Even those who’ve come to expect Donald Trump’s authoritarian tactics were taken aback last week when the president signed two first-of-their-kind executive orders targeting a pair of officials from his first term who defied him.

There was barely a pretense in the executive orders that the targeted former officials — Christopher Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), 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.

It took nearly a week, but a reporter — in this instance, The New York Times’ Jonathan Swan — finally asked the White House to make some kind of effort to defend Trump’s actions.

“The president has long said that it would be an abuse of power for a president to direct prosecutors to investigate him,” Swan noted. “Last week, President Trump explicitly directed the Justice Department to scrutinize Chris Krebs to see if it can find any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. How is that not an abuse of power, to direct the Justice Department to look into an individual — a named individual?”

I watched the clip of Leavitt’s response several times, hoping to make sense of it. This was her answer in its entirety:

Look, the president signed that executive order. It’s the position of the president in this White House that it’s well within his authority to do it, otherwise he wouldn’t have signed it. And he signed it, and that’s his policy.

The question was whether Trump abused his power by directing the Justice Department to pursue a named individual — who did nothing wrong, but who the president doesn’t like. According to the president’s chief spokesperson, this was proper because the White House believes Trump has the authority to do this.

The circular reasoning is breathtaking: Trump can abuse his power because the White House has concluded that Trump can abuse his power, therefore there’s nothing wrong with Trump abusing his power.

By this reasoning, the president can — effectively, if not literally — do anything he wants, just so long as it’s the position of the White House that his actions are legitimate.

Remember, Trump and his team had plenty of time to come up with talking points on this. They could carefully and methodically craft a specific defense on the merits and present that pitch to the public.

Evidently, they couldn’t come up with anything, which says a great deal about the propriety of Trump’s tactics.

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I can appreciate why the media landscape is crowded, but I continue to believe this should be more than a one-day story. 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 last 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 go even further 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?

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 the orders, calling them “shameful” and “constitutionally corrupt” and accused Trump of “palpably unconstitutional conduct.”

The fact that the White House still can’t come up with a credible defense for the orders, a week later, helps bolster Luttig’s point.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.