Trump Shifts Into Full-Bore Retribution Mode

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

‘I Am Your Retribution’ Comes Home To Roost

President Trump issued two new executive orders Wednesday that each target former government officials in his first administration for investigation and retaliation.

Each executive order identifies the former officials – Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor – by name:

• Addressing Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship
• Addressing Risks Associated with an Egregious Leaker and Disseminator of Falsehoods

You’ll recognize Krebs as the head of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency whom Trump fired after he debunked the bogus claims that the 2020 presidential election was somehow rigged. Taylor was the Department of Homeland Security official who anonymously wrote a deeply critical NYT op-ed in 2018 titled: I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.

The executive orders single out private citizens for punishment, including ordering that they be investigated and that their security clearances be revoked. In Krebs’ case, Trump ordered the attorney general to investigate him, which opens the door to potential criminal prosecution.

It is a daily struggle to convey how abnormal, dangerous, and unprecedented Trump’s depredations are. The White House directing DOJ investigations of anyone in this way is by itself off the charts. The president targeting private individuals with executive orders is unprecedented. Turning the might of the federal government and the bully pulpit against his own former officials is without any corresponding precedent.

All of this – it must be repeated – is being undertaken because of President Trump’s own personal grievances, whims, and perceived slights to his ego and his power. No one is safe from such indiscriminate lawlessness, which itself serves to cow all Americans from confronting or challenging the president’s power.

“I am your retribution,” he promised his supporters in 2023.

The retribution is now.

Trump DOJ Targets American Bar Association

In retaliation against the pre-eminent professional association for lawyers, the Trump Justice Department has barred its attorneys in their official capacities from traveling to or participating in American Bar Association activities. The move was announced in a memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Next In Line: New Law Firm Targeted By Trump

President Trump issued a new executive order targeting the law firm Susman Godfrey, which quickly said it would challenge the move. Unlike Trump’s other executive order targeting law firms, this one was a bit more opaque about his motivations. Susman Godfrey handled Dominion Voting Systems’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News for its involvement in the 2020 election’s Big Lie, which resulted in a $787 million settlement.

Quote Of The Day

“Big Law continues to bend the knee to President Trump because they know they were wrong, and he looks forward to putting their pro bono legal concessions toward implementing his America First agenda.”–White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, saying the quiet part out loud while undermining both the already-shaky legal defense of Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms and the flimsy rationale offered by law firms that cut deals to avoid being targeted

Trump Targets State Climate Laws

One of the most maddening things about America’s descent into lawlessness is that it comes at the exact moment collective action is most needed to address the threat of climate change. But it’s not like the two things are happening in parallel. This week alone Trump has boosted coal and targeted state climate laws. I’m dubious that he can lawfully do much to rein in states, but the message is clear.

At the dawn of the Trump era, I tended to see Trumpism as the final death spasm of majority white rule in America. A decade in, the MAGA era feels more like the death rattle of the carbon-based economy. In either case, they both clinging fiercely to their privileges and prerogatives.

Purged Probationary Workers Lose Again

A day after the Supreme Court blocked the reinstatement of purged probationary workers in the federal government in a California case, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals followed suit in a Maryland case.

Death Knell For Indy Agencies?

The Trump administration is trying to skip the appeals court and fast-track to the Supreme Court its effort to rewrite existing law on independent agencies and bring them more firmly under control. The vehicle for the urgent request for the Supreme Court to reverse its own 90-year-old precedent comes in the combined case of the firing of members of the NLRB and MSPB.

DOGE Watch

• NYT: Elon Musk’s DOGE is leading an effort to link government databases, alarming privacy and security experts.
• Wired: US DOGE Service Agreement With Department of Labor Shows $1.3 Million Fee—and Details Its Mission
• WaPo: Trump sends DOGE to review the Navy.
• Wired: The GAO is auditing DOGE.

Sheer Madness

I would caution against taking at face value the slew of news stories this morning that purport to make sense of President Trump’s abrupt climbdown from the maximal version of his disastrous tariffs. The journalistic imperative to write stories with beginnings, middles, and ends poorly serves readers in circumstances like these where the emperor has no clothes and everyone from White House officials to Wall Street financiers are exposed as trying to pretend otherwise. By definition, there is no “making sense” of the senseless. Two additional points:

• I would recommend this piece on how the maximal version of Trump’s tariffs were making the global financial system – more that just the equity markets – wobble in dangerous and unusual ways.
• The comedown yesterday still leaves significant and deeply damaging tariffs in place that continue to pose a significant threat to global trade, economic growth, and prosperity.

We’re not nearly out of the woods yet on this madness.

Crash And Burn: House GOP Edition

The dysfunctional House GOP – where the impulse to out-crazy one another continues – failed to come to agreement on the centerpiece of President Trump’s legislative agenda, forcing Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to scrap a planned vote last evening. They’ll try again today.

‘A Multidimensional Approach’

In his latest podcast episode, my old colleague Greg Sargent presses hard on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to reconcile Democrats’ kitchen table political messaging with the lawlessness of the Trump II presidency.

Alien Enemies Act Cases Are Alive Again

Federal judges in Texas and New York temporarily blocked continuing deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, but only in limited geographical areas. Since the Supreme Court’s decision earlier in the week overturning U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s nationwide injunction, there has been no similar nationwide bar to the deportation – though the high court did require notice and hearing before any other deportations could occur.

Related: For the deeply curious, LawFare has a deep dive on the Alien Enemies Act litigation. I would particularly recommend the section on whether Boasberg’s contempt of court proceedings against the Trump administration for violating his order blocking deportations survived the Supreme Court’s decision that he didn’t have jurisdiction to issue the order.

Keep An Eye On This Weirdness

The Trump DOJ moved to drop a brand-new criminal case against an El Salvadoran man they’d accused of being a major leader of the brutal Central American gang MS-13. Instead of prosecuting the man, the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to deport him immediately. But the government has offered no explanation publicly for the sudden change in its approach to the case.

The 2020 Election Ain’t Over Yet For Newsmax

A state judge in Delaware has ruled against Newsmax in the $1 billion defamation lawsuit against it by Dominion Voting Systems. The judge found that Newsmax published Big Lie-related falsities about the voting machine company in the 2020 election cycle, but ruled that whether it did so with actual malice would be up to a jury to decide. Trial is scheduled to begin April 28.

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