Phase Two Will Be Worse Than DOGE

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In December, Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker asked Donald Trump about his threats of revenge during the campaign. He demurred. “I’m not looking to go back into the past. I’m looking to make our country successful,” he said. “Retribution will be through success.”

Believe it or not, this statement turns out to have been not entirely honest.

During the first two months of his presidency, the prevailing theme of Trump’s White House was the Elon Musk–led attempt to drastically cut federal agencies. The purge is incomplete—the U.S. DOGE Service continues to seek cuts at more agencies, and litigation has slowed or blocked some of the cuts—but we seem to have already moved into the next stage: revenge.

Trump took one of his most chilling steps toward retribution last week, when he directed the government to investigate two officials in his first administration: Chris Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. The reasons Trump is out to get these two men are clear enough. Krebs, whose work focused on election security, was fired for refusing to say that fraud tainted the 2020 presidential election; as I wrote back in November of that year, Trump targeted him “not because he did a bad job, but because he did too good a job and said so.” Taylor wrote a notable anonymous New York Times op-ed about administration officials resisting Trump, then published a book unmasking himself and worked to organize Republican opposition to Trump.

One might be tempted to think that Trump’s new orders rely on pretexts to target the duo, but they don’t even really bother: They’re pretty straightforward about the reasons. Trump is starting with a conclusion that the two men did something wrong and demanding the government work backwards to find some evidence to support it.

The Krebs order is particularly Orwellian. As he uses the power of the federal government to try to punish someone for voicing his opinion, Trump alleges that Krebs’s conduct “both violates the First Amendment and erodes trust in Government, thus undermining the strength of our democracy itself.”

You don’t have to be a fan of either Krebs or Taylor to be alarmed by these actions, just as you don’t have to agree with Mahmoud Khalil’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to see why his detention is a danger to all Americans. I criticized Taylor’s anonymous op-ed as self-serving and short-sighted when it was published in 2018, but I don’t believe that conduct I think is dumb or misguided is inherently criminal—nor is conduct criminal solely because Trump doesn’t like it.

Any legal inquiries into Krebs and Taylor seem unlikely to go anywhere, beyond stripping their security clearance, which Trump has the power to do. But the two will have to hire lawyers, likely at significant cost, and go through the stress and fear of defending themselves. Even if they triumph, they will have been made examples; other would-be dissenters will see their travails and think twice before speaking, as Trump intends.

Trump has been quietly imposing retribution for some time, but the DOGE-led purges mean fewer longtime professionals who might object to or stand in the way of the latest revenge moves. Late last month, the White House stepped in to fire two career attorneys at the Justice Department “on behalf of President Donald J. Trump”—a serious break with the tradition of Justice Department semi-independence. In January, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, fired several attorneys who had prosecuted cases related to the January 6, 2021, riots. Trump also stripped security details for officials who had served in his first administration but later criticized him—even though some face credible death threats from Iran because of actions they took on Trump’s behalf.

Meanwhile, in a sort of inverse retribution, the administration is rewarding its loyal allies. The Justice Department is pushing for the release of a man convicted of lying to FBI agents about the Biden family. (The original prosecutor on that case, by the way, was appointed U.S. Attorney by Trump.) DOJ is also arguing that people convicted of January 6 attacks on the Capitol whose cases were actively being appealed when Trump pardoned them should be refunded money that they paid in restitution.

One prominent target for Trump’s retribution has been law firms. Trump has gone after a series of major firms simply because current or former attorneys there were involved in things Trump hated: his felony conviction in Manhattan, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s work. Last week, he also assailed a firm that has represented plaintiffs in defamation cases related to 2020 election fraud. As the Atlantic contributor Paul Rosenzweig writes, the speed with which some of these firms have surrendered is deplorable.

In the settlements, these firms have agreed to provide a combined total of about $1 billion in “pro bono” work supporting causes the president backs. As The Wall Street Journal reports, these deals have been negotiated by Trump’s personal lawyer Boris Epshteyn, who is not a government employee—making clear that these causes relate to Trump’s personal revenge rather than some legitimate governmental purpose.

But then, Trump has never seen much distinction between his own interests and the power of the government. For him, revenge isn’t just a welcome adjunct to controlling the levels of government. It’s the reason to control them.

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