Roughly 11 weeks into his second term, Donald Trump has issued well over 100 executive orders, more than in the first two years of his first term, but two of those orders were unusual — not just for him, but for the American presidency.
Late Wednesday, without warning, the Republican incumbent signed two first-of-their-kind orders targeting two former Trump administration officials who’d defied him. In the first EO, the president directed Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Homeland Security to launch a “review” into Christopher Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was “one of the heroes“ of the post-2020 election crisis.
In the second, Trump also directed the Department of Homeland Security to investigate Miles Taylor, a former high-ranking DHS official who became a prominent Trump critic, alerting the public to allegations that he personally witnessed the president’s corruption and ineptitude.
There was barely a pretense in the executive orders that the targeted former officials had done anything wrong. Indeed, the closer one looked at the stated rationales in support of the directives, the more they appeared ridiculous.
But that was hardly the most important problem with the underlying effort. As The New York Times reported, the broader significance of the orders was that Trump’s demands for investigations “are starting to become more formalized through written presidential decrees as he seeks to use the power of public office to punish people and companies he has cast as enemies and silence potential critics.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump crossed a new line. … The memos send a stark message: To oppose Mr. Trump will mean risking punishment at the hands of the federal government. … Mr. Trump is openly using his control of the executive branch to satisfy his desire for retribution against people he perceives as working against him. And his officials are readily helping him.
There are countries abroad where tactics like these are common. But they’re authoritarian countries, not liberal democracies.
A related Washington Post analysis characterized this as “a big moment” as the president “crosses the Rubicon.”
I can appreciate why the media landscape is crowded right now, but to see this as a one-day story seems like a mistake. Trump — who ran on an authoritarian-style platform, who’s trying to concentrate power while expressing indifference to the rule of law — ordered investigations into Americans he doesn’t like.
He has an enemies list, and this week, he began using the power of the presidency to target some of those on that list, despite the inconvenient fact that their only “crime” was telling truths Dear Leader didn’t want to hear.
If the pushback is muted, Trump will do what he’s always done: assume that he can get away with such an abuse, while preparing to keep going down the same radical and dangerous path. Not to put too fine a point on this, but if the president can sic the Justice Department on his critics and perceived enemies, and this isn’t seen as a dramatic scandal, who’ll be next? How far down his enemies list will he go? When I wrote about this yesterday, I received a note from a regular reader who joked, “Joe Biden should’ve pardoned more people.” That might be true, though I’m not convinced it would matter: Trump has already said that, as far as he’s concerned, his predecessor’s presidential pardons don’t really count. I’m reminded anew of J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative legal scholar put on the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush who published a Bluesky thread on Wednesday’s orders, calling them “shameful” and “constitutionally corrupt” and accused Trump of “palpably unconstitutional conduct.” If there’s limited pushback, it is an invitation to Trump to engage in still more palpably unconstitutional conduct.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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