Ten days ago I wrote about the need for a big pile of money and good lawyers who will not only defend Trump’s “enemies list” from civil and criminal legal harassment, but will actively fight the battle against Trump’s legal corruption, MAGA, and human rights abuses. power. Today I want to return to this topic. There is good news and bad news, or good news and suboptimal news. Your mileage may vary.
Let’s start with the good news. There are actually some groups that mobilize to do this type of advocacy. I’m not going to go into details or names of the groups for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, but the groups or federations organize to be the place Trump’s targets can go when they receive a subpoena or a lawsuit or whatever. Another form of harassment or abuse that it takes. And it’s not just Trump. It is a more general effort to defend civil society. So it may be the immigrant rights group that the state attorney general is targeting. Or it’s the independent journalistic outlet being targeted by the federal government, the state government, or the average billionaire. And that’s what’s happening, and it involves a lot of pre-existing groups coordinating their efforts toward that end, but also end-to-end processes that get commitments for pro bono work from law firms and many other things.
But there is a catch. For very real reasons, these groups don’t want to attract too much attention to themselves. They don’t want to become targets of harassment and lawfare themselves when they try to defend others from it. If they themselves run out of work, who will be there to help everyone? So I can’t give you the websites for these operations you might want to look up if you’re being targeted or show you how to contribute money. They are not set up that way and do not want attention.
I have real questions about whether this discreet approach is workable. Can you really be a public force if you’re trying to stay under the radar? I’m not sure this is realistic. (I should add that I didn’t talk to people who worked with these groups, just the groups themselves. So that’s all I have to go on.) To the extent that you do meaningful work — and I think these groups will — you provide a lot of incentives to know More about you. In fact, when I first started researching this, I was kind of disdainful of that approach. It’s a very public interest! These are not the advisors we need in wartime (so to speak)! But when I talked to people involved in these emerging efforts, I changed my thinking, at least a little.
It’s not just Trump and official MAGA that we have to worry about. We are truly facing an era of broader civil repression, where public and private actors will declare war on civil society, government employees, and others in ways that have not happened in the past. There is no single group that can combat this. These emerging efforts will be an important part of the equation — for the government employee facing harassment, and for the nonprofit organization needing legal help to stave off financially devastating subpoenas. And by that I don’t just mean to say… well, the little things. What I mean is that there will be a lot of things, across society, across multiple layers of government. There’s a lot to go around. And not every individual or entity wants to become a model for MAGA abuses of power. They often just need someone to take on the legal work that would otherwise result in the organization going bankrupt or the individual losing their home.
As I learned more, I decided that there was actually a lot of complementarity between the startup efforts I was describing and my imagined Big Pile of Money (BPM). So let me describe what a BPM suite is and why it is still necessary. There are three roles I’m thinking of: Shadows of Fear, Shadows of Safety, and the Great Political Wrestling Match.
One of the best ways I can think of to describe what I’m looking for is an imaginary assumption. Let’s imagine there was another billionaire – a non-promiscuous, non-promiscuous version of Musk – who said: I believe in America. Every person Trump targets, I’ll send them a contact number at huge law firm And if you’re wondering if I’m willing to take the risk of doing the right thing over the next four years, I’ll send you a contact number as well. I will do more than that. I will use the channels of these abusive lawsuits and criminal investigations to charge these people with every discovery move you can imagine. I will use my money and the courts to not only protect people but to embarrass and humiliate abusers, making them wish they had never started.
Obviously this person does not exist or has not come forward yet. And really, this one is going to have a lot of power, and it’s not ideal to start with. This is where the Big Pile of Money will come in, playing this role with billionaire money, small donors, and a board of trusted individuals to make sure everything stays on top. It’s possible that one of the emerging efforts I’ve learned about will eventually fill that role. If they do, great. But at least so far the people I’ve talked to seem to be leaning against it.
Let’s go through our list of three things from the top.
First, the shadow of fear. That’s the point. Trump in most cases does not care about the individuals involved. You do this to create a shadow of fear beyond the targets in question. You can convince everyone to keep their heads down or even send out their own versions of the $1 million start-up fee that all billionaires and corporations send out today. A large battle group like this resists the specter of fear and begins to create the world. The beginnings of the darkness of safety. This is a critical, public and political need, although not partisan or ideological: to reduce the shadow of fear and expand the shadow of safety.
But it’s not just defense. As we have seen over the past decade, our current politics represent a large and tumultuous spectacle of performative power and humiliation. It’s professional wrestling in the civilian arena, as almost everyone has realized by now. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. This is the language of politics today.
The pressing problem is that on the legal war front there is only one gladiator in the ring, and that is Trump. You need another fighter in the ring who speaks and acts in the same performative language, not only to defend the goal but also to hurt, embarrass and humiliate the other side. Any process that does not play in this field does not play this general performative role. This is crucial. It also runs a virtuous circle, or at least a vicious one. People need to open their pockets – billionaires and ordinary people. People open their pockets when they see points placed on the board, when they see punches being thrown. Defense is good, but offense is what keeps people engaged, sending money, and feeling empowered rather than demoralized. You cannot do this simply by eliminating the small and medium-sized problems faced by the targeted people more or less quickly – although it is absolutely essential that the groups and associations that do this work are present.
This is what I mean by integration. You need both.