The American president is a POS.
The president is making good on his campaign promise.
www.theatlantic.com
No one can say they didn’t know.
During his first official campaign rally for the 2024 Republican nomination, held in Waco, Texas, Donald Trump vowed retribution against those he perceives as his enemies.
“I am your warrior,” he
said to his supporters. “I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
Sixty days into Trump’s second term, we have begun to see what that looks like.
The president fired the archivist of the United States because he was enraged at the National Archives for
notifying the Justice Department of his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office following his first term. (The archivist he fired hadn’t even been working for the agency at the time, but that didn’t matter.) He also
fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, a traditionally independent regulatory agency, in violation of Supreme Court precedent and quite likely the language of the statute that created it. (Both members plan to sue to reverse the firings.)
Trump
stripped security details from people he had appointed to high office in his first administration and subsequently fell out with, including General Mark Milley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the former diplomat Brian Hook, and the infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci. The National Institutes of Health, where Fauci worked for 45 years, is being
gutted by the Trump administration. The environment there has become “suffocatingly toxic,” as
my colleague Katherine J. Wu reported.
Trump has
sued networks and newspapers for millions of dollars. His Federal Communications Commission is
investigating several outlets. And he has
called CNN and MSNBC “corrupt” and “illegal”—not because they have broken any laws, but simply because they have been critical of him.
Trump’s FBI director,
Kash Patel, told the MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon in a
2023 interview that “we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you.”
Trump has also come after the legal profession,
expanding his attacks on private law firms and threatening the ability of lawyers to do their job and private citizens to obtain legal counsel. U.S. Marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels as Elon Musk and other Trump-administration allies “ramp up efforts to discredit judges,” according to a Reuters
report. On his social-media site, Musk has attacked judges in more than 30 posts since the end of January, calling them “corrupt,” “radical,” and “evil,” and deriding the “TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY.”
Earlier this week, Trump targeted a federal judge, James E. Boasberg, who ordered a pause in deportations being carried out under an obscure wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Trump, who ignored that court order, called the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic” and demanded his impeachment. (Chief Justice John Roberts responded to the president’s attack with a rare public rebuke.) Trump and his supporters are clearly looking for a showdown with the judicial branch, which could precipitate a constitutional crisis.
But that’s hardly where the efforts at intimidation end. Trump’s
antipathy for Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was on vivid display a few weeks ago, when the president berated Zelensky in a televised Oval Office meeting. Trump’s hostility toward the Ukrainian president, whom he referred to as a “
dictator,” is explained in part by
his long-standing affinity for totalitarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine three years ago. But it almost surely also has to do with Trump’s embrace of
a conspiracy theory that
Ukraine intervened in the 2016 presidential election in an effort to defeat him. (In fact it was
Russia, not Ukraine, that interfered in the election, and on behalf of Trump.)
Last Friday, in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, the president described his adversaries as “scum,” “savages,” and “Marxists,” as well as “deranged,” “thugs,” “violent vicious lawyers,” and “a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government.”
No one has any doubt what this means: The department is under Trump’s personal control. As if to underscore the point, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who called Trump “the greatest president in the history of our country,” said she works “at the directive of Donald Trump.” The Justice Department is Trump’s weapon for revenge. And his appetite for vengeance is insatiable.
