The Former President's System of Consequences and Incentives

Donald Trump's insatiable desire for retribution has rapidly transformed into a structured framework. During the twelve months, the chief executive's fury and caprices have taken on the form of government actions in ways comparable to historical dictatorial regimes. Government figures who resist his demands are immediately dismissed and substituted by loyalists. Critical figures who challenge him face prosecution, trial and sanctions. Adversaries have been designated under executive orders as “anti-American”, “anti-Christian” and “opposing economic freedom”, and warned with criminal charges as “extremists”.

Federal Agencies Restructured

Every instance involving prosecution of Trump's enemies and protection for supporters exhibits its own unique qualities. Yet, despite their individual form, they represent examples of what has arisen as a deliberate approach. Such events are anything but isolated. The administration's cleansing of federal prosecutors and law enforcement personnel, alongside his placement of supporters in senior roles, began quickly, quickly assumed a consistency, and has now been shaped into a structure. Federal prosecutors and the law enforcement agency have been remade into political organizations under his explicit direction to execute his directives. Injustice has been rendered normal. It constitutes the retribution system.

Management is more concerned with penalizing the leader's alleged enemies than they are with protecting our national security.

Within the System

The beginnings of this mechanism has been uncovered in the lawsuit of several ex- senior law enforcement agents filed in September in the federal court in DC against agency head Kash Patel and attorney general another official for illegal termination in “a effort of revenge against the officials for what Defendants judged to be a refusal to demonstrate adequate allegiance”. In the complaint that one official, the ex- acting FBI director, recounts a discussion in which Patel “openly confessed the impropriety of his actions”.

Driscoll had sought to shield FBI agents from being terminated, the filing alleges. The director advised him that “administration officials” – interpreted by Driscoll to be the presidential administration and DoJ – had ordered him to fire all those who they determined as having been involved in a law enforcement case against the president. The filing adds: “He clarified that he had to terminate the individuals his superiors told him to fire, because his ability to keep his own job relied on the removal of the officials who worked on investigations involving the President. He commented that there was no option he or him could do to halt these or any other terminations, because ‘the bureau attempted to incarcerate the chief in detention and he recalls it clearly.’” After he informed the director he was disregarding the FBI's own policies, Patel reportedly said “he recognized that and he knew the nature of the summary firings were almost certainly improper”.

Broad Impact

Since Patel's reported acknowledgment to him, the DoJ and the law enforcement agency have been gutted and repurposed for his retribution system. Multiple of the FBI's top officials were terminated or pushed out in the first days of the administration. About thousands of lawyers at DoJ have agreed to a “early exit scheme”. A minimum of multiple federal prosecutors, among them those in the Manhattan division, stepped down in dissent over what they regarded as partisan influence in withdrawing the criminal prosecution against the city leader, the mayor, in exchange for his assistance with the administration's Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups of migrants. The ethics division of the justice department, which manages ethical violations, has been cut down to minimal staff. The civil rights division has been decimated: seventy percent of its employees has departed. A third of executives at DoJ have resigned. The unit enforcing environmental law has lost half its supervisors.

Incentives and Sanctions

Concerning the Adams case, the acting US attorney for the NY office, Danielle Sassoon, stepped down in objection against what she characterized as the “trade-off”. The border official, the president's “immigration leader,” was present as the enforcer with Adams on television to state: “Unless he complies, I'll reappear in the city.”. Additionally, a former official, previously the justice department figure and a former Trump attorney, who brokered the deal, was granted an appellate federal judgeship, a possible pathway to the highest court.

The president's protection for wrongdoings perpetrated while in power, provided by the unprecedented ruling of the GOP-led on the supreme court, thus preventing his criminal case over the January 6 insurrection and maintaining his public standing for the national vote, is the cornerstone on which he depends to shield his loyalists. Given this protection, he has been freed to enable wrongdoing. The effect of the court judgment infuses his government and the GOP thoroughly. The legal case has escalated. As a past leader's administration lawyer he said about the Watergate