Trump posts his Watergate tapes
It ended Nixon's presidency. For Trump, it's just another Saturday.
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One of the biggest lessons we can take from the Trump era is that Richard Nixon thought way too small.
Watergate? Pffft. That’s for pikers. The real presidential crime move is just to log on to your for-profit social media platform and tweet out your demand that your attorney general get moving on prosecuting your political enemies based on ginned-up charges.
Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, "same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam "Shifty" Schiff, Leticia??? They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done." Then we almost put in a Democrat supported U.S. Attorney, in Virginia, with a really bad Republican past. A Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job. That's why two of the worst Dem Senators PUSHED him so hard. He even lied to the media and said he quit, and that we had no case. No, I fired him, and there is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so. Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot. We can't delay any longer, it's killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT
Because everything is terrible but also very stupid, it wasn’t clear whether Trump intended this missive to be a DM to Pam Bondi or for public consumption, particularly since it seemed to be addressed to her. Trump deleted the initial post, only to re-up it with one minor change, which was to add a last name, Halligan, to the “Lindsey” mentioned in the original. (More on Ms. Halligan later.)
If you spent Saturday wondering if this was a DM, you weren’t alone. Justice Department officials thought it was likely this was indeed a private message meant for Bondi, but decided it best just to pretend Trump intended it to be public. Isn’t it great that we’ve descended so far into an authoritarian cult of personality that even Trump’s hand-picked officials aren’t comfortable inquiring as to whether Dear Leader made a mistake and instead have to treat his every action as divinely ordained?
Whatever transpired behind the scenes, Trump’s revised post made clear that he sees no problem whatsoever with openly calling for the most mind-bendingly corrupt behavior imaginable.
Unsurprisingly, the media is not meeting this moment. Rather than treating this like the five-alarm-democracy-destroying fire that it so obviously is, we get Politico downplaying it as “Trump publicly vented at Attorney General Pam Bondi” and WaPo going with “a series of extraordinary social media posts Saturday, a breakdown of traditional fire walls.”
People! The man literally used his social media platform to tweet out a demand that his attorney general prosecute his opponents, ones he’s already characterized as “guilty as hell.” This isn’t “venting.” This isn’t extraordinary. It’s criminal.
Or, well, it would be criminal but for the fact that the conservatives on the Supreme Court invented a sweeping immunity from prosecution that ensures Trump can do whatever he wants.
In a way, it’s that immunity, even more than the actions of Trump or his sycophants, that has led us here, to the complete repudiation of the post-Watergate consensus that it’s bad when the president uses the might of the federal government to go after opponents. If Trump can’t be prosecuted for inciting an insurrection in an attempt to overturn an election, he’s certainly not going to get jammed up for telling administration officials to figure out a way to prosecute his enemies.
Indeed, it’s as if Trump, knowing full well that he really can’t be touched, decided to just speedrun the Watergate era.
Watergate was only possible because Nixon surrounded himself with top aides who were weak, craven, and willing to commit crimes to help him stay in power. Trump has done the same, stashing his morally flexible cronies in key positions to allow for a whole-of-government attack on his political opponents.
For example, the political persecutions of Sen. Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Fed Governor Lisa Cook are possible thanks to Bill Pulte, Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency director. Pulte proved exceedingly willing to dig through mortgage records to try to find something, anything, to justify investigations.
Ed Martin, who heads the DOJ’s “weaponization working group” and is also both the pardons attorney and the special attorney for mortgage fraud, makes Pulte look almost restrained. In the midst of his sham “investigation” into James’s alleged mortgage fraud, Martin, with a photographer from the New York Post in tow, posed for pictures outside James’s Brooklyn home.
None of this would be happening if Bondi weren’t fully on board. Mere hours after she was confirmed, she created the weaponization working group to review the criminal cases against Trump, go after former special counsel Jack Smith, and examine the “unethical prosecutions” of January 6 rioters. She takes her marching orders from Trump and ghoulish White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller rather than maintaining the traditional — and necessary — separation between the White House and the DOJ.
Even prior to Pulte’s mortgage fraud nonsense, Bondi signed on to opening investigations into Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, both of whom served during Trump’s first term. Krebs committed the unpardonable sin of not agreeing that the 2020 election was stolen, while Taylor’s crime was writing an op-ed about Trump being a threat to democracy.
Bondi has also overseen the purge of DOJ employees who worked on the criminal prosecutions of Trump, with about 35 people having been ousted by mid-July. That’s separate from the roughly 30 January 6 prosecutors Ed Martin fired in January when he was interim US attorney for Washington DC.
Trump even already had his very own version of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre back in February, when multiple top prosecutors left rather than sign on to a blatantly corrupt quid pro quo arrangement dropping criminal charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams signing on to Trump’s immigration crackdown.
There’s no reason to think that these sorts of purges will stop. Trump can only succeed if he is surrounded by loyalists. Anyone with a conscience, or even just a healthy fear of going to prison, is an impediment to his goals. Hence why Trump said he would fire Eric Siebert, his own appointee for US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, over Siebert’s failure to bring a criminal case against Letitia James. Siebert resigned rather than be a part of this, which brings us back to Lindsey Halligan.
The new Fascism Barbie
Does it really need to be said that Halligan — who is, apparently, your new US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — is one of Trump’s former personal lawyers? Does it really need to be said that Halligan has no relevant experience whatsoever for the job?
If it feels like you’ve seen Halligan’s name relatively recently, it’s because she was previously tapped to help Vice President JD Vance destroy the Smithsonian. Yes, when Halligan moved to DC, she did what a lot of new arrivals to the nation’s capital do: hit the museums. But where normal people come away from the Smithsonian with a profound sense of the scope of history and art, Halligan emerged unhappy that there were exhibitions about other countries and ones that talked about America’s legacy of racism. Wouldn’t want that!
Before coming to DC to literally whitewash history, Halligan represented Trump during the investigation into the classified documents he squirreled away in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. Before that? Property insurance cases in Florida. Not a single prosecution, ever. So, Halligan is about as qualified to be a US attorney as she is to be Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary, Lindsey Halligan, Esq., her current moniker in her role as destroyer of the Smithsonian.
It’s tough to keep track of how many of Trump’s former personal attorneys now have administration jobs they are in no way qualified for. Besides Halligan, there’s Alina Habba, who may or may not be the US attorney in New Jersey after a federal judge ruled that the administration’s stringing together of temporary appointments to avoid Senate confirmation was unlawful. Habba has the dubious honor of likely being the only US attorney pick to have ever been slapped with sanctions of nearly $1 million for her past representation of the president as a private citizen in one of his myriad lawsuits against political appointments.
Then there’s White House Counsel David Warrington. Sure, he has no experience in government, but he did represent Trump in matters related to January 6, which is the only experience that really counts as far as Trump is concerned. Warrington helpfully drafted a memo justifying the collapse of the wall between the White House and the DOJ, saying that both Trump and Vance could inquire about criminal and civil investigations.
And of course, there’s Todd Blanche, the number two official at DOJ. Blanche got his job because he handled Trump’s New York hush money trial. He also thinks that yelling at Trump isn’t just a crime — it’s a criminal conspiracy that maybe could be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Emil Bove, another former Trump criminal defense attorney, is no longer at the DOJ, having been rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Before his departure, though, Bove appears to have helped quash an investigation into Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who was caught on tape taking a $50,000 bribe.
So much for the traditional independence of the DOJ.
Contrast all of this, if you will, with the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden, who maintained such a hands-off relationship that he stood aside while the agency literally prosecuted his son. There’s certainly a case to be made that his attorney general, Merrick Garland, could have been bolder — and speedier — about prosecuting Trump, but that’s not related to any independence or lack thereof.
Where Nixon had to contend with a Supreme Court that rejected his claim of absolute immunity and a Congress that stood ready to impeach him, the other branches of government these days have no interest in reining in Trump. He can basically do a Watergate every week comfortable in the knowledge that no one will stop him.
That’s it for today
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Thank you for this sharp piece. I’ve written extensively on how power systems reward loyalty over law, and how institutional incentives are quietly restructured to serve personal vendettas. This isn’t just corruption, it’s behavioral engineering.
The Trump era didn’t just rewrite norms. It rewired the reward system. It’s conditioning. It signals to future appointees that loyalty is currency, and hesitation is punishable.
— Johan
Professor of Behavioral Economics & Applied Cognitive Theory
What should be terrifying is that he probably meant this to be an instruction sent via DM on his dime-store social media platform. That he is conducting executive business on a platform that I would bet my bottom dollar that all the major countries have broken into the databases of, and now are reading what he is instructing his inner circle to do.
But as you mention, the Supreme's have elevated Trump (and the presidency, at least when a Republican occupies that chair) to be untouchable.