Ten days ago I wrote about the need for a big pile of money and good lawyering that would not only defend Trump’s self-proclaimed “enemies list” from civil and criminal legal harassment but affirmatively take the fight to Trump and MAGA’s legal corruption and abuses of power. Today I want to return to that topic. There’s good news and bad news, or good news and suboptimal news. Your mileage may vary.
Let’s start with the good news. There actually are some groups mobilizing to do this kind of defense. I’m not going to get into particulars or names of the groups for reasons I’ll explain in a moment — but groups or consortia that are organizing to be the place that Trump targets can go when they get their subpoena or their lawsuit or whatever other form the harassment or abuse it takes. And it’s not just Trump. It’s a more general effort to defend civil society. So perhaps it’s the immigrants rights group which is targeted by a state attorney general. Or it’s the independent press outlet being targeting by the federal or a state government or your run-of-the-mill billionaire. This is happening and it involves a lot of pre-existing groups coordinating their efforts to this end, but also umbrella operations getting commitments for pro-bono work from law firms and much else.
But there’s a catch. For very real reasons these groups don’t want to draw a lot of attention to themselves. They don’t want themselves to become the targets of harassment and lawfare when they’re trying to defend others from it. If they themselves get run out of business who’s going to be around to help everyone else? So I can’t give websites for these operations that you’d want to look up if you’re a target or show you how to contribute money. They’re not set up that way and they don’t want the attention.
I have real questions whether that running-under-the-radar approach is viable. Can you really be a public force if you’re trying to stay under the radar? I’m not so sure that’s realistic. (I should add that I haven’t spoken with people who’ve worked with these groups, only the groups themselves. So that’s all I have to go on.) To the extent you’re doing meaningful work — and I think these groups will — you’re providing plenty of incentive to find out more about you. Indeed, when I first started poking around about this I was kind of contemptuous of this approach. It’s too public interesty! These aren’t the wartime consiglieres we need (so to speak)! But as I talked to people involved in these nascent efforts I shifted my thinking, at least a bit.
It’s not just Trump and official MAGA we have to worry about. We’re really facing an era of broader civic disinhibition, in which public and private actors will be declaring war on civil society, government employees and more in ways that simply haven’t happened in the past. There’s no one group that can combat that. And these nascent efforts are going to be a critical part of the equation — for the civil servant who gets harassed, for the nonprofit which needs legal assistance fending off financially ruinous subpoenas. And by this I don’t mean just to say … well, the small stuff. What I mean is that there’s going to be a lot of stuff, across society, across multiple layers of government. There’s a lot to go around. And not every individual or entity wants to become a poster child for MAGA abuses of power. Often they just need someone to pick up the legal work that would have bankrupted the organization or made an individual lose their home.
As I learned more, I decided that there’s actually a lot of complementarity between the nascent efforts I’m describing and and my imagined Big Pile of Money (BPM) group. So let me describe what that BPM group is and why it’s still necessary. There are three roles I think of — penumbras of fear, penumbras of safety and the grand political wrestling match.
One of the best ways I can think of to describe what I’m looking for is by an illusory hypothetical. Let’s imagine there was another billionaire out there — a non-decadent, non-degenerate version of Musk — who said: I believe in America. Every person Trump targets, I’m going to send them a contact number at mega law firm X, which I’ve retained, and it’s an open tab for as long as they need. And if you’re out there wondering if you’re willing to take the risks of doing the right thing over the next four years, I’ll be sending you a contact number too. And I’m going to do more than that. I’m going to use the channels of these abusive lawsuits and criminal investigations to load these folks down with every discovery motion you could have imagined. I’m going to use my cash and the courts not just to protect people but to embarrass and humiliate the abusers, make them wish they’d never started.
Obviously that person doesn’t exist or they haven’t come forward yet. And really that person would have so much power it’s not ideal to start with. That’s where Big Pile of Money group would come in, playing that role with billionaire and small donor money and a board of trusted individuals to make sure everything stays on the up and up. It’s possible one of the nascent efforts I’ve learned about will eventually take up that role. If they do, great. But at least so far the ones I’ve spoken to seem to lean against it.
Let’s go through our list of three things from above.
First, the penumbra of fear. That’s the whole point. Trump in most cases doesn’t care about the individuals involved. You do this to create a penumbra of fear that goes way beyond the targets involved. You can convince everyone else to keep their heads down or even send in their own versions of the $1 million initiation fees all the billionaires and corporations are currently sending in. A big fighting group like this pushes back on that penumbra of fear and starts creating the beginnings of a penumbra of safety. That is a critical, public, political though not partisan or ideological need: contracting the penumbra of fear and expanding the penumbra of safety.
But it’s not just defense. As we have seen over the last decade, our present politics is a big, loud spectacle of performative power and humiliation. It’s pro-wrestling in the civic square, as almost everyone has now realized. Whether you like that or not is beside the point. That’s the language of politics today.
The pressing problem is that on the lawfare front there’s only one wrestler in the ring, Trump. You need another fighter in the ring speaking and acting the same performative language, not just defending the targeted but damaging and embarrassing and humiliating the other side. Any operation that doesn’t play in that realm isn’t playing this performative, public role. That’s critical. It also operates a virtuous or at least non-vicious circle. People need to open their pockets — billionaires and average people. People open their pockets when they’re seeing points put on the board, when they see punches being landed. Defense is good, but offense is what gets people involved, sending in cash, feeling empowered rather than demoralized. You simply cannot do that by more or less quickly making targeted people’s minor to medium sized problems go away — even though it is absolutely necessary that groups and consortia doing that work be there.
That’s what I mean by the complementarity. You need both.
