Trump’s entire administration is run on pettiness and revenge
President Donald Trump’s thirst for personal revenge has him using the whole of the federal government to attack everyone he feels wronged by. As Judge Beryl Howell put it: “Pursuing personal payback is not something in which the government has a cognizable interest.”
She should know, as Judge Howell granted a temporary restraining order, partially blocking the administration from enforcing Trump’s executive order that targeted Perkins Coie, a law firm Trump has been angry at for years.
Trump’s attack on Perkins Coie stems from the fact that the law firm hired the firm that commissioned the Steele dossier, a controversial political opposition research report on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Still mad nearly a decade later, Trump stripped the firm of security clearances and restricted its employees from entering federal buildings. The executive order doesn’t hide this, instead explicitly complaining about the firm’s representation of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and their work with “activist donors” like George Soros.
Perkins Coie filed suit, which led to Wednesday’s temporary restraining order. During the hearing, Judge Howell compared Trump’s behavior to that of the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland,”running around yelling, “Off with her head!”
This isn’t the only firm Trump has personally targeted. He’s also suspended security clearances for the lawyer who represented the whistleblower over Trump’s “perfect call” to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zenenskyy and the firm that provided services for former special counsel Jack Smith.
These attacks are indeed intended to harm these firms directly. However, they also send a message to any law firm thinking of representing someone with interests adverse to Trump: don’t do it unless you want to be targeted.
Trump’s personal hatred is also what fueled his removal of security protections from dozens of people he’s mad at. It only took him one day to strip his former national security adviser John Bolton of his Secret Service detail. Bolton got Secret Service protection thanks to former President Joe Biden because Bolton received threats from Iran over a drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani during Trump’s first term.
Biden did this even though Bolton is no fan of Biden. Indeed, after Trump yanked his detail, Bolton told CBS News, “Notwithstanding my criticisms of President Biden’s national-security policies, he nonetheless made the decision to once again extend Secret Service protection to me in 2021.”
Biden’s actions are what presidents are supposed to do, which is to ensure security protection of people regardless of whether he likes them or shares their politics. But for Trump, security protections are just another thing to arbitrarily withhold as punishment. Bolton’s sin is that he wrote a book calling Trump unfit to be president and, ironically, called him out for punishing personal enemies.
Trump also immediately pulled State Department security details for his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and a senior aide, Brian Hook. Like Bolton, Pompeo and Hook received threats from Iran because they helped implement Trump’s bellicose approach to that country. Like Bolton, the Biden administration understood that security protection was necessary and even warned the incoming Trump team that Pompeo and Hook still faced threats, but Trump pulled the security details regardless.
Unlike Bolton, it isn’t as clear why Trump is unhappy with Pompeo. There are some minor things, like disagreeing with Trump’s assertion that Iran didn’t fund terrorist groups during his first presidency. Pompeo also said the GOP needed to shift away from leaders with “fragile egos” and correctly noted that the first Trump administration added to the national deficit.
These are remarkably trivial, but Hook’s transgressions seem nonexistent. Hook, who was Trump’s envoy to Iran during his first term, was also expected to be a senior adviser in the second term. Instead, he was fired via an all-caps Truth Social post on Trump’s first day in office.
One possible explanation is that Hook, though one of the key architects of Trump’s rabid anti-Iran policy, was compromised somehow because he spent his career affiliated with Republicans that Trump thinks are too soft. None of this is a reason to remove security protections from someone still facing active threats—threats that stem from actions supporting Trump’s policies.
In late January, General Mark Milley, who Trump appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, was stripped of his security clearances and had his security detail removed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also ordered an inspector general examination of Milley’s record, with an eye toward reducing his rank.
Milley’s transgression? Upon his retirement in 2023, he told troops they swore an oath to the Constitution, not to “a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.” He also called Trump “fascist to the core.”
Trump learned that at the end of his first term, Milley talked with Chinese officials to tell them there was no threat to China. Trump then went on Truth Social to say Milley was treasonous and implied he should be executed.
Biden preemptively pardoned Milley, knowing that Trump would possibly pursue criminal charges against him. However, that pardon only insulates Milley from criminal investigation. Trump can still use the levers of government to investigate and punish Milley via the inspector general process.
Fifty former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter describing the Hunter Biden laptop debacle as a “Russian information operation” also lost their security clearances. This includes people who served under President Barack Obama, such as former CIA directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta.
It’s also not surprising that Trump swiftly ended the security detail for Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, given he repeatedly attacked Fauci for suggesting actual and effective public health measures to combat COVID-19 rather than implementing Trump’s unhinged and untested ideas.
Fauci only needed a security detail because of Trump’s attacks which, predictably, whipped his worst followers into a frenzy. Fauci has received death threats and has been targeted by conservative GOP members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said he should be tried for crimes against humanity.
Trump’s behavior is viciously whimsical and unpredictable because he’s driven by pique as much as politics. It’s mad king behavior, King Lear banishing those who won’t flatter him.
This isn’t how government is supposed to work. People shouldn’t have to live in fear of crossing Trump, but that’s exactly what’s happening, and exactly what Trump wants.