There’s been quite a bit of reporting in recent weeks about Donald Trump, members of his inner circle, and the behind-the-scenes plotting for how they’d use power if elected next year. The Republicans’ plans are centered around a straightforward goal: revenge.
As The Washington Post reported this week, the former president and his allies “have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term.”
It was against this backdrop that Trump sat down with Univision, which asked if he was prepared to use a “weaponized” government to pursue his perceived political foes. Semafor obtained a transcript of the interview and highlighted the Republican’s answer:
“Yeah. If they do this, and they’ve already done it, but if they follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse,” he said. “It could certainly happen in reverse. What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box.”
Later in the same interview, the front-runner for the GOP nomination added, “They have done something that allows the next party — I mean, if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business, they’d be out of the election.”
There are a few angles to this that are worth keeping in mind as the 2024 race continues to unfold.
The first is that Trump isn’t making much of an effort to hide his intentions. The investigative reports offer important details and perspective, but the former president appears wholly uninterested in keeping his cards close to his chest. The Republican is practically bragging about his intentions — and not just in this week’s interview.
The second is that Trump’s logic is deeply flawed. To hear him tell it, prosecutors are trying to hold him accountable for his suspected felonies, which in turn means the identical efforts can now “happen in reverse” if he’s returned to power in 2025.
But that’s not how any of this works. If a police officer arrested a car thief caught in the act of stealing a car, it does not mean that the thief would be justified in trying to later arrest the police officer. The suspected criminal could not credibly go to court and argue, “Well, the cop released the genie out of the box.”
Finally, there’s recent history to consider. To hear Trump tell it, if voters put him back in the White House, it’ll be President Joe Biden’s fault if Trump tries to use federal law enforcement to go after his opponents. “He started it,” the Republican is effectively arguing.
But even putting aside the fact that Biden has nothing to do with his predecessor’s criminal cases, the point remains that Biden didn’t start it. As New York magazine’s Jon Chait summarized, “Trump only intends to prosecute his political enemies because they did it to him first. In fact, Trump has been planning to lock up his political opponents since he first ran for office, well before any of the current prosecutions began.”
Quite right. As we discussed a couple of months ago, the former Republican president, while in office, spent much of his White House tenure trying to turn Justice Department prosecutors into his own personal attack dogs. The New York Times reported last year that Trump and his team “tried to turn the nation’s law enforcement apparatus into an instrument of political power” to carry out the Republican’s wishes. A Washington Post analysis published soon after highlighted the many instances in which Trump not only leaned on the Justice Department to follow his whims, but also Trump’s efforts to push federal law enforcement to validate the Big Lie in the wake of his election defeat.
The Republican’s weaponization efforts reached a truly amazing pinnacle less than a month before Election Day 2020, when Trump publicly called on federal prosecutors to go after Biden — at the time, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee who was leading the Republican incumbent in the polls — accusing him of undefined crimes. The then-president added that his future successor shouldn’t be “allowed” to run against him. On Oct. 7, 2020, with early voting underway across much of the country, Politico published an especially memorable headline: “‘Where are all of the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his foes.” The next day, the Republican incumbent spoke to Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo and called on the Justice Department to “indict” his perceived Democratic foes — including Biden. After his 2020 defeat, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, said the former president “regularly” wanted to use the Justice Department to retaliate against critics. Trump isn’t preparing a new retaliatory plan; Trump is instead preparing to pick up where he left off. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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