America Needs to “Get Big”#

We had a phrase in the Secret Service for what you do when everything falls apart.

When the shots crack. When the crowd rushes the rope line. When the fence goes down and the alarm’s screaming and your earpiece is a mess of voices talking over each other and your body—every cell, every nerve, every survival instinct a million years of evolution burned into your DNA—is telling you to run. Duck. Make yourself small and invisible and safe.

The phrase was: Get Big.

It meant the opposite of everything your body wanted. You don’t duck. You stand tall. You don’t retreat. You step forward. You don’t curl up and protect yourself—you expand. Arms out. Chest forward. Shoulders square. You put your body between the threat and the person you swore to protect. You make yourself the largest possible target. Not because you want to catch a bullet. Because making yourself big is the fastest way to shield someone else.

Get Big wasn’t about fearlessness. I need you to hear that, because people get this wrong all the time. Every agent who’s ever gotten big was scared out of their mind. Palms slick. Heart hammering so hard it felt like it might crack a rib. Vision narrowing to a tunnel. Legs shaking. Every primitive, hardwired instinct screaming at full blast: Get small. Get away. Get safe. Run.

And they overrode all of it. Not because they were built different. Not because they had some gene you don’t have. Because they’d trained for that moment. They’d practiced overriding the default program so many times, under so much pressure, in so many drills that felt ridiculous until they didn’t—that the override became its own kind of instinct. Not the absence of fear. The management of it. A decision made in advance, hammered in through repetition, executed when everything inside you is screaming to do the easy thing instead.

That’s what Get Big means. Not the absence of fear. The presence of action despite it.

That phrase followed me out of the Service and into every corner of my life. It followed me onto the campaign trail when I announced I was running against an incumbent everybody said couldn’t be beat. I remember the night I decided—sitting at my kitchen table, staring at the numbers, feeling the fear settle into my gut like a rock. Every rational calculation said don’t. The polls said don’t. The consultants said don’t. My bank account screamed don’t.

But there was something else. Quieter than the fear, but stubborn. A voice that said: If not you, who? If not now, when? And how are you going to feel five years from now, knowing you had the shot and took the safe road instead?

I got big. I ran. I lost—by fewer than 3,500 votes, but I lost. And I’ll tell you about that, because the losing is part of the story. Maybe the most important part.

The phrase followed me into media, the first time I sat in front of a camera knowing half the country was going to despise what came out of my mouth. It followed me into every conversation where telling the truth was harder than telling people what they wanted to hear. It follows me every morning when I wake up and choose—deliberately, against every pull of comfort and self-preservation—to keep swinging in a political landscape that rewards cowardice and punishes anyone who says what they actually think.

And now, after everything we’ve walked through together—the fence jumpers and the rot inside the bureaucracy, the IRS being turned into a weapon, the media going blind on purpose, the lobbying racket, the double standards, the email scandal, the slow systemic decay eating this country from the inside—I’m asking you to do the same thing.

Get Big.

If you’ve made it this far, you know things most people don’t. Or maybe more accurately—you can now put words to things most people feel in their gut but can’t quite name.

You know the institutions built to protect us have been hollowed out. Not by foreign enemies. Not by some shadowy conspiracy. By something much more ordinary and much more lethal: complacency. Bureaucratic drift. The slow, quiet erosion that happens when nobody gets fired for screwing up and nobody gets rewarded for doing it right.

You’ve watched the immune system of this republic get weakened, piece by piece. Security standards don’t collapse in one dramatic failure—they die by a thousand small compromises, each one easy to justify on its own, devastating when you add them all up. Oversight turns into performance art. Hearings that generate soundbites but never reform. Reports nobody reads. Accountability that lands on the little guy while the powerful negotiate their way out.

You know about the double standards. The selective enforcement. The institutional design that makes bad behavior the rational choice and good behavior expensive. You know the media was supposed to be democracy’s watchdog and became its lapdog—not through some grand plot, but through the same incentive rot that eats every institution that stops facing real competition.

You know all this now. The diagnosis is done. The infection’s been mapped. You can trace it from the source through every compromised organ.

So now you’re standing where everyone stands when they learn something ugly about the world they live in.

Two options. Just two. There is no door number three.

Option one: do nothing.

Close this book. Shake your head. Say “that’s awful” and “somebody should fix that” and “the whole system’s broken.” Share a quote on social media. Bring it up at dinner so you sound informed. Then go back to your life exactly the way it was before you read a single page.

Nobody will blame you. Nobody will even notice. That’s the beautiful, terrible thing about inaction—it’s invisible. There’s no moment where somebody points at you and says, “You could’ve done something and you didn’t.” The system is built to absorb your inaction. It’s been absorbing the inaction of millions of smart, well-meaning, genuinely concerned people for decades. One more doesn’t register. The machine doesn’t notice when a gear that was never turning keeps not turning.

Option two: get big.

Let me be straight with you about what getting big actually looks like. It’s not what you think. It’s not the movie version—the triumphant montage with the swelling music where the hero rises from the ashes and conquers everything in three minutes flat.

Getting big is dragging yourself to your local school board meeting at 7 PM on a Tuesday after a twelve-hour day, when every part of you wants to go home and melt into the couch. It’s sitting in a hard chair under fluorescent lights, listening to proceedings you barely follow, waiting for the public comment window—and then standing up with your pulse in your throat and your voice not quite steady, and saying something that needs saying, even though half the room will hate you for it.

Getting big is raising your hand at the neighborhood meeting and asking the question everyone’s thinking but nobody wants to touch. It’s volunteering for a candidate you believe in—not with a check, but with your nights and your weekends. It’s running for office yourself, even the tiny local seats nobody pays attention to, because you’ve figured out that the foundation matters more than the penthouse.

Getting big is writing the letter to the editor. Picking up the phone and calling your representative’s office. Having that conversation at Thanksgiving that makes everybody squirm—not because you like fighting at the dinner table, not because you want to wreck the holiday, but because you’ve realized that staying quiet about things that matter has become its own kind of betrayal.

Getting big is hard. And the hardest part isn’t the doing. It’s the moment right before. The moment your brain runs through its whole library of reasons not to.

But people are doing it anyway. Hundreds of mothers and grassroots activists are expected to rally in front of the Supreme Court this week over a pesticide case that most of Washington assumed would pass without public scrutiny. CNN reported that these MAHA organizers — many of them first-time activists — secured a two-hour White House meeting with RFK Jr. and chief of staff Susie Wiles, and they’re now threatening midterm consequences for any politician who ignores them. As one of them put it: “Nobody votes, and nobody rallies like a mother.” That’s what getting big looks like when it leaves the metaphor and becomes a movement.

“Someone else will handle it.” No, they won’t. They’re telling themselves the same thing.

“It won’t matter.” You don’t know that. And even if it doesn’t change the outcome, it’ll change you.

“I’ll make things worse.” Worse than silence? Worse than the direction we’re already heading?

“People will think I’m crazy.” Some will. So what.

“I don’t know enough.” You know more than you think. And the people making the decisions right now know less than they pretend.

“It’s not my fight.” If you live here, vote here, send your kids to school here—yes, it is. It is absolutely your fight.

I’ve heard every one of these. I’ve said every one of them to myself. And I’m telling you from the other side: every single one is the voice of retreat wearing the mask of wisdom. It sounds reasonable. Prudent. Like a mature adult running a sensible cost-benefit analysis.

It’s not. It’s fear. Plain, ordinary, human fear in a nice suit, speaking in complete sentences.

Here’s what I’ve learned about how action actually works—and this isn’t a pep talk. This is real.

The first time you get big is brutal. The first time you speak up, push back, raise your hand, say the thing nobody in the room wants to hear—it feels like stepping off a ledge with nothing underneath you. Your hands are soaked. Your voice breaks. You lie awake for hours afterward running every word back, convinced you looked like an idiot, convinced everyone’s laughing, convinced you never should’ve opened your mouth.

But something happens after that first time. Something you can actually feel.

The threshold drops.

The second time is easier. Not easy—easier. The fear’s still there, but it’s smaller. That voice saying “don’t do it” is quieter. The memory of having survived the first time—of speaking up and not dying, of stepping forward and not being destroyed—pushes back against the fear.

Third time, easier still. Fifth time. Tenth time. And somewhere along the way—different for everyone, but it happens—something fundamental shifts inside you. The old program, the one that’s been running since you were a kid—stay small, stay safe, stay quiet, don’t make waves, don’t draw attention, don’t risk it—that program gets overwritten.

Not erased. Overwritten. By a new one, built from real experience: I’ve done this before. I was terrified. I did it anyway. I’m still here. I can do it again.

This is how the brain actually works. The pathways that fire together wire together. Fear responses shrink with controlled exposure. Confidence isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build, one uncomfortable moment at a time, like a muscle that only grows when you push it past what’s comfortable.

And the returns compound. They’re permanent. Every time you override the retreat instinct, you’re not just winning that one moment—you’re upgrading your operating system for every moment after it. Making the next act of courage a little easier. And the one after that easier still. Building a trajectory that turns an anxious person into a brave one—not by killing the anxiety, but by building the habit of moving through it.

But here’s what I need you to understand more than anything else in this entire book:

Your battlefield is not Washington, D.C.

It’s not the cable news set. Not the op-ed page. Not the Senate floor or the campaign trail or the viral tweet.

Your battlefield is wherever you’re standing right now.

It’s the PTA meeting where decisions about your kid’s education are being made by the people who showed up when you didn’t. It’s the city council session where a zoning change is about to reshape your neighborhood and there are twelve people in the audience. It’s the company meeting where a terrible policy is being adopted in dead silence because nobody wants to be the one to object. It’s the conversation with your neighbor who repeats something they heard on TV that you know—you know—isn’t true, but correcting them would be awkward, so you nod and change the subject.

That nod. That subject change. That tiny, automatic flinch away from discomfort. That’s where the immune system fails. Not in the big dramatic moments. In the small ones. The invisible ones. The ones that feel too trivial to matter.

But they matter. They matter because the immune system of a republic doesn’t work like a centralized army with a general calling shots from a bunker. It works like an actual biological immune system—distributed, decentralized, leaderless. Millions of individual cells making independent decisions to respond to threats in their own territory. No cell waits for orders from the brain. No cell needs clearance from headquarters. Each one watches its own patch, spots threats in its own neighborhood, responds with whatever it’s got.

You are one of those cells. I am one of those cells. Everyone reading this is one of those cells.

In Virginia, voters just proved what a single activated cell can accomplish. CNN reported that citizens approved a redistricting referendum through direct ballot action — ordinary people using the democratic tools available to them to reshape their own political representation. No celebrity endorsements. No billionaire backers. Just voters who decided that gerrymandering wasn’t someone else’s problem to solve. They got big. They showed up. And the map changed.

And the strength of the system isn’t determined by any single cell, no matter how powerful. There are no superhero immune cells. No cell so strong it can make up for all the others going dormant. The strength is determined by one thing only: how many cells are active. How many are alert. How many are responding to what’s in front of them, in their own corner, with their own tools, right now.

A body where only a handful of cells are working is a body that’s dying—doesn’t matter how powerful those few cells are. A body where millions of ordinary, unremarkable cells are alert and engaged and willing to act? That body can fight off damn near anything.

That’s the choice. Not between winning and losing. Nobody can guarantee you a win. The forces lined up against a healthy republic are massive, dug in, well-funded, and patient. No single person is going to turn this around alone.

The choice is between active and dormant. Between engaged and checked out. Between getting big and staying small.

People ask me—more often than I can count—whether the fight is worth it. Whether anything actually changes. Whether one person, one vote, one voice, one school board speech, one donation, one uncomfortable Thanksgiving conversation makes any real difference in a system this big and this broken.

My answer is always the same.

I don’t know.

I honestly don’t know if your school board speech will change the policy. I don’t know if your donation will tip the race. I don’t know if your letter to the editor will move a single opinion. I don’t know if that conversation at Thanksgiving will open a mind or just ruin the pie.

But I know two things for certain.

First: the fight changes you. Win or lose, the act of standing up—of overriding the retreat instinct, of choosing action over passivity—rewires something inside you that can’t be unwired. It turns you from a spectator into a participant. From someone things happen to into someone who makes things happen. From dormant to active. And that change is permanent. You can’t un-become the person who stood up. You can’t go back to being the one who always sat down. The threshold moved. The system updated. You are, in a way you can actually feel, a different person than you were before you acted.

Second: every single person who ever changed history did not know they were going to win when they started. They were scared. Outnumbered. Told it was pointless, that the odds were impossible, that the smart move was to keep their head down and wait for somebody braver to go first. They had every reason to stay small.

They got big anyway.

I lost my first race for Congress by fewer than 3,500 votes. Election night, I sat in a hotel room watching numbers come in precinct by precinct, the margin shrinking and swelling and shrinking again, the ground shifting under me like a slow-motion earthquake.

I’d given everything. Savings. Time. Privacy. My family’s peace of mind. Months of knocking on doors, shaking hands, making my case to anyone who’d listen and a lot of people who wouldn’t. Mocked by the political establishment. Ignored by the press. Outspent by a number I’d rather not say out loud.

And it wasn’t enough.

I could’ve stopped. Gone back to a comfortable life and told myself—truthfully, because it would’ve been true—that I gave it my best. “He fought the good fight,” people would’ve said. “Respectable showing.” End of story.

But I didn’t stop. And the reason had nothing to do with thinking I’d win the next one. I had no idea if I’d win next time. What I had was something more useful than optimism.

I had the knowledge—earned, not given, bought with sweat and failure and nights staring at the ceiling—that the version of me who ran was better than the version who would’ve stayed home. Not morally superior. Better as in more alive. More connected to the world I lived in. More engaged. More worthy of the country I’d spent years putting my body on the line for.

The fight changed me. Not the result. The fight. The act of getting big—stepping into the arena, refusing the safe path, choosing to matter—did something to me that winning could never have accomplished and losing could never take away.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about courage. It’s not about the outcome. It’s about who you become in the act of doing something. And that person—the one forged in the doing, tempered by the failing, strengthened by the decision to keep going anyway—that’s the person the world actually needs.

So here’s my last question. Not a rhetorical flourish. Not a tidy bow for the final page. I’m asking because I genuinely need to know.

What is your Get Big moment?

Not the fantasy version. Not the grand heroic gesture you’ll make “someday when conditions are right.” Conditions are never right. The timing is never perfect. The information is never complete. If you’re waiting for the ideal moment to act, you’re waiting for a bus that was cancelled years ago.

I mean the one right in front of you. The one you’ve been dodging. The one sitting in the back of your head, poking at you, making you uneasy every time you let yourself think about it—which is why you try not to.

The school board meeting you keep meaning to go to. The phone call you keep meaning to make. The letter you keep meaning to write. The conversation you keep meaning to have. The campaign you keep meaning to join. The race you keep meaning to run. The stand you keep meaning to take.

That’s your battlefield. Not Washington. Not the national stage. Not somebody else’s fight. Yours. Your kitchen table. Your block. Your town. Your company. Your piece of the world.

The immune system doesn’t need heroes. It needs cells. Millions of ordinary, unremarkable, unheroic cells doing their job where they are. Responding to what’s right in front of them. Not waiting for orders. Not waiting for someone more qualified to go first. Not waiting for conditions that will never come. Just acting. In their place. With what they have. Starting now.

Get big.

Not because it’s easy. It isn’t.

Not because you’ll win. You might not.

Not because anyone will thank you. They probably won’t.

Get big because the alternative—staying small, staying safe, staying quiet while the system you depend on rots around you—isn’t safety. It’s surrender dressed up as common sense. And surrender, once it becomes habit, becomes permanent. The muscles of courage atrophy like any other muscle. Stop using them and one day you’ll reach for them and they’ll be gone.

Get big because every institution, every community, every family, every nation is only as strong as the willingness of its people to stand up when standing up is hard.

Get big because the fight itself—win or lose, seen or unseen, cheered or condemned—is the thing that makes you who you were supposed to be.

Get big because somebody has to go first. And if you’re reading this sentence, you’re out of excuses for why it shouldn’t be you.

The fight is right in front of you. It’s always been right in front of you.

Stand up. Plant your feet. Square your shoulders.

Get big.