“It was getting more and more political because, like, we can’t help it,” Ms. Winner recalled.
Mr. Trump was a constant theme. According to Ms. Winner’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, her daughter was convinced that he would destroy the country. Ms. Winner told her mother she was glad she’d left the Air Force, because there was no way she could serve under him. When the United States bombed an air base in Syria, Ms. Winner told her mother it was “smoke and mirrors,” Ms. Winner-Davis recalled — Russia was given warning to evacuate the base, her daughter said.
Ms. Winner watched Mr. Trump on TV scoffing at suggestions of Russian interference. “He’s lying,” she thought; she’d seen the proof. She recalled that the whole enterprise of government and war had started to seem rotten; she’d thought that she could make a difference working quietly within national security and, eventually, gaining enough authority to make better decisions. Now it felt pointless.
“If there’s this jackass in the White House, apparently none of this matters,” she said recently, trying to describe her mind-set when she printed the report and dropped it in the mail. “It was the repeated lies.”
For years, Ms. Winner had dreamed of distinguishing herself in a moment of heroism. “I always wanted to be a badass like Carrie from ‘Homeland,’” she said. “Somebody who got something done in counterintelligence or counterterrorism and I think — I don’t know — just kind of being that stand-alone figure.”
There was a lot of talk about insurgency that year. Twitter was full of grandstanding and “I am Spartacus” declamations. But Ms. Winner slammed into a hard realization: Despite all the grumbling and proclaiming, the resistance, if it existed, did not rush to defend her.
Ms. Winner talks a lot about social media, about its capacity to warp political life and set traps for people — including herself. She is haunted by the experience of watching news stories about politicians’ tweets from inside prison, where she had zero access to social media.
Twitter didn’t give the prisoners protective gear during the pandemic. Facebook didn’t prevent inmates from losing family members to street violence. Nothing came of it, she realized, but cluttered minds and wasted time.