Fearing Payback, Critics of Trump Mute Themselves

A Chill Stifles Debate, From Colleges to Capital, Averting Threats and Protecting Careers

Author

Matt Davis
March 09, 2025

Hey, friends. For those of you who are new here, I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each morning at 9 a.m. if you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later).

It’s the first day of “daylight savings” here in New York, which means I got out of bed at 8:40 a.m., which as the father of a rambunctious almost-four-year-old may as well be noon! My “Whoop” says I am 95% recovered! Let’s do this!

Convicted felon Donald Trump has recently tanked the stock market, made unconstitutional moves to pull congressional funding from a variety of agencies and been rebuked even by a Supreme Court stacked in his party’s favor, done Vladimir Putin’s bidding in negotiations to bring “PEACE” to the war in Ukraine, lied repeatedly and obviously about a multitude of things, spread disinformation wantonly and deliberately, Tweeted that he wants to turn Gaza into a Trump resort, and was, let’s not forget, found liable for sexually abusing (and subsequently, defaming by lying about it) Jean Carroll in the changing rooms at Bergdorf Goodman. I say all this not to “criticize” the president, but merely to relay the objective facts which are true about the president, and which I’m glad to know because I’ve been reading the newspaper so that you don’t have to. God bless a free press in a democracy! Those, too, are just the facts off the top of my head. If I went back through the archive of this month-and-three-days-old-newsletter I’m sure I could extend this paragraph by a few hundred words. Last week I applied for an Annenberg Civic Media Fellowship for this initiative which I expect they’ll turn me down for because this newsletter is too controversial for their milquetoast liberal tastes, but that’s fine. F__k the Annenberg Civic Media Fellowship! (*you see what I did there? I spoke up against my interests because I’m not a coward in a democracy! It’s a muscle we all need to flex!).

The point is, I ain’t afraid of no ghosts Trump. It’s true that my business serving nonprofits with strategic communications advice and PR services has seen multiple contracts pulled thanks to “Agent Orange’s” effect. It’s been surprising to the extent that I’ve started a new initiative with some colleagues called the Department of Nonprofit Efficiency (D.O.N.E), and we’re selling t-shirts! (*Say, if you want to hire us, we’re available, although honestly, six people have booked meetings with us this week and I don’t expect my personal Trump Slump to last as long as the stock market’s, or, frankly, Donald’s. Still, f__k you, Donald! You ain’t gonna finish me off that easy!).

The bigger point of reading the newspaper today is that most people are very much afraid of no ghosts Trump.

Ray Parker Junior from the Ivan Reitman-directed music video for his theme tune to Ghostbusters. The song was my earliest introduction to pop-funk. I couldn’t believe how catchy it was! Fun fact: Huey Lewis also settled out of court with Parker because of similarities to the song “I Want A New Drug” which is rather similar, actually, and should probably have been your theme tune in the 1980s. I told you I had slept well.

“The silence grows louder ever day” according to today’s lead story by Elisabeth Bumiller who is writing about all the people who are scared to say things about Donald Trump. A democracy, as the Washington Post’s slogan will tell you, “dies in darkness,” as well as, er…silence, although that’s ironic because the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos, under whose tenure that slogan was coined in 2017, recently slashed the paper’s opinion section in favor of something altogether more Trump-friendly. Here’s the paper’s former editor, Marty Baron, writing about Bezos’s new liquid spine in the Atlantic six days ago. Get ready to throw up a bit in your mouth.

All the signs lately point to a determined effort by Bezos to either placate Trump or please him outright: quashing an editorial that backed Kamala Harris for president only 11 days before the election and ending a decades-long tradition of presidential endorsements. A gushing postelection message of congratulations to Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback,” with no mention of Trump’s sordid resistance to the peaceful transition of power, which marked a historic low in presidential politics. Having Amazon join other tech companies in donating $1 million to the inauguration fund. Making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago for a late-night dinner with Trump, where Bezos and Melania Trump discussed a documentary about her—a chat that led to a $40 million licensing deal with Amazon, reportedly nearly three times the offer of the next-highest bidder. Sitting on the dais, as Trump’s showpiece, during the inauguration ceremony. And, last week, a Bezos memo prohibiting any opinion articles in the Post that aren’t aligned with his own ideology of “personal liberties and free markets,” an imperious intervention that caused the editorial-page editor to resign. Trump himself disclosed that he’d dined with Bezos the very evening the Post owner issued his latest dictate.

F__k you, Jeff Bezos! You’re an enabler of fascism, too! So, who’s scared to speak out against these goons, Ms. Bumiller?

“Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

“Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill, stunned by President Trump’s revisionist history that Ukraine is to blame for its invasion by Russia, and his Oval Office blowup at President Volodymyr Zelensky, have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Mr. Trump or completely reversed their positions.”

It may be because I grew up in Croydon. It may be because I had a very good anti-bullying teacher when I was, like, nine years old. Or perhaps it’s just that as a former journalist I value the importance of speaking truth to power. But I am incensed by all this weakness. When speaking up might cost you personally, it’s all the more important to speak up. Turn the other cheek, compadres! We all need to find the courage to do so, or the stakes are high.

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, CEOs, mayors, or governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”

I’m surprised he found the courage to speak up on the matter, given that the White House on Friday canceled $400 million in Federal Grants to Columbia University. Hey, you know who else got their funding yanked at Columbia University?

Ray Stantz and Peter Venkman, people.

Ms. Bumiller recounts the increase in spinelessness in some depth. Here’s an eye-roller. Like WHO IS THIS?

“One prominent first-term critic of Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that not only would he not comment on the record, he did not want to be mentioned in this article at all. Every time his name appears in public, he said, the threats against him from the far right increase.”

Oh, gosh. The article also recounts the about-face of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina — chronicled here on Feb 16 — who got back into his box about the appointment of Pete Hegseth, a violent drunk, as defense secretary after Trump threatened to run someone against him in the next primary.

A senator from Mississippi took down a social media post showing him shaking hands with Mr. Zelensky after the confrontation with Donald Trump. And…

“More than a half-dozen Republican defense hawks in the Senate — not a group usually shy about communicating its views — declined to comment for this article or did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. Trump’s statements on Ukraine or why other Republicans were not speaking out.”

That’s so damning, don’t you think?

The article compares the pressure on intellectuals to that of the McCarthy era. Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is often told he’s brave for speaking up, but he insists it isn’t so. I love this quote:

“When people tell me, ‘Oh, you’re brave,’ it frightens the hell out of me,” he said. “I’m a little neurotic Jewish kid from Long Island. I’m afraid of everything.

Mr. Roth is going public, he said, “because it’s a scandal that the federal government is trying to keep people from speaking their minds.”

We all need to talk about why we’re scared to speak up, I think, based on where we’re from. Repeat after me: “I’m a scared x y z kid from _________, and I’m scared to speak up about Donald Trump being a danger to democracy, but I’m doing so because the idea of being silenced by fascism is more frightening.”

Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, is quoted saying Republicans in the house don’t want to get harassed at the grocery store or country club.

“Mr. Swalwell, who receives plenty of threats himself, said that he spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his campaign and office funds on security for his family, and that his daughter recently included a member of his security detail in a drawing of her family for her kindergarten class.”

This paragraph reminds me of another California politician:

Arrrrrrrnold.

Elon Musk called Senator Todd Young of Indiana a “deep state puppet“ on Twitter last month after Mr. Young asked tough questions at the confirmation hearing of Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard’s views are in fact so wildly fringe that her confirmation is genuinely alarming. I believe that, but it’s also the view of security experts. 

Musk “soon deleted his post and said he had spoken to Mr. Young, whom he was suddenly calling “a great ally in restoring power to the people.” And Mr. Young went on to confirm Ms. Gabbard. But he doesn’t sound too pleased about it.

Musk has changed the calculus on all this, it seems.

Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat who is friendly with a broad group of Senate Republicans, said in an interview that “those who I have traveled with and worked with and prayed with and been involved with in foreign aid and foreign policy are struck by the swiftness, the forcefulness, the cruelty and the lack of organization of the cuts.”

Why do they not speak out? Mr. Musk, he said, has issued “a credible electoral threat” to finance primary opponents.

And yet, senators only face re-election every six years. “Frankly,” Mr. Coons said, “it is a combination of hoping that things change and somehow this all comes apart and the chain-saw approach to government stops.”

I think a way of paraphrasing that is: “If only Mr. Musk would suffer some sort of Ketamine overdose.”

What’s fascinating about all this is that Republicans have also been spreading fear of the “silencing” effect of “woke politics” on the left. In this piece from March 1 about “What Republican Men think of Trump and Masculinity,” for example, there’s this:

Even if Mr. Vance was exaggerating when he said men can’t tell a joke or have a beer with friends, he and Mr. Trump, along with the podcasters who helped them relay their message to men, tapped into something, said Richard Reeves, founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. “The playfulness, the transgression, the freewheeling conversation” is happening on the right, he said — while people on the left are too scared to say the wrong thing.

I’ve been deepening a lot of my friendships with men in New York, lately, and discussing this danger, openly. We have all agreed that it’s very important to be able to say the “c-word” as we’re talking about Donald Trump. Whatever you may think of that, I’ll defend its importance to the grave! But as Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer, says in this article:

“For a Republican senator to say they’re so worried that they’re going to betray their oath of office is such cowardice. Why are you in office?”

Meanwhile there are signs that some are finding their courage.

Jim Farley, the chief executive of Ford, was sharply critical last month of Mr. Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on cars and components from Mexico and Canada, saying they “will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen.”

Mr. Trump made good on that threat and imposed 25 percent tariffs this week on all products from Canada and Mexico. But after a conference call on Wednesday with executives from the three largest automakers, including Mr. Farley, Mr. Trump said he would pause tariffs on cars coming into the United States from Canada and Mexico for one month.

The bottom line, it seems, is that the more outspoken everyone is about Donald Trump and his colleagues being…dangerous for America, the better for America. It’s not rocket science, that. But it does take guts. Let’s find ours.

Repeat after me: “Donald Trump is a ____.”

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and child.