Your Silence Isn't Strategy. It's Surrender.

Stop deluding yourself that you're the adult in the room. If you stay, you're complicit in Trump's crimes.

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and CIA Director John Ratcliffe speak before a Cabinet meeting featuring “Gulf of America” hats for everyone, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in the Cabinet Room. | Official White House Photo by Molly Riley

There are two kinds of Trump appointees.

At the senior level, we have the ambitious, the telegenic, and the master sycophants. This column is most certainly not for J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, or any of the other Fox alumni staining the government with their incompetence and malice.

It’s not for the committed cultists and Trumphadi ideologies like Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Karoline Leavitt. They’re part of the inner cult, the Worshipful Company of the Golden Kneepad.

It’s not for the MAGA Schedule Cs trolling on government accounts or the misfit lawyers with degrees from state schools who got here by pretending they spotted election fraud or the sons of donors in tailored suits, but rather for the quietly horrified agency staffers who grimace at the orders but execute them anyway.

This is for the ones who reassure themselves that they’re “the adults in the room,” that they’re protecting the country from even worse outcomes by staying in a job that’s now indistinguishable from a moral meat grinder. This is for the law enforcement types in DHS, ICE, the FBI who feel themselves being tugged closer and closer to a new role as a domestic Federal brute squad. This is for the officers in the military being pushed to use their troops against American citizens.

You know what’s happening. You see it every day, and unlike the rest of us, you’re not guessing. You’re not reading tea leaves or decoding threads on X or poring through court filings; you’re in the room. You’re reading, and sometimes writing, the memos, hearing the plans, watching the dismantling of decency and law and human dignity in real time.

And still, you stay. Silent. Complicit.

You don’t get to play the stunned victim later. Not this time.