Being the revenge president goes two ways. First, you have to screw your enemies. Second, you have to make sure your friends have impunity to break the law. After two weeks, here is Donald Trump's scorecard:
- Dropped prosecution of former Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry for lying to the FBI.
- Dropped charges against his pals in crime, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, Trump aides who helped him cover up his theft of classified documents.
- Ordered the firing of all DOJ prosecutors associated with the documents case.
- Pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who founded an organization for large-scale drug trafficking and spent nearly a million dollars paying for the murder of five enemies.
- Dropped the investigation of Republican Rep. Andy Ogles over campaign fraud.
- Placed dozens of USAID workers on immediate leave over unspecified "insubordination" issues.
- Ordered DOJ to fire prosecutors involved in January 6 cases and ordered the FBI to "scrutinize" hundreds of agents who were involved in the prosecutions, in preparation for a possible purge.
- Demanded "details" about FBI employees involved in a case against a Hamas terrorist involved in taking Americans hostage on October 7.
- Pardoned or commuted the sentences of everyone involved in the January 6 insurrection, including rioters convicted of assaulting police officers.
- Pardoned two DC police officers convicted of covering up their role in the death of a man they chased at high speeds because he was driving a moped without a helmet.
Am I missing anything?
The IG firings could be classified under "revenge" I think. IIRC it was an IG who first reported the news that Trump was trying to use the threat of a US aid shutoff to get intel from Ukraine on Hunter Biden.
Also, removing security from several high ranking former officials (Milley, Pompeo, Fauci, etc) is very definitely a form of revenge.
He's also after PBS and NPR. For "airing commercials".
Sticking to the 'fears and claims of the end of liberal democracy are overblown and overstated' sentiment? It would be tragically comical if you were to change your opinion long past the rubicon.
Y'all realize that we became a dictatorship last week. Right?
Protest and there will be tanks in the street. You will bow.
And yet despite Trump telling us exactly what he was going to do, the majority of American voters still preferred him to a Democrat.
"Things That Make You Say 'Whoa'" for $500!
Not true, the majority of voting age Americans who showed up on election day. The majority didn't show up at all.
👍👍👍👍👍
Well, a good populist demagogue is good at duping people by using extreme exaggerations, lies, slander, and personal attacks. And no politician in history is better at using extreme exaggerations, lies, slander, and personal attacks to gain supporters.
If Trump had told exaggerations and lies no more than any other typical US politicians, he could never have come close to winning. Trump is the absolute master of selling bullshit.
Makes me say, what were these 77 million people who don’t understand ‘rule of law’ doing during civics class?
Hoisted for another thread and on-topic here: Any bets on how soon Johnson and Thune fire the Capitol Police who were on duty on J6, and how soon thereafter Bondi and the DC US attorney's office prosecute them for assault, conspiracy, and whatever else they can dream up?
In a like vein, it can't be long before he mouths off about suing Fanone, Dunn, and Gonell for defamation and encourages his terrorist posse to do likewise.
The script would require the state punishing law and security officials (cops judges, lawyers, national defense) to send the message that anyone on the fence needs to fall in line.
I expect the democrats will respond with words about working together on bipartisan solutions
We aren't in Kansas anymore.
He's busily wiping public information off computer systems throughout the government,
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/31/health/cdc-websites-gender-lgbtq-datasets/index.html
And while everybody's staring at that who knows what he's doing to the CIA.
Oh, yeah, he erased web pages of the executive order for the FAA firings
Various agencies have been told to wipe anything that even mentions climate change.
they did that last time
That is the least surprising thing so far for me
Or LGBT people. Gone.
Because it was DEI that did it.
Flooded a bunch of farms and wasted water because he wanted the 'taps on'.
Ordered Rubio to illegally remove passports from trans and nonbinary Americans
Handed the Office of Management and Budget to non-Congressionally approved private party
not much to hear from the opposition. did they all leave the country?
+25.
Garland did not release the very important report (Volume 2) by Jack Smith about the Mar-a-Lago documents case because there were still charges against Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, two co-conspirators - which he could have dismissed. Instead, he's kept it open. And now, to nobody's surprise, the charges were dropped by Trump's DOJ. We may never see Volume 2 (in our lifetimes).
For me, that's proof that all along (Federalist Society) Garland was running interference for Trump. He slow-walked prosecution of Trump because of his prim, norms-über-alles, holier-than-thou fussbudget mind.
Biden was a sentimental old fool who gave Garland the job of A.G. to make up for hurt feelings for getting punked with the SCOTUS nomination. At the highest levels of government, sympathy should never be a factor when making personnel choices.
That will be Biden's legacy.
That, and Gaza.
I'm not sure that's correct. I believe Garland got the job because he and Biden expected the Republican Party to renounce Trump and all his works and return to normalcy. This, you'll remember, happened in the era when Biden could say things like this without being laughed out of the primary:
And yet despite all that he still wasn’t able to get ahead of his destruction of the US economy, staring this weekend.
I’m beginning to think JD Vance is smart to be, so far, the guy who did not want to pardon violent J6ers.
11. Gave Elon the keys to the OPM current and former employee databases, patted him on the head, and said, "Go for it, sky's the limit!"
12. And the federal payments system.
FBI leaders ordered to resign:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/30/politics/senior-fbi-leaders-demoted-wray/index.html
That is even before Patel has been confirmed.
By 2027 the FBI will be a private gang of the president, ready to intimidate, use violence and kill anybody that stands in the way.
Very surprising that I am the first to mention this.
Just keep telling yourself and all the trump people you know that they voted for this. Trumpers won’t care. So far these things are annoying, but they don’t affect anyone I know. I’m boycotting. Necessities only. Quiet quitting. In the short term, I think this is the right response. Or go about your business normally because, you know, every thing is great.
It’s too soon for any other kind of opposition among the public. Let senator fetterman have his way and see if it works.
Trump’s revenge agenda has shocked officials who ‘didn’t think it was going to be this bad’, insiders say.
The headline is kind of infuriating. They probably voted for him. Probably said democrats were being hysterical. 😂
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/31/trump-federal-workers-deep-state
“But Hirschhorn said Jack Smith, who wound up his investigation after Trump’s election victory and resigned as special prosecutor before he took office, was protected by “prosecutorial immunity”.
“Unless they can show that he absolutely acted in bad faith, which is not the situation here, any threat against him is like a fart in a category 5 hurricane,” said Hirschhorn. “It will go whimpering away.”
😂
Forceful action. By gawd if that doesn’t bring down the price of eggs, I don’t know what will.
Sheriff of Nottingham?
I see the link to "Truth Social" (Orwell?) in the pervious post is now "broken". Temporary or are they banning people from sharing....
Many of his "presidential orders" seem to run contrary to law. What are the odds they will abide by court orders?
Yes, I'm looking forward with substantially more than mild curiosity to what happens when federal marshals get nose-to-nose with Hegseth's hand-picked Goth Warrior corps over a court order.
The federal marshals won't get paid?
I see the link to "truth" is back up....
It turns out to be more complicated than I thought. Marshals are officers of the courts and one of their primary duties is enforcing court orders, which was my starting point. They were prominent in enforcing desegregation orders, for example. But it turns out administratively they're part of DOJ even though they answer to the courts. And I think some of the far right has less than no use for them because they were the enforcers at Ruby Ridge and some other western land confrontations.
The bigger point is that, although I hope like hell it doesn't come down to this, it could be a case of whether, for example, a court order for Elmo's minions to leave the Treasury office would need to be physically enforced, and whether Marshals would enforce it, and whether they'd be resisted by other executive elements if they did, and/or whether DOJ would order them to stand down, and whether they'd follow DOJ or court orders.
This is really bad shit to have to think about in the US of A. And it's where trump is leading us, and these are the kinds of decisions he can force on people who shouldn't be put in anything like that kind of position. He forces people into situations where they have to side with him or not, never relents in that MO, and he has no compunctions about ultimately pushing them to suicide if it'll demonstrate they're on his side.
The Republican Congress means impeachment is out of the question; and the Court has taken prosecution off the table. We need a plan to restore democracy after 2 - 4 years of tyranny.
What are the odds that the Supreme (Supine?) Court will actually issue decisions that declare any of his unconstitutional and/or illegal actions invalid? Up until Trump v. United States, the Roberts Court seemed to be balancing rulings against and rulings for TFM; then Roberts violated his own purported principles by deciding what did not need to be decided. This Court hasn’t been shy about ignoring precedent, or about making up rationales out of whole cloth (the ‘major questions’ doctrine).
and 50+% of Americans watched his antics for 10 years, and voted him in . . . again
All these years I thought the MAGAs, Evangelicals and QAnons were the minority. Silly me.
I continue to believe that it speaks to a high level of gynophobia and racism.
Toss in good ole greed for the Trifecta ?
Yup. You have to hand it to the Democrats - being less popular than this guy took some doing!
All it took was nominating an intelligent, competent, sane Black woman. Should have realized the electorate was in a mood for some fascism.
49.8%
Not much resistance either.
Under the law, Chopra was to serve a five-year term, which meant he could have stayed on as the CFPB director. But he had publicly stated that he would leave his post if the new president asked.
Bye bye.
More than 1,100 EPA new hires or transfers who have worked there under one year and are considered on probation were warned of termination. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epa-employees-warned-of-immediate-termination/
But a few trans girls play HS sports...
Remember the important stuff
I don't really care about it either, but why is this the hill we are supposed to die on?
(or upon which we are supposed to die!)
Why is that something that democrats even talk about? It must be important to you and others. But it is, quite clearly, a loser issue. If we want to support some niche issue, then perhaps we ought to do it more quietly. Or at least admit that we're willing to lose in order to make our point.
if you have to resort to a strawman to make a point, you have no point
And treating people decently is a "niche issue"?
Yikes
You wear your bigotry like an ugly xmas sweater
Kudos
The tariffs on Canada and Mexico might be retribution too. Perhaps those countries never showed the proper adulation of Trump during his first term.
Or maybe it's not retribution – maybe just Trump being the bully toward the weaker, which he so loves to do. Or maybe it’s both.
How do you chase a moped at high speeds? Can you chase someone walking at high speeds?
Was wondering that, also. ‘He was pedaling like fury!!’
And just a few weeks ago, he was swearing to faithfully uphold....
how quaint....
7, Ordered DOJ to fire prosecutors involved in January 6 cases and ordered the FBI to "scrutinize" hundreds of agents who were involved in the prosecutions, in preparation for a possible purge.
Some of them must be career prosecutors. Don't they have a valid case for suing DOJ for illegal termination? And, if they sue, how will the supreme court decide between their claim and the SC's opinion that the president cannot be held accountable for actions he takes as part of his official functions?
I think they're almost all career. So was McCabe, iirc, and it took him what, a couple years or so to get a settlement? These firings are completely lawless and invalid and should be immediately rescinded and the people reinstated, but I don't see a snowball's chance of that.
Individually I think they'd probably have strong cases but if I understand the procedures, they'd have to go through a civil service commission review first before they could go to court, a commission trump's people will surely sabotage anyway. So realistically, given that they're mostly mid-level people who need incomes, they'd be looking for cash compensation a few years down the road. That's a long way from justice and the kind of thing people like trump and Elmo bank on.
Your last questions are the nightmare that the immunity ruling fueled for me. They say he's not subject to criminal law while he's in office. How big a jump is it to say that as the single unitary overlord of the whole damn executive branch he's not subject to administrative law? Even though he explicitly swears, as God is his witness, to see that the laws be faithfully executed. All laws, not just criminal ones, including administrative and appropriations. And even though he or a predecessor signed on to all but a handful of them.
Of course our supremes have been inventive recently and they could take "execute" to mean something besides "carry out."
"Your last questions are the nightmare that the immunity ruling fueled for me."
For me too. Trump is an aberration that hopefully disappears in four years or earlier. But supreme court decisions live on until gingerly rescinded. I can see Constitutional crises one after another when the next president(s) decides to test the limits of the unitary presidency.
"Revenge is a dish best served steaming hot" - old Trump family saying.