The Retribution Phase of Trump’s Presidency Has Begun
It is not as if he was hiding the plan. When Donald Trump campaigned for a return to the White House in 2024, he openly adopted a platform for revenge and reprisals against his political enemies. Even when allies practically begged him to swear the idea of using the presidency as a personal revenge tool, Trump was explicit on his intentions. I have often thought back to an interview he made in June of last year, in Mar-A-Lago’s ballroom, with the retractable television Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, a fan and supporter of Trump. “You have so much to do,” said McGraw. “You don’t have time to even go. You only have time to do well.” Trump’s response was smiling. “Well, revenge takes time. I will say that,” he said. “And sometimes revenge can be justified. Phil, I must be honest. You know, sometimes it can. “
Friday morning, the vibrations of revenge was strong when the news broke out of a search for the FBI in Maryland Home and at the DC office of John Bolton, the third national security adviser of Trump, which has since become one of its most frequent and most acerbic public criticisms. The details on the raid were sparse, but the first reports suggest that the managers sought evidence that Bolton had disclosed classified information to journalists and in 2020, “the room where it happened”. (Trump’s Ministry of Justice of Justice tried in vain to end the publication of the book – a best -selling report of discord and dysfunction that marked Trump’s foreign policy during his first visit to the White House.) Bolton could hardly be surprised that the attack on him was renewed. In a new edition of the book which was released in January 2024, he warned: “Trump really cares about reprisals for himself, and he will consume a large part of a second term.”
So let us stipulate that everything that comes from the FBI raid on Bolton, legally speaking, there is a certain terrible predictability. During his first months in power, Trump clearly said that his avenging threats were not just a fanfaronade from the campaign season. He stripped of security authorizations (including those of Bolton) and dismissed career civil servants to have links with his opponents; He demanded investigations into the Ministry of Justice. Earlier in August, Trump’s DOJ launched probes of two of his most frank legal opponents – Californian Democrat Adam Schiff, who led Trump’s first investigation in 2019, and New York Attorney General, Letitia James, whose office managed to continue Trump in a civil affair. We do not yet know where all this will end – it is far from certain that these investigations will lead to prosecution, not to mention a prison wing full of “enemies of the people” Trumpian. But we can already say with certainty that he did not only amazing with his campaign season threats; How is it possible that, so many years in this Trump era, there is no more precise vocabulary to describe how we are constantly surprised when Trump and his advisers do exactly what we expected?
A disturbing indicator of the way it all will take place is how the Trump team is now continuing its revenge program – they no longer really try to hide it. In January, when Kash Patel still needed the votes of some republican senators that are not very trumified to win the confirmation as director of the FBI, he insisted that he did not intend to allow the main agency of the Chief Act in America to rely on the disorderly work of the realization of Trump’s vendettas. “There will be no compensation measure taken by an FBI if I am confirmed as director of the FBI,” said Patel – under the oath, I would underline – at its confirmation audience. Asked about an annex to his book in 2023, “Government Gangsters” – who appointed sixty people who were part of a supposed “deep state of the branch” Arris against Trump, with Bolton, and many others who have already shot Trump in the second term, “said Patel:” It is not a list of enemies. It is total misfaritation. ” However, he was there Friday morning, tweet even before the news of the Bolton raid was public: “No one is above the law … @FBI agents on mission.” Are we going to hear from Republicans other than the two who voted against him that Patel made fun of his testimony under the oath of the Senate? Do not count on it.
Asked about the raid, Trump himself denied any specific forecast. Sort of. “He is not an intelligent guy, but he could be a very antipatriotic guy, we will discover it,” he told journalists on Friday morning. “I do not know anything about it; I just saw him this morning. They made a raid. ”
A week earlier, on August 13, Trump had been quite explicit about his anger towards Bolton, complaining of Truth Social according to which his national security advisor on time remains one of the “favorite losses favorite media and truly stupid people” to quote with attacks against him. It is certainly true that Bolton continued to denounce Trump at a time when many other former officials of the Trump administration were silent, despite having all called, from a “threat to democracy” to a “fascist” manual who “prefers the dictator’s approach to the government”.
The timing is notable: Trump’s social post social post on Bolton has nothing to do with classified information and everything to do with the fact that Bolton was one of the noisiest reality checks on the embarrassing president of the president a day earlier with Vladimir Putin, in Alaska. “Trump has not lost, but Putin clearly won,” said Bolton on CNN just after the two leaders suddenly ended their meeting without any agreement to announce. It was precisely the declaration that sparked Trump’s post: “What is it?” The president complained. “We win everything.” Bolton continued to offer Trump’s efforts in Trump’s efforts for a short time to end the Russian war in Ukraine; He appeared on CNN Thursday evening – in the hours before the FBI raid, in fact – giving an interview in which he attributed the “confusion” on Trump’s negotiations with Putin to say clearly what was discussed and called “the concern of the White House that Trump did not stand up to Putin in Alaska”.
I do not know if Bolton is silent in public is a goal of this FBI raid or simply an auxiliary advantage for Trump. Be that as it may, it represents a direct attack on one of the most informed criticisms of the president, the account of the direct room of the direct room of ignorance, the perfidy and the will to betray the national interest in the service of its own interest, provides an important counterpoint to the daily flow of the propaganda of Pro-Tump now adopted by most American rights.
While I would digest the news of Friday morning raid, a historian friend sent a quote from Huey Long, the Populist politician of Louisiana who showed the political potential of an American style demagogue, winning the governor of his state and a seat at the end of the Twenties and wrong on the right. Long observed that the imposition of American -style fascism would not require military control but that “would only have to obtain the right president and the right cabinet” to emerge as a “American movement at a hundred hundred”. In addition, he added: “It would not be necessary to remove the press. A couple of powerful newspaper channels and two or three articles with practical monopolies of certain fields were going to suffocate, slander and make singing in silence, and ruthlessly to eliminate competitors. ”
The uncomfortably relevant evaluation of Long is a reminder that Trump’s actions do not exist outside of history. The tools that have worked so effectively to silence criticism in the brutal dictatorships of the 20th century – or in Putin Russia, moreover – work just as well when they are deployed by the Avenging President. ♦
