I want to tell you about a phone call I had this morning. It solidified for me how seismic last night actually was.
I spent the night in Washington rather than at home, bouncing between election parties and live coverage of the midterms. We invested a lot in this election. Literally. For the better part of a year, our DEFIANCE.org community has been announcing new actions almost every week to protect our elections and fight back against Trump, under a banner we stole from him: make the midterms “too big to rig.”
And it worked.
Democrats took back both chambers of Congress in an election that will be written about for many years to come. Deep-red states went blue in one of the most powerful repudiations of a president we’ve ever seen. The margins were so wide in these races that Trump’s anticipated crackdown — up to and including the potential for federal agents to seize ballots in races his people lost — never materialized. They knew they couldn’t get away with it.
But even though I was literally up almost all night reporting on the results, I hadn’t fully processed any of it until my wife called. I could hear it in her voice after she’d only said a few words. Maybe even after only the first one. “Honey…”
Hannah and I are lifelong conservatives who met, of all places, inside the first Trump administration. We like to say we “found love in a hopeless place.” Inside secure briefing rooms, we bonded over a shared revulsion at what we were watching. And she stood by me after I made a decision that was guaranteed to blow up our lives: turning against Trump, unmasking myself as his “Anonymous” internal critic, and spending years afterwards warning that he posed a mortal danger to the Constitution if he ever returned to office.
That danger came to pass. Donald Trump returned. And the damage he’s done is difficult to capture in its totality.
In less than two years, he’s nearly destroyed the U.S. Constitution. He ignored laws passed by Congress by the dozen… took a wrecking ball to agencies he had no legal authority to delete… purged the civil service… fired the watchdogs… remade the Justice Department into an instrument of revenge… ordered the prosecution of his critics by name… thumbed his nose at the courts… put troops on the streets… sent masked agents to kidnap people in the night… shipped them to foreign prisons without hearings… teased the suspension of habeas corpus rights and the invocation of the Insurrection Act… sued newspapers and threatened broadcast networks… arrested journalists… extorted law firms and universities… jailed students for what they said… and tried to literally rewrite parts of the Constitution by executive order.
You can disagree with a president’s “policies.” But these were attacks on the rules that govern the system itself. While the courts tried to hold the line, most of the guardrails that are supposed to stop corruption were ripped out, as we recounted in a documentary ahead of the midterms.
So I told Hannah I was having trouble processing all of it. How do you even describe what happened last night against that backdrop? Where do you begin?
“Well,” she said, “just think about what’s happened to us. Look at how much has changed”
She was right, as usual. Our family’s experience over the past two years is a very tiny but telling microcosm of what the country has been through. Indeed, we knew after the 2024 election that our lives would never be the same. We knew Trump would come back and wreak havoc. And we knew he’d come for us.
He did.
On April 9, 2025, he gathered reporters in the Oval Office and signed an order his own aides later said was meant to “send a message” to his foes. For the transgression of speaking out against him, he accused me of “treason,” a crime punishable by death, and directed federal agencies to investigate me. Without evidence. In a sense, it was the justice process run in reverse in a way that — until then — I’d only read about in foreign despotisms. Declare the man guilty, then send the agents to find a crime.
I’ve told that story so many times that I now feel strangely removed from it, like it really is an anecdote in one of those history books about a nation taken over by a would-be dictator. But it was real. And the thing that upended our lives didn’t actually turn out to be the agents or the legal maneuvering. It was the rush to the exits all around us.
The fear of a returned Trump was so great that we lost almost our entire support network. Our circle of friends. Business partners. Some family. People who stood beside us at our wedding told us they’d need to keep their distance, lest they suffer guilt-by-association consequences. Few of them said it outright. Many just stopped answering phone calls. Others offered phrases that I still can’t get out of my head, like the couple we were very close with that asked for us to keep our distance for a while and remarked: “We have to put our oxygen masks on first.”
Then the safety net fell out. My own business partners set fire to the company we’d built together, informing me that because I was a “public enemy” of the president, they’d either find a way to remove me for cause or start a new company without me if I didn’t resign. I was gobsmacked.
We even struggled to find lawyers. Trump had so thoroughly intimidated the big firms that several I’d worked with in the past quietly let me know they couldn’t take the case. Within weeks we were without an income, without many of our closest friends, and without any real certainty that we were safe in our own country. It was lonelier than anything I’d ever experienced.
And in time, we became the tiniest data point. Because it happened to so many other people — and often with far worse outcomes — like the people who’ve been sent out of our country in violation of their rights and away from their families and with no recourse whatsoever.
But at the time, it felt like our world had ended. Hannah and I reflected on it. How we’d faced the urgent necessity of downsizing our lives… how we worried about protecting our daughter amid the death threats… what we’d do if our own government tried to put me in prison. There were nights after the baby went to sleep that we sat on the floor of our closet packing go-bags and scrolling through our retirement accounts to figure out what we could liquidate.
“They took pretty much everything away. Almost no one stood by us,” she said, holding back tears. “And now we have an army.”
That last line got me. I’m not a terribly emotional person. But that was the feeling I’d been struggling to capture all morning.
After Trump returned, America became a place that felt foreign to itself. A place where free speech was no longer free, where it was treated as treasonous, where the people who dared to exercise it were stripped of their dignity and held up in front of the masses to “send a message” to anyone else who might cross the leader. And in a single night, it became a place where Americans stood up together in stunning defiance to repudiate it.
This was by no means assured. There were points last year when I thought we might not make it. When former political leaders and pro-democracy colleagues suggested in hushed conversations that my wife and I should consider claiming asylum in a safe allied nation, I knew we’d entered uncharted territory. The only way out was if people stood up, and it would be risky for the first of them. Even some of the bravest people I know had gone silent after Trump’s return and the breathtaking retribution we all witnessed. In our own lives, the people who were still around pleaded with us not to “poke the bear” and advised us to keep our “heads down” until it blew over.
Yes, they’d taken pretty much everything from us. But I wasn’t ready to let them take my country.
In time, the watchword in our house became “defiance.” And everything changed. Our own personal fears and anguish became a sort of slow-burning resolve. Eventually, I decided to ignore the advice of the capitulators to just quietly restart my career and try to forget what had happened to us. I wanted to give more people the confidence to fight back, knowing how hard it had been for us to make the decision. There’s strength in numbers, they say, and that might be our only way out. So a year ago, we launched this organization, and frankly, we had no idea whether anyone would show up.
Now look where we are. Look at what happened last night. It was never a foregone conclusion that America would rise up against what was happening. Other nations have collapsed under less pressure. But we did. The judicial branch that Trump has pressured to the point of breaking now has a Congress behind it. And two branches of government are prepared to rein in the rogue third branch.
Of course, it’s not over. A Congress can check Donald Trump, but it can’t undo all the damage overnight. A man who treats the Constitution the way that he does won’t be stopped solely by losses at the ballot box. I’ve long predicted he’ll become even more reckless after a setback like this.
But when I think about the sea of people who turned out yesterday — in places I never imagined, like South Carolina and Texas and Kansas and everywhere in between — I know that Hannah is right. We were isolated and afraid before, but that’s changed.
Now we have an army.
Your friend, in defiance,
P.S. DEFIANCE.org is a nonprofit “club for the courageous.” We literally exist to FIGHT the corruption you just read about. We announce a new effort every week to counter Trump’s abuses of power. That’s what your membership funds. If you haven’t yet, become a member today.
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