Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories, as litigants rush to settle their cases.

On November 20, 2024, lawyers for Trump and Elon Musk’s company X, filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. That court was expected to rule on the legal merits of a set of 2021 lawsuits that Trump had filed against X, Facebook, and YouTube, alleging that the companies had unlawfully removed his social media accounts under government pressure weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.

[Read: Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing]

Now, the attorneys told the court in the November letter, no ruling would be needed in the case. “We write to advise the court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement,” read the joint letter, which was also signed by lawyers for Trump’s co-plaintiffs.

The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.” The day before the letter was filed, Trump had appeared in South Texas with Musk to watch the launch of Musk’s latest Starship rocket.

In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court, in some cases for years, have now lined up to negotiate. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, settled with Trump in December.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had been threatened with jail by Trump as recently as September, traveled to Mar-a-Lago on January 10 to negotiate a settlement with Trump in the Facebook case, which named Zuckerberg personally as a defendant. The deal they struck, according to two people briefed on the agreement who requested anonymity to discuss the arrangement, will cost Meta $25 million in damages and legal fees, a remarkable turn of events that coincided with other demonstrations by Zuckerberg of new fealty toward Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported today that $22 million will go to fund Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs.

“We don’t have any comment or guidance to offer,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told me in a text message, before confirming the $25 million settlement.

These agreements stand to give the most litigious president in American history symbolic victories for himself and financial victories for his legacy. The settlement negotiations raise the question of whether Trump is using his new powers to bully his legal opponents into submission, and whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.

Neither X nor the president’s legal team have publicly disclosed the terms of their settlement discussions with Trump, or even confirmed whether the cases have been settled. Ari Horltzblatt, the attorney for X who filed the settlement notice in the Ninth Circuit, declined to comment when reached by phone. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Multiple co-plaintiffs with Trump, who filed his 2021 case as class action lawsuits, also declined to comment this week when reached by The Atlantic. “No comment at this time,” Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher who lost her Facebook account after posts that were flagged for COVID misinformation, wrote to me in a text message. “Check back with me later in week. I can’t talk right now,” radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who lost his Twitter account, wrote in an email.

[Paul Rosenzweig: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

Trump based his 2021 legal crusade against the social media giants on the assertion that they banned his accounts because of government pressure, in violation of the First Amendment. His co-defendants, including the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, have claimed substantial financial harm—“at least $1 million,” in Wolf’s case—from having their own accounts banned. The companies have argued that Trump has failed to show clear evidence that their decisions were directly dictated by a government power. Trump’s argument also has been complicated by the fact that he ran the federal executive branch at the time that his accounts were shut down; Joe Biden was still president-elect.

Ironically, some legal observers argue that Trump might now be committing the very sin that he accused Democrats of perpetrating against him—using the power of his incoming presidency to pressure private companies to take actions for his personal benefit. They worry the companies are agreeing to settlements less from fear that they would lose in court than fear that they would win.

“Trump may be doing what he claimed Biden was doing but he never really did,” Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University who has been tracking the X and Meta cases, told me. “If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”

The precedent for such legal surrender was established late last year by ABC News, which had been sued by Trump for defamation; the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanolopolous that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” ABC News struck a settlement with Trump in mid-December that sent $15 million from parent company Disney to help build his future presidential library and paid $1 million in legal fees, shocking First Amendment attorneys. (Attorneys for Disney had concluded that the case posed substantial risk, The New York Times reported, and that the settlement was a small price to pay to resolve it.)

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, was considering a settlement with Trump over his $10 billion claim that 60 Minutes illegally interfered with the election by favorably editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount is in the process of merging with Skydance Media, a deal that would require approval by Trump appointees. “We have no comment,” Paramount Global spokesman Justin Dini told me in a statement.

Trump has also sued Gannett, the owner of The Des Moines Register, alleging consumer fraud for a poll the Register published before the 2024 election that showed Harris with a lead over Trump in Iowa days before the election. (Trump won the state.) Gannett has signalled that it intends to contest the case in federal court.

The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict of interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me that the current situation gives enormous power to a president who has indicated a willingness to use litigation to get his way. “What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”

The Trump case against YouTube and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of parent company Google, filed in 2021 with the X and Meta cases, has been lying dormant in a Northern California courtroom since December 2023, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal of the case against X.

Musk’s decision to settle before an opinion now opens the possibility that the YouTube case will be revived unless that company too seeks a settlement. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, declined this week to comment on the company’s legal strategy.

On Inauguration Day, many felt real euphoria at the prospect of a wholesale renovation of America’s institutions. And, as I’ve argued often, our constitutional democracy does need renovation—the various elites are disconnected from the people, bureaucracy afflicts everyone, and many of us find it impossible to hold our elected officials accountable. Yet I fear that the renovations we’re about to get will take us in the wrong direction.

Americans have been yielding sovereignty to tech magnates and their money for years. The milestones are sometimes startling, even if one has long been aware of where things are heading. I was astonished and alarmed when I learned, in the summer of 2023, that Elon Musk had, within a span of five years, built an orbital network comprising more than half of the world’s active satellites. His share has now risen to more than 60 percent. Already in 2023, he controlled battlefield communications infrastructure used in the war between Ukraine and Russia. Musk is currently the head of Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, which is taking over the U.S. Digital Service. At the same time, he may be making a bid for TikTok’s American platform. Ownership of TikTok brings immense power. In December, the Romanian elections were canceled in the middle of voting because of fears that propaganda from Russia, by means of TikTok, was driving the election results.

Musk is well on his way to controlling the world’s communications infrastructure. This is not by accident. He swims in an intellectual universe, alongside his PayPal associates Peter Thiel (who funded J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign) and David Sacks (now Trump’s AI and crypto czar), whose writers advocate for replacing democratic leadership with a CEO-monarch, and argue that higher-IQ “sovereign individuals” should rule over people with lower IQs. Musk, Sacks, and Thiel all spent formative boyhood years in South Africa. As the historian Jill Lepore noted in The New Yorker, Musk’s grandfather took the family to South Africa for the sake of apartheid, having left Canada after being jailed for his leadership activities in the Technocracy movement, “whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule.” Thiel has made “freedom” his life’s pursuit. Since 2009, he has argued that freedom is incompatible with democracy, and that “the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

[Brooke Harrington: The broligarchs are trying to have their way]

Two original MAGA leaders, Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, have railed against this “techno-feudalism.” That is what they see Musk and his allies trying to bring about, whether in collaboration with Trump or by using him as their puppet. For the first time ever, I find myself agreeing with Bannon and Loomer.

The whole situation went from concerning to surreal when, two days before his inauguration, Trump issued a meme crypto coin, known as $TRUMP. A memecoin is a form of cryptocurrency that has no value-creating function in the crypto ecosystem. Instead, it references some popular phenomenon and gains its value only because of people’s interest in that popular phenomenon. Typically, memecoins also lack the security that could render them a stable part of the crypto financial infrastructure.

The fully diluted value (or market cap when the full supply is circulating) of  $TRUMP, 80 percent of which is owned by entities that the Trump family controls, shot up within 24 hours of its release to more than $70 billion. It is now bouncing around between $20 billion and $30 billion—meaning the president now holds something like 75 to 80 percent of his wealth in crypto. That goes well beyond monetizing the Trump brand through T-shirts, gold sneakers, and steaks. This time, Trump has auctioned himself. Leaving aside the technical substrate, there is arguably little difference between $TRUMP and the president posting a deposit-only Swiss-bank-account number online, into which people can deposit funds and privately show him the receipts for their deposits. His personal wealth now depends on these depositors. He has turned himself—and therefore his office—into a for-profit joint-share stock corporation. People with $TRUMP in their crypto wallets are the shareholders.

[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]

Who knows if the president intended this outcome, but leaders in the crypto space have long hoped for the replacement of nation-states with “network states” encompassing communities that come together on the blockchain. They are celebrating $TRUMP as the first crypto community to have gained control of a nation-state’s powers by capturing the president’s attention through control of his digital wallet. If what Trump has done is upheld as legal or becomes a norm, other global leaders have every incentive to do what he did, turning democratic governance into corporate governance. Melania Trump, for one, has already followed suit; her coin was issued a few days after Trump’s.

Last week, the DOGE homepage displayed the icon for Dogecoin, which Musk has declared to be his favorite coin, and which he holds. (He has faced litigation as a result of accusations that he sought to pump it up; the lawsuit was dismissed.) The icon appeared in vibrant color against a black background. It was removed within 24 hours.

Two features of the $TRUMP memecoin are especially troubling. First, there is the question of who owns the coin. Initial activity for sales of $TRUMP—and, therefore, its financial backing—came from buyers on the platforms Gate and Binance, which are restricted in the United States. Although it will take years of analysis to determine who the eventual beneficial owners are, the reliance on Gate and Binance suggests that early uptake occurred abroad, and particularly in markets controlled by U.S. adversaries—China, Iran, North Korea, Russia. As of 2023, according to a Wall Street Journal report, U.S. trading volume on Binance was very low. Users in China provided Binance with its greatest market share, at 20 percent of trading volume, and about 10 percent of Chinese customers were at the time identified as “politically exposed persons”—that is, according to the Journal report, “government officials, their relatives or close associates who require greater scrutiny due to their greater risk of involvement in bribery, corruption or money laundering.” Because memecoins depend on a collective belief in their value, investors (other than the issuer) who buy the coins are the people who hold up that value. Those early movers on the Gate and Binance platforms can be meaningfully understood to have handed Trump billions, at least on paper. (Steve Gregory, the Gate CEO, was invited to the inauguration.) They also hold power over that wealth. If they withdraw confidence and dump their assets, the value of the coin would trend toward zero. So Trump now appears to owe most of his new wealth to crypto investors in adversary states who are quite possibly closely connected to governments themselves—investors whom the rest of us are not able to identify, but who can identify themselves to him by proudly waving their $TRUMP-filled digital wallets.

[Read: Hawk Tuah wasn’t what it seemed]

Second, there is the question of what it means to convert political office into something that is subject not merely to the general pressure of financial influence but to the power of shareholders over an officeholder’s immediate personal wealth. This is of course why other presidents and senior executive-branch officials have sold off their investments or placed them in blind trusts for the duration of their terms. The neo-reactionary voices in the tech space—the NRx crowd, as they call themselves—have for some time wanted to take the powers of governance over territory out of the hands of nation-states and place them into the hands of platform-based collectives committed to capitalism first and foremost. For years we’ve watched the problem of money in politics get worse and worse, but the Trump coin takes the matter to another level. It provides the technical means for enabling the vision of total capture of governance institutions by tech communities.

What speculative futures are now possible? The president could easily organize a one-token, one-vote referendum—as many coins and decentralized autonomous organizations, which are built out of blockchain communities, already do—among asset holders on major U.S. public-policy issues. Think of it as a corporation giving shareholders their one vote per share. Yes, a corporation has to please its customers—in this analogy, American voters—but it really needs to please the shareholders who help sustain the share price. If $TRUMP were to introduce a voting mechanism for asset holders in this way, it would immediately implement the long-held anarcho-capitalist dream of converting global governance regimes into for-profit joint-stock corporations—minus any Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements, which the president has hinted about relaxing. If other leaders do what Trump has done, then we would see global governance structures generally privatized—and political leaders provided with great incentives to collude with the common interest of capital holders, rather than governing for a true cross-class common good.

Where would that leave voters? In a position somewhat akin to fans at WWE wrestling matches. Politicians, all beholden to a community of shareholders separate from their voters, would collude in steering toward benefits for those shareholders, while pretending to fight one another in public. Imagining such a possibility would seem crazy if people in the tech world hadn’t been writing so much about just this kind of governance structure—and if the technical pieces weren’t now all falling neatly into place.

Trump promised back in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” and he was correct, as I’ve written before, about the need to restore experts to their rightful place as servants of the people rather than quasi-autonomous technocrats who order the world as they think best. But instead of draining the swamp, Trump appears simply to be importing even larger crocodiles from Silicon Valley: multimillionaires and billionaires who mostly couldn’t give a fig for self-government of, by, and for the people. The man who vowed to slay the old “deep state” appears ready to accept a new, more totally controlling, one.

[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]

Speaking recently on NPR, Bannon used the term techno-feudalism again and went on to explain: “These oligarchs in Silicon Valley, they have a very different view of how people should govern themselves … They don’t believe in the underlying tenets of self-governance.” This seems right. In his inaugural address, Trump echoed Lincoln, promising a new birth of freedom, but just a few rows behind him, among other tech luminaries, was Musk, nearly levitating with joy when Trump promised territorial expansion both on this planet and in space and cheered for DOGE—Musk’s agency and his favorite memecoin.

The principles of popular sovereignty were hard-won—principles that vest the ownership of government in we, the people, not they, the owners of memecoins. When early Americans before, during, and after the Revolution sought to make self-government durable, they circulated pamphlets that articulated the values and tools necessary for successful self-governance. The renovations we need will similarly depend on real understanding of self-government. I’ve been a civic educator my whole life, but now I see an even more urgent need to pick up the pace at which we spread the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers, as well as works that have updated those texts, to sharpen our collective understanding of what popular sovereignty requires.

After the British government first allowed the East India Company, traffickers in tea, to rule India, and then fell into a full fiscal entanglement with the company, Americans dumped the company’s tea in Boston Harbor. Maybe it’s time to dump Dogecoin.

These days in Washington, D.C., among a class of Extremely Beltway types—the name droppers, the strivers, the media gossips—Donald Trump’s threats to exact revenge on his enemies have turned into a highly specific (and highly absurd) status competition.

Olivia Troye has heard the joke so many times that she already has a well-worn comeback prepared. When nervous journalists and teasing D.C. types crack to Troye—a lifelong Republican who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland-security adviser before becoming an outspoken Trump critic—that they might end up in adjoining Guantánamo Bay cells, she responds: “I had the Gitmo portfolio, so I can give you some tips.”

In a moment of deep uncertainty in the nation’s capital, where Trump took office promising vengeance but where the scope of his intentions remains nebulous, many of Trump’s known critics have unofficially divided into two adjacent camps: those, like Troye, who have real reason to be alarmed by the president’s threats and are quietly taking steps to protect themselves and their family, and those who are loudly—and often facetiously—chattering about how Trump and his posse might throw them in a gulag. (There are also those in Trump’s orbit who are joking, one hopes, about whom they might throw in the hypothetical gulag.)

Whereas many of those branded most prominently with the scarlet R of Resistance are now eager to stay out of Trump’s sight line, other figures in Washington are actively self-identifying as could-be Trump targets, in a very D.C. show of importance. And often the people talking openly about getting thrown in a gulag likely aren’t even important enough for the gulag.

At one of the many swanky parties in the run-up to Trump’s second inauguration, a White House reporter confessed to me that during a recent meeting in outgoing White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’s office, the reporter had—mainly in jest—asked to get on the list for a preemptive pardon. In his final The Late Show episode during the Biden administration, Stephen Colbert also played with the gag, telling his audience, “The next time you all see me, Donald Trump will be president. And you may not see me! Next four years—next four years, we’re taking this one day at a time.”

If the classic “D.C. read” is scanning a book’s index for one’s own name and frantically flipping to the listed pages, then even a mention in Appendix B (“Executive Branch Deep State”) of Government Gangsters, written by Trump’s pick for FBI chief, Kash Patel, can serve as a status symbol in certain circles.

[Read: The sound of fear on air]

“For a lot of people, it’s a joke that is a thinly disguised flex—it’s joking about how important you are,” Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America who has been on the receiving end of such jokes many times, told me. “It’s sort of become a standard greeting in a lot of circles: ‘See you in the gulags.’ ‘I hope we get the nice gulag.’”

“Then every once in a while,” he added, “someone makes that joke to someone who is actually scared or has hired a lawyer, and it’s not so funny.”

Tim Miller, a former Republican turned ardent Trump critic who writes for The Bulwark, told me that he not only regularly hears the joke but also sometimes finds himself “reflexively making it,” the way remarking on the weather is an almost involuntary conversational crutch. “And then after I do, just clarifying that I don’t actually think I’m going to the gulag and that there are people who are at real risk from this administration, and we should probably focus on that,” he said.

On Inauguration Day, President Joe Biden issued a handful of preemptive pardons that included five members of his family, lawmakers on the January 6 House committee, and people Trump had threatened, including Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top public-health expert during the coronavirus pandemic, and retired General Mark Milley, whom Trump floated the idea of executing after The Atlantic published a profile of him. Others who have attracted Trump’s ire have both publicly and privately lamented that they were not on Biden’s pardon list.

Rachel Vindman, the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—who testified before Congress about a 2019 call between Trump and the Ukrainian president during which Trump asked him to investigate Biden’s son Hunter—posted on social media after Biden’s pardons emerged, “Whatever happens to my family, know this: No pardons were offered or discussed. I cannot begin to describe the level of betrayal and hurt I feel.” Her husband appears in Patel’s appendix.

[Read: In praise of mercy]

In the early weeks of his second presidency, Trump has spoken ambiguously about plans to punish his perceived enemies, though he has already taken steps to root out those in the government he believes are part of the anti-Trump “deep state.” In some ways, the list in Patel’s book is instructive. The appendix mentions prominent figures whom Trump has already put on notice or begun targeting: Biden (“the funny thing—maybe the sad thing,” Trump noted in his first post-inauguration interview, with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, is that Biden failed to pardon himself); Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton (within hours of taking office, Trump pulled U.S. Secret Service protection from Bolton, who faces threats on his life from Iran); and Fauci (last week Trump also terminated Fauci’s security detail). Yet the list also mentions people such as Elizabeth Dibble and Nellie Ohr, alleged deep staters who are hardly household names and whose alleged offenses are too complicated and obscure to quickly explain.

Patel also previously shared on social media a meme that featured him wielding a chainsaw and buzzing off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, ranging from “Fake News,” CNN, and MSNBC to people such as Biden, the former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker.

Just before Election Day, the longtime Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren shared an X post from an Arizona reporter, writing, “He should be the first journalist sent to the gulag.” She later said she was joking. Mike Davis, one of Trump’s most vocal outside legal defenders, has led the unofficial social-media brigade threatening to toss reporters and other perceived enemies into the “gulag,” statements he described to The Washington Post as a “troll” to nettle the left.

But now that Trump, back in the Oval Office, continues to display a willingness to punish those who have crossed him, this sort of declaration from Trump allies can take on a more menacing edge. On Inauguration Day, Davis unleashed more than a dozen posts on X that, depending on the perspective, could be read as trolls or threats. “Dear Congress: We need a supplemental to feed the Vindmans in federal prison,” he wrote in one. “Dear Tony Fauci: Roll the dice. Decline the pardon. And see what happens,” read another. And in a third, using a format he repeated for many of Trump’s enemies, he addressed Biden’s former Homeland Security secretary by name, writing, “Dear Alejandro Mayorkas: No pardons for you and your staff?”

“Nobody is above the law,” Davis said, when I called to ask him about his public posts. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about, and if they’ve done nothing wrong, why did they need a pardon?”

Some of those squarely in the sights of Trump and his allies have begun taking steps to protect themselves. Troye, for instance, has retained a lawyer, and recently made sure that she and her family members had up-to-date passports. Rachel Vindman, meanwhile, told me that she and her family moved from Virginia to Florida two years ago—uprooting their daughter in the middle of sixth grade—in part because they “wanted to live somewhere a little bit more anonymous.” (She was also, she added, ready to leave the D.C. bubble and eager for a “fresh start.”)

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

In many ways, the fear that the mere prospect of retribution has struck in Trump’s opponents—prompting them to hire personal security or nervously bluster about the gulags—could be victory enough for MAGA world. After winning reelection, Trump posted on social media a list of out-of-favor individuals and groups—including “Americans for No Prosperity,” “Dumb as a Rock” John Bolton, and Pence, his former vice president—and said that prospective administration hires should not bother applying if they had worked with or were endorsed by anyone on the list.

“That’s the financial gulag,” one person told me, speaking anonymously because he has worked for three of the people or entities on Trump’s list, and doesn’t want his business to be blackballed. “It’s not quite a gulag, but it does have a chilling effect.”

Similarly, those who did not receive pardons from Biden worry about the financially daunting task of protecting themselves. “Did you not think of the people who are about to get destroyed, who defend themselves, who have no congressional coverage, who are not politicians, who are not millionaires, who don’t have dozens of PACs that are protecting them?” Troye asked. “There are people who worked on government salaries.” (A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on Biden’s relatively selective set of pardons.)

Vindman, who lived in Russia for several years, said that although no one knows exactly what to expect in Trump’s second term, her experience in Moscow might offer a glimpse: Colleagues policed themselves, and other Russians proactively took actions they believed would please Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It was never a direct ask,” she told me. “It was a more tacit thing.”

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Vindman, who has friends who regularly check in on her, said she spent Election Night wide awake. Her husband was in Virginia with his twin brother, Eugene Vindman, a Democrat the state’s suburban voters elected to the House, and the task of telling her daughter that Trump had won fell to her. “The hardest part of that was laying in bed awake, worrying,” she said. “She’s in eighth grade, and maybe the last four years of her with us will be marred by that, by this harassment.”

When, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump’s close ally Elon Musk accused Alexander Vindman of “treason,” warning that “he will pay the appropriate penalty,” Rachel Vindman told me that her immediate concern was for her in-laws and her 98-year-old grandmother, who heard the comment and worried on her family’s behalf.

But personally, Vindman said she is working to find daily joy and maintain a sense of normalcy for herself and her family. Her husband recently turned his masters thesis into a book, The Folly of Realism, coming out at the end of February. When I asked her if she ever considered urging him not to publish, because it would thrust their family back into public view, she was emphatic: “Do you just say no to it because it might anger them or put you in the spotlight?” she asked. “It’s that kind of quiet defiance of living your life.”

“It could be a mistake. I guess we’ll never know.” She paused, then added, “Well, I guess we will know.”