If the secret to understanding a strongman is to identify his greatest weakness, one place to start with Donald Trump is his obsession with his own eventual obituaries. Trump knows that they will mention his history-making presidencies, his ostentatious wealth, and his unusual charisma—but he also is aware that when he dies, people will remember his conviction on 34 felony counts, and that there is nothing he can do about it. Even now, White House officials have told me, Trump rages about how his guilty verdict is sure to be mentioned way up high in his obituaries.
Trump’s fixation on all of this leapt to mind today when I heard that he’d called for the arrests of the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago—not just because it explains Trump’s psychology, but also because this obsession is one of the driving motivations of his revenge crusade, which is now escalating dramatically.
It bears pausing on the starkness of these facts: The president of the United States today demanded the jailing of two elected officials who belong to the opposing political party. Trump did not offer evidence that Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson had committed a crime, nor did he even suggest what charge either man would face, though the outburst presumably stemmed from their opposition to Trump sending the National Guard to Chicago to protect ICE officers.
This, of course, is hardly the first time Trump has urged the incarceration of his political foes. (This is the man who led “Lock her up” chants at his rallies, after all.) But what makes this moment so significant is what happened a short time later, in a courtroom just outside Washington, D.C. There, former FBI Director James Comey was arraigned on charges of making false statements to Congress. Trump’s threats are no longer bluster. The guardrails of his first term are gone. He is instead surrounded by enablers, including a pliant attorney general. The federal government is taking legal action against those whom Trump wants punished. Retribution is here.
White House aides scoffed to reporters in the first months of this administration that the talk of vengeance was an overblown media creation and that Trump was instead focusing on matters such as tariffs and resolving global conflicts. They acknowledged that during a signature campaign speech, Trump had flat-out declared, “I am your retribution,” promising his supporters that he’d strike back at those in power who they believed had oppressed them or curtailed their freedoms. He would simply right some wrongs, his aides claimed, by, say, pardoning the January 6 rioters—and yes, yes, all of them, including those who’d violently attacked police officers. Even as those around him, led by his aide Stephen Miller and others using Project 2025 as a playbook, began to challenge powerful institutions—such as law firms and universities—that they believed had long worked against conservatives, the president’s aides insisted that talk of revenge was just hyperbole.
Yet after the passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the revival of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, things changed, one current and two former White House officials, as well as one outside adviser, told me on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump couldn’t get some die-hard MAGA supporters to stop dwelling on his ties to the disgraced sex offender. The signature Republican legislation proved unpopular. The economy, whipsawed by tariffs, was displaying warning signs. Trump’s poll numbers began to slip, and the GOP was in danger of losing the midterms—which alarmed Trump and fueled some of his most extreme moves. With Republican control of Congress in danger, Trump began focusing more on retaliation.
Trump has long ruminated about the criminal and civil charges that were brought against him after his first term in office. He now privately acknowledges that they were a political gift, believing that the charges reeked of government overreach and made him look like a martyr to his supporters, the outside adviser and one former official told me. He has told advisers that, in retrospect, every day he spent at the defense table in a Manhattan courtroom during a trial for falsifying business records was a political advertisement. The case yielded a conviction, but that was the only trial he faced before last year’s presidential election (after his win, he faced no real punishment and was able to make the other cases vanish). But in the moment, he was terrified of being convicted and still seethes at the humiliation he faced.
He has fumed for months to aides and outside allies about the injustices he believes he has faced, but often, his rants—or social-media posts—have not contained explicit instructions, leaving it up to officials to determine how, or whether, to carry out his wishes, one current and one former aide told me. But one Truth Social post late last month was shocking in its directness. In what appeared to have been intended as a private message to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump directly called for the prosecution of Comey as well as of Senator Adam Schiff of California and New York Attorney General Letitia James. All three had crossed Trump: Comey had helped steer the initial steps of the Russia investigation; Schiff was among the leaders of Trump’s first impeachment; James was behind a civil case that resulted in a $500 million penalty for the president. Comey was indicted just days after Trump’s message, in a case brought by a replacement federal prosecutor after the original attorney balked and was forced out. Another prosecutor reportedly resigned rather than bring charges against James.
The normal barriers between the White House and the Department of Justice were obliterated. And Trump made his motivation plain, writing in the message to Bondi: “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Trump has never much cared for the principles of the criminal-justice system. In the 1980s, he added to his then-growing fame by calling for the execution of the five suspects in the Central Park jogger case before they’d even been convicted. (They were later exonerated.) In his 2016 campaign, he called for the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server, though she had not been charged with any crime. In his first term, Trump believed that the Department of Justice was there to serve his whims—he famously asked for his own Roy Cohn, the notoriously ruthless New York lawyer—but was stymied at times by his previous attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, and by entrenched department norms enforced by career officials. Trump’s wishes for investigations into Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama were denied.
But those obstacles are gone. Trump has insisted that the Department of Justice under Joe Biden was weaponized against him, claims goaded on by aides such as Miller and Russell Vought, who also champion efforts to expand the president’s power over all facets of the executive branch. And Bondi’s appearance before the Senate oversight committee yesterday was defined by her refusal to answer basic questions about her work—including the Comey indictment—as well as an obsequiousness to Trump that suggested that she was indeed comfortable acting as the president’s personal lawyer.
“The firewall between the political side and the DOJ has completely eroded,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told me in an email. “And there’s the very peculiar parallel that you have a former FBI director coming in to be charged with lying to Congress, yet we have the Attorney General of the United States not being truthful to Congress.”
The administration has creatively used other levers of government to punish its foes; see the way it has wielded the threat of cutting off federal funding to universities or federal business with large law firms, or the way it’s either toyed with or initiated harassment against individuals—stripping security clearances, triggering IRS audits, revoking licenses, pursuing expensive litigation. The pace has picked up since the murder of Charlie Kirk. Officials have used the assassination as a pretext to act upon plans that were already in the works, some written by Miller, to crack down on what they deem are lefty NGOs and other organizations, including those funded by George Soros.
When I asked what charges Trump thought would be appropriate against Pritzker and Johnson, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded in a statement that the men “have blood on their hands,” and that “these failed leaders have stood idly by while innocent Americans fall victim to violent crime time and time again.”
Trump has aimed to expand presidential power and use it to go after his critics in ways that this country has never seen. He stripped away Kamala Harris’s security detail, the Department of Justice is investigating the former CIA director turned Trump critic John Brennan, and the Federal Communications Commission threatened Jimmy Kimmel. In some cases, he wants to inflict on others the charges he himself faced: John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, had his home raided by FBI agents as part of a classified-materials probe, and Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, has been accused of mortgage fraud (Trump was previously accused of mishandling classified materials and falsifying property records).
Those close to Trump no longer downplay the possibility of the retribution campaign widening further. And the president himself, following Comey’s indictment, indicated that his personal vengeance tour is only getting started.
“They weaponized the Justice Department like nobody in history,” Trump said. “What they’ve done is terrible, and so I would, I hope, frankly, I hope there are others. You can’t let this happen to a country.”
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