Advice to Funders: Protect Democracy Defenders Who Stand Up to Trump
Trump threatens all who dare to challenge him. Help them stay safe and hire lawyers.
SO YOU’RE RICH, VERY RICH. You’re anywhere on the political spectrum, you cannot abide Donald Trump, and you’re looking for ways to make sure this era ends while you’re still alive. Preferably while you have some time left to savor life in a post-MAGA world.
The question is where to put your money. In the spirit of the giving season, how about launching a bipartisan Stand Up to Trump Freedom Fund? While threats are a bipartisan plague these days, and last week saw Trump cabinet and staff picks targeted along with MAGA threats against Democratic lawmakers, the most immediate and straightforward need is money to underwrite legal, physical, and political protection for people who fear breaking with or taking on Trump.
In their short history in U.S. politics, Trump and his MAGA movement have already demonstrated that all perceived enemies, rivals, and critics of Trump are vulnerable. Targets have ranged from state-level election workers and authorities to senators, representatives, military leaders, the federal workforce, and their high-profile bosses.
Republicans who supported the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law were called traitors for giving President Joe Biden a win, and some received death threats. The temperature inevitably will rise under Trump, given his personnel choices and his explicit promise to perpetually aggrieved conservatives last year that “I will be your retribution.” That’s especially true now that he’s announced he’ll fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and replace him with wannabe hatchet-man Kash Patel.
As early as the afternoon of January 20, Trump will be able to officially nominate his roster of dangerous picks for top jobs and to fire, or at least attempt to fire, any federal employee deemed hostile or woke—from the career Justice Department lawyers who brought two federal criminal cases against him, to homeland security bureaucrats who might not rubber-stamp Trump’s radical anti-immigrant policies, to an expert in a highly technical “climate diversification” job described by the Wall Street Journal as “identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.”
Standing up to Trump is risky and expensive. A critical mass of Republican senators managed to convince Trump to back away from Matt Gaetz for attorney general after an action-packed eight days in which Trump announced the choice, Gaetz resigned from Congress, sex-and-drug investigation details started leaking, Trump “instructed Gaetz to jump” (as Bill Kristol put it), and Gaetz jumped.
But there are frightening Trump picks still in play, and ten GOP senators—maybe closer to a dozen—are potential defectors. Those who run for re-election in 2026 after defying Trump have been assured they’ll have MAGA primary challengers. Those who retire will have to worry about their personal safety until they leave office in January 2027.
We’ve seen it all before, and not just on infrastructure. When Trump and MAGA take offense, people get death threats. Their spouses and families get death threats. They get fired and they get primaried. They sue or get sued. Paul Pelosi was beaten and nearly killed by a disturbed person trying to find his wife (then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), interrogate her about the FBI investigation Trump calls “Russiagate,” and maybe “break her knees.”
Trump’s allies and aides themselves sound like mob enforcers when they talk about his (less than resounding) victory, his billionaire backers, and what Team Trump expects of senators. “The mandate and the order from the American people is: Whoever he nominates and appoints, you better pass them through the Senate,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on a podcast last month. “That is your job. You say ‘Yes sir!’ and you get it done.”
An unnamed senior adviser gave the same warning to ABC’s Jonathan Karl in even more raw language. “If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it,” the adviser said, adding: “The president gets to decide his cabinet. No one else. That’s just the way it is.”
And then there was the “high level” MAGA-world figure—maybe the same one who talked to Karl—who told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman: “They should be afraid. They didn’t win the election. Trump did.”
The refusal of GOP senators to get on board with the Gaetz nomination was either a onetime act of defiance or a prelude to blocking the growing number of compromised, unqualified, and outrageously inappropriate picks on Trump’s “team of outlaws.” Trump is banking on the former. Or else what? Republican senators who vote against his nominees are “signing their political death warrants,” Steve Bannon told Semafor on Friday.
Sherman calls lawmaker safety an undercovered story, and I agree. Most Trump-MAGA targets, even members of Congress, don’t have the kind of money to hire bodyguards or lawyers. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump in both his impeachment trials, said a year ago that he had been spending $5,000 a day on private security to protect his family since the January 6th Capitol riot. He also said other senators did not vote to convict Trump because they feared for their families’ safety and could not afford protection.
Maybe it’s craven, but I don’t discount the comfort and security that would come from knowing there are deep pockets on the side of truth, justice, and undermining the Trump-Musk regime. On the side of normal people who may need financial help in the face of physical threats, political threats, and partisan firings that should be challenged.
Pitching in to protect standing up to Trump would strengthen freedom of speech, thought, and conscience among elected officials, and help protect the civil servants we count on without even realizing it. Violence and coercion are not the American way. We need all the help we can get to make sure they don’t prevail.
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