Let me tell you about the time Donald Trump wanted to tap our phones.
The Trump administration's frenetic effort to monitor aides is the latest evidence of a president who is increasingly unhinged.
The president was becoming paranoid. If it wasn't already obvious, then a request he made to a senior adviser solidified it: Could the White House spin up wiretaps on the phones of staff — and hunt down the disloyal ones?
That was in October 2018. And I remember it like it was last week.
In the lead-up to that year’s midterm elections, there were quiet conversations among Trump’s cabinet-level officials about resigning in protest. It’s quaint to think now, but back then, it felt like things were spiraling out of hand. The president was becoming unglued in public. He was barking illegal orders at his team in private. And in general, he seemed mentally unwell.
You already know how that story ended. Rather than a large group of officials quitting in one big moment of defiance (for which I was arguing), they left the administration in onesies and twosies, or Trump picked them off because he knew they were critical of his mismanagement. A moment that could have awakened the nation sputtered.
But put that aside.
What I want to tell you about is how weird it was getting in another way. One night that October, a group of Trump appointees, myself included, gathered at a cabin in rural Virginia to discuss what to do next. The agenda? All the chaos I just mentioned. Trump’s growing instability, his irrepressible desire to do illegal things, and the increasing ineffectiveness of the word “NO.” The president was getting more brazen behind the scenes and more willing to flout the Constitution, despite advisers’ warnings he could be impeached and removed from office.
I pulled up at the little cabin with the sun setting over a nearby farm. As I walked up the gravel drive, there was an aide standing there at the back door with an open bag. Right away, I knew what it was. Before a word was spoken, I unfastened my smart watch and reached into my pockets to pull out my two phones. Then I dropped the devices into the Faraday bag — a pouch designed to block electronic signals from going in or out — and went inside the cabin.
We were worried about being watched. For good reason. By that point, it wasn’t unusual for us to leave our phones behind in a motorcade or power them down before a sensitive conversation. In Washington, D.C., paranoia is like a renewable resource — someone is always watching and listening. But this was different, because of an idea the president had raised days earlier in private with a senior aide.
Donald Trump, I was told, had queried a White House staff member about the possibility of wiretapping his own appointees. Us. He wanted to know if he was being critiqued behind his back and who was leaking bad stories about him. He raised the idea with the aide and, from what I know, was gently waved off — treated as if he’d said it by accident. A passing dark thought better left unacknowledged. Yet it didn’t take long before rattled advisers began quietly sharing the information with trusted confidants. Beware: the president wants to wiretap us.
I was on the receiving end of one of those conversations.
That’s why the Faraday bag came out at the cabin. Staff were concerned that even if we powered down our devices, they might still be compromised if Trump had found someone willing to break the law for him and spin up wiretaps. So we took no chances. We used the laws of physics to prevent any signal from getting in or out. Ironically, we were protecting ourselves against possible illegal surveillance by the president so that we could have candid conversations about how he was constantly trying to break the law.
That was the first Trump administration. Back then, the guardrails were battered but still holding. These were the “good old days” when a president’s musings about spying on his own staff could still be waved off by adults in the room because it probably wouldn’t happen, though we didn’t want to take chances.
We don’t have to imagine what it’s like now.
According to new CNN reporting, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and FBI Director Kash Patel personally orchestrated a sprawling leak investigation at the White House last week, one aimed at finding out who disclosed information about Trump’s Qatari-gifted 747 meant to serve as Air Force One. Officials were reportedly asked to hand over their phones to investigators on White House grounds. Patel, who had been preparing to travel to Chicago, was diverted to the West Wing, where he spent roughly seven hours stationed in an office next to Wiles’s with a setup one source described as a “war room.”
Even to me, the image is shocking. The director of the FBI — the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency, an institution whose independence from the White House has been a bedrock norm since Watergate — set up shop steps from the Oval Office to personally run an investigation into the president’s own staff… at the president’s behest… because the president was embarrassed by press coverage of his airplane.
And apparently the dragnet didn’t stop at the White House gates. Investigators sought information from officials across multiple agencies who had traveled with Trump or had a role in the trip. At least one federal agency reportedly warned its employees that if outside investigators came asking for information or devices, they should immediately contact their agency’s lawyers. According to these reports, not everyone complied with the demands to surrender their phones.
It got worse, as we know. The same night Patel posted up at the White House, the Justice Department issued grand jury subpoenas to New York Times journalists who reported on the security concerns surrounding the new plane. FBI agents showed up at reporters’ homes to serve them. This episode will be looked back on years from now as one of the major escalations in Donald Trump’s censorship campaign.
Thankfully, the Times is striking back. This week, the paper filed a motion to quash the subpoenas, which demanded that journalists Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, and Eric Schmitt appear before a grand jury in the Southern District of New York and give up their confidential sources. The motion was filed under seal pursuant to a court order, and the Times is fighting to have the papers unsealed because, as its lawyers rightly note, the public has a right to know what on earth its government is doing here.
None of this should surprise you.
After Trump left office the first time, I recounted a warning from a career national security official about the lengths to which Trump would go in a second term to enforce loyalty. This person had witnessed the White House revenge machine up close like, and he knew that, once the guardrails were gone, the president’s paranoia would take us into uncharted territory.
“They are going to send more [political appointees] into the IC, pulling FISAs and other things to support political aims and engage in political retribution,” he speculated, referencing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In other words, the White House will turn the powers of the American spy community inward. The FISA law outlines procedures for government wiretapping of civilians, including on U.S. soil. If law-abiding careerists are purged, the next Trump [administration] will find it easier to use intelligence powers to monitor…staff and, worse, to keep tabs on rivals.
Well, here we are.
The careerists have been purged. The loyalists are very firmly in place, though they shouldn’t get too confident that Trump believes they’re true “loyalists.” He wants them to be watched, and now, they know that they are being watched. In 2018, we needed a Faraday bag to speak freely in a cabin in rural Virginia, but in 2026, federal employees evidently need lawyers on speed dial because the president’s henchmen might come for their phones at any minute.
So it’s clear the paranoia inside Trumpworld hasn’t changed much. What’s obviously changed is that no one is waving the president off anymore. His personal fears have been permitted to become chilling acts of censorship.
The question we posed in private back in the first term is now more valid than ever. It’s the one Trump’s second-term diehards should be asking themselves right now, as their phones are getting seized: Do we keep tolerating the lawlessness and become its witting enablers, or do we finally speak out against it together, in a loud moment of defiance?
I won’t hold my breath for their answer.
Your friend, in defiance,
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