Trump’s Foes Fear His Retribution Has Already Begun

The Washington Post

17:06 JST, December 21, 2024

Since he was elected, President-elect Donald Trump has waffled on his campaign-season vow to punish his enemies when he returns to the White House, declaring this month that his “retribution will be through success.”

But many of Trump’s critics – and targets – fear that his long-promised campaign of retribution has in fact already started.

Trump’s first impulse is to go after people who cross him, and he’ll only be emboldened to do so in his second term, said Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer during Trump’s first term who has since been critical of the president-elect.

“That’s his instinct, that’s what’s going to happen, and that’s what’s happening now,” Cobb said.

On Wednesday, Trump posted on social media that one of his most vocal Republican critics, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (Wyoming),“could be in a lot of trouble,” citing a House GOP report released earlier this week that recommended the government criminally investigate her. The president-elect recently escalated his attacks on another favorite target, the media, by filing a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and its longtime pollster, accusing them of “election interference” for publishing a poll three days before the election that showed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris winning Iowa. And Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, vowed last year that “conspirators” in government and media would face consequences if he served in a second Trump administration.

Trump campaigned on claims he was wronged by prosecutors, the media and top officials in his own administration, and famously told his supporters, “I am your retribution.” Now he is preparing to retake the White House with a team that shares his aggressive approach to critics and a Republican Party that stands staunchly behind him. Trump’s opponents are bracing for a second Trump administration with more loyalists and fewer people pushing back on the president’s impulses, as some top Cabinet members did during Trump’s first term.

Legal experts are skeptical that Trump has a criminal or civil case against many of his targets. But lawsuits that are ultimately dismissed and threats of prosecution that are unlikely to result in convictions can serve as their own kind of punishment, forcing Trump’s enemies to spend time and money on their legal defense.

“We must not normalize a president-elect who is working hand in glove with Congress … to gin up baseless allegations of criminality to prosecute Liz Cheney,” said Norm Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House of Representatives’ first impeachment of Trump in 2019. “Nor is there any basis to sue a pollster and the outlet publishing a poll because it was incorrect.”

“The goal here,” Eisen added, “is to create a climate of intimidation so that potential opponents will bow down and bend the knee.”

Trump and his allies have said they are merely seeking accountability for injustices against him, including criminal prosecutions of Trump that they decried as political.

The justice system “must be fixed and due process must be restored for all Americans, which is exactly what President Trump will do as he returns to the White House,” Trump communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement. “As President Trump has said in multiple interviews, the DOJ and FBI in his Administration will make decisions on their own accord because he actually believes in the rule of law, and that the greatest retribution will be delivering success for the American people.”

Trump also promised retribution against his enemies in 2016, telling then-Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate that he would appoint a special prosecutor to scrutinize her actions and that if he was in charge, she would “be in jail.”

But once elected, Trump quickly backed off the idea, telling reporters that prosecuting Clinton is “just not something I feel very strongly about.”

Trump was also inconsistent during his campaign, alternately offering up his “retribution will be through success” line and suggesting that his administration “could or should investigate, prosecute or jail a wide range of people.” He promised to appoint a special prosecutor “to go after” President Joe Biden, “the entire Biden crime family” and “all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & country itself.” He also repeatedly suggested that members of a House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol should be prosecuted.

He reiterated that idea Dec. 6 in his first network TV interview since the election, even as he also claimed he is “not looking to go back into the past.”

“For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump said of the committee members in a sit-down with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” just after naming Cheney and Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Mississippi), who chaired the Jan. 6 panel.

Trump’s allies in Congress have taken up the message. The GOP push to punish Cheney intensified this week when a House subcommittee led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Georgia) released a report criticizing the work of the Jan. 6 committee and accusing her of tampering with a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by communicating privately with her. Hutchinson, a former Trump White House aide, testified that people in Trump’s orbit pressured her to stay quiet.

The report, from the House Administration subcommittee on oversight, said that “numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney … and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Loudermilk’s report “intentionally disregards the truth” and “instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did,” Cheney wrote Tuesday on social media.

Cobb, the ex-White House lawyer, called the recommendation to criminally investigate Cheney “absurd” and said, “People are just lining up to get under Trump’s umbrella.”

Republicans who clash with Trump, meanwhile, can expect fierce backlash from the GOP base. GOP senators successfully objected to Trump’s now-withdrawn pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general – but Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) paid a political price for expressing doubts about Pete Hegseth, Trump’s selection for Defense Department.

MAGA influencers and activists loudly criticized her and fanned talk of a primary challenge. Days after saying she was not ready to back Hegseth, Ernst requested a second meeting with him and called their talks “encouraging.”

Trump’s pick to lead the FBI also suggests to many observers that the president-elect remains focused on punishing his enemies. Patel, a national security staffer in Trump’s first administration, has been a leading critic of what Trump calls the “deep state” – a collection of government officials Trump and his allies accuse of working to thwart his agenda when he was in office. Patel’s book, titled “Government Gangsters,” includes a 60-person list of “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State” that includes Biden, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

A Trump transition spokesman, Alex Pfeiffer, said Wednesday that Patel will “end the weaponization of law enforcement” and that his FBI will “target crime, not law-abiding individuals.”

Like Trump, Patel has filed lawsuits against media outlets and government officials who he feels have wronged him. In his book, Patel derides Wray as “corrupt,” calls for people who leak information to be prosecuted and says journalists and media outlets “should also be more easily sued when they publish defamatory stories based on gossip.”

In a blurb for Patel’s book, Trump praised it as a “brilliant road map highlighting every corrupt actor” and a “blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these Gangsters from all of Government.”

Asked on “Meet the Press” this month if he wanted Patel to launch investigations into people on that list, Trump replied: “No. I mean, he’s going to do what he thinks is right.” Pressed on the question, he later said: “If they were crooked, if they did something wrong, if they have broken the law, probably. They went after me. You know, they went after me, and I did nothing wrong.”

By suing the Des Moines Register and its former pollster, Ann Selzer, Trump signaled that he plans to continue his long habit of going after organizations he calls “fake news,” including The Washington Post.

Trump could be emboldened by the recent success of a defamation lawsuit against ABC News. In a settlement made public this past weekend, ABC agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential foundation and museum and express “regret” for anchor George Stephanopoulos’s false on-air statements about Trump. The news surprised some legal observers who believed that robust legal protections for media gave ABC grounds to keep fighting the case.

Trump’s latest lawsuits against the media hinge on complaints of “election interference” rather than defamation and appear less likely to succeed in court, legal experts said. But they could still be burdensome.

Trump’s complaint against the Des Moines Register and Selzer alleges the defendants wanted to “create a false narrative of inevitability” for Harris in the final stretch of the presidential election. Selzer’s poll, which showed Harris leading the state by three points, turned out to be far off the mark: Trump won Iowa by about 13 points.

The Des Moines Register’s parent company, Gannett, has acknowledged its poll turned out to incorrect but believes Trump’s lawsuit is meritless, Lark-Marie Antón, a spokeswoman for the media conglomerate, said in a statement. Selzer, who was well-known for accurate surveys before the Iowa debacle, declined to comment.

Sarah Isgur, a former Justice Department staffer who appears on Patel’s “enemies list,” said that Trump could pay a political cost if he focuses on retribution.

“I think it’s an unhelpful place politically for Trump to be in because the political priority for this administration surely has to be inflation, crime, immigration, the sort of things that top those issue polls that voters really cared about,” Isgur said in an interview.

But other Trump critics fear he is more emboldened to act on his personal grievances this time. Not only is he filling his administration with absolute loyalists, but he also expects to be less constrained by traditional checks on presidential power. The conservative-leaning Supreme Court has ruled that presidents have broad immunity for official acts during their presidency. Republicans control both the House and the Senate. And Trump is barred by the Constitution from running for or serving a third term, so he will not have to worry about facing voters again – though some allies have floated the idea of Trump running again anyway.

Trump’s actions so far are “heavy, heavy stuff,” said Chris Edelson, a government professor at American University and the author of two books on presidential power. He said there is no evidence that those in power will try to stop him.

“In a functioning democracy,” he said, “when you’re elected to office, it doesn’t mean you can use power for personal goals to go after your perceived enemies, but that’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing.”