A couple of weeks after joining his party’s national ticket, then-Sen. JD Vance was eager to ease the minds of voters concerned about Donald Trump and his threats of retaliation. Trump, the future vice president said at the time, is “not a vengeful guy.”
Shortly after the election, Trump appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and suggested vengeance wasn’t part of his plans for a second term. “I’m not looking to go back into the past,” he said, adding, “Retribution will be through success.” The Republican president echoed the point in his second inaugural address, declaring, “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”
I have some bad news for anybody who believed any of these claims. The Hill reported:
President Trump on Saturday doubled down on his accusations that former Vice President Harris paid celebrities to endorse her during the 2024 presidential election. The president, echoing previous claims that Harris paid Beyoncé, Oprah and Al Sharpton to support her White House bid throughout the campaign trail, said Harris and the celebrities involved should be ‘prosecuted.’
(Disclosure note: Sharpton hosts a program on MSNBC, my employer.)
I’ve lost count how many times the president has made this claim, which continues to be demonstrably wrong. As for why the Republican interrupted his trip to Scotland to push this falsehood again — which included some all-caps hysterics and a variety of exclamation points — your guess is as good as mine.
I don’t seriously expect anything to come of this, because federal prosecutors know what Trump does not: Bringing criminal charges against political foes based on made-up allegations doesn’t work.
But before that observation brings comfort to anyone, it’s important to acknowledge the broader landscape. The New York Times, assessing Trump’s intensifying campaign of retribution, reported last week, “This is what Washington thought retribution would look like.”
When President Trump started his second term, there were deep fears among current and former Justice Department officials, legal experts and Democrats that Mr. Trump would follow through on his repeated promises to ‘lock up’ or otherwise pursue charges against high-profile figures like Liz Cheney, James B. Comey and former President Barack Obama. Mr. Trump quickly went after perceived enemies — but not always the anticipated ones and often not in the anticipated ways.
The Times’ analysis noted that the Republican has displayed “a willingness to weaponize the federal government” in novel and audacious ways, and there’s ample evidence to bolster the point. Just last week, for example, Trump falsely and repeatedly accused Barack Obama of “treason,” suggesting the former Democratic president should be prosecuted over made-up allegations. Soon after, Trump talked up the idea of prosecuting Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, too.
That came on the heels of news that the Trump administration had launched criminal investigations into former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, two longtime targets of the president. (Disclosure note: Brennan is a paid contributor to MSNBC and NBC News.)
They’re part of a growing list. In April, for example, Trump signed two first-of-their-kind executive orders that targeted a pair of officials from his first term who defied him. There was barely a pretense in the orders that the targeted former officials — Christopher Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Miles Taylor, a former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official — had done anything wrong. Indeed, the closer one looked at the stated rationales in support of the directives, the more ridiculous they appeared.
Nevertheless, the president directed Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Homeland Security to launch a “review” into Krebs, while simultaneously ordering DHS to investigate Taylor.
Weeks later, Trump broke new ground again, directing the Justice Department to launch a wide-ranging investigation into Joe Biden and officials in the Democrat’s administration, based on Republican conspiracy theories about the former president’s mental health. It was an unprecedented move: An incumbent American president had never before publicly ordered a federal probe of his predecessor.
There was a degree of irony to the circumstances. After his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump spent years insisting that Biden had ordered an investigation into him — an odd conspiracy theory for which there is literally no evidence — but Trump then did exactly what he falsely accused his predecessor of doing.
Trump also endorsed California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s arrest, before demanding that CNN face criminal prosecution for running reports the White House didn’t like.








