He had rehearsed every sentence on the flight, convinced that if he framed the stakes clearly enough, someone in that room would flinch. He spoke of institutions, of guardrails, of what it meant to normalize a man who treated law as suggestion and power as private property. He named the danger directly, believing clarity might still have force in a world trained to blur everything into “both sides.”

They listened the way one listens to a weather report about a distant storm: with interest, not intention. While he described a democracy at risk, they quietly assessed volatility, upside, timing. Trump was not a question of right or wrong but of entry and exit points, of positioning. When he finished, there was no clash, no catharsis—just a soft, professional silence. His warning had landed as data. They had already decided to live inside the world he feared.