President Trump is sowing chaos at a blistering pace.
He “is dismantling watchdog offices and other parts of the public integrity apparatus for two reasons, one backward-looking and one forward-looking,” Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote by email:
The backward-looking reason is revenge. Some of these people and offices have stood in his way before or tried to hold him accountable for his actions. So he wants to destroy them.
The forward-looking reason is his desire to use his power corruptly. In his first term, President Trump profiteered from his office in ways that no other post-Watergate president would have dared to do, including by encouraging diplomatic travelers from foreign countries to patronize his hotels. He got away with it. So he expects, reasonably, that he can do it again.
The president and his allies are using their drive to slash the size of the federal work force to break the bonds of restraint. To do so, they are deploying a strategy of intimidation, punishment and coercion. They have silenced watchdog agencies, discharged prosecutors, forced resignations and dismissed government officials whose job it was to maintain ethical standards.
Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown, succinctly summed up Trump’s goal in a comment she posted on X. Citing the firing on Feb. 21 of top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force, Brooks wrote, “It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.”
Axing the judge advocates general was part of the Trump administration’s seizure of control of the top military command, including the removal and replacement of Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first African American to lead a branch of the United States Armed Forces; of Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations; and of Gen. James Slife, the Air Force vice chief of staff.
Retired Rear Adm. Mike Smith, founder and president of the National Security Leaders for America, issued a statement warning that “this purge of senior leadership will force current and future military leaders to consider whether following a lawful order today will get them fired by a future president, creating immense tension in the chain of command.”
Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters was, in turn, more than a gesture of loyalty to his supporters. It signaled that those who back him in the future — even to the extent of violently attacking police officers — will be exempt from punishment.
“There’s no doubt that Trump and Musk are aggressively moving to eliminate essentially all checks on their decisions,” Michael Miller, a political scientist at George Washington University, wrote by email, “from Congress to internal inspectors to the courts. In part, that fits a familiar desire for more power and control over policy. But it also opens the door for unprecedented levels of corruption.”
While “there is the potential for self-enrichment,” Miller acknowledged, “more likely, we’ll see nominally legal forms of self-enrichment like Trump’s ‘memecoin’ and more sophisticated forms like Musk’s targeting of agencies that have oversight powers over his businesses.”
The biggest danger, Miller wrote, is the use of
corruption as power. The essence of corruption is deciding policy based on personal benefit rather than public interest.
Once it’s understood that the vast resources and power of our government will benefit or punish based on how you benefit Trump or Musk or their allies, we have a fully corrupted system of immense power, extending past the government to business, media, universities, and anyone with something to lose. The genius of the design is it’s generally legal and can quickly form a durable equilibrium.
The administration’s attempt to silence potential critics reaches well beyond the White House. Trump and his regulatory appointees are gearing up for a full-scale assault on the mainstream media, musing about threatening the licenses of major networks and filing multimillion-dollar defamation suits.
At the same time, Trump has appointed an acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who has sent letters to congressional Democrats suggesting that their criticism of Trump appointees and Republican Supreme Court justices may violate laws barring threats against public officials.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton, sees nefarious motives driving Trump and Elon Musk, writing by email:
The Trump/Musk government has singled out anti-corruption measures for particularly direct attacks. Firing inspectors general. Announcing that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Foreign Agents Registration Act will not be enforced. Getting rid of the election security advisers. Engaging in blatant conflicts of interest without even attempting to disguise them. Targeting the Public Integrity section of the D.O.J. with threats.
A partial list of what Trump and his appointees have done in their first month in office includes halting enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; dismissing the director of the Office of Government Ethics; laying off 6,700 I.R.S. employees, most of whom were working in the compliance and enforcement division; terminating the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and ordering its staff not to start new enforcement investigations or to work on existing ones; and disbanding a Justice Department foreign influence task force and closing down a foreign corporate enforcement unit in the department.
Kimberly Wehle — an expert in civil procedure, constitutional law, administrative law and the separation of powers, who served as an associate under the independent counsel Ken Starr — replied to my query by email:
It is evident that Trump & team are deactivating internal and external accountability and oversight mechanisms to enable autocratic rule, i.e., government by a single person having unlimited power. This requires purging anyone from the government likely to adhere to their oath to defend the Constitution and the rule of law.
Trump was elected with 34 felony convictions to his name; lawlessness is his comfort level. By consolidating power and either punishing or intimidating anyone who might challenge him, he will be the law in America.
Without watchdogs, Wehle continued, “Trump, his family and Musk can bilk the taxpayers for their own profit. And without any oversight, we won’t know whether, how or to what extent it’s happening.”
Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, an organization that advocates campaign-finance reform, was equally explicit in his critique of the second Trump administration. He wrote by email:
Trump is operating as a lawless president. His preposterous statement that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” is saying, in essence, that he can do anything he wants with no recourse for his actions.
The Supreme Court’s absurd presidential immunity decision appears to have only emboldened Trump. Like dictators and authoritarians around the world, Trump sees the presidency as an extension of his personal business and financial interests — a brazen abuse of his office.
Some of Trump’s actions conflict with his claimed goal of cutting federal spending. The main purpose of many of the agencies and individuals Trump has attacked is to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, for example, has determined that by cutting the I.R.S. budget the Trump administration will actually increase the deficit: “A $35 billion rescission would reduce revenues by $89 billion over the 2024-2034 period and increase the cumulative deficit by $54 billion.”
Ed Martin, a former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, was appointed by Trump on Jan. 20 as acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin, whom Trump has now nominated for the permanent position, initiated what he calls “Project Whirlwind,” which is aimed at investigating those who threaten public officials. Some of Project Whirlwind’s initial actions, however, threaten to come after Democrats who are viewed by Republicans as a menace.
Martin sent letters and emails to Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, warning both men about their critiques of Republican and conservative public figures.
Martin’s Feb. 17 letter to Garcia read:
During a live interview with CNN, when asked how Democrats can stop Elon Musk, you spoke clearly: “What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is a fight for democracy.’” This sounds to some like a threat to Mr. Musk.
“We take threats against public officials very seriously,” Martin added. “I look forward to your cooperation with my letter of inquiry after request.” In his letter, Martin did not note that President Trump has one of the most extensive records in recent history of threatening his political opponents.
Vice President Kamala Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted,” Trump declared at a September 2024 campaign rally. “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said at another point during the campaign.
Trump is evidently determined to cow another watchdog institution, the media.
Brendan Carr, a Republican whom Trump picked to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has emerged as a principal agent on this mission.
On Jan. 29, Carr ordered an investigation of NPR and PBS member stations, saying he is “concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials.”
In a letter to Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, and Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, Carr wrote, “It is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
The implicit threat posed by Trump’s control of the F.C.C. and other regulatory bodies already appears to have enabled Trump to browbeat one of the major networks into submission.
In December 2024, after Trump won re-election, ABC News settled a defamation suit he brought that claimed that one of ABC’s journalists, George Stephanopoulos, had wrongly (and repeatedly) said that a jury found that Trump had “raped” the writer E. Jean Carroll, when the jury in fact found that Trump had committed “sexual abuse.”
Politico reported on Dec. 17 that ABC’s decision to settle the suit “baffled and concerned some media lawyers because the network seemed to have strong legal arguments.”
Television networks are particularly vulnerable to political pressure, a vulnerability that is on display in the ongoing difficulties facing Paramount, CBS’s parent company, in its bid to sell CBS-licensed stations to Skydance.
In a Brookings essay, “Trump’s CBS Lawsuit Ties Media Freedom to F.C.C.’s Regulatory Power,” Tom Wheeler, a former F.C.C. chair under Barack Obama, carefully breaks down the interplay between the federal regulatory system and Trump’s attempt to suppress hostile media coverage. Here is my brief chronological outline of events based mainly on Wheeler’s article:
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On Oct. 16, 2024, the Center for American Rights, a conservative law firm, filed a complaint with the F.C.C. requesting an investigation into WCBS, New York, for “news distortion” in the airing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
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On Oct. 31, 2024, Trump filed suit against CBS, asking for $10 billion in damages because the “60 Minutes” interview with Harris amounted to “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales of the presidential election in her favor.”
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On Dec. 18, 2024, Brendan Carr, just before his selection as F.C.C. chairman, posted on X: “Paramount’s sale of CBS broadcast licenses to Skydance remains pending before the F.C.C. This filing from the Center for American Rights raises what it describes as significant concerns, including ones that go to CBS’s adherence to the public interest standard. The F.C.C. will need to address these concerns.”
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On Jan. 22, 2025, Carr, now chairman of the F.C.C., revived the complaint against CBS, despite the fact that his predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, had dismissed it, declaring that “the First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy. The F.C.C. does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”
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On Jan. 25, the F.C.C. sent CBS a “letter of inquiry” requesting an unedited transcript of a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris.
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On Feb. 8, Trump doubled his claim against CBS to $20 billion.
Trump and his allies have placed CBS and Paramount, its parent company, in a squeeze, pitting First Amendment principles against business imperatives. The strategy reflects Trump’s view of the mainstream media as not just an adversary but as an implacable foe with hostile intentions.
While campaigning for Republican congressional candidates in 2022, Trump repeatedly pledged to jail reporters who refuse to identify confidential sources on stories critical of him.
Perhaps half in jest, Trump suggested at an October 2022 rally that the threat of prison rape would be enough to get journalists to identify their sources. “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was,’” he said, adding that the punishment would apply to “the publisher too — or the top editors.”
I asked Ian Bassin, executive director of Project Democracy and a former associate White House counsel during the Obama administration, to put Trump’s first month in office in broader perspective.
Bassin emailed back:
The anti-democratic regimes of the 20th century tended to be primarily ideologically driven. The communist movements in China and the Soviet Union were motivated by utopian fantasies. Even the fascist movements in Italy and Germany largely sprang from dark ideological manifestoes like “Mein Kampf” or newspapers with political agendas like Il Popolo d’Italia.
In the 21st century, Bassin continued,
while modern-day populist demagogues have ideological views, their quest for power and personal profit plays a far larger role. And so what we’ve seen in recent years from Venezuela to Hungary to Turkey to Russia to Brazil are autocratic leaders who dismantle the precise guardrails designed to check abuses of power and public corruption, which then paves the way for those leaders to enrich themselves at public expense and to use the proceeds in part to further aggrandize their power.
This model, Bassin argued,
should be a warning for what we could see here in the United States. The takeover of independent watchdog agencies by the president, the firing of inspectors general, the removal of apolitical civil servants to be replaced with loyalists (especially in the law enforcement ranks), are all removals of the precise checks that are supposed to prevent corruption, abuse of power, and self-dealing.
These developments have the potential, in Bassin’s view, to create what he calls “autocratic capture,” a corrupt cycle “in which monetary success is only possible for supporters of the regime. This will incentivize private interests to toe a political line and prove their loyalty in order to stand any chance of succeeding in what would become a tilted marketplace.”
It’s actually much worse than “tilted.”
As Patrick G. Eddington, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, put it in the conclusion of his Feb. 3 essay, “Illegal Actions, Missing Consequences: “This isn’t about the rule of law. It’s about the law of the jungle.”
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