'People are going silent': Fearing retribution, Trump critics muzzle themselves

Washington: The silence grows louder every day.

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. CEOs alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.

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

More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond.

People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Trump's image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Musk, the president's partner and the world's richest man.

"When you see important societal actors -- be it university presidents, media outlets, CEOs, mayors, 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 University and the co-author of the influential 2018 book "How Democracies Die."

Trump campaigned in 2024 promising retribution against his enemies and has quickly sent menacing signals from the White House. He revoked the security details of high-profile critics like Gen. Mark Milley, a retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chair who faces death threats from Iran, and said he would pull the security clearances of lawyers at a law firm who are representing Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated him.

One prominent first-term critic of 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.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., was wavering in his support for Pete Hegseth, Trump's nominee for defense secretary, until the president threatened him with a primary, Tillis did a turnabout and Hegseth won confirmation. (Tillis' office said the senator was simply performing careful vetting.)

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., told Zelenskyy in a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel that he was there with other senators "as a show of support." But after Trump's confrontation with Zelenskyy later that day, Wicker took down a social media post showing him shaking hands with the Ukrainian leader.

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 Trump's statements on Ukraine or why other Republicans were not speaking out.

Most elected Republicans are fully supportive of Trump and his agenda, and on issues like immigration, some Democrats are moving in his direction, reflecting public opinion. Democrats were divided over the wisdom of the protest by Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, during Trump's address to Congress on Tuesday night.

But the lack of pushback from targets of Trump's retribution and policy agenda is striking, if understandable in other cases.

University presidents are largely silent because they are protecting their institutions, said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education. "Don't wrestle with a pig," he said. "You'll just get muddy and annoy the pig."

Business leaders rarely criticize presidents of either party, and in any case, they like Trump's plans for tax cuts and deregulation, if not his tariffs. They also recognize, one of them said, that "periodically culling the workforce is actually good for a healthy organization."

But that business leader thinks that CEOs see the way that Musk is going about slashing the federal workforce as "totally crazy" -- but would say so only on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.

Pressure on Intellectual Life

Not everyone is staying silent. Consider Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University.

"This is the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era," Roth said in an interview. "And I think it'll be seen in the future, as that time was seen, as a time when people either stood up for their values or ran in fear of the federal government."

Roth has called some of the Trump administration's rhetoric authoritarian and has spoken out in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In an interview in The Washington Post's opinion section last month, he criticized Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for using their Ivy League degrees to advance professionally while portraying themselves as populists against "woke" universities.

People sometimes tell him he has courage, Roth said, but he insisted it wasn't so. "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."

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

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. and a frequent critic of Trump, said the real fear among Republicans in the House who might otherwise voice criticism of the administration on some issues was violence against their families.

"I'm friends with a lot of these guys, and I had wrongly assumed that what was holding them back from speaking out against Trump was they were afraid of losing their jobs," he said in an interview. "But what they're afraid of is their own personal security. They tell me that their wives tell them, 'Don't contribute to us getting harassed at church or at the grocery store or at the club.'"

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 own family, and that his daughter recently included a member of his security detail in a drawing of her family for her kindergarten class.

Sen. Todd Young of Indiana is one Republican who has experienced browbeating from Musk for not staying in line. After Young asked tough questions last month at the confirmation hearing of Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump's director of national intelligence, Musk said on social media that Young was a "deep state puppet."

Musk soon deleted his post and said he had spoken to Young, whom he was suddenly calling "a great ally in restoring power to the people." Young went on to confirm Gabbard, although in an interview, he pointedly said he had not discussed her with Musk.

"I don't think anyone should be afraid to register their convictions," he said. "OK?"

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., 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? Musk, he said, has issued "a credible electoral threat" to finance primary opponents.

And yet, senators only face reelection every six years. "Frankly," 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."

'Totally Reasonable to Be Worried'

Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who oversaw the Biden campaign's successful efforts to beat back lawsuits filed by allies of Trump seeking to overturn his 2020 election loss, is sharply critical of Republicans who say they acquiesce to Trump out of fear.

"I know what it's like to be targeted by him and the mob he unleashes," Elias said in an interview. "It is totally reasonable to be worried. But for a Republican senator to say they are so worried that they're going to betray their oath of office is such cowardice. Why are you in office?"

Other Republicans see the warnings of authoritarianism as overblown.

"I'm becoming less and less sympathetic," said former Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his role in egging on the Jan. 6, 2021, mob at the Capitol. "The rending of cloth and the gnashing of teeth, good lord."

After the anti-Israel protests against the war in Gaza on college campuses, Meijer said, "there's a lot more that the fringes on either side share with each other."

That is the perspective of Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur who supported Kamala Harris for president in 2024 and who spoke recently in Washington at the Principles First summit, an annual anti-Trump gathering. The Republicans, he said, saw "all the identity politics and all the wokeness" on the left "as the real silencing factor."

Cuban added that "now that Trump has won, there isn't value in calling him names. Name-calling is good for running for office, sometimes. Good for trying to get people excited at a rally. But neither fit me."

Olivia Troye, a first-term Trump White House official who broke with him and spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, said that the "Never Trump" movement had splintered and that it was difficult for her to watch what was happening.

"We're in a moment when there's self-preservation, and I don't blame people for that," she said. "But we need to remind ourselves that we have the power. The only reason that they have the power and are continuing to do what they do is that people are going silent."

As Trump has continued his aggressive effort to reshape the government, there are some signs that more people are speaking out.

In a letter to lawmakers last month, five former defense secretaries who served under Republicans and Democrats -- Lloyd Austin, Jim Mattis, Leon E. Panetta, Chuck Hagel and William J. Perry -- condemned Trump's firing of senior military leaders last month and asked that the House and the Senate hold "immediate hearings to assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump's dismissals."

House Republicans are facing voters angry about Musk's assault on the federal bureaucracy at town hall gatherings around the country, a hint of a growing backlash.

Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford Motor, was critical last month of 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."

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

Levitsky said he had some hope. The United States, he said, has a "wealthy and diverse opposition," and rather than outright authoritarianism, there could be "a slow and gradual slide into a gray area."

As he put it, "no democracy this old or this rich has ever broken down."

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.