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Donald Trump's insatiable desire for retribution has swiftly morphed into a methodical framework. Within the past year, the chief executive's fury and caprices have assumed the form of administrative measures in ways reminiscent to historical repressive regimes. Justice department personnel who do not cooperate are summarily dismissed and replaced by supporters. Political leaders who confront him risk legal action, judicial process and punishment. Critics have been designated under administration orders as “hostile to national interests”, “opposed to religious values” and “against free markets”, and threatened with criminal charges as “extremists”.

Federal Agencies Transformed

Every situation involving legal action of Trump's enemies and immunity for his allies exhibits its own distinct characteristics. Yet, regardless of their individual form, they exemplify expressions of what has emerged as a systematic technique. These episodes are far from isolated. His purge of federal lawyers and FBI agents, coupled with his installation of loyalists in senior posts, started quickly, promptly developed a regularity, and has now been formed into a regime. Federal prosecutors and the Federal Bureau have been remade into ideological organizations under Trump's explicit orders to carry out his wishes. Wrongdoing has been rendered standard. This is the system of punishment.

Leadership is more concerned with punishing the leader's perceived enemies than they are with safeguarding our national security.

Within the Apparatus

The foundation of this framework has been exposed in the lawsuit of several ex- high-ranking law enforcement agents filed in September in the judicial system in the capital against FBI director a senior appointee and top lawyer Pam Bondi for illegal termination in “a initiative of revenge against them for what administration figures judged to be a refusal to show adequate allegiance”. In the complaint that Brian Driscoll, the previous temporary head, describes a exchange in which the director “publicly admitted the impropriety of his conduct”.

The official had sought to shield law enforcement officers from being dismissed, the lawsuit claims. He told him that “they” – interpreted by him to be the executive branch and DoJ – had ordered him to remove all those who they considered as having worked on a criminal investigation against him. The complaint adds: “Patel stated that he had to dismiss the people his superiors told him to remove, because his capacity to retain his own position depended on the ouster of the officials who handled cases involving the chief executive. The director noted that there was no way he or the official could do to prevent these or any other dismissals, because ‘the agency tried to incarcerate the chief in jail and he remembers.’” After Driscoll informed the director he was violating the FBI's own regulations, Patel reportedly said “he knew that and he was aware the character of the swift terminations were probably improper”.

Widespread Consequences

After his claimed admission to Driscoll, the DoJ and the FBI have been weakened and reorganized for Trump's retribution system. Several of the agency's top officials were terminated or pushed out in the first days of the administration. Roughly thousands of legal professionals at DoJ have accepted a “early exit scheme”. A minimum of several DoJ lawyers, including those in the Manhattan division, resigned in protest over what they regarded as political interference in abandoning the corruption case against the New York City mayor, a political figure, in exchange for his cooperation with the administration's ICE detentions of immigrants. The anti-corruption unit of the justice department, which manages misconduct investigations, has been diminished to minimal staff. The rights protection unit has been decimated: 70% of its personnel has resigned. One-third of senior leaders at the department have quit. The unit enforcing environmental law has seen departures of a majority its leadership.

Incentives and Penalties

In the Adams case, the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York, the official, stepped down in protest against what she characterized as the “trade-off”. A key figure, Trump's “immigration leader,” showed up as the enforcer with Adams on television to state: “Should he fail to deliver, I will return in NYC.”. Meanwhile, another figure, formerly the senior DoJ official and a former Trump attorney, who brokered the deal, was awarded an judicial position, a possible pathway to the supreme court.

The president's protection for offenses committed while in government, provided by the unprecedented judgment of the Republican majority on the highest court, thus thwarting his criminal case over the political violence and preserving his political viability for the presidential race, is the foundation stone on which he depends to protect his loyalists. Given this protection, he has been empowered to enable wrongdoing. The effect of the court judgment permeates his government and the GOP thoroughly. The court matter has escalated. In the words of Richard Nixon's White House counsel the figure remarked about the Watergate