Donald Trump's Framework of Punishment and Favor

The ex-president's intense urge for payback has rapidly morphed into a methodical system. Over the year since his election, the chief executive's fury and whims have assumed the form of administrative measures similar to reminiscent to historical dictatorial governments. Federal personnel who resist his demands are immediately dismissed and substituted by loyalists. Opposing leaders who challenge him risk prosecution, trial and punishment. Adversaries have been designated under presidential memoranda as “hostile to national interests”, “anti-Christian” and “against free markets”, and warned with criminal charges as “security threats”.

Government Institutions Restructured

All case involving prosecution of critics and leniency for his allies exhibits its own unique characteristics. But, despite their particular form, they represent examples of what has arisen as a systematic approach. Those incidents are far from coincidental. His cleansing of Department of Justice prosecutors and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, accompanied by his installation of loyalists in senior roles, began quickly, soon took on a pattern, and has now been molded into a regime. The justice department and the law enforcement agency have been transformed into ideological bodies under his explicit command to execute his directives. Unfairness has been rendered normal. This is the retribution system.

Leadership is more concerned with targeting the President's supposed enemies than they are with defending our country's safety.

Within the Apparatus

The beginnings of this mechanism has been revealed in the lawsuit of several former high-ranking FBI officials filed in September in the US district court in Washington against agency head a senior appointee and top lawyer a key figure for illegal termination in “a effort of payback against them for what the accused deemed to be a failure to exhibit proper allegiance”. The document states that Brian Driscoll, the ex- temporary head, describes a conversation in which Patel “openly admitted the illegality of his behavior”.

The official had sought to protect law enforcement officers from being terminated, the complaint alleges. The director advised him that “White House figures” – understood by Driscoll to be the presidential administration and DoJ – had directed him to remove anyone who they considered as having been involved in a law enforcement case against Trump. The complaint adds: “He explained that he had to dismiss the people his leaders told him to remove, because his capacity to hold his own position was contingent on the removal of the personnel who handled matters involving the leader. He noted that there was no option he or the official could do to prevent these or any other terminations, because ‘the FBI attempted to place the President in prison and he recalls it clearly.’” When he informed him he was breaking the agency's own policies, he supposedly said “he recognized that and he was aware the nature of the summary firings were almost certainly unlawful”.

Broad Effects

Following his claimed confession to Driscoll, the DoJ and the law enforcement agency have been dismantled and repurposed for his system of punishment. Multiple of the bureau's senior executives were terminated or forced out in the first days of the government. About thousands of professional attorneys at the justice department have accepted a “deferred resignation program”. A minimum of seven federal prosecutors, including those in the southern district of New York, resigned in protest over what they considered as political interference in abandoning the corruption case against the New York City mayor, a political figure, in return for his collaboration with the administration's Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of migrants. The ethics division of DoJ, which oversees ethical violations, has been reduced to two attorneys. The rights protection unit has been decimated: seventy percent of its employees has left. A third of senior leaders at the justice department have left. The section upholding conservation statutes has experienced the exit of half its leadership.

Rewards and Sanctions

Concerning the legal matter, the interim prosecutor for the southern district of New York, Danielle Sassoon, stepped down in dissent against what she described as the “quid pro quo”. A key figure, Trump's “immigration leader,” showed up as the agent with the mayor on television to state: “If he doesn't come through, I'll reappear in NYC.”. And, a former official, previously the senior DoJ official and a former Trump attorney, who brokered the agreement, was awarded an judicial position, a possible springboard to the supreme court.

Trump's exemption for crimes carried out while in office, provided by the unprecedented judgment of the GOP-led on the supreme court, thus blocking his prosecution over the Capitol riot and maintaining his electoral prospects for the presidential race, is the foundation stone on which he stands to defend his supporters. Given this protection, he has been liberated to enable wrongdoing. The effect of the judicial ruling permeates his presidency and the Republican Party completely. Trump v United States has spread. As Richard Nixon's administration lawyer he remarked about the Watergate