Trump's intense appetite for revenge has rapidly evolved into a methodical framework. Over the past year, the president's rage and impulses have taken on the form of official policies in ways analogous to past dictatorial regimes. Federal figures who do not cooperate are promptly fired and succeeded by devotees. Opposing leaders who confront him face prosecution, trial and sanctions. Adversaries have been designated under executive directives as “unpatriotic”, “opposed to religious values” and “opposing economic freedom”, and warned with legal action as “security threats”.
Government Institutions Transformed
Every instance involving targeting of critics and protection for supporters exhibits its own distinct qualities. However, notwithstanding their particular character, they exemplify examples of what has developed as a systematic approach. Such incidents are far from coincidental. His purge of DoJ prosecutors and law enforcement officials, coupled with his installation of supporters in senior posts, started swiftly, promptly assumed a consistency, and has now been formed into a structure. DoJ and the law enforcement agency have been restructured into ideological bodies under his explicit orders to execute his demands. Wrongdoing has been rendered standard. It represents the retribution system.
Leadership is more concerned with targeting the chief's alleged enemies than they are with protecting our national security.
Within the System
The foundation of this mechanism has been uncovered in the lawsuit of several former top FBI executives lodged in late summer in the US district court in Washington against FBI director Kash Patel and justice department head a key figure for illegal termination in “a campaign of revenge against the officials for what administration figures considered to be a inability to show sufficient political loyalty”. The document states that one official, the previous interim leader, recounts a exchange in which he “freely acknowledged the unlawfulness of his behavior”.
The official had tried to defend FBI agents from being terminated, the lawsuit states. The director told him that “White House figures” – understood by the official to be the White House and DoJ – had directed him to fire everyone who they considered as having participated in a legal probe against him. The document continues: “Patel stated that he had to terminate the people his leaders told him to dismiss, because his capacity to hold his own position relied on the dismissal of the agents who worked on investigations involving the leader. Patel noted that there was no way he or the official could do to stop these or any other terminations, because ‘the agency tried to put the chief in detention and he hasn't forgotten it.’” When Driscoll advised the director he was breaking the bureau's own policies, he supposedly said “he understood that and he realized the character of the summary firings were probably illegal”.
Widespread Effects
Following his reported acknowledgment to the official, the DoJ and the Federal Bureau have been dismantled and redirected for the administration's revenge apparatus. Six of the bureau's senior executives were fired or pushed out in the first days of the presidency. Roughly 4,500 professional attorneys at DoJ have accepted a “early exit scheme”. At least multiple government attorneys, among them those in the Manhattan division, stepped down in dissent over what they viewed as partisan influence in withdrawing the legal action against the city leader, the mayor, in exchange for his collaboration with his ICE roundups of immigrants. The anti-corruption unit of the department, which oversees ethical violations, has been reduced to two attorneys. The equality section has been decimated: seventy percent of its employees has resigned. 33% of top officials at DoJ have left. The unit enforcing environmental law has seen departures of 50% its supervisors.
Incentives and Punishments
Regarding the mayor's situation, the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York, she, resigned in protest against what she described as the “exchange”. A key figure, the president's “border czar,” appeared as the enforcer with the mayor on Fox News to announce: “If he doesn't come through, I'll reappear in NYC.”. And, Emil Bove, earlier the acting deputy attorney general and a ex-lawyer, who negotiated the deal, was awarded an judicial position, a likely stepping stone to the judicial branch.
The president's exemption for crimes perpetrated while in government, awarded by the remarkable judgment of the Republican majority on the judicial body, thus thwarting his criminal case over the political violence and maintaining his public standing for the presidential race, is the foundation stone on which he depends to defend his loyalists. Under these circumstances, he has been liberated to authorize corruption. The impact of the supreme court decision infuses his presidency and the GOP completely. The legal case has metastasized. In the words of Richard Nixon's White House counsel he commented about the Watergate
