Trump Pursues Vengeance with Relentless Determination



[For Donald Trump, Revenge is a Dish Best Served Piping Hot

The president is wasting no time in following through on his frequent campaign trail vows for retribution – with a torrent of purges and pardons. Trump’s sending a chilling message through the US government: officials who cross him, investigate his alleged abuses of power, or join his critics once they leave office must beware his fury. Their livelihoods and even their lives could be at risk. But those who act in his name, even violently, like January 6 convicts, can expect protection.

The reckoning gathered pace on Monday. Over a dozen career officials, who worked on the Justice Department investigations into Trump and who should have civil service protections, were fired after being told they could not be trusted to “faithfully” implement his agenda. In another development, the administration opened a “special project” to take concrete steps to probe prosecutors who oversaw criminal obstruction cases against certain January 6 defendants that were ultimately tossed because of a Supreme Court decision last summer.

These steps followed the dismissal of more than a dozen government agency watchdog officials known as inspectors general. It was lost on nobody that the official who informed Congress about Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, which led to Trump’s first impeachment, was an intelligence community IG. Last week, Trump stripped security details from some former key officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser John Bolton, who are facing threats from Iran after serving Trump during his first term.

Trump’s legal maneuverings came alongside an escalating initiative to strip the government of top layers of the civil service. In another shocking move, the administration put about 60 senior career officials at USAID on immediate leave, following Trump’s executive order that froze almost all foreign assistance.

As the president targeted government officials who did not break the law, Washington is still reeling from the pardons and commutations offered to thousands of January 6 rioters, some of whom beat up police officers in 2021.

These moves show Trump is determined to learn from his first term, when he was often frustrated by the checks and balances of government and believed he was thwarted by career officials. Conservatives argue that Trump, after winning an election and saying exactly what he’d do with a second term, is well within his rights in gutting the government. Many Republicans before Trump felt that the federal bureaucracy actively thwarted right-wing policies that voters installed a president to pursue.

A recurring question over the next four years will be whether the unprecedented actions from Trump are those of an anti-establishment disrupter that simply offend normal presidential decorum or whether they are illegal or corrupt.



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