For this week’s Letter from Trump’s Washington, Antonia Hitchens is filling in for Susan B. Glasser.
“I love getting even with people,” Donald Trump told Charlie Rose, in a 1992 interview. Trump was promoting a new book, which he had just started to write, called “The Art of the Comeback.” It offered ten tips for success. Among them: play golf, always have a prenuptial agreement, get even. Getting even has been a lifelong preoccupation. My “retribution’s going to be success,” Trump said, in 2024, when asked how he’d avenge his political enemies if he were reëlected President. On Wednesday, during a televised Cabinet meeting, Trump, discussing the political impact of the war in Iran, said, “I don’t care about the midterms.” To the extent that he does care, it seems primarily about settling scores, not preserving Republican majorities. Most recently, in the Senate primary runoff in Texas, he had weighed in at the last minute to endorse Ken Paxton, the loyal but serially embattled state attorney general, who beat John Cornyn, the incumbent. Cornyn, Trump wrote, “is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough. . . . John was very late in backing me in what turned out to be a Historic Run for the Republican Nomination, and then, the Presidency, itself, both of which were Landslide Victories and, more importantly, gave us the Country that we have today—THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA.” Ken Paxton, meanwhile, “has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter.” The same day, as part of a settlement agreement between Trump and the I.R.S., the Department of Justice announced the creation of a $1.8-billion “Anti-Weaponization” fund for victims of political persecution to seek a formal apology and monetary damages. “People were destroyed, they went to jail, their families were ruined, they committed suicide. . . . The Obama Administration started it. The Biden Administration was horrible in terms of what they’ve done to people,” Trump said. “It was the most violent thing I’ve ever seen in politics.” A five-member panel selected by the Attorney General would disburse the funds with seemingly no oversight.
During his 2024 Presidential campaign, Trump cast himself into a shared martyrdom with his supporters. “I am being indicted for you,” he would say, referring to the multiple criminal cases that had been brought against him. “All of this persecution of Donald Trump—I don’t mind, I’m doing it for you.” His attempts to impede the certification of the 2020 election led to him being charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, alongside hundreds of January 6th rioters. (In his case, the charges were thrown out when the Supreme Court ruled that, as President, he had absolute immunity for official acts.) On Trump’s first day back in office, he granted clemency to fifteen hundred or so convicted rioters, undoing the largest criminal investigation in American history. That day, he signed an executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which pointed out that January 6th had been “ruthlessly prosecuted” whereas cases against “BLM rioters” had been dropped. Many of the pardoned January 6th defendants thought this was merely the beginning of getting what they were owed. They wanted to come to the White House; they wanted to rewrite the historical record; they wanted money. Last June, the D.O.J. settled a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by a Capitol police officer while trying to climb into the Speaker’s Lobby. The family was awarded nearly five million dollars; the Air Force offered to hold a funeral with full military honors. The D.O.J. started scrubbing its website of news releases about past January 6th prosecutions. Earlier this year, a large banner of Trump’s face was unfurled down the side of department headquarters.
The evening that the anti-weaponization fund was announced, I was at the soon-to-be-shuttered Kennedy Center, where officials in black tie mingled on a red carpet. The occasion was a screening of a film called “By Dawn’s Early Light,” a documentary built on a report published by the White House Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. Trump had established the group in response to concerns that Joe Biden’s Justice Department had sought to “squelch faith in the public square.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was among the officials featured onscreen discussing how the Biden Administration had allegedly used the federal government to target Christians. (For example, a hymn-singing group was convicted for blocking access to an abortion clinic; Trump pardoned them.) I often meet Administration officials who describe their domestic remit as restoring normal Americans’ “faith in the system” after endless “weaponization.” But for many of the President’s most ardent backers, these endeavors have actually fallen short.
