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Donald Trump’s voracious desire for retribution has quickly evolved into a regular and predictable system. In the year since his election his rage and whims have assumed the form of policies in the same way that Stalin’s purges could be called policies. Figures within the federal system of justice who do not do his bidding are summarily fired and replaced by loyalists. Leaders who have called him to account or are in his way may face indictment, trial and punishment. Opponents have been designated under Presidential National Security Memorandum No 7 as “Antifa”: “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalist,” and threatened with prosecution as a “terrorist”. Meanwhile, many aligned with him escape justice, whether through the hand of the Department of Justice or the presidential pardon power. Now, he demands compensation for having been prosecuted to the tune of $230m from the Department of Justice (DoJ) budget.
Each of the cases involving prosecution of Trump’s enemies and, on the other hand, the leniency extended to his allies has its own peculiarities of outrage. But whatever their unique and arbitrary perversities, they are expressions of what has emerged as a technique. These episodes are not isolated or coincidental. Trump’s purge of DoJ prosecutors and FBI agents, accompanied by his installment of flunkies in senior positions, started in a rush, quickly assumed a pattern, but has now been molded into a regime. The justice department and the FBI have been remade into political agencies under Trump’s explicit command to carry out his wishes. Injustice is made routine. It is the retribution system.
The origin of this system has been exposed in the complaint of three former senior FBI officials filed on 10 September in the US district court in DC against FBI director Kash Patel and attorney general Pam Bondi for illegal termination in “a campaign of retribution against Plaintiffs for what Defendants deemed to be a failure to demonstrate sufficient political loyalty”. In the complaint, Brian J Driscoll, the former acting FBI director, describes a conversation in which Patel “openly acknowledged the unlawfulness of his actions”.
Driscoll had tried to shield FBI agents from being fired, the complaint alleges. Patel told him that “they”– understood by Driscoll to be the White House and justice department – had directed him to fire anyone who they identified as having worked on a criminal investigation against Trump. The complaint continues: “Patel explained that he had to fire the people his superiors told him to fire, because his ability to keep his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on cases involving the President. Patel explained that there was nothing he or Driscoll could do to stop these or any other firings, because ‘the FBI tried to put the President in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.’” When Driscoll told Patel he was violating the FBI’s own internal rules, Patel allegedly said “he understood that and he knew the nature of the summary firings were likely illegal”.
Since Patel’s alleged admission to Driscoll, the Department of Justice and the FBI have been gutted and repurposed for Trump’s retribution system. Six of the FBI’s senior executives were fired or forced out in the early weeks of the administration. About 4,500 professional attorneys at DoJ have accepted a “deferred resignation program”. At least seven federal prosecutors, including those in the southern district of New York, resigned in protest over what they viewed as political interference in dropping the corruption case against the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, in exchange for his cooperation with Trump’s ICE roundups of immigrants. The Public Integrity section of DoJ, which handles corruption cases, has been reduced to two attorneys. The Civil Rights Division has been decimated: 70% of its staff has left. One-third of senior leaders at DoJ have quit. The section enforcing environmental law has lost half its leadership.
In the Adams case, the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York, Danielle Sassoon, resigned in protest against what she described as the “quid pro quo”. Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” appeared as the enforcer with Adams on Fox News to declare: “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City,” and Emil Bove, previously the acting deputy attorney general, a former Trump attorney, who arranged the deal, was awarded an appellate federal judgeship, a potential stepping stone to the supreme court.
Trump’s immunity for crimes committed while in office, granted by the extraordinary ruling of the Republican majority on the supreme court, thus thwarting his prosecution over the January 6 insurrection and preserving his political viability for the 2024 election, is the foundation stone on which he stands to protect his stalwarts. With such immunity, he has been freed to authorize corruption. The effect of the supreme court decision permeates his administration and the Republican Party down to its bones. Trump v United States has metastasized. As Richard Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean said about the Watergate scandal, it has become “a cancer on the presidency”.
The understanding that nobody significant who is working for or supporting Trump can ever expect to face the bar of justice for criminal behavior has been absorbed as an operating principle. In his service, they are released from following the rule of law in favor of obedience to the rule of the leader. As Trump stated in granting a commutation to the former Republican congressman George Santos, convicted of stealing of Covid unemployment insurance benefits, credit card fraud, embezzlement of election funds, and identity theft, among other crimes, “at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Santos is now able to join Trump in his box at the Kennedy Center Honors when disco queen Gloria Gaynor is bestowed her award and belts I Will Survive – apparently one of his favorites.
In his inside-out world, Santos the con is transformed into Trump’s projection of himself as a victim. Santos is washed clean; he is resurrected. The Santos commutation, after serving 84 days of an 87-month sentence, was a minor masterstroke for Trump to demonstrate even more than contempt for the law and his exultation of stupidity. Santos was not just the class clown of the House Republican conference. The fake descendant of Holocaust survivors, phony Goldman Sachs banker, bogus real estate tycoon, but real Brazilian drag queen, was an albatross for congressional Republicans. Trump’s commutation is another one of his gestures to demonstrate that the House Republicans will swallow any embarrassment and insult with servility.
Santos’s commutation represents the obverse but essential element of the retribution system – the rewards system. The favors began on his inauguration day, when Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 people involved in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, followed by pardons for 23 anti-abortion activists convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, 16 politicians as of June (including those from his first term), financial fraudsters, and closely connected donors, including Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and whom he appointed ambassador to France. One of the January 6th pardoned prisoners, Christopher Moynihan, was arrested on October 20 for attempted murder of the House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. More than 10 of the January 6th insurrectionists pardoned by Trump have been rearrested, charged or sentenced on a variety of charges, including child sexual assault and plotting to kill FBI agents.
Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” has no need for a pardon or commutation. He was exempted from prosecution by Trump’s DOJ after having reportedly been taped in a sting operation by FBI agents in September 2024 accepting $50,000 in cash in a Cava bag in exchange for promising to deliver federal contracts once he assumed his position under Trump.
Homan has offered a series of conflicting explanations about the money. On Fox News, he insisted he did “nothing criminal,” a non-denial denial. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, offered a different explanation, announcing that Homan had never taken the cash. When Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked Bondi on October 7, “What became of the $50,000,” she did not answer, but spewed a falsehood that Whitehouse had taken a campaign donation from someone who had held meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. Apparently taking the cue, Homan went on the rightwing NewsNation to say: “I didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” In short, he has claimed he has not done anything illegal in not doing it. If he were to write about it, Homan might borrow the title from OJ Simpson’s If I Did It.
Trump’s pardons and grants of clemency often bypass the traditional review process of the pardon attorney at the justice department, even though he has replaced the professional Liz Oyer with the crackpot Ed Martin, who was an organizer of Stop the Steal rallies and attorney for January 6 defendants. As the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Martin led the purge of DOJ prosecutors of January 6th insurrectionists. But Martin’s tenure was abbreviated when it was clear his confirmation to hold the job permanently would be rejected by the Senate. Trump sent him to DOJ, where he is also the head of the new Weaponization Working Group. Martin has overseen the cellophane-thin indictment of the Federal Reserve Board governor, Lisa Cook, for alleged mortgage fraud, which she denies. Trump has fired her, but the supreme court has allowed her to stay in her job until it hears the arguments in the case in January 2026.
Trump’s scheme of indicting “enemies within” on contrived mortgage application fraud charges extends to New York attorney general Letitia James, who successfully prosecuted Trump for financial fraud, and targeting the Democratic senator Adam Schiff, who led Trump’s first impeachment. Trump has enlisted for this particular retribution campaign the enthusiastically thuggish Bill Pulte, like Trump another unworthy entitled heir, grandson to the billionaire founder of a home building empire, to dredge up the thin gruel to make the accusations. Pulte has a history of making belligerent insults, even to a family member who filed a lawsuit against him to stop his “degrading and threatening harassment”. In early September, at the new exclusive private club in Washington for Trump people, the executive branch, treasury secretary Scott Bessent confronted Pulte for “trash-talking him” to Trump. “I’m going to punch you in your fucking face,” Bessent said, according to the New York Post. Yet Trump still apparently values Pulte for his utility as one of his loudmouth bullies.
Ed Martin peeked into the James case with a letter to her attorney Abbe Lowell on August 12 asking for her to resign as “an act of good faith”, adding that his letter was “confidential”. Lowell replied that given the letter’s obvious violation of the code of “professional responsibility” for justice department attorneys, “I was not sure it was actually from you.” Lowell also noted that Martin had staged a strange “photo opportunity”, standing in front of James’ brownstone in Brooklyn accompanied by a photographer from the New York Post, “outside the bounds of DOJ and ethics rules”. Even more bizarrely, Martin wore a trenchcoat, perhaps in homage to the character of Columbo, a fictional detective made famous in a TV series of the 1970s but earlier played by the actor Thomas Mitchell, Martin’s uncle. “One has no conceivable idea of any proper or legitimate reason you went to Ms. James’ house, what you were doing, and for what actual purpose,” wrote Lowell.
When Trump demanded the indictment of the former FBI director James Comey, his recent appointee as the US attorney in the eastern district of Virginia, Erik Siebert, refused on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence for the allegation. He was promptly replaced by Lindsey Halligan, a former beauty contestant and insurance lawyer from Florida, who had assisted in Trump’s documents case at Mar-a-Lago, and been elevated to a senior associate staff secretary in his White House. Six top attorneys in the EDV office either resigned in protest or were fired. One of the longtime professional prosecutors who was fired, Michael Ben’Ary, taped a letter to the door, stating: “leadership is more concerned with punishing the President’s perceived enemies than they are with protecting our national security.”
Comey’s daughter, Maurene Comey, an assistant US attorney in the southern district of New York, was fired in July. She filed a lawsuit claiming her “politically motivated termination” was “unlawful and unconstitutional” and solely the result of her relationship to her father. Perhaps coincidentally, she was the prosecutor in the cases of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Just when James Comey filed a motion for the judge to dismiss the case against him as a vindictive prosecution, a reporter at Lawfare, Anna Bower, revealed that Halligan had initiated text messages on Signal petulantly complaining to her about her stories on the James case and demanding corrections. In fact, Bower had only tweeted a New York Times article that cast doubt on the central contention of the prosecution that James used a second home as a rental property. Halligan demanded changes in the article that Bower did not write, but Halligan claimed she couldn’t discuss them because of grand jury secrecy, which she broadly hinted at. Then, when Bower informed her she would publish their exchange, Halligan belatedly insisted it was off the record. She noted that she erased her messages on Signal on a regular basis, which violates the Federal Records Act. In the world of yesterday, Halligan would have been instantly removed and under investigation from both the DOJ and congressional committees. A DoJ spokesperson responded to Bower with the department’s official statement: “Good luck ever getting anyone to talk to you when you publish their texts.”
The sheer amateurishness of Halligan may make Trump’s system appear unprecedented, which it is certainly in American History. Nixon at his worst only aspired to what Trump is putting into practice. But aspects of it have had their parallels in the purges that were characteristic of authoritarian regimes of the past. “In other words, this system is the logical outgrowth of the Leader principle in its full implication and the best possible guarantee for loyalty,” wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The cranks, incompetents and ambitious losers recruited to carry out Trump’s vengeance invariably display a spectrum of quirks. His preference would be that they would all be a chorus line of former beauty queens. “It’s that face. It’s those lips. They move like a machine gun,” Trump has mused about his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. Whoever the Trump misfit might be, beauties or Martin, they are replaceable widgets that function within the system he’s created. Trump wages war on the enemies within with the eccentrics at his disposal. They represent the revenge of the second-rate or less, taking positions once held by the most qualified and then wreaking havoc on their meritorious betters in a wave of resentment. They reflect their damaged leader. That is the beating heart of Trumpism.
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Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
