Donald Trump has accused James Comey and Jimmy Kimmel of inflaming violence against him through their use of Instagram photos and late-night television jokes. It’s a remarkable irony. The man whose rhetoric and actions have created an entire culture of intimidation across Washington is claiming that words of criticism are what is dangerous.
But the irony runs even deeper than it first appears. Trump didn’t build this system of fear through government censorship alone: he built it through a mob. And that mob is far more effective at scaring people into “self-censorship” than any presidential order could ever be.
When I revealed myself in 2020 as the anonymous critic from inside the Trump administration, I experienced both forms of censorship at once. Trump’s official response was swift. In retaliation for criticising him, he threatened me with federal investigation. “He should be prosecuted!” Trump bellowed to pitchfork crowds, calling for his Justice Department to investigate me. But those weren’t the threats that did the most to upend my life – it was the crowdsourced violence.
After I came forward, death threats flooded in. Those rallygoers took Trump’s message – that “terrible things” should happen to me – to heart. They fired off emails, social media posts and letters to my house. People demanded that I be hung and shot by firing squad. They posted photos of my family online, pictures of my nieces and images outside my siblings’ homes. It escalated to the point that I had to leave to live temporarily in a safe house and hire armed security.
After stalkers kept finding my location, my security team recommended my vehicle be searched for electronic tracking devices. So I took my car to a location near CIA headquarters, where former intelligence officers helped disassemble it looking for bugs. They didn’t find any. The experts were as confounded as I was about how people kept doxxing my location. The mob was almost omnipotent.
Trump left office in 2021, and it all settled down, but that didn’t last long. When he returned four years later, he opened a federal investigation into me for “treason”. Like clockwork, another wave of threats began. The violent missives were directed against me, my wife and even my infant. We had to upgrade security everywhere we stayed. In some cases, it got bad enough that we’ve been forced to take legal action against people we’d never met in states across the country.
So, you want to know why people self-censor? It is situations like mine. Trump and his acolytes realise they don’t need to arrest everyone, they just need to make enough public examples that everyone else decides speaking up isn’t worth the cost.
And that’s partly the calculation Republican members of Congress are making right now, despite the fact that some Maga influencers are abandoning the President. I’ve been texting with some of those elected GOP leaders over the past few weeks, urging them to follow suit, to speak out.
I know they’re appalled by Trump. When he was threatening genocide, they said so – to me, in private messages. But not one of them has spoken out publicly. In some ways, I understand why, because I’ve seen what speaking out costs.
But what they don’t get is that their silence is making it worse for them, not better. Intimidation is a vicious cycle. As soon as you cower, the current grows stronger. The ones doing the intimidation face less resistance, realise their tactics are working, and double down. Unfortunately, the numbers have proven this to be the case in America.
According to the US Capitol Police, violent threats against US members of Congress have soared from roughly a thousand a year in 2016 to nearly ten thousand annually. Not coincidentally, this aligns with Trump’s tenure in public life. His most extreme followers are being trained that intimidation works. Every Republican who stays silent is reinforcing the lesson that threats get results.
I can pinpoint the exact moment many of these Republicans really lost their nerve: January 6, 2021. Incidentally, that was the same day my car was being searched for tracking devices by former spooks. As it was being picked apart, a mob was storming the United States Capitol. The Republicans who witnessed that day internalised a lesson: Trump not only was willing to threaten them with official revenge if they strayed from his edicts, but he was also able to dispatch violent crowds to do his bidding. So they shut themselves up.
The only way to break the cycle is numbers. When enough people speak out at once, the attack surface diffuses. The threats lose their isolating power, and then the calculation changes. Like any marketplace – as we all learned in economics – the price of dissent goes down the more we increase the supply of dissenters.
Those Republican senators and congressmen now whispering their objections could transform the entire dynamic if they would simply say out loud what they’re already saying to people like me in texts or on the margins of events in Washington. They think their silence is protecting them, but their silence is precisely what’s making it worse for everyone else, including themselves.
It’s possible that the growing number of Maga influencers deciding to break with Trump will be enough to get Republican leaders to find their spines, too. Perhaps they’ll begin to see that Trump’s censorship attacks against public figures like James Comey and Jimmy Kimmel set a precedent that could be used against them in the future by a vengeful Democrat president.
Or maybe – just maybe – they’ll realise that the scariest form of censorship is the one they’re doing to themselves. While short-term silence might bring temporary safety, history tells us it costs us something fundamental: our liberty.
Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a No 1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator and democracy reform leader.