Mike Benz, the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department official who served in Trump's first administration, is sounding the alarm: the window for exposing deep-state corruption is closing, and the midterms are the deadline.
In a recent interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation, Benz argued that the Trump administration needs to dramatically accelerate its disclosure efforts across multiple federal agencies or risk depressing Republican turnout in November. Not because the base would vote Democrat. Because they might stay home.
"I don't think that the base would even flirt with voting for Democrats. The question is, 'Is their disenchantment enough to sit home?'"
That's the real danger, and Benz is right to name it. Enthusiasm isn't loyalty. You can believe in a movement and still feel like the movement isn't delivering. The Trump administration has a record to run on, but Benz is making the case that records alone won't cut it. The base came for accountability, and accountability requires sunlight, as The Daily Caller reports.
Benz pointed to the handling of the Epstein files as a source of frustration within the MAGA base. The files, released under a bipartisan bill Trump signed, generated enormous public interest. But Benz argues the "collective fixation" on those documents exists precisely because there haven't been other disclosures of comparable consequence.
"The fact that it's only the Epstein files — and even that at the barrel of a gun by congressional bill — is not as much as we could do."
This is an important distinction. The Epstein revelations matter. But as Benz noted, they don't change people's day-to-day lives the way a major reveal around mass censorship, political persecution under the Biden administration, or Russiagate abuses would. The files are a proof of concept. They showed the public that institutions have been hiding things. Now the public wants the rest.
Benz wasn't vague about what he wanted to see. He named six agencies he believes should face full-scale transparency investigations:
And he put a number on the ambition:
"We should be having five million CIA files. We should be having five million State Department files. We should be having five million USAID files."
He also named specific scandals he wants dragged into daylight: former Special Counsel Jack Smith's Arctic Frost investigation, during which the FBI obtained phone records of Republican members of Congress. The malfeasance of the John Brennan CIA under Obama and the Bill Burns CIA under Biden. Fast and Furious. Russiagate. The censorship-industrial complex. The list reads less like a wish list and more like a catalog of institutional rot that has never been cleaned.
Every item on that list has one thing in common: the American public was told to trust the institutions responsible, and those institutions abused that trust.
Benz credited the administration's early momentum. He praised the pace of the first several months, particularly during the period when Elon Musk was involved.
"I think that there have been a lot of amazing things this admin has done, certainly the first five months when Elon [Musk] was here."
But he drew a sharp contrast between the energy of that opening stretch and what followed, urging the administration to double down on the approach that defined its first four months rather than the last four. The implication is clear: the foot came off the gas, and the base noticed.
What Benz is describing isn't just a political strategy. It's a theory of legitimacy. The MAGA coalition didn't form around tax policy or trade deals alone. It formed around the conviction that a permanent bureaucratic class had captured the federal government and was operating beyond democratic accountability. Voters who believe that aren't satisfied with economic wins. They're looking for something transformative.
"I think right now, a lot of people feel they're being asked to trust without the reforms and accountability that a lot of people expected to be the antecedent."
That sentence deserves attention. Benz isn't describing disloyalty. He's describing unmet expectations. The base expected transparency to precede trust, not the other way around.
Benz went further than domestic scandals, arguing that the administration should expose what he described as attempts to overthrow governments in Poland, Brazil, Hungary, and Romania, as well as interference in France and Spain. Whether one agrees with the framing on every count, the broader point stands: the same intelligence and diplomatic apparatus that surveilled American citizens and censored American speech didn't confine its operations to American soil.
The through line is institutional arrogance. Agencies that believed they knew better than voters at home apparently believed the same about voters abroad. Documenting that pattern isn't conspiratorial. It's historical. And Benz wants the full historiography on the record while an administration sympathetic to disclosure actually holds the keys to the filing cabinets.
"You have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do so."
Midterm elections are notoriously difficult for the party holding the White House. Turnout is everything, and turnout is driven by energy. Benz argues that the base's energy isn't fueled by normalcy. It's fueled by the belief that this administration is willing to do what no other would: tear back the curtain on decades of government misconduct and let the public see what's there.
If that energy dissipates, if voters conclude that the transparency they were promised has stalled, the consequences won't show up as a shift to Democrats. They'll show up as empty chairs at polling places. That's a quieter failure, but just as fatal to a governing majority.
Benz closed with urgency that bordered on finality:
"And I think the time is now or else the mother will be lost."
He's not wrong about the window. Administrations don't get more ambitious as midterms approach. They get cautious. If the transparency offensive Benz is calling for doesn't begin now, it likely never begins at all. And the institutions that spent years operating in the dark will have survived yet another opportunity for accountability without a scratch.
