This week, Trump’s relationship with Natalie Harp gets even stranger, including one detail from her own brother that Trump is not going to enjoy hearing.

And down in Florida, voters in a solidly red county break over the constant culture-war in the classroom.

Frederic Poag joins us to revel in the losses.

But first, we have some midterm business to get into.

Two legally required intelligence reports on our elections are missing, including one Congress was supposed to receive more than three months ago. Now the DNC is going to court to find out what Trump’s DOJ may be planning with ballots this November.

And it’s that time of the week again where we crown Trump’s biggest bootlicker with the DJT Solemate Award.

So let your hair down and put on your DEFIANCE hat, America. We made it to the end of another crazy week.

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• MON, AUG 24 — TUNNEL TALK — This is the space where Defy Ants get to sound off on what’s happening right now: the headlines, the WTF moments, and the stories of defiance. Tell us what’s got the colony buzzing this week, and we’ll share some of your responses with the whole hill.

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• WEDS, AUG 26 — MY DEFIANCE MISSION — On Mission Wednesdays, we highlight the defiance actions Members are taking in their own communities. Tell us your story here. Every action counts!

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• FRI, AUG 28 — THE DEFIANCE BOOK CLUB — We are super psyched to launch the DEFIANCE Book Club this month! Our first selection: Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum. Visit your library or favorite bookstore and pick up a copy today. More details every Friday!

GROW THE DEFIANCE

DEFIANCE Members are absolutely crushing it, spreading the word about our club for the courageous to their friends. There is strength in numbers, and that’s exactly what defiance requires. Here’s how you can help build our numbers—and get a shoutout on the Daily with Miles and Xander:

1. Go to https://www.defiance.news/leaderboard

2. Use the buttons provided to share your personal referral link on X, Facebook, or email. Or, copy the link (circled in the example below) to share it via text or other social platforms.

A few weeks ago, I was standing in the lobby at CNN, catching up with a journalist I respect. And he said something that I haven’t been able to shake.

He’s a good man and a hard worker. A great reporter, in fact. We were talking about the conservative influencers who’ve been caught taking money from foreign governments to stake out lunatic positions online.

I made a wry comment, something like: “Must be nice. Wouldn’t it be great if people were getting paid big bucks to stand up to Trump?”

He smiled and said: “Well, isn’t that what you’re doing?”

He meant it jokingly. Or maybe half jokingly. But for a very long time, a comment like that would have struck a painful chord, because it was Donald Trump’s oldest and favorite accusation against me and everyone like me who quit his administration to warn the country about the danger of re-electing him.

The president worked hard to convince millions of Americans that his former cabinet members, hand-appointed officials, and administration aides couldn’t possibly believe their criticisms of him. All of us must have been doing it for some other reason. Our opposition must have been about money. The word Trump uses, and the word his whole movement adopted with the reflexivity of pull-string dolls, is “grifter.”

As I stood there with that journalist, I thought about sharing my wealth-building secrets. Free of charge, of course. A good grifter will always give a free sample first.

Step one of my grift: get fired from your first real job out of government for refusing to stay quiet about the president. Surely, there’s more money in dissent.

Step two: fill out the paperwork for welfare benefits. All the best con men are on unemployment while they make their big bet.

Step three, and this is where the scheme really accelerates: give away the majority of proceeds from your book, hundreds of thousands of dollars, at the very moment you’re struggling to figure out how to pay your own bills.

Step four: spend whatever else you have on security and lawyers, whether to protect your family or to fight MAGA stalkers. Every penny you drop on concealed weapons and lawyers will eventually make you richer. Trust me.

Step five: get placed under federal investigation by a vengeful president, then sit at the kitchen table with your wife and price out what it would mean to sell your house to cover what’s coming. Also, consider getting even more lawyers.

Step six: decide to fight back — and then hold your wife as she cries after the startup you built together, and the friendships that have mattered most to you, crumble before your eyes.

Follow those steps, friends, and you too can build generational wealth.

But I didn’t stop there, and neither should you.

My racket continues to this day. This year, I decided to accept a salary lower than the salary from my last job in government. Why? Because I want the anti-corruption organization I’m building to stay lean. We’ve given hundreds of thousands of dollars to other groups on the frontlines to counter Trump’s abuses of power, rather than line our own pockets. Meanwhile, I have personally put tens of thousands of dollars into the cause this year alone. You have to spend money to make money, right?

Stay with me here because the windfall is coming.

Just the other week, someone asked me how much I get paid when I go on television every week. For the millions of views and tens of millions of clicks. This must be where the money is, right? Well, here’s the invoice so that you, too, can see how lucrative it is to become a resistance superstar: zero dollars. That’s right. I’ve made zero dollars from television appearances. I drive hours back and forth to the city, or give up days with my girls when I have to fly to New York, because every appearance is a chance to show people that it’s okay to criticize a man who has branded you a traitor and who is waging an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. We have to be visibly unafraid, or the threats will work and we will lose the republic.

So, are you ready to cash in like me?

Obviously I’m being facetious (though, to be clear, I am doing just fine). But the point I want to make is that the money-making would’ve happened down the proverbial “road not taken.” I actually did get to take it, briefly. Before Trump returned to office, I was on the path to building a multimillion-dollar business. Keeping my mouth shut was the lucrative option. It always was. The real profits in American life these days are earned by sitting comfortably on the sidelines. Yet it comes at a terrible price, which — at this point in my life, with what’s happening in our country — I decided was not a price worth paying.

To the poor souls who’ve bought into Trump’s myth about his enemies getting rich at his expense, I would say this: go find the people who blew up their careers to oppose the president… and just ask them how lucrative it’s been. Ask how enticing it feels to have your children threatened. Ask how famous they feel getting turned away from jobs while their ex-colleagues who kept their heads down rake in cash from the same institutions that now pretend they don’t exist. Then they should ask themselves where they’d do the same.

The “resistance grift” is the only grift in history whose mass of participants mostly end up with less money, fewer friends, and in more and more instances, a federal case file doled out by a vengeful president. To the handful of folks who’ve done better financially than they otherwise would have, I say, more power to them!

When defiance is more profitable — morally and actually — than compliance, we’ll know that we’re winning. So I welcome it. I hope that opposing a wannabe dictator becomes the wealth-generating path. And given how many of Trump’s pro-dictator podcasters are bailing on him, there are early signs we’re headed that direction.

In truth, it took me years to let go of anger about the “grifter” label, especially when I was counseling people who’d spoken out and were suicidal over the hate they’d received or the bleak financial prospects that befell them for doing what was right. They didn’t deserve the added hell of being accused of making out like bandits. Not when many were barely hanging on.

Then I had a revelation.

After I decided to resume fighting back against Trump, publicly, a close friend huddled with me in urgent conference. He wanted to know why I was doing what I was doing, he was mad at me for putting myself at risk (or so he said), and he accused me of selfishness. Was I just trying to get attention? Then, he explained in hand-wringing detail that he would need to step back from our friendship, lest he and his own business interests get caught in the crossfire. Ah, I thought, now I understand what’s happening here. He laid out the logic of disassociation. “I have to put my oxygen mask on first,” he said, which were among the final words we exchanged.

My anger was replaced by pity. When someone accuses you of self-aggrandizement or “grifting” for standing up for what you believe, they are telling you something about themselves. They cannot imagine sacrificing for a belief. They cannot fathom that a person would trade money, safety, and standing for a principle. So there must be a catch. There has to be an angle or a payout hiding somewhere.

Put another way, the accusation becomes a confession. It maps the exact boundaries of the accuser’s own character.

Donald Trump calls everyone who defies him a grifter because Donald Trump cannot conceive of a human being who isn’t one. He can only conceive of the motivations that have become second nature to him. In his world, there are only two kinds of people. There are those who are running a con and those falling for one. The idea of moral conviction, of doing a costly thing because it’s right, simply does not compute.

Accordingly, any time Trump uses the word “grifter,” it should be treated like self-incrimination. He unwittingly indicts himself when he reaches for the word. He’s telling us about a motive with which he’s all-too-familiar. Lately, he’s given us billions of pieces of proof — in the form of the questionable profits he’s made as president.

These days, I don’t feel angry at the people who are still echoing Trump’s “grift” claims, whether it’s against me or Hunter Biden or whoever they decide to take down. Mostly, I just feel sad because it’s a signpost that they’ve become full citizens of Trump’s America, which of late is a country where the founding ideals no longer register as honest motivations. Everyone is assumed to be making a buck, and everything is presumed to be a grift.

That cynicism is Trump’s truest legacy, and in some ways, it’s more deeply corrosive than any of his corrupt acts or anti-constitutional policies. A nation that cannot believe in sincere sacrifice will not ask it of anyone. And it certainly will not honor those who offer it.

The journalist in the CNN lobby is a good man, and his quip only stung because it got me thinking again about how the poison is now in all of our water. So here is the answer I should’ve given him, and the one I’ll give you instead:

The only way back to a country where doing the right thing is simply right, where it needs no hidden explanation, is for enough people to keep doing it… very loudly… publicly, whenever possible… and despite the risks... until the cynics run out of excuses for dismissing the only thing that matters, in the life of nations and of individuals alike: character.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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

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Barron Trump lives off an estimated $150 million fortune.

Much of that wealth comes from World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto venture that just received conditional approval from Trump’s own government to operate a national trust bank.

A bank, mind you, that pays no interest to its depo…

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The Trump administration has built a massive anti-fraud task force that is being puppeteered directly from the White House. And its real mission has almost nothing to do with saving taxpayers money.

The New York Times revealed a few days ago that the Justice Department’s newest fraud target is a weathered white food truck in Santa Ana, California, that sells ice cream and produce. On the surface, it was a weird case. Of all the suspects DOJ could go after, why spend valuable federal prosecutorial and investigative resources on a food truck? Why not leave that to the local authorities?

When it came out which agents did the investigating, the picture started to make more sense. The evidence was amassed by ICE — an agency already on a quest to validate Donald Trump’s claim that immigrants are stealing from Americans — and its agents evidently decided to focus finite resources on a tiny business in an immigrant heavy community outside of Los Angeles… in a state the White House has begun targeting aggressively… where DOJ also appears to have its governor, Gavin Newsom, under investigation.

The goal was not to take down serious criminals. It was storytelling. Trump says his enemies are grifters. Accordingly, he’s reorienting the federal government to prove — whether they’re governors or immigrants — that his political and societal opponents are rotten right down to the food trucks from which they sell.

The giveaway is that, as DOJ is building these types of cases, it’s simultaneously abandoning major white-collar prosecutions. Corporate investigations (which can uncover billions in theft and billions in restitution for victims) have fallen to their lowest level in decades. In fact, the Times found that the volume of such cases is literally thousands below the Biden administration and far below Trump’s own first term. Meanwhile, the president has been pardoning wealthy executives and dropping cases left and right against friendly corporations.

So no, the Trump administration is not hunting fraud. It’s hunting down its enemies with anything it can find. “Fraud” just happens to be the easiest label to apply.

Minnesota is a potent example. Late last year, welfare fraud was used as the thinly veiled pretext for the Trump administration to launch a massive immigration crackdown (and political shakedown) in a state led by Democrat Tim Walz, who challenged Trump for the White House in 2024. Thousands of ICE and CBP agents flooded into Minnesota to address a problem that — if the reasons were genuine — should have required not more than a few dozen accountants. It certainly didn’t need gun-toting agents. While Trump was forced into retreat, his team first tried to coerce state leaders to forfeit their voter rolls, which critics pointed out had precisely nothing to do with the original fraud claims. Of course it didn’t; from the start, the whole exercise was about political leverage.

Then DOJ sought to investigate Governor Tim Walz for allegedly impeding the president’s crackdown. That was halted by a federal judge, who saw through the effort as a crude mechanism of political retaliation, ruling that it appeared meant to “coerce Minnesota officials… [and] to harass and retaliate against them” for resisting Trump’s invasion of the state.

So what did the White House do? They went back to the fraud claims! Knowing they were likely to lose, they shifted tacks and referred Governor Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to the Justice Department for another criminal investigation, before the judge even struck down the first one. The second referral was based on the allegations regarding misuse of welfare funds by immigrant groups in the state. MAGA Republicans have now used that scandal as a cudgel to undercut Democrats in the midterm elections. The “fraud” doesn’t actually matter to them. The retribution does.

To understand what Trump’s task force is actually meant for, just look at how it’s being managed. The DOJ’s new fraud division doesn’t report to some expert in criminal investigations. It reports directly to Vice President JD Vance, an arrangement without precedent, especially since it effectively circumvents the Attorney General himself. Apparently, catching crooked food truck vendors requires the second-highest official in the land. And Vance has been very busy with this mission. In June, he personally made the criminal referral against Walz. Asked where the “war on fraud” goes next, Vance answered: California. (Surely it’s just a coincidence that they’re going after the blue state led by the man Trump most fears will try to succeed him.)

The true nature of Trump’s “anti-fraud” plans came into view last year, as the White House pursued retribution against New York Attorney General Letitia James, the woman who won a nine-figure civil fraud judgment against Trump. In September, the president publicly demanded on social media that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Weeks later, his hastily installed prosecutor in Virginia (a former White House aide who had never prosecuted a case) indicted James for alleged “mortgage fraud.”

The theory in that case rested on an allegation that James lied on housing paperwork to save herself a few thousand dollars over several years. Clearly, this is the type of sweeping “theft” that will help America pay down the nation’s $40 trillion debt (at least a quarter of which has been amassed on Trump’s watch.) Unsurprisingly, the whole process was so sloppy that a federal judge threw out the case. Then ordinary citizens did something extraordinary: grand juries refused to re-indict James. Twice. They clearly did not see the sweeping criminal scheme that the president saw.

Nevertheless, Trump’s DOJ decided that mortgage fraud was still the easy button for quickly spinning up an investigation into a rival. Senator Adam Schiff got the same treatment, a mortgage-fraud referral ginned up by Trump’s housing regulator that stalled for lack of evidence (and which has now boomeranged so badly that a federal grand jury is investigating the investigators who cooked it up). Meanwhile, the administration continues to pursue Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who is fighting off the same unproven charges, deployed not to recover a nickel for taxpayers but to hand Trump control of the central bank.

“Fraud” has become the administration’s codeword for “revenge.” The term is a respectable-sounding wrapper for criminalizing the political opposition. And now that Trump’s team has systematized the plan with a task force — making the issue a top priority for all U.S. attorneys in the country — we will see more and more cases brought, like the recent cases against left-leaning nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.

If anyone on the political right doubts Trump’s motivations, they need only apply a simple test. Has his administration been faithful to the cost-saving mission? A White House genuinely obsessed with protecting taxpayer dollars would not be spending nearly a billion of those dollars (much of it raided from other agencies) to gild the White House and build a ballroom, or just as much to retrofit a luxury jet from Qatar. You cannot loot the treasury with one hand and call yourself its guardian with the other. Well, you can, I guess. But the word for that is also “fraud.”

So here’s what we do about it, friends. We make sure that we preserve everything. When power changes hands, which it eventually will, we will seek all the documents, including every criminal referral memo, target list, email between the White House and the task force, hand-written notes from the vice president’s fraud meetings, and so on. All of it will be subpoenaed and reviewed, whether by a new Congress next year or a new Justice Department after that.

And guess what? They can’t shred it all on the way out the door, because they’ve trapped themselves. If they want their prosecutions to survive, there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away. I suspect that when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead exactly where the Letitia James and Adam Schiff cases already point — back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens.

That’s when the real fraud trials will begin.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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

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

Winning in November is key to giving the defiance some real teeth in Congress and statehouses. But Trump is doing everything …

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If there is a single takeaway from the unfurling “scandal” over Senator Jon Ossoff calling out Donald Trump’s creepy relationship with a young aide, it is this: Democrats should be more like Jon Ossoff.

At a rally in Atlanta on Sunday, Ossoff called out the commander-in-chief’s reckless war, with a pointed jab:

“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings, he golfs, and trades stocks. He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

He was talking about Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old executive assistant reporters describe as Trump’s “security blanket,” and the aide who joined the small group of presidential advisers who secretly switched planes with Trump in Turkey to avoid traveling on Air Force One while it was supposedly being targeted by Iran. The White House proceeded to lose its mind over Ossoff’s quip. The communications director called the senator “Jon Jackoff” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” while a spokesman called him a “feminine theater kid.” Trump went with a milquetoast jab almost no Gen-Z-er would even understand, accusing Ossoff of acting like “Pee-wee Herman.”

A calm and collected Ossoff responded the very next day by smiling and reminding the world that Trump is a “draft-dodging crook president.”

I just want to make two comments about this ordeal.

First, Ossoff nailed it.

Naturally, Republicans are flooding social media today to make you believe the senator’s jab was beneath the dignity of our politics. But let’s consult the abbreviated record of the man they’re defending. Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll… he was convicted of 34 felonies for covering up hush money to a porn star he slept with shortly after his wife gave birth… he was recorded bragging about grabbing women by the genitals… roughly two dozen women have accused him of sexual misconduct… he spent years palling around with Jeffrey Epstein, praising a man who liked women “on the younger side”… and at this very moment, his attorney general is in federal court defying a judge’s orders to release FBI interview notes concerning a woman who alleges Trump sexually assaulted her when she was thirteen years old (an allegation Trump denies but is apparently desperate to keep buried).

I found it weird enough when I worked for Trump that he always surrounded himself with attractive young girls (where it was just outside the Oval Office… just down the hall at the front desk… or basically in every office in the building). I find it even weirder that, these days, he picks the ones who literally write him notes and leave them in his personal quarters saying things like “You are all that matters to me” and “I want to bring you joy.”

These are the pearls Republicans are clutching. They are shocked — shocked! — that anyone would insinuate impropriety by a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser who hires people like Natalie to serve under him. Good luck turning that into a political asset in a midterm year.

So no, Ossoff’s critique isn’t “low-brow.” It’s a scorching hot laser beam. He took documented reporting of Trump’s corruption (including the secret flights, the ballroom obsession, the golf, the stock trades, the war he’s losing, and the weird stories about his too-adoring personal assistant) and compressed it into one sentence that delivered a hornet sting to the wannabe dictator in the White House.

Second, the “scandal” reveals something more important that everyone in the political opposition must take note of.

Ossoff has rediscovered the Achilles’ heel of autocrats. And it’s mockery. Strongmen can handle all the hatred because, weirdly (and this is Trump’s long-standing view), the hatred confirms their power. What they actually have such a hard time with is laughter. When people point and laugh, they cower and quiver. The tactic is as old as time.

In Heroes of History, legendary historian Will Durant writes about how the earliest comedians did this in ancient Athens, wielding humor as a powerful weapon to expose political corruption and greed. None landed a harder blow than Aristophanes, who tormented the tyrants of Athens from the stage. Amidst a foreign conflict that threatened to bring down the fledgling Athenian democracy, the playwright’s productions were purported to be “brilliant, coarse, and merciless,” Durant wrote, “calling for a return to an almost forgotten morality, and crying for an end to war.”

Or fast forward to when Charlie Chaplin famously punctured Hitler’s mystique, while half the world still appeased the thuggish mustached man. Or consider the example of two of my contemporary favorites: (1) Alexei Navalny, who did more damage to Putin with one video mocking his gaudy secret palace than a decade of communiqués ever did; and (2) Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian who once played a president on television, and who has out-dueled the Kremlin for four years running as the actual president of Ukraine. (There’s a reason in China that Xi Jinping bans Winnie the Pooh memes and that President Erdogan in Turkey prosecutes comedians.) The ridicule works.

Trump understands this instinctively, which is why the briefest, winking mention of “Natalie” in Ossoff’s speech produced a coordinated White House meltdown. Ossoff found the nerve, and — oh boy — it connected with the whole body of Trump’s corruption. Now, the president is screaming in agony.

I’ve watched Democrats spend the better part of the past decade drafting strongly worded letters and waiting for our institutions to save us. Ossoff, the supposedly vulnerable incumbent, has been choosing a different path. While he’s no trained comedian, he’s out there with the swagger of Aristophanes by pointedly naming the enablers, mocking the corrupt, and smiling wryly as Trump and his minions demand apologies.

So here’s a lesson for every Democrat who’s tried to do battle with a lowlife president by using high-minded policy papers. Fight like Jon Ossoff. You might just find that you’ll actually win.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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

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

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

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The second rule of Fight Trump’s Revenge Club: Seriously…NEVER. BACK. DOWN.

Mike Nellis knows this firsthand.

After news broke over the weekend revealing just how far Trump’s DOJ went in its investigation of his company, Authentic Campaigns, Mike joins us to talk about what happened when he refused to roll over.

And it looks like Disney is finally learning the same lesson. After bending the knee and writing Trump a $16 million check, he only came back for more. Now, with his FCC on their backs, they’re taking him to court.

We’re also heading to Big Bend, where resistance to Trump’s $1.7 billion border project has managed to do something neither Congress nor the courts have done yet: stop the bulldozers.

For now.

Ramón Rodríguez Aranda and Laiken Jordahl join us from Texas on how they got the bulldozers to stop and what it will take to keep them that way. Want to get involved? Visit NOBIGBENDWALL.ORG.

And we close today by honoring one of our own.❤️

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THIS WEEK ON THE ANT HILL

• WEDS, AUG 19 — MY DEFIANCE MISSION — On Mission Wednesdays, we highlight the defiance actions Members are taking in their own communities. Tell us your story here. Every action counts!

• THURS, AUG 20 — SHOW US YOUR ANT-ITUDE! — We wanna see your DEFIANCE swag, your original artwork, your unique ways of shouting out your defiance to the world in creative ways. Send your pics to our editor here.

• FRI, AUG 21 — THE DEFIANCE BOOK CLUB — We are super psyched to launch the DEFIANCE Book Club this month! Our first selection: Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum. Visit your library or favorite bookstore and pick up a copy today. More details every Friday!

GROW THE DEFIANCE

DEFIANCE Members are absolutely crushing it, spreading the word about our club for the courageous to their friends. There is strength in numbers, and that’s exactly what defiance requires. Here’s how you can help build our numbers—and get a shoutout on the Daily with Miles and Xander:

1. Go to https://www.defiance.news/leaderboard

2. Use the buttons provided to share your personal referral link on X, Facebook, or email. Or, copy the link (circled in the example below) to share it via text or other social platforms.

I’m a member of an encrypted group chat I probably shouldn’t be in anymore.

To be clear, I’m in a lot of chats I’ve muted or routinely ignore because I don’t have time. My life is fully focused now on countering corruption. So if it doesn’t have to do with that, I scroll past it. The college-friends thread has been neglected and so has the one of former Capitol Hill staffers. For some people, “group chats” have become the modern equivalent of the early 2000s email chain letter. An ignored nuisance.

But I recently took a renewed interest in this one. It’s a collection of CEOs and venture capitalists who discuss everything from robotics breakthroughs to American politics, and I was added years ago while advising companies on emerging tech and national security. I took a look at the chain, for the first time in a long time, because I was curious to see how these people were reacting to the Trump administration’s growing crackdown on AI companies.

I stumbled on something even more interesting.

Before I get to that, I’ll note that many of the people in the chat were pro-business Democrats who once groaned about Joe Biden’s executive order requiring developers of the most powerful AI models to share safety-test results with the government. Innovation-killing federal meddling, they called it. Trump ceremoniously threw out that Biden-era order on his first day in office. But since then, the Trump White House has undertaken far more heavy-handed moves than its predecessor, like blocking specific AI companies from releasing their products or labeling them a “national security risk.”

So I wanted to see: did Trump’s crackdown strike these techno-optimists as a big-government takeover?

Weirdly, as I scrolled through the chats from earlier this year, I saw that they seemed to welcome the new restrictions. Executives who fretted two years ago about Biden so much as talking about AI policy now praised Trump’s “foresight” in intervening in the marketplace. For a few of the group-chat participants, the motive was transparent. They’re deeply invested in rival firms or were delighted to watch a surging competitor brought to heel. Others, I’ll grant them, harbor genuine worries about the pace of progress.

But for most, it’s something else. Something darker.

What was striking to me was the general about-face. Plenty of these executives and startup vultures were as anti-Trump as it got during the president’s first term. They cheered for the tech-sector resistance or helped lead it, back when companies refused to enable a surveillance state or lend their tools to Trump’s agencies after those bureaucracies appeared to have been coopted to pursue the president’s political enemies. Now, many of these seem entrepreneurs are holding their tongues… or worse, applauding the ruler they once openly reviled.

I scrolled back through months of discussions I’d missed, since auto-disappear was not turned on. The tycoons and wannabe tycoons posted selfies from the White House, articles about “exciting” developments in the Trump administration like an explosion in defense-tech spending, and even favorable comments about the president’s garish America 250th celebrations. If anyone brought up controversies, they seemed to dance around criticism of the president or reached for comically cautious language. “Concerning,” one wrote in April of Trump’s threat to annihilate the Iranian people in a fiery genocide if their leaders defied him. Yes, concerning.

The more I scrolled, the more I felt like the chat was from a parallel reality. A space alien reading it would conclude the Trump administration was broadly celebrated, marred only by the occasional errant remark from its figurehead. Otherwise, all was well and good for the American people, their businesses, their allies, and the world writ large. (Except token costs. Token costs, the group-chat members fretted, were eating up a lot more of their budgets than expected.)

You’ve watched the public version of this yourself. You saw Tim Cook fawning over Trump in the Oval Office. You saw Bill Gates yucking it up with the president at a White House dinner. You saw Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg (men whose companies once took strident moral stands by defying this president) beaming through tech-summit photo ops. This isn’t even lobbying anymore. Lobbying, at least, was a professional necessity across administrations. This is more like the groveling pursuit of lapdog friendship with the president and his sycophants… a pursuit in which they’re thrown small morsels of mutual affection and expected to sit and drool and wait for more, while the White House wreaks havoc in the economy, raises prices, and creates chaos in global trade.

So let me go back to the Stockholm Syndrome group chat.

Why — in a private chat no less — were so many of them dancing in lockstep to the regime’s music when I knew, knew, they were registered Democrats and former anti-Trump diehards? The answer is a phenomenon rare in America but endemic to autocracies. It’s social fear. Many of these people are afraid of what happens if they say how they really feel. They’re afraid of being found out or snitched on, e.g. that a true believer in the mix, or a rival angling for advantage, will report their disloyalty to a White House that keeps blacklists of people and of insufficiently aligned companies.

I learned this early in Trump’s second term, when big-tech CEOs conveniently forgot they knew me the moment I landed on that blacklist. Despite the fact that some of them were my clients. The fear went beyond major companies. I realized how far the rot had actually spread when my legal defense fund couldn’t find a catering company to hire in a major city to serve soda at a fundraiser. When they found out the purpose of the event (to raise funds for an enemy of the president), these small businesses declined, fearing the possibility of ICE enforcement against their employees.

But a lot has changed since then. Popular defiance against Donald Trump has surged. Celebrities and news organizations have found their voices. Millions of Americans have filled the streets. Even MAGA diehards — from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie to Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Tim Pool — have broken with the president in ways once unthinkable.

Yet business leaders seem like the last corner of society still holding out. They’re evidently the most tightly gripped by the president’s Darth Vader chokehold and wary to create daylight with a man who’s created a novel carrot-and-stick system for U.S. companies. While scanning the missives in the group chat, I felt like I was reading the text exchanges of Susan Collins clones, each cheerfully looking the other way until an atrocity forced out a murmur of “concern,” then moving briskly along.

History knows what to call these people. Germany’s industrialists convinced themselves that flattering the new regime was shrewd risk management. Today, they’re remembered as regime collaborators (and some ended up at Nuremberg). Russia’s oligarchs have similarly learned that obedience buys no safety; it just gets them a shorter leash. And when they stray, sometimes they get thrown out of windows.

The lesson is that the compliant never get total protection. They just get used. And then when history shines a light backward, they get remembered for it.

As the defiance to Donald Trump grows in this country, I wasn’t expecting much bravery from America’s business leaders. But I certainly had not anticipated the level of enduring cowardice. It’s not even that I want them all to join the resistance again. In the group chat, a few of those folks harbor true MAGA sympathies. Fine. But I want the rest to publicly pick a side and stop being so mealy mouthed or, worse, offering up fake praise for a man who they believe is an autocrat. At least then they’d stand for something.

Before you get too excited, I’m not going to “Jeffrey Goldberg” these people. They can learn the hard way what capitulation looks like. Not long from now, the most craven among them will start getting subpoenaed for donations to Trump’s ballroom… or get questions from the press about no-bid contracts they secured with Trump’s agencies… or experience the eventual release of emails showing them sucking up to Trump aides who might one day land in federal prison.

I’ll let karma run its course. In the meantime, I might post this essay in the thread. Then I’m leaving the chat.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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The deadline came and went, and yet, there was no deal. But somehow, America’s allies are the ones catching hell for it.

Former CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr joins us as Trump scales back military exercises with South Korea while cozying back up to Kim Jong Un. Is this retaliation for n…

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Nine years ago, I helped write Donald Trump’s first National Security Strategy. This weekend, he shredded what was left of it, and he may have invited the next Pearl Harbor in the process.

Writing that document back in 2017 was an awkward assignment from the beginning. For one thing, the president never actually read it. It was ostensibly the master plan for how his administration would conduct itself in the world, and Donald Trump didn’t so much as edit the first page. So since he was incapable of offering up a strategic vision, the strategy document itself described how we hoped Trump would operate, not necessarily how he intended to. His aides couldn’t know his intentions if he didn’t appear to have any — at least not beyond the grievances of a given week.

Still, the strategy said the right things. It pledged that America would remain a champion of liberty, deepen our alliances, and confront the ambitions of rival powers in the most strategically vital places on earth, especially where China, Russia, and North Korea had nefarious plans.

On Taiwan, we committed “to provide for Taiwan’s legitimate defense needs and deter coercion.” On Eastern Europe, we warned that “Russia is using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment” to the continent. On the Korean Peninsula, we vowed to “remain ready to respond with overwhelming force to North Korean aggression.” Those are the words you’d expect from the White House. They were also, at best, the wishful thinking of nervous aides trying to paper over a president who seemed impulsive at beast and, at worst, ready to forsake America’s global responsibilities and cast our lot with a small band of autocratic thugs instead of our fellow democracies.

That’s part of why I quit and wrote A Warning. I wanted Americans to see where Trump was headed, especially on foreign policy and especially in a second term, when all the adults would be gone. I cautioned that a Trump unbound would treat our friends as enemies and our enemies as friends. What’s more, I warned that flipping the script would put the United States in unnecessary mortal peril by exposing us to surprise attack and stripping us of our greatest legacy and strongest protection: leadership of the free world.

It’s happening now. If you want a yardstick to measure how bad it is, just look at each of those same strategic crossroads named in the original Trump national security strategy (again, the one that we wrote and he merely rubber-stamped). The president is abandoning our friends in all the places where we are needed most, and he is leaving behind vacuums to be filled by his dictator buddies.

Start with Korea. On Sunday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” our joint military exercises with South Korea, complaining that our ally wouldn’t join his war with Iran and insisting the drills send a signal that is “inappropriate and hostile” to our friends in North Korea, which he called “unthreatening and respectful.” Ah yes, Mr. President, they are so “unthreatening” that during your first term we had to urgently plan for the possibility that the hermit kingdom might launch a nuclear attack on the continental United States because Kim Jong Un was so “respectful.” By the way, Trump announced America’s pull-back from its longtime ally days after North Korea launched a ballistic missile in a show of force against the South.

Then look at what else is happening in the Pacific. This weekend, the Navy pulled the USS George Washington out of Asia to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, leaving the western Pacific without a single American aircraft carrier, while China grows more aggressive toward Taiwan by the month. In fact, Taiwan has been holding emergency drills practicing what to do if Beijing orders an invasion. So why is America pulling back vital resources? Because Trump has no real interest in deterring China, where he has marveled enviously at Xi Jinping’s power and toyed with the idea of a “grand bargain.”

Instead, his ego has America mired in an open-ended war with Iran that is grinding down our ships, draining our missile stockpiles, and running our sailors ragged. So he’s sending more ships into that quagmire. (And Tehran, according to the Wall Street Journal, spent the recent “ceasefire” preparing a wider war, with one regime adviser boasting that “the main war has not yet begun.”)

Finally, take a look at what’s happening in Europe. Satellite imagery revealed this weekend that Russia is building a network of secret drone bases within striking distance of NATO, with storage for a thousand attack drones at a single site. German authorities just found a suspected Russian drone rigged with explosives at the Leipzig airport. And Western planners are quietly admitting they have no real plan for NATO’s nightmare scenario, a coordinated Russian and Chinese strike on two fronts, at the very moment Trump has hollowed out the alliance that exists to prevent such a surprise attack. The response from the White House to these provocations has been near-total silence.

Our enemies are gobsmacked by what’s happening. Under Donald Trump, we’ve walked out onto thin ice and handed our foes a sledgehammer. They must be fist-pumping in foreign briefing rooms.

Strategically, I believe we are in the most perilous hour of the modern era, and it is peril of our own president’s making. Donald Trump’s real National Security Strategy has been to get revenge against countries that criticize him, to advance his own self interests, and to build bridges to dictators with whom he can work once he leaves office. The great dealmaker has sold us out to the most dangerous nations on earth.

Before America entered the Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote something that would come to be viewed as prophecy:

“How heavily do the destinies of this generation hang upon the government and people of the United States… Will the United States throw their weight into the scales of peace and law and freedom while time remains, or will they remain spectators until the disaster has occurred; and then, with infinite cost and labor, build up what need not have been cast down?”

We know the answer our grandparents gave. The question has come around again.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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

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Bloomberg dug into thousands of glowing public comments backing the proposal, and wouldn’t you know it, some of them came from dead people?

I guess Trump found them after all and apparently put them to work.

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Newly released files show that federal authorities opened a terrorism probe in Minnesota that ended up targeting ordinary protesters whose weapons of choice were wooden spoons and cookware.

This winter, young climate activists in Minnesota stood outside hotels where ICE agents were being housed, banging pots and pans. The protesters kept agents awake at night, and they also urged the hotels not to do business with DHS. The group called these clever pop-up activations “wide awakes,” launched amidst an immigration crackdown that saw the murder of U.S. citizens, illegal detentions, and widespread government misconduct. In short, it was the kind of activity Americans have engaged in since the founding, somewhere between a picket line and a cowbell.

What the activists didn’t know is that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was spying on them under the auspices of a broader federal inquiry, justified partly on grounds of “domestic terrorism.”

According to newly released government documents reported by the New York Times, DHS opened the secret investigation out of its St. Paul office in late January, four days after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was filming officers during the immigration crackdown. Rather than investigate the agents who killed Pretti, federal authorities set out to probe the protest movement itself, including labor unions, community organizers, and a climate group called the Sunrise Movement, which we featured on DEFIANCE Daily just a few months ago.

What followed was expansive surveillance. According to the Times, this included the seizure of some of the groups’ financial records, the infiltration of Signal chats, and in-person spying on organizers who were putting together the types of protests with which the Sunrise Movement and area residents made headlines. Indeed, undercover agents infiltrated activists’ internal meetings at libraries, public parks, and in churches, recording not just what people said but who they were.

At one training session in a church meeting room in Roseville, Minnesota, agents wrote down attendees’ license plate numbers, matched the plates to their owners’ names, scraped their social media, and compiled what they called an “intel work-up” on each person. In the course of such monitoring, DHS put together dossiers on ordinary teachers, veterans, and union members who were challenging the president’s violent, anti-immigration agenda.

In another instance, investigators scrutinized three years of wire transfers from the nation’s largest health care workers union under the heading of “domestic terrorist financing.” Prosecutors then showed a grand jury a PowerPoint asserting that eighteen organizations, including the AFL-CIO, the Democratic Socialists of America, a state teachers’ union, and a small Minneapolis bike shop called the Grease Pit, were part of a conspiracy against ICE. No such charges have been filed against those organizations.

Internally, DHS branded one leg of the effort as “Operation Puppet Master.”

In June, the investigation produced an indictment of fifteen people and was announced with great fanfare by the Trump administration as a takedown of “antifa” — the group the administration has designated as the leading terror threat to the United States. The alleged offenses included throwing ice chunks at ICE vehicles. While such infractions may or may not result in actual convictions, observers were quick to point out that the case was a far cry from DHS’s post-9/11 efforts to thwart bombings, mass shootings, airplane hijackings, and other nefarious plots from actual terrorist organizations like al Qaeda and ISIS.

(The federal judge overseeing the proceedings has already ruled that the activity at the heart of the supposed conspiracy, following ICE vehicles and reporting where they go, is not grounds for arrest.)

What’s just as alarming as the terrorism allegations is that investigators went beyond looking into mere individuals and conducted surreptitious monitoring of left-leaning organization — groups that helped organize tens of thousands of Minnesotans to stand up for their rights. None has been accused of a crime. Yet the groups were evidently subpoenaed, surveilled, and infiltrated by federal agents.

The Times report quotes Harry Jacobs, one of the federal prosecutors who resigned in protest from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota that oversaw these investigations, blasting the Trump administration’s misconduct:

“The government’s power to investigate is extraordinary, and with that power comes a responsibility to exercise care and restraint…An investigation should begin with a legitimate basis to suspect criminal conduct, not with a chosen institution or group. Prosecutors must follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, rather than select a target and work backwards to build a case.”

Evidence now appears to show DHS doing exactly that. The paper trail paints a picture of agents who targeted left-wing groups because of their viewpoint on Trump’s immigration crackdown, without evidence of criminal conduct, and who then went on a fishing expedition within those groups to find possible infractions they could try to prosecute.

I spent years at DHS and have worked with almost every head of the department, under Democratic and Republican administrations. Until Trump’s first term, few of them would’ve been caught dead overseeing an investigation like this. The responsible agents would’ve been suspended or fired. The conduct would’ve been reported to Congress. And departmental leaders would’ve seen it, rightfully, as a chilling violation of free speech. No longer. In story after story, we are witnessing the slide of DHS down a slippery slope into becoming the warden of a burgeoning police state.

The Times piece invoked a similar episode in our history, known as Cointelpro. That was J. Edgar Hoover’s program of infiltrating and cataloguing left-wing activists, which was so notorious that Congress spent decades building guardrails to prevent other such flagrant violations of civil liberties from happening again. Those guardrails have now failed. And anyone tempted to treat Minnesota as a one-off should look at the paper trail.

This all flows from a presidential directive signed by Donald Trump last year, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which ordered a whole-of-government campaign against what the administration labels “domestic terrorism,” including groups with “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-Christian” views. Prosecutors and agents across the country are now under pressure to enforce NSPM-7 and make it their top professional priority. One of my oft-repeated concerns is that the extent of this major abuse of power is being kept classified, as terror investigations are treated as the most sensitive national security cases.

What we don’t know yet is how far the rot has spread. Minnesota is just where the documents leaked into public view. The real question (the same one I asked last week about the warrantless tracking of James Comey), is how many other groups and how many other ordinary Americans are being secretly catalogued right now for constitutionally protected speech? The government will not volunteer the answer. We know that. And we only know about Operation Puppet Master because defense lawyers pried the records loose from the administration.

So let me tell you what we’re doing about it. This month, DEFIANCE.org launched the real Anti-Weaponization Fund, built to support the targets of exactly this kind of presidential revenge, and as of this writing we are actively exploring how to team up with other pro-democracy groups to protect protesters’ rights and counter these violations in court. The lesson readers should not take away is that protesting is dangerous; it’s that protests are working, so well in fact that they’re terrifying the regime. Indeed, when the federal government assigns undercover agents to a pots-and-pans demonstration, it’s telling you that it really can’t stand the noise.

Thankfully, federal judges are getting fed up with an administration that is increasingly abusing DOJ and DHS powers. I have faith in the justice system in the long run. I have faith that the wrongly accused will be vindicated. But I won’t rely on faith alone. That’s why every week at DEFIANCE.org we do something about it.

The current president of the United States wants Americans to think twice before joining a group chat, attending a training at a church, or banging a pot outside a hotel in protest of his administration. The answer to him is more noise, not less. So while this story continues to unfold, my advice to you is: keep on banging.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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

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It’s not the service members who risk their lives and comfort for this country.

It’s not those who simply wish to build a life and live in peace.

It’s not even the loyalists who serve him time and time again, no questions asked.

It’s just T-R-U-M-P.

For starters, Trump loves cosplaying as a great milita…

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Donald Trump’s corrupt “anti-weaponization fund” is dead (for now). The billion-dollar program he devised to hand your taxpayer dollars to pro-Trump criminals never got off the ground. But today, we’re launching an actual one — to thwart his campaign of retribution.

We’re calling it the real Anti-Weaponization Fund, and its purpose is straightforward: when the president of the United States illegally wields his power to destroy someone’s life, we’ll have resources to help fight back. The effort was first announced last night, and it’s being funded by DEFIANCE.org.

I know what the destruction from a presidential grudge feels like, because I’ve dealt with it more than once. When I came forward from inside his first administration to speak out, he tried to ruin my life. I rebuilt it in the aftermath. But when Donald Trump returned to office, he signed an order directing federal agencies to investigate me for “treason” — for speech the First Amendment plainly protects. It took him almost nothing. The squiggle of a pen and a short press conference. That was enough to swing a heavy wrecking ball into my life once more.

The blacklist did its work fairly quickly. As most of you know, my small business collapsed, as colleagues and clients fled. Some of my closest friends went quiet, afraid that association with me would put them in Trump’s crosshairs, too. And the ordinary rhythms of our life — whether it was family gatherings, dinners in Washington, D.C., and the simple assumption of safety — were soon replaced by a low, constant hum of dread. Then there was the false quietude of fear. Or maybe you’d call it the silence that comes after an explosion.

People I loved reached out to me and my wife and whispered to us that we shouldn’t poke the bear. We shouldn’t fight back against Trump, regardless of the consequences we were already suffering. It will blow over, they said, so don’t make it worse for yourself. What many of them were actually saying was: Don’t make it worse for us. I understood and heeded them, for a while. But that kind of silence is corrosive to anyone with a conscience. The loneliness gnaws at you, and after a while it curdles into something a lot worse; it becomes a kind of silent shame — that you took advice to do the thing which you knew was wrong. Staying quiet.

Then something happened. My wife and I broke. The quiet drove us mad, especially at ourselves. We felt betrayed by our own concessions — and the unnatural act of laying low when everything inside of us said that what’s right is to fight back. To defy. We took a deep breath and stood back up.

When we did, we were genuinely surprised to discover we were not alone. Yes, a lot of people in our social circle scurried away, stopped calling, or stopped responding to texts. But we discovered another universe of support we never knew existed. It poured in from all corners of the country, from people we’d never met and likely never will. Complete strangers. Their encouragement did more than buoy our spirits. Some of them gave us the means to stand our ground and bring legal challenges against the administration, some of which are still to come. (For instance, the amazing folks at Whistleblower Aid offered the support of their legal defense fund.)

My story has become a mere footnote in the scope of Trump’s sprawling and unprecedented revenge campaign. He has gone after members of Congress and business executives and foreign leaders and regular folks who have challenged his conduct. He’s made a sport of wielding federal authority for personal grievance.

In the months after he attacked me, one of my good friends who never wavered, Xander Schultz, called me with an idea: we should find a way to help others who are in the president’s crosshairs. We should build an organization to gather around the targets of Trump’s revenge machine at the precise moment the intimidation is designed to paralyze them. Then, we could be a lifeline… give them the financial support… offer encouragement to be brave instead of being compliant.

In the end, we went bigger. We launched DEFIANCE.org to crowd-source courage for all Americans — giving anyone and everyone an opportunity, every single week, to fight Trump’s corruption in ways big and small. That’s what we do now. Each Wednesday, we announce a real action to counter his abuses of power.

But we never lost sight of that original idea. And this week, we’re bringing it to life in an early iteration.

Which brings me back to the real Anti-Weaponization Fund. Trump used that term to describe a scheme to loot the Treasury for his allies. Thankfully, that fund is moribund because of congressional pressure and public outrage. But we’re taking the term away from him and using it to describe our effort to counter the weaponization of government. His weaponization of government.

Here’s how it works. When the president threatens or opens an investigation into someone, files charges, or strips a person of their job, license, or security clearance (because they did their job, exercised their rights, or stood up to abuses of power), our team will reach out. First, to tell them what I needed to hear in my darkest stretch: you are not alone. Then, as resources allow, we’ll help them secure legal, security, and/or other assistance to defend their rights. We are partnering with legal defense organizations and other pro-democracy groups equipped to take up these cases. And we’ll mobilize our community in their defense, including by collecting messages of encouragement for those targeted people.

We’ve already been doing this informally by helping provide advice to folks whose rights are threatened. Now we want to formalize it. This is just a first step. We’re a small organization, so we won’t pretend we can bankroll every case that Trump’s retribution machine generates. Far from it. But that’s what crowd-sourcing courage is all about — filling the gaps where it’s needed most. We plan to help affected individuals by getting them the timely backing to defend their rights.

Like autocrats before him, Trump’s strategy depends on the cruel calculus of intimidation. He needs his targets to feel isolated and intimidated just enough to give in. If he does that, then he doesn’t need to prosecute all of his enemies. Because the others will self-censor or fold when they see what happens to the first group. Every time someone capitulates, the next abuse gets easier. On the other hand, every time someone stands up, the machine grinds a little slower for all of us.

I’ll never forget the strangers who came forward when we were at our lowest. They changed the trajectory of our lives, and they’re the reason I get to write these words today as a free man still in the fight. The Anti-Weaponization Fund is part of how we pay that forward.

You can chip in to support the fund here. If you don’t have financial resources to help, that’s okay, because we’re also inviting anyone to send notes of support to people in Trump’s crosshairs. We’ll rotate that list regularly, and we’ll get the messages directly to them to make sure they know other people are in their corner, whether it’s high-profile targets or ordinary Americans persecuted for protesting a lawless regime.

In America, we don’t submit to kings. But we must go further. We must resolve to stand beside the people who stand up. If we do that, no one will be left bowing down.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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

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

Presidential revenge is no longer a threat. It’s a program. Security clearances pulled by t…

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Donald Trump is carrying out a far more sweeping renovation of the White House than was previously known. You are paying for it. And he might be breaking the law in the process.

While you were out buying the groceries Trump promised to make cheaper, his administration quietly assembled nearly a billion dollars to gild the president’s mansion, most of it from taxpayer funds. According to confidential contracting documents reviewed by the Washington Post, the White House has stockpiled money for at least $927 million in construction on the grounds, the most expensive overhaul of the property in its history in raw dollars. And Trump didn’t ask Congress for it.

To do it, analysis shows the Trump administration secretly raided funding from other agencies and accounts, including $415 million that was appropriated by Congress in part to recruit and train the Secret Service agents who take bullets for presidents. Instead, that money is being redirected to buy him a ballroom and pay for other renovations that haven’t been fully disclosed to the American people or Congress.

The mechanics of how the White House is doing this are just as damning as the number. The administration apparently routed the funds through the “Executive Residence,” the small housekeeping office that employs the White House curators, calligraphers, and carpenters. Its maintenance account normally receives about $2.5 million a year from Congress. Since Trump took office, his aides have stuffed $875 million into it, including $500 million in transfers from the Secret Service and the White House Military Office, money donated from corporations and wealthy individuals connected to the president, and another $70 million from sources the documents don’t identify.

Why launder the money through the housekeepers? I’ll tell you. Because that office is exempt from ordinary federal disclosure rules. The contracts are typically confidential. In theory, this is partly to protect the president and the White House complex against threat actors. But it’s definitely not so the commander-in-chief can put together unauthorized passion projects with taxpayer funds and avoid public criticism. That’s why last Friday, a federal appeals court ruled against part of Trump’s scheme, finding that the White House evaded accountability by trying to build the ballroom without congressional approval. Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court.

I spent years working on the House Appropriations Committee, so let me explain the legal architecture that Donald Trump seems to be treating as a suggestion. The power of the purse belongs to Congress. It’s the first power the Constitution grants, in Article One, and it means the executive branch cannot take money lawmakers appropriated for one purpose and spend it on another, not without explicit approval. When Congress declined to fund Trump’s ballroom, that was basically their answer. They didn’t also say, “But you can take the money from other places!” The president evidently didn’t like his restrictions.

By moving Secret Service training money into a redecorating account, he may be committing the same species of offense he was impeached for the first time. Remember when Trump defied Congress’s direction on funds for Ukraine — and dangled the money as a quid-pro-quo, with demands that Ukraine investigate his political rival, Joe Biden? That, of course, wasn’t an “authorized” purpose of those funds. It was a high crime, one for which he was then investigated and impeached.

Trump clearly didn’t learn his lesson. He’s back at it again.

One thing I can say with certainty is that the investigations into this will be sweeping. House Democrats are already sending document-preservation letters to the companies financing and building one part of this project — the ballroom — and if voters hand them the gavel in November, they will almost certainly expand that investigation into all aspects of the Trump administration’s spending schemes. Right now, he appears to be moving money into special accounts to allow himself to do an extreme home makeover that no one gave him the power to carry out.

As they say, follow the money.

But when I read the Washington Post report, I felt like another message needed to be delivered to Trump and his family. They needed to be told to stop treating our government like their own cheap casino, and they also needed to be notified that their attempt to literally etch their legacies into our buildings, cities, and society will fail.

So let me tell Trump, right now, what he needs to hear:

Everything you are doing is temporary.

You are a mere renter behaving like an owner, which you are not. And the moment you are gone, the demolition will begin.

We will take down the ugly drapes and the gold trim.

We will take down the gaudy flourishes in the Oval Office and the embarrassing Walk of Fame along the colonnade.

We will unpave the Rose Garden and let it bloom again.

If the ballroom ever rises, we will tear it down the same way you tore down the East Wing, except we will do it legally.

We will take your face off the $1 coins, pull them from circulation, and melt them down while we remove your signature from paper currency.

We will strip your name from TrumpRx and Trump Accounts, pull the banner-sized portraits off federal buildings, and cancel the planned triumphal arch before a single stone is laid.

If we’re too late, we’ll tear that down, too.

And when it’s all said and done, we’ll erase your likeness from every place it didn’t belong, from the park passes all the way down to the stationery.

You are wasting your time and wasting our money… because we will undo the entirety of your corrupt legacy. Do you understand?

Autocratic rulers stamp their names and faces onto the state because they know their legacy cannot survive on the merits. And many of them would rather die infamous and reviled than fade into obscurity. In that same spirit, Donald Trump is trying to make himself permanent by fusing his noxious brand with the republic so that removing him feels like removing America. Well, it won’t work. This country has defied better-built cults than his (ask the British monarchy), and the statues always come down.

To show him what that will look like, we made a video earlier this year imagining January 21, 2029, the day his name starts coming off of everything. I’ve included it below. If this looks like a mere movie trailer to you, don’t worry. The full-length, documentary film will be a masterpiece.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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

TODAY’S FEATURE: MY DEFIANCE MISSION

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Now, the security operation to secretly move Trump off Air Force One makes sense.

The elaborate cover story afterward? A little harder to explain.

Especially from a president who never misses a chance to tell us how tough h…

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The Trump administration is laying the groundwork to seize ballots in contested midterm races. While they’ll likely lose in court, losing is actually part of the plan.

Earlier this year, the president’s agents did an obvious dry run for how to steal future elections. On January 28, the FBI raided the election hub in one of the most contested 2020 battlegrounds — Fulton County, Georgia, where Trump was previously indicted for pressuring officials to “find 11,780 votes” that didn’t exist. The president himself said the raid would help him find out who “really won” the 2020 election, despite the fact that those ballots had been counted three times, each time confirming that Trump lost. (Also, it goes without saying that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to run an unauthorized “recount” of an election because the president is a sore loser.)

But here’s what should spook every U.S. state: it worked. After Trump’s DOJ sued Fulton County for its 2020 records and failed, it decided just to go seize them. The FBI quietly went to a magistrate judge earlier this year and sought a warrant to raid the county’s election offices. Their filing rested largely on fraud claims debunked years ago and identified no concrete evidence of a crime. But the judge signed it anyway. Then FBI agents barged in and carted off 656 boxes, including the county’s only copy of its 2020 ballots. And Georgia wasn’t a one-off: the administration has gone after 2020 ballots in Arizona’s biggest battleground county, too.

Election-watchers are rightfully worried this tactic will be used in the heat of the 2026 midterm elections. And here’s how the Trump administration might do it:

Since last year, DOJ has demanded that nearly every state hand over its complete, unredacted voter lists, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. For states that have complied, the Trump administration has evidently been running the data through DHS databases to weed out “illegal aliens.” But the databases are notoriously faulty, and there is limited oversight over who might get purged, raising fears that legitimate U.S. citizens in key battlegrounds would be dropped from the voter rolls.

A dozen red states complied and handed over their lists. But thirty states and D.C. refused and were sued by the Trump administration. The good news is that DOJ has lost every single one of these cases so far in federal court (twenty-one times already) with judges ruling that no federal law gives DOJ the right to demand states’ unredacted voter files. A normal Justice Department would have dropped the other cases after losing just five times.

So why are Trump’s lawyers still fighting?

Because they’re creating a pretext. In my opinion, the Trump administration is preparing the rationale for its future warrant affidavits to go seize ballots in these “non-compliant” states. This will be their logic: We asked X state to let us verify its rolls to weed out fraud; it refused; the courts blocked us; therefore, no one can say whether noncitizens decided this election. So to investigate any fraud claims, we need to go get the ballots themselves.

The result would be chaos-by-design. Picture FBI agents carting boxes out of election offices in two or three states with razor-thin margins, races that decide control of the House and Senate. While the ballots sit in federal custody, certification of a victor will be difficult if not impossible. In the meantime, voters will rightfully fret that Trump’s agents are meddling with the results. MAGA candidates on the losing end will refuse to concede, citing the “ongoing investigations.” And the White House will make sure the fog stays thick enough to hand GOP leaders in Congress a pretext to delay seating new members, which will be the final step in preventing a peaceful transfer of power if Democrats win either chamber.

So where is this likeliest to happen?

If you overlay the refusers (the states that declined to hand over their voter rolls to Trump’s DOJ) with this fall’s top battleground races, then thirteen light up as high risk: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. These states are home to some of the most important House and Senate toss-up races. Depending on how the results look after Election Day, the Fulton scheme could hypothetically be carried out in any of them.

These thirteen are the likeliest targets, but they aren’t the only states at risk. There are battleground states that actually cooperated with the DOJ’s voter roll demands — including Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Florida, Nebraska, and North Carolina — that could be hit, too. Here the pretext would simply be flipped around: We ran the voter lists they gave us, and we found anomalies. So we have to go investigate.

Would these seizures hold up? Especially if the investigations are all conveniently conducted in places where it might help a losing MAGA candidate contest the results? In the end, probably not. Warrants require probable cause of an actual crime, the ballots belong to states themselves under state law, and the refusing states have already beaten this Justice Department twenty-one straight times. More importantly, there is almost certainly not going to be evidence in these places that illegal voters have somehow voted in such numbers that they’ve influenced the outcome.

But the Fulton County scheme proved a major weakness in the system. An initial FBI raid just needs a single magistrate judge’s signature. After that, getting the ballots back can take months of litigation. With the ballots in the custody of the feds, they’ll have the upper hand to claim possible “fraud” because they’ll control the evidence.

In the end, Trump’s team doesn’t care about losing in court. All they care about is fighting the battle in the court of public opinion for two months — between the election on November 3, 2026, and January 3, 2027, when the next Congress is supposed to be seated. That’s long enough to diminish confidence in the results and to create enough justification for Speaker Mike Johnson to secure support from his caucus not to hand over power. Indeed, under the law, the House majority has the final say over who gets seated in the chamber.

This is no conspiracy theory. Trump tried to do this once before in 2020, albeit in a far more fly-by-night fashion. He ginned up stolen-election claims out of nothing. He went to courts across the country. Of course, he lost more than sixty of those election cases, but that almost didn’t matter. His goal was to create enough uncertainty in the court of public opinion to give Republicans air cover on January 6, 2021 to refuse to certify the results. (It nearly worked, were it not for Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with the plot… and a violent mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol and discredited the whole effort.)

The real difference this time is that nobody gets to be surprised. Fulton County was an obvious rehearsal. Every single state must be on guard. Attorneys general should consider sending public letters to the chief judges of every federal district in their states putting them on alert. The letters should ask that any warrant application having to do with ballots or election equipment be heavily scrutinized and challenged, or elevated to a district judge. These frontline judges are the last check before the FBI trucks roll in, and after what happened in Fulton County, all of them need to know that they might be served bogus claims from the FBI for seizing America’s votes.

In the meantime, every at-risk state must have their emergency motions pre-drafted and ready to file within hours (fortunately, many already do). Secretaries of state should harden the chain of custody for ballots so an FBI seizure can’t feed on ambiguity. Local prosecutors must know their election-interference statutes front and back and be ready to prosecute lawbreaking feds (at DEFIANCE.org, we’ve helped many of them gear up to do precisely that). Finally, states should keep coordinating as a bloc, pre-bunking the “uncertainty” narrative before the Trump administration decides which races it wants to contest.

When he came for their voter rolls, most states told Donald Trump “no” and beat him every single time in court. The law is on their side. This fall, they need to be ready to say it again when the feds come for their ballots — with the paperwork already filed, before the FBI is at the door.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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

TODAY’S FEATURE: TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE ON TRIVIA TUESDAY!

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