PLEASANTON, Calif. — It was a child’s drawing — the kind of sweet, simple sketch you hang on the refrigerator — but something about the family portrait was off.
The heights and the adult-to-offspring ratio didn’t line up, so Eric Swalwell asked his daughter, “Who are all these people?”
“That’s Mr. Darly,” the kindergartner replied, naming the security escort who’s been a presence, looking out for the Democratic congressman, his wife and their three small children, for roughly her entire life. The bodyguard has grown so familiar to the 6-year-old she now considers him part of the Swalwell family.
Sadly, frightfully, that’s where we are as a country under the vengeful presidency of Donald Trump and the bludgeoning fist of his malign henchman, Elon Musk: a place where protection is needed because vocal political opposition can lead to physical endangerment.
It’s not only skewed the perspective of Swalwell’s middle child, but cowed some of his fellow lawmakers — those elected to supposedly advise, consent and exercise their best judgment — into silence and submission. Swalwell hears it privately from some of his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill.
He once thought their greatest fear was a stiff primary challenge and the possibility — heaven forfend — of losing reelection. But, no, he said, it’s deeper and more primal than that. They fear personal reprisal and possible violence.
“Their spouses are telling them, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t be the tallest poppy in the field,’ because when you do this to your family, everything becomes more uncomfortable. Going to church, going to the country club. Your kids are going to be harassed in school,” Swalwell said. “They don’t care about losing their job. They just don’t want a bull’s-eye on their family.”
The 44-year-old former criminal prosecutor has represented a moderately well-off slice of the East Bay suburbs — Fremont, Livermore, Pleasanton among them — for the last dozen years. He waged an upstart bid for president in 2019, the signal moment coming in an early debate when he challenged Joe Biden by recalling his first run for president in 1988, when Swalwell was himself a child.
The 40-something Biden was correct back then, Swalwell cheekily suggested, when he said it was time for Democratic elders “to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans.”
“He’s still right today,” Swalwell said.
“I’m still holding onto that torch,” Biden replied — and the rest is, well, you know what happened.
Don’t be too surprised if Swalwell makes another try for the White House in 2028.
Meantime, he’s working to rally dispirited Democrats ahead of next year’s midterm election and continuing his pushback against Trump and Musk, all while under protective watch — almost entirely paid for, it should be noted, with campaign funds and not taxpayer dollars.
Swalwell, a centrist compared with many in California’s congressional delegation, earned the enduring enmity of the president and his followers during the first Trump administration, when the congressman was a constant presence and unrelenting critic on social media and the cable TV circuit. He gaveled the House into session on Jan. 6, 2021, and served as one of nine impeachment managers holding Trump to account for inciting the mob that overran the Capitol that day.
By Swalwell’s account, he has spent well over $1 million on personal security over the past few years. That’s on top of other added expenses: enhanced security systems at his home, the necessary use of metal detectors at town hall meetings and while appearing in the districts of other lawmakers.
He’s received countless death threats against himself and his family. He’s been physically accosted. A suspicious package arrives at his home just about monthly. “That’s concerning,” Swalwell said, “because it’s demonstrating that they know where you live.”
Two years ago, on a family trip through the Midwest, the congressman and his son were deliberately sneezed on at a Chipotle restaurant.
He tries to shield his children from politics and the unhinged passions of the moment. “I don’t want to poison his mind and make him worry about things a little kid shouldn’t worry about,” Swalwell said of his eldest child, now 7. “Oh, that,” he explained to the boy, after they wiped away the respiratory residue. “That was a weird guy.”
However, reality can’t help but impinge on daily life. The lawmaker’s kids are no longer allowed to play outside in their front yard. Too much risk.
Anyone old enough to have lived through the Clinton administration, the George W. Bush years or Barack Obama’s time in the White House knows that rubbed-raw political feelings are nothing new. But there’s a qualitative difference with a spiteful, foul-mouthed, score-settling president leading by acrid example.
Unfortunately, “more and more people believe that the means to political power can … be achieved through either violence or the threat of violence,” Swalwell said.
He’s grown a bit jaded, having lived under constant menace for some time now. “The alternative, just hiding under the bed, is not really productive,” Swalwell said.
But not everyone in his family is quite so ready to shrug off the danger.
Over lunch recently in his district, Swalwell recounted a conversation with his father.
The congressman has a close and loving relationship with his parents, despite their pro-Trump sentiments. (“We have a rule since I showed up in 2016, and there were a lot of red hats at our family Thanksgiving. My mom said, ‘No more hats.’”)
After seeing him repeatedly attacked on Fox News, Swalwell’s father called him and asked, “‘Can’t you just lay low and stop talking about this guy? … I’m really worried that something’s going to happen to your kids.’”
Swalwell took a bite of his chicken pita wrap. He told how his father, a police chief in small-town Iowa, was fired because he stood up to the local good-old-boy network, refusing, on principle, to brook their petty tyrannies.
It’s why, Swalwell said, his family moved West, eventually settling in Northern California. “I told him, ‘Dad, everything, every way I respond, is what I learned from you as a police officer.’ ”
It’s an example his own kids may appreciate someday.
