read Part I here.
Read Part II here.

III. Separation

There’s a third pillar of democracy the founders counted on to keep democracy standing. I saw it cracking eight years ago. Let me tell you when.

During the first Trump administration, I took a lot of incoming fire for publishing my disclosures about the president anonymously in the pages of The New York Times, then, in the book A Warning. Critics cast a skeptical eye at the spectacle. Surely it couldn’t have just been about exposing corruption. What was Anonymous really in it for? Fame? Fortune? A future run for public office, perhaps?

Ask my wife if you want the real answers. She’ll tell you about the glamorous “eminence” that comes with opposing an autocrat. Stalkers. Doxxing. The harassing of your family. Menacing notes from strangers who imagine they’re in video game. The ear-perking moment of someone saying your name on television rings pretty hollow when held against the unrepeatable experience of seeing your child’s name written in a death threat. If that’s “fame,” you can have it back.

As for money, we’d be better off if I hadn’t forfeited the majority of the proceeds from A Warning. Even if my wife won’t admit it, at least the middle-class, Midwest kid inside of me will voice his displeasure that I gave away a veritable windfall, especially after losing two jobs and a small business, and — at one point — having to go on welfare during the struggle against Trump. (Sorry, kid. I still don’t regret it.)

As for launching a political campaign, I’m running from public office, not for it.

But there’s one criticism I will entertain. After I came forward, folks asked: Why didn’t you submit your disclosures “officially”, via internal whistleblower channels, Congressional notifications, or even lawsuits? Why not use the system itself against Donald Trump to hold him accountable? The idea was tempting. Look at what a single whistleblower complaint in the Ukraine scandal did, miring Trump in impeachment proceedings.

I wrestled with the options. I considered revealing observed episodes of presidential misconduct — direct orders from his mouth to break the law, attempts to use executive power to torture innocent people (sometimes literally), the frenzy of disastrous ideas that could endanger American lives and the Constitution alike — first through internal complaints or by lawyering up and going to Congress. But every time, the scenarios played out the same way in my mind.

The system would falter. Watchdogs would waver for fear of investigating the man who could fire them, and if the White House wasn’t tipped off right away, they’d still delay the wheels of justice long enough to win a second term. So on a night in August 2018, halfway around the world on official business in a hotel room in Australia, I decided to cut out the middlemen. To blow the whistle. To make sure it was heard by Trump’s actual bosses.

I went to you. In the words of one of my dead idols, “the people themselves” are the most dependable check on a corrupt ruler. Their vote pronounces the final word on whether someone is fit or unfit for public office. Eight years ago, I judged that the internal institutions of dissent were too weak to hold him accountable. The pathways were compromised. If I wasn’t correct in thinking so back then, I am now.

Which brings me again to the five pillars of democracy and our assessment of where they stand. We said that “restraint” was the first pillar — a ruler’s commitment to the rule of law. If that fails, which it has, the pressure shifts toward “dissent” and the ability of insiders to call out corruption. This second pillar is at risk of failure, too, amidst an unprecedented censorship campaign.

So if an alarm still bell still rings, who is there to answer it? And what becomes of a warning when there’s no one to answer it? Here’s the truth.

If a leader forsakes his oath, using powers for revenge and riches… if he tries to silence those who’ve witnessed misconduct… there is another column to bear the weight. The third pillar of democracy is separation. The founders divvied up governmental power, separated it, hoping that if one element was corrupted, others would conspire to contain it.

Immerse yourself in the literature of the American Revolution, and you’ll find that one obsession rises above the rest. It wasn’t taxes, tea, or independence. The obsession was power. The studied men who crafted our nation had classical educations and libraries to rival today’s most well-read statesmen (if there are any left). One of them had the actual audacity to edit the Bible.

In all their studies, they kept coming back to power. Where it pools, how it moves, and who, in the last resort, holds the gun. A nation, in its rawest form, is simply a collective agreement about who gets to wield the weapon during disputes. Power was not an abstraction. To them, it was the direct ability to coerce. All of that reading and writing and debate about liberty came down, more or less, to a primary dilemma. What happens when too much power collects in one pair of hands?

Power behaves like a gas. I’ve seen the physics of it (and more often than not, the noxiousness). The gas expands to fill whatever space you allow it, seeping past each boundary the moment a boundary weakens. You can’t reason with gas. You can only contain it. Accordingly, our Constitution created a containment system. The founders refused to let the gas pool in a single place. They split it up between the federal government and the states… then split it again among three branches, set at war with each other… then against within those branches.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 51. He first hoped democracy would produce good leaders, but he wasn’t depending on it. “If men were angels,” he wrote, “no government would be necessary.” He called the result a “compound republic”: the various parts would check each other, as each checked itself.

The pillar of separation gives dissent somewhere to land. A warning shouted inside a true republic always reaches a rival power that can act on it, whether it be a court that can strike a law down, a Congress that can cut off the money, or a governor who can stand on his state’s own ground and say “please leave.” In this sense, the alarm is never wasted. The architecture promises an answer from somewhere. That is, if the chambers haven’t been pried open and the gas hasn’t rushed into a single room.

Yet the worst case scenario is playing out.

Congress is forfeiting its power. The branch the founders made strongest — the all-important keepers of the power of the purse, of war, of oversight — have handed them, almost gratefully, to the president. Without a hint of irony, House Speaker Mike Johnson (a Constitutional lawyer) has willingly ceded his chamber’s prerogatives to Trump. His party faithful have gazed at the president with adoring, half-lidded eyes and glistening lips as he spends money they never appropriated and wages wars they never approved. All they desire is his approval.

The states have not gone willingly. Over the furious objection of their governors, the president federalized the National Guard and sent troops into Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. In a detail Madison would have found beyond belief, Donald Trump ordered one state’s soldiers, Texas’s, into another state, in Illinois! I can’t tell you how many times we sought to redirect, delay, and deny Trump’s illegal efforts in the first term to violate state’s rights and assert his power where it didn’t belong. But that’s why people like me are now under presidential investigation; not because we were wrong (the troop deployments have been ruled to be unconstitutional) but because we cost Trump valuable time.

And what about the courts?

Here the story splits. The lower courts have held. I might go further and say that the lower courts have shown exquisite poise in their defiance of what appears to be — in the eyes of Democratic- and Republican-appointed judges alike — a systemic campaign of criminality carried out by a wannabe despot in the Oval Office. Don’t take my word for it. Read theirs. The rulings have been fiery, damning, and unyielding against transgressions of the law and Constitution.

But their orders have been appealed, ignored, or met with threats to invoke emergency powers to sidestep judicial review. The highest court in the land, which might have held the line, has been moving it — in what appears to be a desperate effort to avoid confrontation with the Executive Branch. In Part I, I told you the Supreme Court placed the president above criminal law. This week, on the eve of our 250th, it went further, handing him the power to fire at will the heads of the independent agencies built to sit beyond his reach.

“The result,” Justice Sotomayor warned in her dissent, “is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before.” One of judges concurring with the majority, Neil Gorsuch, wrote about it like it was an administrative correction, saying the sweeping powers had been “reassigned to the President.”

I marvel at the pride that must belong to whoever actually wrote the words “reassigned to the President.” So many humiliating things have never been said in so few words. The opinion should have said: “Mr. President, you may go ahead and take what isn’t yours. This high Court has no quarrel with a Constitutional robber baron, so long as you are not too unkind to us. Don’t worry about Congress and their prerogatives. They can go pound sand. We will permit you to pick our pockets and clean our clocks, so long as you don’t take our robes, for we are naked underneath them!” For the simplicity of that surrender in such a short phrase, a smug law clerk deserves a high-paying job at a Washington law firm that bent the knee to Trump.

Let me put it another way. The president didn’t need to pry open all the compartmented chambers for the gasses of power to expand into them. The Supreme Court saw him trying to break in with a crowbar. And they said, calmly, “Don’t trouble yourself. We’ll unlock the door for you and look the other way.”

Take a fresh look at the pillars. The first pillar of restraint was blown to bits by Trump. The second pillar of dissent has cracked as he tries to destroy it from within (though the marble is a bit stronger than he suspected). But to compromise the third, the separation of powers, he’s managed to save some energy. It hasn’t required the blunt force of a fascist’s fury. He’s had help deconstructing it — willing accomplices who were supposed to be his institutional opponents — taking it down for him, as if the pillar been placed in democracy’s temple by accident.

So, as we step warily along the promenade these pillars, we can speculate what the building inspectors might say. The constitutional architects would be alarmed. In a random inspection, they’d look at the first three pillars and tell us to leave the premises immediately. No structural engineer could certify this building.

So should we flee? Against your better judgement, I’m going to tell you to remain. Come see the final two pillars. Then decide whether the structure can be saved.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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First, the good news: in a 6-3 ruling, the Court rejected Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order, a fight DEFIANCE members helped fund back in December alongside Norm Eisen and the Democracy Defenders Fund. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion himself. Justice Thomas, unsatisfied, wrote a 90-page dissent for a 194-page ruling. Read the room, man.

Then the other shoe dropped. In a separate 6-3 decision, the Court stripped away federal limits on coordinated spending between political parties and their candidates, just in time for the midterms. Kavanaugh called it neutral. Justice Kagan called it an open door to “quid pro quo corruption.” We’ll let you guess which party is sitting on the bigger war chest.

Meanwhile, the people’s house got a $500 million makeover nobody approved. The Washington Post reports that the Trump White House quietly handed out a no-bid contract for the new ballroom, bypassing procurement rules entirely. This, after Trump told everyone private donors had it covered.

And as the country turns 250, the White House is reportedly floating a plan to hand out 250 pardons to mark the occasion. One defense attorney described the resulting scramble as a “three-ring circus.” Another, more bluntly, put a price tag on access: two million dollars.

To help us make sense of the pardon chaos, we’re joined by Liz Oyer, the former U.S. Pardon Attorney whom this administration fired in March. She says Trump has turned clemency into the Hunger Games, and she’s got new reporting on how Bureau of Prisons policy changes may have quietly worked in Ghislaine Maxwell’s favor.

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Last night, we held an important conversation with Worth Rises Executive Director Bianca Tylek. Here’s what we learned:

• Two companies dominate the industry. GEO Group and CoreCivic operate 90% of the immigration detention system.

• You may own them without knowing it. If you have a Vanguard retirement fund, you could be invested in both. Vanguard owns over 10% of each company.

• You can push for a switch. Ask your employer to move to a different retirement fund provider. No other provider holds anywhere near what Vanguard does, so switching to almost any alternative is a meaningful act of divestment.

• Enough departures force a decision. If Vanguard loses enough clients, it has reason to drop GEO Group and CoreCivic from its funds.

• One exit can trigger a cascade. If Vanguard sells, the falling share price could prompt other funds to dump the stocks too—purely for performance reasons—setting off a mass sell-off.

• This is a way to stop prison camp expansion. A lower stock price and higher cost of borrowing would cripple these companies’ ability to expand their operations.

Your Mission - If You Choose to Accept It

1. Go to GTFOICE.org/divest and follow the two actions steps

2. Make this a movement!

   1. Share this campaign with three friends

   2. BONUS - if your employer is using Vanguard, recruit a couple co-workers to reach out to your employer with you!

If You Missed It…

You can rewatch the livestream at the top of this post! In the first half of the video you’ll also hear from leader Michael Wriston as he breaks down the latest (mostly good) news regarding Trump’s Prison Camps.

Thank you for being a part of this important effort!

The GTFO ICE Coalition

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II. Dissent

Listen closely, and that sound you can barely hear is the sound of the second pillar of democracy starting to buckle. It’s coming apart in bits and pieces. Every so often, a rock or two hits the floor below, but the onlookers are too distracted by the rest of the rubble to notice. After all, the first pillar tumbled down with great force from the blitz of presidential efforts to seek revenge and riches — the first of five pillars of democracy we assessed in the lead-up to America’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday.

Read Part I here.

This next one is different. You cannot hear the question a government employee decides not to ask, the program that gets corrupted while its staff say nothing, or the social media post a frightened federal official deletes before sending. Yesterday, I told you the weight of the fallen first pillar had shifted somewhere unseen. Here’s where it went: into silence. In key places where it matters, truth-telling has been quashed.

Dissent is the second pillar of our democracy. When the “restraint” pillar fails (when a president decides the rule of law is less important than the ruler himself and embarks on a crime spree as we are witnessing), then the weight shifts to whoever is prepared to sound the alarm. Indeed, if an offense against democracy cannot be prevented, the next best hope is that there will be voices willing to identity it and cry out, loudly, that the structure itself is unsound. A free nation’s errors are not self-correcting. They must be named to be fixed.

To grasp what we’re losing, remember how strange it was to build in the first place. For almost all of human history, to criticize the ruler was a crime. Most people who’ve walked this earth lived under the fear that they couldn’t question their government, let alone condemn it. Doing so was seditious libel, or lèse-majesté, an injury to the majesty of the king. The truth of what you said was no defense. In fact, a true charge against a powerful man was thought the most dangerous kind of all, for he would be more grievously injured by the revelation of his real transgressions rather than imagined ones.

Yet the colonists smuggled in a dangerous idea, Carried over from London in the 1720s, in a set of essays called Cato’s Letters, they imported the notion of dissent by design. “Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together.” Only wicked rulers, Cato wrote, dread what is said of them. To expose a corrupt official was not a libel but a legitimate public service.

In 1735, those two worlds collided in a New York courtroom. A German immigrant printer named John Peter Zenger had published a newspaper that needled the colony’s royal governor, and for that, he was charged with seditious libel and jailed for months. Under the law of the day, he had no defense, because the truth wasn’t one. It didn’t matter whether what he printed was accurate or not. But his lawyer, the famed Andrew Hamilton, urged the jurors to do what the law essentially forbade and to acquit a man for telling the truth. What’s more, he exhorted them to decide the matter for themselves rather than leave it to the governor’s handpicked judges. They came back in roughly ten minutes. “Not guilty.”

While the verdict changed nothing in the statutes (royal governors went on jailing printers for decades), it changed something in the American mind. The conviction took hold that a free people should have every right to say true things about the men who rule them.

When the founders finally had a country of their own, they did what no government before them had dared. They enshrined the right to criticize the government into the supreme law, above the government’s own reach. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, read the First Amendment. Like the first pillar, this was another novelty in the annals of human civilization.

They understood the concept more deeply than other constitutional features because they were dissenters themselves. As escaped slave Frederick Douglass said of the founders, they were quiet men, but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. Douglass knew, too, because he became perhaps the greatest and most radical dissenter this country ever produced. On the fifth of July, 1852 (the day after a Fourth, which he would not celebrate), he stood in Rochester and asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” He honored the founders and indicted their heirs in a single breath, loving the principles of the Declaration enough to damn the nation for betraying them.

THAT is what dissent is. It’s wrongly viewed as hatred of your country, when in reality, the practice often shows greater fidelity to it than any of a nation’s unquestioning flatterers can stomach. And listen to how Douglass described the alternative. To stay silent about the cruelty in front of him, “to chime in with the popular theme,” would have been, in his mind, “treason most scandalous and shocking.”

The silence was the treason. Radical indeed.

So hold that against our present moment. When Donald Trump came back and signed orders and threatened probes into his critics for “treason,” what he really meant was he was punishing them for unfriendly speech that offended the king. When Douglass faced that same word, he turned it the other way around. The real betrayal was saying nothing. In a healthy republic, dissent is the highest form of patriotism and silence is the betrayal, yet in a captured one like ours, the labels are deliberately and ham-handedly switched.

The response to the switch over the past 18 months, at least for a subset of America, will earn epochal shame. When Trump’s revenge campaign barreled forward upon his return, the safeguard should have been immediate and forceful dissent by society’s leaders. A vocal protest from the elected and elites. Yet most saw their courage run exactly the opposite direction toward safety.

Each of us can rattle off who the cowards were by memory. The party faithful who didn’t dare question Trump’s sharpening of his power into a spear; the law firm chairmen with whole floors of lawyers, who cosplayed as worshippers of the Constitution, yet who bent the knee when they saw the parchment rolled up to swat them; the university presidents with billion-dollar endowments, whose soft minds were tamed long ago by tenure and who went easily mute for fear of losing their prestige; the network executives who wrote eight-figure checks to make a president’s animosity go away, lest they get taken off the air; and the titans of technology and finance who could move markets with a sentence and chose, instead, to stand silently behind the leader or pay tribute with donations to his inaugural fund and his ballroom and whatever other self-aggrandizing cause he put before them.

In other words, the marble at the top of the pillar — the high-up, load-bearing stone mass that belongs to the elite — is the portion that cracked first and put the rest of it at teetering risk of failure. But the pillar of dissent hasn’t crumbled. Why?

Well, the bravest noises came from people at the base of the column. Think of them when you need inspiration, e.g. the immigrant rights organizer with a mortgage and no lawyer, the local leader who resisted a federal invasion knowing no one would catch her if she fell, or the nonprofit team in the crosshairs of a sham investigation. They’ve defied the corruption and retaliation, like heralds against hubris, with a fledgling hope that the siren of their warnings might arrest the damage to all the other pillars. Here in America today, courage runs inverse to power.

I’ve written and spoken about this pillar more than any other. Not long ago, I gave a talk about what it costs to speak out and why we must do it anyway. You can watch it below, if you want, but I won’t relitigate the case here. Other than to say that the price of dissent is historically high.

I want to leave you with a single number because it shows why, despite all the bravery we’ve heard and seen from down below (and notwithstanding the deafening silence of the elites up top), that the gravest danger to the pillar of dissent is elsewhere. In the middle of the column — and perilously unseen. It comes in the form of self censorship.

After the President put a series of his former officials under federal investigation last year, his aides let the press know why. It was, the henchmen said, “to send a message.” The gangsters wanted to punish the few who’d observed and exposed Trump’s abuses of power, in order to intimidate many more who might bear witness. The message landed hardest where it hurt the most. Federal officials — the people whose frontline dissent could undo Trump’s campaign of corruption — have been largely cowed into silence and made to fear for their livelihoods, if not their lives.

Here’s the datapoint I promised. A year ago, under the government’s own workforce survey, roughly 72 percent of federal workers said they felt they could safely report illegal activity inside the government. Today, that figure has collapsed to 22 percent. You do not need a statistician to recognize that a dissent collapse from seven-in-ten down to two-in-ten is something never before seen inside federal agencies.

Please consider what that means. In a single year, an intimidation campaign run from the Oval Office took the share of public servants willing to blow the whistle on lawbreaking and cut it by more than two-thirds. What a cynical success. The stewards of government who witness corruption, abuse, and illegality are now far too frightened to say a word. Trump wanted a workforce that looks the other way, and he’s on the path to getting it.

They’re building the machinery to finish the job. The administration moved to strip whistleblower protections from tens of thousands of federal workers; fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the one agency whose entire purpose is to protect whistleblowers; purged seventeen inspectors general and hollowed out the Office of Government Ethics; deleted whole agencies that had challenged Trump in his first term; and is advancing a government-wide nondisclosure agreement that would bind some two million civil servants to silence for the rest of their careers, with refusal to sign as grounds for firing. With a stroke of the pen, he also stripped job protections from eight thousand of the government’s most senior career officials, including the people who draft the regulations and decide who receives federal grants, making them fireable at will for “subversion of presidential directives,” and roughly tripling the ranks he can purge on a whim.

Once a strong pillar of democracy, dissent within the official ranks is at risk of total collapse. It’s the proverbial canary in the coal mine. And Donald Trump has killed the canary and smeared its blood on the walls. The brutal English king Henry VIII didn’t have to behead every courtier to make people afraid. Just a few. Then the rest knew the axe could fall at any moment.

Alas, this is where the wannabe dictator and his allies have misjudged their power. Intimidation has a shelf life. Records are forever. We will remember who did this. We’re writing all of it down, including right here in the virtual pages of DEFIANCE. Tyrants can send missives and threats all they want, but in the final analysis, history sends the verdicts.

So look closely at this second pillar before we move on. The crack runs the entire length of it. The capital has been sheared off, the upper courses have fallen, and the strong and well-defended elements have broken away and crashed to the ground. The crack has not reached the base, thankfully. The base is holding, grain by grain, on the backs of people whose faces no one will ever put on a coin.

The middle is weakened by fear of a federal worker who’s been bullied ferociously into self-censorship and who wonders, in quiet moments, whether to take a stand while watching colleagues gagged and humiliated. This is the one pillar that cannot be knocked down from outside. It can only be surrendered from within, and time will tell whether it stands. Thought its condition as never been worse.

In my own whistleblowing experience, I learned that a warning is only as strong as the thing that can act on it. A shout in an empty house changes nothing. So for dissent to matter, the alarm has to reach someone equipped to act on it, whether the Congress or the courts or some rival power with the strength to take the warning and force a confrontation. That’s where the weight is shifting now.

And tomorrow, that’s where we will turn.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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“Is mankind the biggest threat to marble?”

I wrote this (admittedly odd) question to myself in the margins of a book years ago. I was traveling the Mediterranean during graduate school and struck by the ruins in Rome and on the Acropolis in Athens, like many millions before me. Wind, rain, heat, and the grinding of the centuries hadn’t done much to these places. Marble shrugged it all off.

But, mingling among sweaty tourists, I saw that the stone did have a natural predator. Us.

Any wreckage seemed to have been wrought by angry hordes or, perhaps, by the emperors and kings who undertook “remodeling” when they seized power. You see it at most of these historical sites from antiquity. At the Parthenon in Greece, for instance, you learn that the structure withstood storms and fires and earthquakes for literally thousands of years. That is, until one afternoon in 1687.

A besieging army turned its guns on the temple, struck the gunpowder stored inside, and blew it open in a single blast. Boom. Two thousand years of endurance were undone in a moment by vengeful men.

This weekend, I flipped through old books in my office looking for inspiration upon the occasion of America’s coming birthday. A warning gawked at me from one of the pages, documented jaggedly in my own handwriting. Is mankind the biggest threat to marble? I wrote the question while traveling and reflecting in a period when I had a more unburdened mind. At the time, Barack Obama was president, my former political party was busily critiquing his tan-suit, cool-guy aesthetic, and our gravest worry seemed to be whether we could cobble together enough votes in Congress to trim his budget.

How quaint!

Today, the pillars of our democracy are in doubt. The very “marble” is endangered, as it turns out, both literally and figuratively.

American democracy rests on a handful of structural supports. They work together to bear the weight, and they’ve lasted long enough that we developed an almost childlike naivety about their sturdiness. We’re the world’s oldest continuous democracy, which means we’ve defied the ages! Surely, we’ll last another 250 years. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves. So you can understand our collective shock when, in a single year, multiple pillars have begun to crack or crumble, all at once.

I was among those who forecasted it. Yet even I was surprised by the speed of the damage. In a detail that would make historians and fiction writers blush, the primary antagonist is a man who actually lusts for marble. He spends a great deal of his time attempting to redecorate his temporary home with expensive stone and our nation’s capital with new self-aggrandizing monuments and our democracy with unusual customs, to the point that they’re each beginning to look like something else entirely.

This week, as the country turns two hundred and fifty years old, I want to walk with you to five of those marble pillars. From the most fragile to the most fundamental. You decide whether the building is structurally sound. The columns were designed to keep our democracy aloft, and at each, I want to stop and ask the same question: will it hold and if not (if it actually falls), what’s left to support the rest?

Come with me to the first pillar. Here, you won’t need to squint to see the damage.

I. Restraint

Our story actually begins in the aforementioned Parthenon. When I wrote about the “vaunted plazas of open society” in my book A Warning, I had this place in mind. The ancient marble temple is one of the most iconic sights in all of human civilization. It sits high atop a compound of ruined temples, known as the Acropolis, where its many pillars catch the light along the sun-drenched cliffs of Athens. Some of the most famous figures of history walked its colonnades.

The philosopher Aristotle would’ve wandered the marble promenades of the Parthenon more than two thousand years ago, toying with ideas as he watched the sun set over Greece or lecturing his students about the perils of power. During this time, he jotted down an idea on which the structure of American democracy would one day rest. Maybe he even developed it on one of those walks.

The law itself should govern the state, Aristotle wrote, rather than any single man. People in power should be “guardians and servants of the law,” never its master; otherwise, the system itself would collapse from the avarice and ambition of meager men. He had nothing but contempt for a state where “the people govern and not the law.” Democracy would eat itself if not restrained.

Aristotle’s words were as much prophecy as philosophy. He saw the pillars crumble around him. He saw Athens convulse with faction and turn on its own. Charged with impiety, he fled into exile, and the city's democracy soon fell. He died within the year.

Two millennia later, the economist and historian Friedrich Hayek traced America’s own creed (a government of laws, and not of men) straight back to Aristotle’s pen. Hayek observed that the idea itself wasn’t original to the United States. What was original was that we wrote it down and aimed it at the rulers themselves. We crafted a Constitution. Ours was the first country to enshrine its aversion to autocracy in a written document, i.e. a piece of parchment that itself was held to be more important than any ruler. This was a place where the president swore his oath to the Constitution and where judges were handed the power to scan the parchment, look the leader in the eye, and tell him “no.”

It was a system built on RESTRAINT.

The law would rule, not the rulers. Aristotle would’ve beamed. But the founders were even more ambitious than that. They hoped to fill the public offices with people who would not need restraining in the first place.

“The aim of every political constitution,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 57, “is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous.”

First, choose the good. Then, bind their hands anyway, just to be safe. The formula was something of a double failsafe. It was meticulously constructed to ensure virtuous folks were chosen to sit in the “chairs” of state and wouldn’t dream of abusing their power, but even if they did, they’d find themselves locked down. Chained to the law and unable to wield power selectively, vindictively, or arbitrarily, lest they be booted from power or prosecuted.

So today, ask yourself the first question the founders posed for us. Have we chosen the wise and the virtuous? (I said you wouldn’t need to squint to see the damage to this first pillar.)

Donald Trump didn’t enter office with restraint on his agenda. He did not write paeans to the rule of law. Don’t take my word for it, though. It was his declaration. He returned to power with vitriolic words that will echo through history in ways far beyond his own comprehension.

“I am your retribution,” he bellowed at a rally during the 2024 campaign. He meant it. Restraint would have no part in his second term, though he could’ve been more specific and clarified that he’d blow past institutional constraints to pursue both revenge and riches. As such, he is pretty much the archetype of the man the founders feared.

Let’s start with revenge. No research is needed. Any concerned American today can tell you, stream-of-consciousness, much of what the sitting president did after returning to office. He went after his enemies… issued executive orders punishing law firms that crossed him… hand-signed investigative orders into individual critics… turned the Justice Department loose on a long list of enemies… brought charges against former advisors who defected… threatened to jail or execute sitting senators and congresspeople who questioned his orders… told the cameras that his detractors were “traitors”… slashed funding for the universities and coerced them to bend to his will… cancelled the contracts of non-compliant businesses… cancelled the comedians who mocked him… slashed federal funding to Blue States that didn’t vote for him… sent troops into the cities that despised him… and empowered agents to shoot citizens who defied him, with Trump’s officials telling a stunned nation that his gun-toters had “absolute immunity.”

I could go on. But we must save space for the riches, as the Constitution’s constructors had also hoped restraint would keep our leaders from profiting off the presidency. Alas, they never met Donald Trump.

Weeks within retaking office, he put out an open solicitation — to any foreign government listening — that he was looking for a new airplane for himself… not long after, he accepted a $400 million jumbo jet from the government of Qatar that will effectively become his own when he leaves office (the most lavish foreign gift ever taken by an American president and a textbook breach of the Constitution’s ban on emoluments)… launched a personal cryptocurrency the week of his inauguration and a family crypto empire that has poured hundreds of millions into his pockets (while his own regulators quietly dropped their investigations into the firms paying in)… turned the East Wing of the White House into rubble for a billion-dollar ballroom, bankrolled by the very corporations with business before his government and in which he himself has a stake… awarded no-bid contracts to friends… allowed family members to undertake official business for the United States while raising billions in investment from some of the same entities and nations on the other end of that official business… and so much more.

His corruption is so on-the-nose that he even decided to put his face on America’s money. The currency minted for our nation’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday was meant to carry the milestones of the American story, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the end of slavery, the long march for civil rights, and so on. Those designs were set aside. Another version was drawn up, including the new proposed dollar coin bearing Trump’s face, a raised fist, and the words FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT.

Restraint is nowhere to be seen.

But what about the second component of that double failsafe? The rule of law. Are not the leader’s hands still tied? Is he not bound, too, by written rules of our democracy?

In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that a president is substantially immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. In that moment, the servant of the law was placed, in large measure, above it. That damage to the “rule of law” cannot be overstated. Aristotle’s nightmare was not smuggled in through some back door in the darkness; it was announced from the bench in broad daylight by the highest court in the land. While better men and women would have ascended to high office and treated this ruling carefully or read it more conservatively, this man did not. Donald Trump sought its outermost limits from the start — and then to exceed them.

Some will say that every president tests the edges of power. And every one of them has, in one way or another. My alarm here is over the convergence of both factors, i.e. a man placed above the law and using that newfound freedom openly and all at once to punish the people he hates and enrich the people he loves, himself first among them. That has no precedent here in America. Definitionally, it is boundless corruption of the highest order.

Accordingly, we needn’t ask whether the pillar of RESTRAINT will hold. It is not cracked or gashed. It has crumbled. Chunks of marble are piled high as a tombstone to democratic virtue.

The shock many of you have felt upon seeing this wreckage is the same shock that all who witness history feel in realtime. We’re lulled into thinking that momentous events belong in old books. We’re surprised when they happen in front of us. And we’re even more surprised when the heroes of history do not leap from the page to stand in the way.

Do they really expect us to take over? Well, yes, they do.

After all, a constitution is just a letter from the dead to the living. The dead cannot make us read it any more than they can make us abide by it. The law couldn’t stop any of this from happening because the law has never been able to stop anything by itself. It binds only those who consent to be bound and who show restraint. Once that is gone, many ominous possibilities are brought forth.

Consider what the collapse of this first pillar means. If the most powerful man in the country is beyond the law’s reach, for now, the least powerful are well beyond its protection. My family was met with this raw reality. I don’t remind you in search of a shred of sympathy. I do it because “retribution” stays an abstraction for most folks until you give it a face. I want you to look it in the eyes.

In the weeks after the president personally ordered his agents to investigate me for “treason,” I came home to find a wife in tears, worried about losing our home. There she was again, weeks later, sitting in our bed reading messages online of threatened harm against our infant daughter, written by gleeful members of the president’s mob. A close friend called to offer to help cover our mortgage, because the business I had built was coming apart as frightened colleagues fled. Lawyers called with updates about the criminal charges the government was working to bring against other people who’d attacked Trump, men and women staring down the possibility of decades in prison — a warning of what the president might do to me. Meanwhile, friends who’d stood beside us at our wedding sought distance until it all “blew over.”

There was no trial and no charges. Only the criticism I’d leveled against the man in power, and for it, the addition of my name to a public enemies list. That’s what a single signature on a piece of paper did to a single family. Now, multiply it by every name already on the list, every name likely to be added, and every name that is meant to fear the stroke of his pen. Those are the ripple effects of unrestrained power.

When a column of that size comes down, the whole building is supposed to come down with it. It hasn’t, not yet. The load has shifted onto other pillars. Tomorrow, I want to tell you where the pressure has gone — and why the bulk of the force could go “unseen,” even by defiant patriots like you.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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When a nuclear-capable missile tore through the sky (a weapon built to reach American soil), the national security world went into crisis mode. But Donald Trump was distracted. He was making phone calls — trying to figure out how to kick legal migrants out of America.

Some of you have heard me tell this story before.

It’s worth referencing again today, because the Supreme Court just made it matter more than ever.

Let me take you back to a day in November 2017. I was in the middle of a doctor’s appointment, when my phones started lighting up. Government phone on one side. Personal phone on the other. Buzz buzz buzz. The buzzing wouldn’t shut up.

At the time, I was working inside the Trump administration, helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and a military aide to the secretary was trying to reach me. I finally picked up. Something had happened, he told me breathlessly. I needed to get back to headquarters as fast as humanly possible. The aide couldn’t say what the problem was over an open line. But scanning the messages on my other phone, I already knew.

I got in the car and raced toward Northwest Washington, past the cop cars dotting Embassy Row, watching the news alerts pile up on my screen. North Korea had launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. Its most powerful one yet and reportedly its first projectile capable of reaching anywhere in the world, including the city I was speeding into.

At DHS, I found our acting secretary, Elaine Duke, sitting in a secure conference room. We’d spent weeks preparing for exactly this moment. The defense secretary had pulled me aside not long before and told me to get ready as if we were going to war and that DHS should assume the homeland was in mortal danger. A missile could be fired any day, headed our direction, and as a country we had to be on hair-trigger alert. The president was in the midst of a free-wheeling confrontation with North Korea, and his team was genuinely worried he could get us into an accidental war.

Trump wasn’t bluffing as a “3D-chess” way of calling Kim Jong Un’s bluff. He seemed almost indifferent about whether his angry Tweets sparked an actual nuclear conflict.

So when I sat down across from our DHS chief, I expected to talk with her about the missile. Instead, I saw she was fighting back tears.

“This isn’t why I came back into government,” she said.

I asked her what happened.

Trump had called. As a nuclear-capable ICBM ripped across the sky, the president’s mind was on the border. He rang Elaine urgently to tell DHS it was time to “deport them all.” The president was pressuring her to rip up something called Temporary Protected Status, pulling the DHS chief away from monitoring a situation that had real life-or-death implications and which the president himself should have been paying attention to more than anything on earth.

The missile, thankfully, failed. Its re-entry vehicle broke apart and crashed into the ocean off the coast of Japan, according to reports. The thing that did not fail was the president’s obsession. While the rest of us were war-gaming the unthinkable, he was fixated on kicking out people from America who weren’t even here illegally.

Here’s what Temporary Protected Status (TPS) actually is, because the administration is counting on you not knowing, amidst the Supreme Court’s decision this week to let Donald Trump move forward with the sick plan he called us about in November 2017.

TPS is a humanitarian program Congress created in 1990. It lets people from countries shattered by war, earthquakes, or disaster live and work here legally until their home country is safe enough to return to. Fully vetted. Work-authorized. Taxpaying. They’re not here against the law. They’re here by an act of Congress.

But it was never about that for Trump. For a time, I was in denial about his deep-seated animus toward migrants, until I saw it up close. Surely, accusations that he was a “bigot” were overblown; he was an immigration hardliner, but that was just a policy position, right? Wrong. In meeting after meeting, I saw that Trump carried a deep, abiding, almost cartoonishly obvious animosity toward foreigners. He wanted them gone, even if it meant deporting people back to countries our own State Department said were unsafe for anyone to travel to.

I’ve never seen someone so red-faced, beady-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth angry over any single issue in my life as Trump was on anything related to migration. On TPS, in particular, he wanted to rip up the promise we’d made to these people. They were “moochers,” he said. Trump wasn’t interested in the law’s requirement that we assess the danger of sending those people home first. Just get them the hell out, he demanded.

“No,” we said. The law required us to assess whether a country was safe to go back to before we stripped people of their humanitarian protections and marched them home. We weren’t going to break the law. However, I didn’t need intelligence and foreign policy analysts to do the assessments for me (though our DHS analysts did it anyway). I could just read the headlines. Many of these TPS countries were far too dangerous to visit, let alone resettle within.

Trump didn’t care. In his mind, it was up to him whether a country was too dangerous. And even though he’d personally said such places were “hellholes,” he changed his tune when it came to deportations. If it meant sending people out of America, well, then those places were suddenly just warm vacation spots! “But sir, Haiti is in freefall.” Who cares. Send them back. “But sir, Syria is still being ripped apart by war and chemical weapons attacks and airstrikes.” Who cares. Send them back.

Yesterday, in a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the president to do what he’s been dying to do. They ruled that Trump can strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The Court majority didn’t rule that a place like Haiti is safe, by the way; it ruled that courts basically can’t second-guess Trump on whether it’s safe. Never mind that more than 2,300 people have been killed by gangs there this year and 1.5 million have been driven from their homes.

The Court took the coward’s way out.

You think this doesn’t matter for you. You might read all of this and not know a single immigrant in this country and say, “That’s too bad.” But I think you deserve the truth, coming from someone who’s spent years working on these issues, including for the man in the White House. These coming deportations will hit you hard, too.

Everything in your life is about to get more expensive (again). The hundreds of thousands of the people about to be sent home are the workers holding up your daily life. The ones cooking your food, staffing your hospitals and nursing homes, framing your houses, harvesting what you eat. If you pull that many people out of the economy, you will feel it at the register. That ain’t my compassion talking. That’s just basic arithmetic.

But here’s the most important thing for you to understand. Your president is distracted. So much so, it’s mentally debilitating. He can’t focus on his other responsibilities.

He obsesses over “foreigners,” day and night. He slurps down the social-media slop about migrants eating cats and dogs. He beams at what he calls the “straight out of central casting” ICE agents he’s hired to round those people up (sizing up the beefiest ICE guys during photo ops, sometimes with an admiring warmth that lasts a little too long and a weird twinkle in his eye that we’d whisper about). He laps up the Fox News segments on border “invasions.” I remember him waking up the DHS secretary and our team late at night with fevered phone calls to tell us we needed to watch Lou Dobbs re-runs, recounting crackpot fears about America being “taken over” by Trojan Horse foreign plots — and the videos he’d just seen of a caravan crossing the border.

“Mr. President,” we’d tell him. “They’re using B-roll. Old footage. There’s not a migrant caravan crossing the border right now. Go back to bed.”

Here’s the fine point of it. Donald Trump cares more — far, far more — about “mass deportation” than he ever did about the dangers our country faced from “mass destruction.” He’s failed to do his other jobs. He’s failed to protect you. In just the past 18 months, his Justice Department has dropped tens of thousands of criminal cases, terrorism investigations, and other national-security probes to focus resources on immigration. He’s reassigned tens of thousands of analysts, intelligence operatives, and law enforcement agents, redirecting them to spend their time hunting down and deporting people or focusing tracking border flows.

In doing so, he’s left us dangerously defenseless against cyber criminals, foreign spies, jihadist groups, and beyond.

To the sitting American president, kicking out foreigners comes before everything. Doesn’t matter if they’re here legally or not. So, of course he thinks this week’s ruling is good news. The judges sided with him and said, in effect, that it’s up to Trump whether he can send people back home. Even if that means telling them to walk the plank, which in some cases, it will. Some of these migrants will be sent home to their deaths.

What Trump doesn’t realize, perhaps, is that he’s just handed us another reason to beat him in November. Congress can do something about all of this. And they will, once power changes hands. Donald Trump may wear his heartlessness on his sleeve, but we’ll be wearing “I voted” stickers on ours — right after we kick his ass in the midterms. See you at the polls, Mr. President.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor
P.S. Help spread the defiance by sharing this post.

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THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST

We are tracking these stories today.

1. A JUDGE JUST ORDERED THE DOJ TO RELEASE MORE EPSTEIN FILES, INCLUDING MATERIALS MENTIONING TRUMP. A federal judge ordered the DOJ Thursday to release additional unredacted Epstein records or explain by July 2 why it can’t. Among the materials allegedly withheld: 36 mentioning Trump. The lawsuit, brought by legal analyst and journalist , also alleges the DOJ under acting AG Todd Blanche redacted the names of “co-conspirators” in a draft indictment and the names on email exchanges regarding a “torture video” involving minors. Trump has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged. The same DOJ that quietly transferred Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security prison is now being ordered to stop hiding the files. They have until July 2 to comply. We look forward to hearing that explanation next week.

2. TRUMP IS NOW CONTROLLING WHICH AI MODELS AMERICANS GET ACCESS TO. The Trump administration intervened to restrict OpenAI’s newest model, GPT-5.6, limiting its release to a small group of government-approved partners. OpenAI changed course at the White House’s request, with CEO Sam Altman telling staff it wasn’t the company’s “preferred long term” approach. This comes after a federal export-control directive forced Anthropic to pull its two most advanced models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, and after Trump signed an executive order asking AI companies to submit models for a “voluntary” government review 30 days before release. So much for voluntary. The administration that promised to prioritize innovation over regulation is now effectively deciding who gets access to new AI. A former Trump AI policy adviser put it bluntly: “The whole AI industry in America is effectively frozen from new public releases.” The rules, he noted, “change constantly and are always a secret, even to the administration itself.”

3. ACT OF DEFIANCE — A JUDGE JUST BLOCKED TRUMP FROM CUTTING OFF LOANS FOR NURSES AND THERAPISTS. A federal judge blocked part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill on Wednesday that would have lumped graduate students in nursing, physical therapy, public health and other fields under a $100,000 loan cap — far short of what their degrees actually cost — by excluding them from the “professional degree” category. The judge found the Education Department had overstepped its authority and warned the move would be “detrimental to the public, particularly in underserved communities that may face a shortage of healthcare and other critical professional services.” In other words: Trump’s bill would have kneecapped the future healthcare workforce. The courts stepped in… as they keep having to do… to check Trump.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT — A WEEK OF DEFIANCE

Here were our shows and articles this week!

• We’re releasing a documentary about Trump’s crimes before the midterms. DEFIANCE.org is joining the team behind the landmark 2020 film UNFIT to co-produce its sequel, UNFIT TOO, putting the case against Trump’s criminal enterprise and his co-conspirator Republicans in front of every American, free on our YouTube channel, before a single midterm ballot is cast. Sign up to host a watch party at www.DEFIANCE.org/watchparty.

• What a loser. Trump spent his whole career sorting the world into winners and losers, and this week he became the thing he feared most, racking up defeat after defeat across the courts, Congress, and the country, with his approval cratering to 30 percent. And it was only Wednesday when we wrote the piece.

• They want to jail journalists. We will not let them. Trump’s DOJ tried to drag Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters in front of a grand jury to unmask their sources, then quietly folded when the papers fought back — an ominous preview of an assembly line of press oppression that traces back to the “treason” probe opened against me.

• Trump will likely lose a major Supreme Court case. You helped beat him. The high court looks ready to strike down Trump’s illegal order ending birthright citizenship, a case backed by the Democracy Defenders Fund, whom DEFIANCE.org members voted to fund back in December. You all read about the threat, you got fired up, and you did something real about it.

• You can find this week’s DEFIANCE Daily episodes HERE, including the most recent one, below.
  

WHAT’S COMING UP

• TODAY — WEEKLY COFFEE — Come one, come all! But only Members can ask questions. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• TODAY — DEFIANCE DAILY (+ MAGA LOSSES!) — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET, you can 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. Fridays are special because we go over the MAGA LOSSES of the week and let you vote on the DONALD J. TRUMP SOLEMATE AWARD winner.

• NEXT WEDS — MONTHLY MEMBER MEETING — This is a members-only meeting of DEFIANCE.org. We get together… review the previous month’s actions… and talk about how we’re going to hold Donald Trump’s corrupt, bone-spurred feet to the fire. Come with ideas.

• ADD US TO YOUR CALENDAR — You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.