President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order in the White House on April 8.Evan Vucci/AP
The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Let’s go back to June 2, 2024. That morning, Fox & Friends Weekend aired an interview with Donald Trump conducted by the show’s hosts—Pete Hegseth, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and Will Cain. Three days earlier, Trump was found guilty in his porn-star/hush-money case. (Remember, he’s a convicted felon!) And Campos-Duffy brought up a subject that’s long been of great interest to Trump: revenge. As I’ve written many times, Trump’s three most powerful psychological motivations are revenge, revenge, and revenge. (Last month in this newsletter, I traced some of his history as a “revenge junkie.”) In the aftermath of the verdict that found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, Campos-Duffy gently prodded him: “You [previously] said, ‘My revenge will be success for America.’ You just had this verdict. Do you still feel the same?”
“I say it, and it sounds beautiful: ‘My revenge will be success,’” Trump said on a Fox News appearance in June 2024. “I mean that.”
“It’s a really tough question in one way because these are bad people,” Trump replied, referring to his critics and those who had brought criminal cases against him. “These people are sick.” He rambled about how tough he was and bragged about how during his first term he had fired FBI Director Jim Comey. He then returned to the issue of retribution: “Look it’s a very interesting question. I say it, and it sounds beautiful: ‘My revenge will be success.’ I mean that. But it’s awfully hard when you see what they’ve done. These people are so evil.”
A far-too-sympathetic Cain tried to push Trump toward a clearer answer. “I hear you struggling with it. I hear you say it’s a tough question—a bit unsure. You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president.”
Trump responded: “I beat her. It’s easier when you win. They all said lock her up and I could’ve done it. But I thought that would have been a terrible thing. And then this [verdict] happened to me. So, I may feel differently about it. I can’t tell you. I’m not sure I can answer the question.”
Here was a more interesting and revealing exchange than most of Trump’s softball sessions with Fox sycophants. He was still tethered to his lifelong obsession with revenge—if they screw you, screw ’em back 10 times worse, he often said when asked to describe his key to business success—but he knew it was unwise to vow vengeance during his comeback campaign. Yet he could not promise to abandon revenge altogether, as if he realized it was impossible for him to pass up an opportunity for retribution. In a rare (for him) moment, he said he could not provide a firm answer. He seemed to be saying, It would be great to promise I won’t be fixated on vengeance if I’m elected president, but I know me—and that ain’t me.
Trump has abused the power of the presidency to go after his enemies in ways Richard Nixon could never have imagined.
It sure isn’t. Trump cannot escape his compulsions, and perhaps his most powerful one is to get even. It was always obvious that score-settling would be job No. 1, should he return to the White House. An insecure man who’s always had a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain, he’s defined his life by his relentless accounting and pursuit of grudges. The only surprise has been that his revenge-a-thon has been so extensive, so vicious, and that it has been so successful and generated such little pushback.
Trump has abused the power of the presidency to go after his enemies in ways Richard Nixon could never have imagined. He has pulled security details and/or security clearances from his political opponents and critics, such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and others. He has extorted law firms that employed lawyers who previously challenged him politically or legally, and in mob-boss fashion he has forced them to pledge hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services to his favorite causes (other than himself).
This past week, Trump signed executive orders targeting two officials who served in his first administration: Chris Krebs, who was then the nation’s cybersecurity chief, and Miles Taylor, a Department of Homeland Security official who anonymously wrote an op-ed and then a book criticizing Trump. The president called Taylor a traitor and instructed the Justice Department to investigate him. Krebs’ sin was having declared the 2020 election, which Trump lost, free of fraud. Trump went so far as to revoke security clearances for employees of SentinelOne, a cybersecurity firm where Krebs now works. Trump has also trained his ire on universities (including Columbia University, Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater), cultural institutions (the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution), and assorted news organizations.
In any previous era, this orgy of vengeance would be the top political story. Yet with the flood of Trump-spurred outrages underway since January 20, it does not dominate the headlines. Moreover, the surrender of many of his targets undermines criticism of Trump’s revenge frenzy. Trump has used the capitulation of these law firms as proof that he is right to assail them as hotbeds of evil scheming that threatens the nation. On Wednesday, he claimed that the settlements signed by these firms—some previously associated with Democratic causes—was proof the 2020 election was stolen from him: “The election was rigged. It’s been proven…When you look at all these lawyers and law firms that are signing, giving us hundreds of millions of dollars. It was proven by so many different ways…It was a very corrupt election.”
ABC News settled with Trump ($15 million); Meta settled with Trump ($25 million). CBS has been considering settling a case that Trump filed against its news division. It’s all encouragement for worse and more dangerous conduct.
Of course, Trump was lying about that. But embedded in that lie was an important point. By yielding and offering Trump hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work, these firms were indeed bolstering the notion they had done something wrong—whatever that may have been—when they had not. Each white flag waved in the face of a Trump attack strengthens him and his authoritarian bullying.
When Trump first targeted Paul, Weiss, that law firm explored joining with other firms to mount a united front against Trump’s assault. But it quickly folded, and that effort evaporated. Reuters reported on Thursday that the cybersecurity industry was declining to rally behind SentinelOne and Krebs. Columbia University complied with Trump strong-arming last month by agreeing to a list of onerous demands from Trump to regain the $400 million in federal funding he suspended. Was that sufficient? Absolutely not. In response, the Trump White House did not resume the funding and raised the prospect of slapping a consent decree on Columbia that would place the school even more so under the thumb of the administration. Feed the leopard, and the leopard wants more. (Brown, Princeton, and Harvard have told Trump to get lost.)
ABC News settled with Trump ($15 million); Meta settled with Trump ($25 million). CBS has been considering settling a case that Trump filed against its news division. It’s all encouragement for worse and more dangerous conduct. On Sunday night, after 60 Minutes aired two stories about Trump, he called on Brendan Carr, his loyalist running the Federal Communications Commission, to revoke CBS’ broadcast license. (In his first days as FCC chief, Carr ordered investigations of NPR and PBS.)
I don’t expect these careerist MAGA cultists to make a peep. But I confess I am disappointed in the Establishment.
What the last few weeks have taught Trump is not only that revenge is sweet; it’s also so easy! Why cease? Many of his foes fold, and there’s been no political cost for his perversions of power. Republicans and conservatives once were eager to decry excessive presidential flexing. They screamed about Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden issuing too many executive orders and governing through these directives. Remember the outrage when Biden tried to wipe out some student debt through an executive order? Now these fretters about presidential abuses are silent. As are those Republicans and right-wingers who in the past railed about the so-called “weaponization” of government, such as, notably, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Trump is literally exploiting his position to demean and destroy his detractors and his perceived enemies, even ordering the Justice Department to investigate a critic. Yet…crickets.
I know: You are stunned by the hypocrisy.
I don’t expect these careerist MAGA cultists to make a peep. But I confess I am disappointed in the Establishment: those law firms, universities, media organizations, and corporate leaders who are either bending the knee or not protesting Trump’s arguably illegal blackmail operation. With their silence, they are all complicit in Trump’s war on America and enabling his march toward autocracy. “This is the Vichy moment. It’s a classic collaborationist dilemma,” says Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, which has not yet been assaulted by Trump. “You can have preserved your school, but you live in a sea of authoritarianism.”
Trump’s latest attack on a law firm (as of this writing) demonstrated how absurd and dangerous is the mad king. His target was Susman Godfrey, and the executive order he signed denounced the firm for alleged efforts to “weaponize the American legal system and degrade the quality of American elections.” Like similar directives, it did not specify the firm’s supposed misdeeds. But we know why Trump is after it. Susman Godfrey successfully represented Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News in the defamation case that accused the right-wing network of knowingly spreading Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and won the company a $787 million settlement from Fox. It also has represented Dominion in lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani, former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, and others who peddled pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. And it has handled Dominion’s similar lawsuit against Newsmax.
Here’s another way for Trump to keep fighting for his Big Lie—and to punish those who have helped expose it as utter bullcrap. (The executive order also excoriates Susman Godfrey for offering financial awards and employment opportunities to “students of color.”) As with the other firms on his hit list, Trump ordered the suspension of security clearances held by its attorneys, limited government interactions with the firm, and barred its lawyers’ access to federal buildings.
Susman, to its credit, is fighting back, as are Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block. These other law firms, each a target of a similar executive order, have sued Trump and won preliminary rulings that found Trumps’ directives violated the Constitution. In the lawsuit Susman filed against the Trump administration on Friday, it summarized the emergency at hand:
It ought to be a point of widespread consensus: A president should not use the authority of the federal government to pursue his personal vendettas.
In America we have, in the words of John Adams, a government of laws and not men. President Trump’s campaign of Executive Orders against law firms and others, including the Executive Order he signed on April 9, 2025 against Susman Godfrey, is a grave threat to this foundational premise of our Republic. The President is abusing the powers of his office to wield the might of the Executive Branch in retaliation against organizations and people that he dislikes. Nothing in our Constitution or laws grants a President such power; to the contrary, the specific provisions and overall design of our Constitution were adopted in large measure to ensure that presidents cannot exercise arbitrary, absolute power in the way that the President seeks to do in these Executive Orders.”
The firm added: “If President Trump’s Executive Orders are allowed to stand, future presidents will face no constraint when they seek to retaliate against a different set of perceived foes. What for two centuries has been beyond the pale will become the new normal. Put simply, this could be any of us.”
More than 500 law firms and hundreds of law professors and former judges have filed amicus briefs to support the law firms Trump has attacked. Still, many leaders in the legal world and elsewhere have stayed mum, cowed by Trump. It ought to be a point of widespread consensus: A president should not use the authority of the federal government to pursue his personal vendettas. In fact, Trump’s flagrant abuse of power might constitute an impeachable offense.
So far, Trump has (mostly) gotten away with it. Even if he loses in court, he has blackballed law firms, and potential clients with interests before the federal government have been sent a signal: Don’t hire these guys. The acquiescence and silence, no doubt, emboldens Trump. Who know who he’ll come after next? Corporations, nonprofits, Hollywood studios, think tanks? With many in the powers-that-be class yielding to Trump’s revenge-palooza or declining to protest it, there’s likely no end in sight. After all, a junkie is always looking for the next fix.
