The Former President's Regime of Consequences and Incentives
Donald Trump's intense appetite for revenge has quickly evolved into a structured system. During the past year, the leader's anger and whims have adopted the form of administrative measures in ways analogous to historical authoritarian governments. Federal figures who do not cooperate are promptly removed and succeeded by supporters. Critical officials who question him risk prosecution, court proceedings and punishment. Critics have been designated under presidential memoranda as “unpatriotic”, “anti-Christian” and “opposing economic freedom”, and threatened with legal action as “extremists”.
Federal Agencies Restructured
Each situation involving prosecution of political opponents and leniency for loyalists demonstrates its own unique features. However, notwithstanding their specific character, they embody examples of what has developed as a systematic method. These incidents are anything but coincidental. Trump's purge of federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents, accompanied by his placement of devotees in high-level posts, began rapidly, soon took on a consistency, and has now been formed into a regime. Federal prosecutors and the FBI have been remade into partisan organizations under the president's direct command to implement his demands. Injustice has been made standard. It represents the apparatus of revenge.
Leadership is more concerned with penalizing the leader's perceived adversaries than they are with protecting our public welfare.
Within the System
The beginnings of this mechanism has been revealed in the legal complaint of multiple former top Federal Bureau officials filed in late summer in the federal court in Washington against FBI director a senior appointee and top lawyer Pam Bondi for wrongful dismissal in “a campaign of payback against Plaintiffs for what the accused deemed to be a failure to show sufficient political loyalty”. The document states that Brian Driscoll, the former interim leader, describes a discussion in which he “openly admitted the unlawfulness of his actions”.
He had tried to defend FBI agents from being fired, the lawsuit claims. He informed him that “White House figures” – interpreted by Driscoll to be the White House and DoJ – had directed him to dismiss all those who they identified as having worked on a criminal investigation against the president. The document adds: “He explained that he had to dismiss the people his superiors told him to fire, because his chance to hold his own job was contingent on the ouster of the personnel who were involved in investigations involving the leader. Patel commented that there was no option he or Driscoll could do to stop these or any other dismissals, because ‘the bureau attempted to put the chief in prison and he remembers.’” After the official told the director he was violating the FBI's own regulations, the director supposedly said “he knew that and he realized the character of the immediate dismissals were almost certainly illegal”.
Extensive Impact
Since the director's alleged admission to the official, the Department of Justice and the FBI have been weakened and reorganized for the administration's revenge apparatus. Six of the agency's senior executives were dismissed or pushed out in the early weeks of the administration. Approximately numerous legal professionals at the department have taken a “voluntary departure plan”. No fewer than several federal prosecutors, including those in the New York office, stepped down in protest over what they regarded as political interference in abandoning the legal action against the local official, the mayor, in return for his collaboration with the administration's ICE detentions of migrants. The ethics division of DoJ, which oversees ethical violations, has been cut down to two attorneys. The civil rights division has been severely reduced: 70% of its staff has departed. A third of executives at the department have quit. The section implementing ecological regulations has lost 50% its management.
Incentives and Penalties
In the mayor's situation, the acting US attorney for the federal division, Danielle Sassoon, stepped down in objection against what she characterized as the “quid pro quo”. The border official, the president's “border czar,” appeared as the agent with the mayor on Fox News to announce: “Should he fail to deliver, I'll reappear in NYC.”. Additionally, Emil Bove, earlier the justice department figure and a ex-lawyer, who negotiated the deal, was awarded an court role, a possible pathway to the supreme court.
The president's immunity for crimes perpetrated while in power, awarded by the extraordinary decision of the GOP-led on the judicial body, thus preventing his legal action over the Capitol riot and maintaining his public standing for the national vote, is the basis on which he relies to defend his loyalists. Given this protection, he has been empowered to enable corruption. The consequence of the court judgment saturates his administration and the GOP completely. The legal case has escalated. In the words of the former president's White House counsel John Dean remarked about the Watergate
