On Capitol Hill, Republican senator Thom Tillis was wavering in his support for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for defence secretary, until the president threatened him with a primary and Tillis did a turnabout. (Tillis’ office said the senator was simply performing careful vetting.)
Republican senator Roger Wicker told Zelensky in a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel last week that he was there with other senators “as a show of support”. But after Trump’s confrontation with Zelensky later that day, Wicker took down a social media post showing him shaking hands with the Ukrainian leader.
Senator Roger Wicker took down a social media post showing him shaking hands with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.Credit: Bloomberg
More than half a dozen Republican defence 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 such as immigration, some Democrats are moving in his direction, reflecting public opinion. Democrats were divided over the wisdom of the protest by Democratic congressman Al Green during Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night (Wednesday AEDT).
But the lack of aggressive pushback from targets of Trump’s retribution and policy agenda is striking, if understandable in other cases.
University presidents were largely silent because they were protecting their institutions, said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. “Don’t wrestle with a pig,” he said. “You’ll just get muddy and annoy the pig.”
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Business leaders rarely criticise presidents of either party, and in any case, they like Trump’s plans for tax cuts and deregulation, if not his tariffs. They also recognised, one of them said, that “periodically culling the workforce is actually good for a healthy organisation”.
But that business leader thinks 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, 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 favour of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In an interview in The Washington Post’s opinion section last month, he criticised Trump, US Vice President J.D. Vance and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for using their Ivy League degrees to advance professionally while portraying themselves as populists against “woke” universities.
People sometimes told him he had 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.”
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Roth was going public, he said, “because it’s a scandal that the federal government is trying to keep people from speaking their minds”.
Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell, 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 he spent 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.
Eric Swalwell 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.Credit: Bloomberg
Senator Todd Young 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 last week, 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?”
Democratic senator Chris Coons, who is friendly with a broad group of Senate Republicans, said in an interview that “those who I have travelled 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 organisation of the cuts”.
Senator Todd Young (pictured), whom Elon Musk called a “deep-state puppet”.Credit: Bloomberg
Why do they not speak out? Musk, he said, had issued “a credible electoral threat” to finance primary opponents.
And yet, senators only face re-election every six years. “Frankly,” Coons said, “it is a combination of hoping that things change and somehow this all comes apart and the chainsaw approach to government stops.”
‘Totally reasonable to be worried’
Marc Elias, a prominent 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?”
Marc Elias is sharply critical of Republicans who say they acquiesce to Trump out of fear.Credit: AP
Other Republicans see the warnings of authoritarianism as overblown.
“I’m becoming less and less sympathetic,” said former congressman Peter Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his role in egging on the January 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”.
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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: “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 the “Never Trump” movement had splintered and 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 week, five former defence 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, chief executive of Ford, 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 US industry that we have never seen”.
Trump made good on that threat and imposed 25 per cent tariffs this week on all products from Canada and Mexico. But after a conference call on Wednesday with executives from the three largest vehicle makers, 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, had 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”.
