When President Trump returned to office, his rivals and law enforcement officials feared he would follow through on his pledges to use the Justice Department and F.B.I. to investigate and even imprison his perceived enemies.
But since winning re-election, Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign has turned out to be far more expansive, efficient and creative than anticipated. It has also been less reliant on the justice system.
Not only has he found new ways to use his power to target those he has demonized, but his actions — or just the prospect of them — have led some of those he has gone after to change their behavior and fall into line.
Mr. Trump has employed tactics including lawsuits, executive orders, regulations, dismissals from government jobs, withdrawal of security details and public intimidation to take on a wide range of individuals and institutions he views as having unfairly pursued him or sought to block his agenda.
In the process, he has blurred the personal and the political, making it difficult in some instances, like his targeting of academic and cultural institutions, to distinguish between his grievances and policy goals.
In many cases he is relying on, or asserting, unilateral power rather than turning to the courts or federal agencies to carry out his demands. Many of his targets are those who prosecuted or challenged him politically, or are institutions and groups he sees as ideological impediments, like elite universities.
Threatening criminal investigation is still very much part of his playbook. He suggested again last month that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should “go to jail,” and his choice to run the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington has repeatedly taken steps to scrutinize Democrats and purge people who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attacks.
But the president’s targets are often giving way under other types of pressure.
Most recently, a number of major law firms chose to buckle in the face of punitive executive orders that could cripple their ability to do business, accepting his terms rather than fight in court.
“They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,’” Mr. Trump said last month.
He added: “Law firms are just saying, ‘Where do I sign? Where do I sign?’”
Mr. Trump is only the second president in American history to serve a nonconsecutive term, and he appears to have entered office this time with a maximalist view of his powers even if they are disputed or untested. And unlike his first term, he is no longer being kept in check by aides drawn from the ranks of the military or establishment Republicans who saw their jobs as protecting him from himself.
“It’s scary to be in a position where we have an executive who is prioritizing acts of retribution and is doing it in creative ways that bypass traditional safeguards and norms,” said Sean Brennan, who as a Justice Department prosecutor oversaw cases against rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and was fired just 11 days after Mr. Trump took office. “And often, by the time it can be challenged in court, the damage is done.”
Mr. Trump’s willingness to impose costs on those who cross him or fail to heed his demands has now become a consistent characteristic of his first months in office, extending to political opponents and government officials; news organizations and television networks; corporations; lawyers and their firms; universities; think tanks; and cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian.
Last month he directed the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States,” a step that critics said could suppress legitimate legal efforts to challenge policy and hold government officials accountable for their actions.
“For now, it’s an easier way of pursuing retribution without having to deal with other institutions like juries and the courts that come with all sorts of potential requirements and barriers,” said Daniel C. Richman, a professor of law at Columbia University and former federal prosecutor.
“But whether it’s going after law firms, removing security details or killing critical grants, this is also a ‘push-button presidency,’” Mr. Richman said, adding that Mr. Trump’s approach appears to be built on “the notion of ‘Let’s do this to them, and see what happens.’”
Asked about Mr. Trump’s expansive retribution campaign, Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, replied, “Traditional presidencies have failed to bring meaningful change to the ways of Washington, and the president is committed to upending the entrenched bureaucracy.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign has not gone totally unchecked. Federal judges have ruled in favor of those law firms that have chosen to fight Mr. Trump’s executive orders in court. But by beginning his second term with actions like removing the security details of former aides and officials he considers disloyal — even though they continue to face serious foreign or domestic threats — he signaled that anyone crossing him could face serious consequences.
In taking on big law firms, Mr. Trump went after firms that employed lawyers who had played a role in seeking to hold him accountable or that had represented his political rivals. But he also created the prospect that anyone who got on his enemies list in the future could have a hard time arranging representation by a big-name law firm, a potential development his critics saw as profoundly undercutting a foundational principle of the justice system.
It also signaled to the firms, which have resources to bring lawsuits against the administration to stop potentially illegal policies, that opposing it in court could be financially catastrophic.
Several of the firms targeted by Mr. Trump — Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block — fought the executive orders. And in a striking example of pushback, three judges ruled the orders were most likely unconstitutional.
But many law firms, like Paul Weiss, have been so scared by the prospect of a public fight with Mr. Trump that they are folding anyway, underscoring how Mr. Trump’s power to extract retribution is not always of a sort that needs Justice Department action or that can be reined in by courts or other institutions. Some firms are making concessions even before any executive order against them has been signed after being told they could be next on Mr. Trump’s list.
Mr. Brennan, the former prosecutor fired for his role in pursuing charges against Jan. 6 rioters, said it was particularly frustrating to watch the law firms capitulate. Dismissed from his government job and with law school debt, he said, he has little ability to fight back and challenge his firing in court. The big law firms, on the other hand, are among the institutions that have the resources to fight Mr. Trump.
“We’re in a unique moment where the rule of law is being threatened and part of lawyers’ duty as professionals is to uphold the rule of law and fight back against threats against the rule of law,” Mr. Brennan said. “And law firms are uniquely positioned to wage these battles but were more worried about their bottom lines.”
In carrying out his campaign, Mr. Trump’s actions often combine political clout, command of public attention and control of some federal spending, sometimes wrapped in language that is a cross between social media post and a legal brief. And in some instances, the very possibility that he could make trouble for those he has decided to target has produced results for him.
Even before Mr. Trump took office, the head of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, and the head of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, went to Mar-a-Lago to see Mr. Trump.
At Mr. Trump’s inauguration, they and other leaders of the country’s major tech companies — once derided by Mr. Trump and his allies as elitists who worked against them — sat just feet away from Mr. Trump.
A week after Mr. Trump took office, Meta, the parent of Facebook, agreed to resolve a lawsuit he had filed against it by donating $25 million to his future presidential library. (The company still faces an antitrust suit by the Federal Trade Commission, and Mr. Zuckerberg went to the White House last week to lobby for Mr. Trump to resolve the suit.)
In recent months, a slew of major American corporations have shed diversity, equity and inclusion programs, signaling to Mr. Trump that they will do away with policies he has called “un-American” in the hopes that they will not draw his ire.
At the same time, the regulatory arms of the government have continued to be mobilized against companies Mr. Trump has attacked. The Federal Communications Commission and the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have signaled to media companies and law firms that they are looking at how diversity played a role in their hiring decisions.
Similarly, academic institutions, long seen by Mr. Trump and his allies as incubators of liberal opposition, are facing the prospect of losing huge amounts of federal aid if they do not bow to Mr. Trump’s demands to do more to combat antisemitism and cease admissions practices based on race, color or national origin.
Last month, Columbia University stunned many of its faculty members by agreeing to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department in response to Mr. Trump’s demands, seeking to avert the potential loss of $400 million in federal funds.
The willingness of those targeted by Mr. Trump to bend to his will marks a significant difference from his first term when Mr. Trump and his administration were met with swift and strong resistance from Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and law firms representing clients taking him on in court.
Most of Mr. Trump’s attempts at retribution during his first term were built on trying to use blunt force, either through public statements or private arm-twisting, to get the Justice Department, F.B.I. and I.R.S. to investigate political opponents or others whose actions angered him. While many of those who opposed him politically, sought to hold him to account or became impediments to his agenda did come under scrutiny in an array of ways, none of them were charged by the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, deeply angering him.
His grasp of how to ensure his wishes are carried out has also strengthened since his first term.
In 2018, the White House press secretary held a briefing in which she said that Mr. Trump would be taking away the security clearance of John Brennan, a former C.I.A. director who had been a fierce critic of Mr. Trump’s and whom Mr. Trump blamed for the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.
Despite the news conference, top aides to Mr. Trump, including his chief of staff at the time, John F. Kelly, stepped in to block the move, telling Mr. Trump that despite what had been said publicly, the idea was vindictive and undemocratic.
Mr. Brennan’s security clearance remained intact.
By contrast, Mr. Trump’s demands in the first two months of his second term that the security clearances of more than five dozen of his political opponents, including Hillary Clinton, former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, and Mr. Brennan were promptly carried out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/trump-biden-law-firms-revenge.html
