Donald Trump is turning payback into policy
Summary
And setting new, dangerous precedents for the American presidency
During a debate last summer, when Donald Trump was asked what he meant by saying that as president he would have every right to “go after" his political opponents, he replied, “My retribution is going to be success." His first few weeks back in the job have confirmed what many of his supporters and critics assumed he had in mind: that in office he would define “success" to include retribution. Mr Trump is not just returning to the ways of American presidents before the Watergate scandal, which led to reforms meant to insulate the Justice Department and FBI from presidential pressure. Those earlier presidents tended to be furtive in their use of government to punish adversaries: Richard Nixon’s “enemies list" was a secret.
Mr Trump is up to something new. He not only wants to punish critics and officials, down to the lowliest bureaucrats, who do not embrace him and his priorities. He wants all America to know he is doing it. Revenge, for him, is best served publicly. His new aides are pulling down official portraits of former aides who crossed him, firing prosecutors and FBI agents who investigated him and demanding the names of thousands more agents involved in the inquiry into the attack on the Capitol on January 6th 2021. As the president said recently, “I have certain hatreds of people."
Mr Trump’s most shocking punishment has been to strip government protection from former officials facing death threats from Iran for supporting his own first-term policy. One of them, John Bolton, who served as Mr Trump’s national security adviser, says he has resorted to “private measures" for protection, having been informed just before the inauguration that the Iranian threat is as active as ever against him and others. “That’s Trump," Mr Bolton says, by way of explanation. “It’s all transactional and seen through the prism: how does this benefit Donald Trump?"
When Mr Trump was asked by a reporter if he would take any responsibility if something happened to Mr Bolton and others denied security, he responded, “I think that, certainly, I would not take responsibility." But Mr Bolton says “The blood would be on his hands," and the president would almost certainly have to take military action against Iran. For Mr Bolton this would be a somewhat pyrrhic outcome, since he supported such action during Mr Trump’s first term. In “The Room Where it Happened", his memoir of working in the Trump White House, he calls Mr Trump’s last-minute decision to cancel a planned reprisal strike on Iran “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any president do".
Mr Bolton’s book is searing even by the molten standards of the Trump tell-all genre. He describes Mr Trump as unfit for the office, easily manipulated by the flattery of foreign leaders, and childishly unfocused, sidetracking national-security meetings with looping digressions about wanting to give citizenship to white South African farmers or to replace electronic aircraft-carrier systems for lifting planes with steam-powered ones. “In no arena of American affairs has the Trump aberration been more destructive than in national security," Mr Bolton writes. One can see why Mr Trump might be annoyed.
As Mr Bolton notes, this is less true of another former official whose government protection Mr Trump withdrew, Mike Pompeo, once Mr Trump’s secretary of state. Mr Pompeo weighed running against Mr Trump, but then fell back in line and gave a speech praising his foreign-policy record at the Republican convention last summer. That now makes him an even more cautionary tale for those who might risk irking Mr Trump: his move against Mr Pompeo sends a clearer signal, as Mr Bolton puts it, “that there’s no limit to how vindictive Trump can be".
This is why, in the “my-retribution-is-going-to-be-success" tradition, assurances by Mr Trump’s appointees about the limits to vengeance should be taken with a grain of salt. Pam Bondi, Mr Trump’s attorney-general, told senators during her confirmation hearings that she would “ensure that all laws are followed" and would not “target people simply because of their political affiliation". If she pursues officials who prosecuted Mr Trump, neither statement could be called a lie if she thinks they may have broken the law, as she has suggested in the past. Kash Patel, Mr Trump’s pick for director of the FBI, pledged during his hearings that “no one that did not break the law will be investigated"—a standard that implies he can determine guilt in advance, and one that also supplies him with plenty of running room if he suspects wrongdoing. And he sure does: “Democrats in power are not held accountable for their crimes," he complains in “Government Gangsters", his own memoir.
Gotta serve somebody in particular
The flipside to punishing critics, however irrelevant they have become, is rewarding loyalists, however dodgy. Hence Mr Trump’s pardons even for those January 6th rioters who attacked police officers. The Justice Department has also abandoned the prosecution of a former Republican congressman (Mr Trump called it partisan). By fighting so hard for nominees like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy junior, Mr Trump is demonstrating how far he will go to reward even manifestly flawed allies, provided their support for him is unqualified.
Mr Bolton believes Mr Trump’s denial of security for former officials will chill policymaking. More broadly, Mr Trump is creating precedents and even incentives for future presidents to conduct wide-ranging reprisals of their own and to flush the bureaucracy of suspected non-believers. Maybe, over time, this will enhance political accountability and lead to better service from the bureaucracy for the citizens. It is more likely to turn taking a government job at any level into a sucker’s bet. For now, if Mr Trump has his way, it will make serving in government mean serving him.
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