The behind-the-scenes strategy Trump is using to silence his loudest critics

When we think of strongman dictatorships we often imagine tanks in the streets, but those usually come in the later stages of repression (think Tienanmen Square) and often are never even needed (think today’s Russia). Instead, as every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically-selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away.

That’s the message of this week’s raid on Ilhan Omar’s home, and so many other atrocities committed by Trump’s eager fascist lickspittles over the past 21 months. He and his advisors are simply repeating a long and well-trod history.

On the morning of March 14, 1757, King George II ordered Admiral John Byng executed by firing squad on the quarterdeck of the HMS Monarch in Portsmouth harbor. His crime? He’d just lost a battle off the coast of Minorca. Two years later, Voltaire wrote the event into his novella Candide, having the hero of his story watch the execution from the deck of a nearby ship. When a sailor standing with him asks why Byng was killed, his hero replied:

“In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others. Pour encourager les autres.”

The phrase has been foundational to the rise of every tyrant in history since. Pick a few people, make an example of them, and the fear will spread across the population in a way that’s just as effective as an army of secret police.

The genius, as Voltaire pointed out, is that it costs almost nothing yet, when done right, can have enormous impact on public behavior.

Trump has been running this play since the day he took office, and this week he ran it again, this time on a member of Congress just three weeks before an election.

Reports suggest that Homeland Security Investigations — a division of ICE — raided Ilhan Omar’s house in Washington looking for paperwork her late father filled out when she was a child refugee. She has not been charged with a crime and, as is so common, ICE isn’t explaining what they’re up to here.

That same afternoon Trump called her “totally crooked” and went off on her that night in Youngstown, Ohio calling the country she came from “one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet” while the crowd chanted “deport.”

Ever since March, this administration has apparently been looking for ways to take down this high-profile and unapologetic critic of Trump and his many criminal and authoritarian acts. Back in March, JD Vance told a rightwing podcaster that Omar had “definitely committed immigration fraud” and that Stephen Miller was working out “how do you go after her, how do you investigate her, how do you build a case.”

As former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor told me on my radio/TV program when Trump went after him, Comey, and others, the raid itself is the punishment.

To destroy a person financially, to traumatize them emotionally, and to scare the hell out of their colleagues in a way that will make them shut up you don’t need a conviction. Hell, you don’t even need a trial. Just a subpoena, a lawyer letter filled with threats, or a raid can lead to hundreds of thousands in lawyer bills and months of sleepless nights.

This has now — like in Russia — become standard operating practice. And it reaches all the way down to a single mother of two in New Jersey; Joanne Carducci, who posts as JoJoFromJerz on Substack, revealed last month that lawyers for the president and first lady spent the first half of this year sending her letters demanding a retraction, an apology, and money over her online criticism of Melania Trump. She bravely describes in detail how threats left her worrying about her children, her home, and her livelihood.

And that’s one of the most low-profile of the cases; we never would have known if she hadn’t spoken up. How many other authors and commentators have been similarly threatened? Odds are 99% will never write about it, particularly if the threats also contain demands for confidentiality like hers apparently did.

— There’s James Comey, indicted twice now, most recently for putting a photo of seashells on social media. It’s been six months since he was charged, and he won’t even be arraigned until January of next year. And the Justice Department fired his daughter from her job as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

— Letitia James, who got a fraud conviction against Trump, was indicted for mortgage fraud last October and after the case was dismissed in November Todd Blanche brought the same case before two more grand juries over two weeks; both still refused to indict her. Now Bill Pulte is going after her.

— Lisa Cook was merely the first Black woman to be a governor of the Federal Reserve, an intolerable situation for this racist, revanchist regime. After the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s efforts to fire her, last week Trump signed an order for her to appear at a closed-door kangaroo court “hearing” on November 5th, two days after the election.

— They went after Senator Adam Schiff, who had to set up a legal defense fund to deal with the consequences.

— Cassidy Hutchison, who at 25 sat in front of the January 6th committee and told her story, has — bizarrely — the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ coming after her.

— When Trump turned his machine against former CIA Director John Brennan, who’s been publicly criticizing Trump, two prosecutors in a row quit so they’ve staffed the case with military lawyers and a former clerk to Judge Aileen Cannon.

— And then there’s Davey Hearn, the three-time Olympian who touched the Reflecting Pool that Trump had hired a donor and friend to re-paint. He was arrested, Jeanine Pirro indicted him for a 10-year felony, and last week his lawyers asked the inspectors general to investigate what they called a “nightmare.” I’m not holding my breath; the arrest for publicly embarrassing Trump was the entire point.

The press is getting the same treatment.

— Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, two Black journalists, were arrested in January at Pam Bondi’s personal direction for covering a protest at a St. Paul church, even though a federal magistrate had already refused to sign the warrant for lack of probable cause. Prosecutors later had to admit the sworn claim that the two were “chanting with agitators” was simply false, but their motions to dismiss the arrest are still pending and racking up legal bills.

— Trump went after George Stephanopoulos and ABC and they stupidly gave him $16 million dollars to make it go away. Instead, though, Trump turned his guns (and his lickspittle, Brendan Carr) on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel.

— And as of Friday, the Justice Department has antitrust demands out to all five networks for briefly suspending pool coverage after the White House banned CNN.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of Trump’s efforts to intimidate and shut down his critics. Reuters reported that the Trump regime has put up a cross-agency task force, meeting since May of last year, to coordinate punishment of perceived enemies.

Their Pulitzer-winning reporting on this issue has counted at least 470 targets of retribution by last November, including 128 federal workers fired and 112 security clearances pulled. The group Protect Democracy has an even more extensive tracker of these efforts to silence dissent and truth.

None of this is new, strategy-wise. In the weeks after the Reichstag fire in 1933, Hitler opened a detention facility at Dachau and threw a few thousand leftwing commentators, politicians, and journalist (among them Carl von Ossietzky) in as a message to the rest of the country.

Stalin exploited the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov as an excuse for show trials that were really designed to cow every party official and newspaper editor who may think of opposing him.

In 2003, the early days of what has since become his dictatorship, Putin jailed just one billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and all the rest immediately fell into line. When a few press outlets dared challenge him, reporter Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her apartment building’s elevator and the Russian press hasn’t spoken up since.

And it’s been tried here before, too, by the guy who taught this to Trump himself.

Joe McCarthy never succeeded in sending anybody to prison for being a communist, but he didn’t have to. As I point out in The Last American President, he and his chief counsel Roy Cohn very publicly destroyed the careers of a few people and, as a result, thousands of teachers, screenwriters, diplomats, and union organizers quietly shut up. What we’re watching today is the Cohn method with the full weight of the United States Department of Justice behind it.

I’ve even encountered a small taste of this in my career. In the late 1960s and early 1970s I was a reporter and the morning news anchor at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, then the number one station in Michigan’s capital.

One morning a state police officer and a federal agent walked into our newsroom and told us that they were about to make a mass arrest a few miles away at a house full of young people who’d stopped paying their federal taxes to protest the Vietnam War. They asked us, politely, to not report it because, they said, they didn’t want to encourage the movement.

After they left, my news director and I argued about it for several hours. It was ultimately his call, though, and we didn’t run the story. Nobody threatened us, but nobody had to. Two men with badges and the power to make your life miserable had asked a favor, and we gave it to them, and I’ve carried that around for more than fifty years.

If a polite request could do that to a newsroom in 1970, think about what a pre-dawn raid on a congresswoman does to every reporter, prosecutor, professor, and civil servant watching the news this week.

The judges who’ve been about the only force in America capable of stopping Trump have been feeling it the most. U.S. Marshals logged 564 threats against federal judges in fiscal 2025, and Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island — who Trump and his allies called a “monster” and a “lunatic” for blocking a funding freeze — had marshals tell him they’d identified at least six credible death threats.

Judge Esther Salas, who now spends her time warning her colleagues about what his rhetoric produces, knows the power of Trump’s intimidation efforts. In 2020 her only son, Daniel, opened the door of their New Jersey home to a Trump supporter in a delivery uniform who’d written that she was a “lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama” and shot Daniel dead. He was twenty.

Trump’s goal is a quiet country. A country where the prosecutor doesn’t bring the case against the powerful donor, the reporter doesn’t file the story, the professor doesn’t sign the letter, the grand juror doesn’t want the hassle, and the judge wonders about her family before she rules.

That’s what the admiral on the quarterdeck was for. You don’t need to arrest a nation to get there. You just need to arrest a few hundred people loudly enough and often enough, and eventually everyone else essentially arrests themselves.

What gives me hope, however, is how the courts have been holding the line.

Three Virginia grand juries looked at Letitia James and said no. A Minnesota magistrate refused to sign the Don Lemon warrant. Judges in Alexandria rebuked prosecutors from the bench. Career lawyers in Florida walked out of the grand conspiracy case rather than put their names on it. The Supreme Court, of all institutions, told Trump he can’t fire Lisa Cook on a whim.

But the lesson history teaches us when we look at how dozens of democracies have been felled by fascist strongmen is that after the legislature and much of the press are cowed eventually the courts will crack, too. The only thing that will prevent that is if Democrats can take power in Congress and use the power of the subpoena to expose this fascist scheme.