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🌊 Notes from the Roca Office: Part 1

A conversation among yours truly about a “slow-moving coup”

August 30, 2025

Bill Maher

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By Max Frost

The Roca team is green and growing. In the last three months, we’ve added three new members. With that has come a surge in office political debates. 

Some offices discourage political talk: As the WSJ wrote Thursday, “Companies are adopting a new, harder-line playbook for dealing with political debate at work.” We don’t, and this week, we found ourselves debating a monologue from Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time. 

Maher is an old-school liberal Democrat who ardently supports free speech and fiercely criticizes the woke left. He opposes Trump but recently dined with him and supports some of his policies. Perhaps more than anything, though, he believes that Trump poses a threat to democracy and that the left must moderate its politics to win his supporters. 

Maher said last Friday:

I don't know if I was the first one to use the phrase slow-moving coup
whenever I said he was never going to concede power, they would say, ‘Oh, you smoked too much pot.’ Well, turned out I smoked just the right amount of pot.

He continued: 

If there was a slow-moving coup, let me just describe some of the steps, and you tell me if I'm being paranoid


First, create a masked police force. Get people used to looking at that. Normalize snatching people off the street. Get them used to that. Normalize seeing the National Guard and the military on the street. Then start talking about crime in the capital, which is basically, you know, has always been a fairly crime-ridden city.

This is our nation's capital where elections are decided. And then have, because the crime is so bad, have other states start sending their troops, not just the National Guard there in DC, but now at least six other states are sending their troops, which then, Trump can then federalize.

So you're having many states' troops on the ground there, and now they're under federal control. So you have in the capital a sort of permanent police presence. So when an election dispute might come up, just hypothetically, I mean, I don't want to be a big pessimist, and I'm going to pretend for the rest of the duration that the Democrats do have a chance of winning and they might win the next election – I just don't think they're ever going to take power, because this is what's going to happen, because I think this coup is going to go off a lot smoother than the last one.

Our office discussed this: Did Maher have a point?

We ran through a repeat of January 6. If it happened again, would the rioters win?

Our newest hire – Rob, who wrote the past two days’ Ghislaine Maxwell stories – said the point was moot. To matter, the Democrats have to win the election. And right now, that appears unlikely. 

Last week, The New York Times quoted “one of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on voter registration trends” as saying the figures are “a big flashing red alert.” The Republican Party, which long trailed Democrats in registration, is advancing in every state that tracks the data. 

The rest of this report is for paid subscribers, who fund our journalism. If you start a two-week free trial today, you’ll be automatically entered to win a free year. Once you sign up, you can access all of our articles here!

Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading a new type of article. We’re hoping that “office debates” become a regular series here. If you want that or not, please let us know. We’re curious to hear. 

We’ll be back with a very special and controversial original report tomorrow. We think you won’t be disappointed. See you then!

In the meantime, check out this past week’s stories below if you missed them:

See you tomorrow,
Max and Max