Authoritarian fear is working

I spent the holidays traveling for a friend’s wedding, and for the first time in years, I was actually pretty unplugged from the news.

It was refreshing. It also meant that coming back was exhausting: invasions and indictments and ICE and Iran and immunizations; Greenland and gerrymanders and global warming.

Somehow, none of that is what frightens me the most right now.

I do political work with different Democratic-aligned causes, and what I’ve been seeing: the weaponization of the Presidency and the Department of Justice is having an immediate and meaningful impact on what people in politics are saying and doing.

Trump has forced people to reevaluate their political engagement, and in many cases, people are choosing to step back. He’s dramatically upped the stakes for people who choose to fight his agenda. Democratic volunteers and donors are looking over their shoulders. He’s made it harder to run for office.

That chills free speech and political expression—the bedrock of American society for 250 years. It’s maybe the most alarming thing happening in America today.

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Article summary:

• Fear—a fear of retribution from the federal government and/or a fear for personal safety—is forcing Democrats to reevaluate their political engagement.

• There is no sense that Republican elected officials are following the law, nor any sense that they’ll be punished for breaking the law.

• Many people who otherwise might run for office are scared off, fearing for their safety and for their family’s safety.

Among Democrats, there is a genuine fear of a vindictive Trump Presidency and Department of Justice

The most alarming thing that I’m seeing in Democratic politics: a lot of people are genuinely alarmed, and fearful, about the weaponization of our legal system.

To state the obvious: this is authoritarian, anti-democracy behavior. What’s happening to Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, and Jerome Powell cannot and should not become the norm in the United States of America.

But it’s forcing Democrats to behave differently. What does this mean in practice? A few examples I’ve seen:

• More people in Democratic politics are hiding their work, hiding where they live, and scrubbing references on the internet to make it harder to figure out who they are and what they’re working on.

• Political donors are cutting back their giving, or they’re working to obfuscate their political giving.¹ There is a fear that giving to the wrong causes or the wrong candidates will mobilize the Trump administration against the donor, their family, the companies they work for, etc.

• Almost everyone in politics uses Signal now,² with messages that delete within a week. There’s a feeling that messages could be taken out of context and, among the more paranoid, a fear that messages could be leaked or hacked.

• Non-U.S. citizens who are in the country legally are cutting back their political speech and activity, for fear of being deported.

All of this is, tragically, justified. People are being threatened at home; Democratic political donors are being looked at with more scrutiny; private conversations are being used as a pretense for punishment; people are being deported for exercising their right to free speech.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi is in Trump’s crosshairs for not being aggressive enough in going after his enemies. That is frightening.

People who work in politics aren’t exactly sympathetic to the general public, but we can all agree: this is un-American. It’s chilling free speech and it’s chilling our right to political expression.

It’s not exactly that people think they’ll end up in prison, though the more paranoid do worry about that. But here’s the reality: if the might of the United States Presidency comes down on you, it’s incredibly time-consuming, difficult, expensive, and stressful to fight. That’s true regardless of who you are, how well connected you are, or how much money you have.

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There’s no faith in our elected officials and diminishing faith in our courts

Speaking of which: there is little sense that the legal system is doing its job. In recent polling data, faith in our justice system is at an all-time low, and Supreme Court approval ratings are at or near all-time lows.

Our courts are nominally nonpartisan, but that’s not how they actually work. Just look at how they’ve ruled on different lawsuits against the Trump administration:

But even deeper than that, there’s a real sense that our Republican elected officials aren’t bothering to do their jobs and are ignoring the law without consequence. Let’s use the proposed veto referendum of Missouri’s gerrymander as an example.³

• Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, has refused to accept nearly 100,000 petition signatures, something he has no right to do.

• Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, said that citizens don’t have a right to a veto referendum when it comes to redistricting—never mind that it’s literally been done before.

• Hoskins then wrote incredibly misleading, biased ballot language, with the active goal of confusing voters.

• On the fly, Hoskins and Hanaway are changing the rules for what happens now that enough signatures have been gathered for the veto referendum. (Ordinarily, the existing legislation is suspended; they’ve decided they can do whatever they want.)

I’ve never been a fan of Denny Hoskins. But the issue isn’t so much that he’s routinely and willfully breaking the law, though he’s doing plenty of that. It’s that he’s routinely and willfully breaking the law and he faces no consequences for doing so, because he’s in the good graces of the state and federal government.

All of this is to say: as Democrats, there’s a real sense that playing by the rules doesn’t work, because the Republicans on the other side of the table aren’t even bothering with the pretense of norms, laws, or the Constitution anymore.

It’s getting harder to recruit the best people to run for office

I’ve written before about how hard it is to run for office. So when I spent time last year recruiting people to run for different U.S. House seats, I did so knowing that it wouldn’t be for everyone.

It's really hard to run for political office Ben Samuels · January 29, 2025 Read full story

I imagine that it’s always been challenging to run for office. But increasingly, taking that leap feels insane.

Let’s start with the big one: there’s a genuine, and justified, fear that you’re putting your life at risk, and you’re putting your family’s lives at risk. Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed last June by an assassin who had a list of 70 different “targets” in and around Democratic politics. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was politically motivated too.

It may be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: if you’re trying to get someone to run for political office, this looms incredibly large. (Most) people are trying to serve their communities; they’re not signing up to put their lives at risk.

Political assassinations are as old as politics themselves. So what feels different now? Two things:

1. People can communicate their thoughts (often unhinged, sometimes dangerous and threatening) directly to political candidates and elected officials via email and social media.⁴

2. We have a President who eagerly promotes conspiracy theories all the time; take what he’s saying about the assassination of Melissa Hortman as just one small example. It’s good that Republican state legislators in Minnesota are speaking out against this, but they do not have the megaphone that Trump has.

The risk and fear of violence, fueled by a President who encourages that violence, is making it even harder to get some of the best people to put their names on the ballot.

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We’re living in a moment of fear

I’m not a fatalist. America has survived other undemocratic moments like the one we’re living in now, and I have faith that we will again.

But I don’t take that as a given. It’s why I’m calling this out, because I haven’t seen many others talk about what’s happening.

The intimidation and fear coming from Trump and his DOJ is antithetical to everything America stands for. Free political expression has been the underpinning of our government and society since the Constitution was ratified.

There is no question that what Donald Trump and his administration are doing is chilling free expression and chilling political discourse. That’s intentional on their part. And it’s truly frightening.

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