🔗 Share this article

Trump's voracious appetite for revenge has rapidly morphed into a organized framework. Within the past year, the president's anger and impulses have assumed the guise of government actions in ways analogous to earlier dictatorial governments. Justice department officials who resist his demands are immediately removed and replaced by devotees. Critical officials who challenge him face legal action, judicial process and punishment. Opponents have been designated under executive orders as “hostile to national interests”, “opposed to religious values” and “against free markets”, and menaced with criminal charges as “terrorists”.

Federal Agencies Restructured

All instance involving legal action of critics and protection for supporters exhibits its own unique qualities. But, despite their individual character, they represent expressions of what has arisen as a calculated method. These episodes are not coincidental. Trump's removal of Department of Justice lawyers and law enforcement officials, alongside his appointment of supporters in high-level roles, began rapidly, soon assumed a regularity, and has now been molded into a system. DoJ and the law enforcement agency have been remade into ideological agencies under the president's clear direction to implement his directives. Unfairness has been made standard. It constitutes the apparatus of revenge.

Leadership is more concerned with targeting the leader's perceived enemies than they are with defending our country's safety.

Within the System

The beginnings of this mechanism has been exposed in the court filing of multiple previous senior law enforcement agents submitted in late summer in the federal court in DC against top official Kash Patel and justice department head another official for illegal termination in “a campaign of retribution against the officials for what administration figures judged to be a inability to demonstrate proper allegiance”. In the complaint that one official, the ex- temporary head, describes a exchange in which Patel “publicly admitted the impropriety of his behavior”.

He had sought to protect agency personnel from being dismissed, the filing alleges. He advised him that “administration officials” – understood by Driscoll to be the executive branch and federal prosecutors – had directed him to dismiss anyone who they identified as having participated in a criminal investigation against him. The filing goes on: “He stated that he had to dismiss the individuals his bosses told him to remove, because his chance to retain his own role was contingent on the ouster of the personnel who handled investigations involving the chief executive. Patel commented that there was no way he or the official could do to prevent these or any other firings, because ‘the bureau attempted to put the leader in prison and he recalls it clearly.’” Once Driscoll told him he was disregarding the bureau's own policies, he supposedly said “he understood that and he was aware the essence of the swift terminations were almost certainly improper”.

Extensive Consequences

Following the director's claimed admission to Driscoll, the DoJ and the Federal Bureau have been weakened and reorganized for Trump's revenge apparatus. Several of the bureau's top officials were terminated or pushed out in the early weeks of the administration. Approximately 4,500 professional attorneys at the justice department have agreed to a “early exit scheme”. At least seven government attorneys, among them those in the New York office, quit in dissent over what they considered as ideological pressure in abandoning the corruption case against the local official, a political figure, in exchange for his collaboration with the administration's Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of migrants. The public integrity section of the justice department, which manages corruption cases, has been diminished to a handful of lawyers. The civil rights division has been devastated: the majority of its employees has resigned. A third of senior leaders at the justice department have quit. The division upholding environmental law has seen departures of 50% its management.

Favors and Punishments

In the Adams case, the temporary lawyer for the southern district of New York, Danielle Sassoon, resigned in dissent against what she labeled as the “trade-off”. The border official, his “border czar,” showed up as the enforcer with Adams on Fox News to announce: “Unless he complies, I'll be back in New York City.”. Meanwhile, a former official, previously the acting deputy attorney general and a former Trump attorney, who arranged the agreement, was given an appellate federal judgeship, a possible stepping stone to the supreme court.

His exemption for wrongdoings perpetrated while in power, granted by the unprecedented decision of the Republican majority on the supreme court, thus blocking his criminal case over the political violence and maintaining his public standing for the national vote, is the foundation stone on which he stands to defend his loyalists. Given this protection, he has been empowered to authorize corruption. The consequence of the supreme court decision permeates his government and the GOP down to its bones. The legal case has escalated. In the words of the former president's administration lawyer the figure remarked about the Watergate