Since his election victory, President Trump has said he would not seek retribution against his perceived enemies. “I’m not looking to go into the past,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Retribution will be through success.”
But in an executive order he signed on Monday night, Mr. Trump made clear that he has every intention to seek out and possibly punish government officials in the Justice Department and America’s intelligence agencies as a way to “correct past misconduct” against him and his supporters.
It would be justice, the order said, against officials from the Biden administration who carried out an “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.”
This is what retribution could look like during the second Trump presidency: payback dressed up in the language of victimhood.
That executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” came amid a blizzard of other actions on Monday evening.
They included a highly unusual separate order that stripped the security clearances of dozens of former intelligence officials whom Mr. Trump has viewed as his political enemies. Another order gave the White House authority to grant immediate top-secret security clearance to any official for up to six months, circumventing the traditional background process managed by the F.B.I. and the intelligence community.