Donald Trump, accompanied by his wife Melania, attends a New Year's Eve event at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., December 31, 2024.
By repealing President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order (EO) banning racial discrimination in hiring for the federal government, Donald Trump has proudly proclaimed his intention of Making America White Again, at least with regard to political power and economic opportunity.
Another EO Trump signed this week proclaims that our sex identity begins at “fertilization” when, in fact, sexual development doesn’t begin to start until at least the sixth week after fertilization. In addition to attacking transgender individuals and setting them up for rank persecution (this EO’s main goal), it’s also a way of laying the groundwork for fetal personhood, a doctrine that will ultimately lead to a total ban on abortion and several methods of birth control.
But the most troubling of his executive orders is the one with the Orwellian name of “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”
It lays out a rationalization to investigate and then prosecute the investigators and attorneys in the federal government who looked into Trump’s many ties to Russia and Putin. It then goes after those who tracked down and imprisoned January 6th seditionists, and tried (unsuccessfully, thanks to Merrick Garland’s temerity) to prosecute Trump for his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election and to steal top-secret nuclear and espionage secrets (which he allegedly then made available to random foreign spies passing through Mar-a-Lago).
The “Weaponization” EO makes clear from the start that it’s not about ending but, rather, beginning the weaponization of the federal government. It starts right out with a proclamation of Trump’s victimhood:
“The American people have witnessed the previous administration engage in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community against those perceived political opponents in the form of investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related actions.”
Representing the alleged crimes committed by Trump and his supporters — including fake electors, the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and threats of violence against school boards and others — as mere political differences with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the executive order goes on to assert:
“These actions appear oriented more toward inflicting political pain [on Trump and his supporters] than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives. Many of these activities appear to be inconsistent with the Constitution and/or the laws of the United States, including those activities directed at parents protesting at school board meetings, Americans who spoke out against the previous administration’s actions, and other Americans who were simply exercising constitutionally protected rights.”
Trump’s lawyers who drafted the EO fail to mention that the Department of Justice investigated intimidation of school board members at the written request of the National School Boards Association (NSBA), hardly a hotbed of leftwing political activity. Or that the people who attacked the Capitol weren’t merely “exercising their constitutionally protected rights” when they killed three police officers and sent 170 others to the hospital.
Proving that “every Trump accusation is an admission,” the EO goes on to claim that the Biden administration had turned America into a third-world nation by using the police power of the state to influence or control politics and elections:
“The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process. It targeted individuals who voiced opposition to the prior administration’s policies with numerous Federal investigations and politically motivated funding revocations, which cost Americans access to needed services.”
Without specifics, it’s impossible to tell exactly what the author is speaking of around “targeting individuals”; in all probability the real goal of this paragraph is to justify Trump’s Justice Department and FBI doing exactly what’s outlined here going forward: investigate and prosecute those “who voice opposition” to Trump as he works to gut Social Security and Medicare and tries to harass or imprison his political opponents. (He just reversed Biden’s reduction of drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid recipients, for example.)
And then the EO wanders into the realm of flat-out lies and misrepresentations:
“The Department of Justice even jailed an individual for posting a political meme. And while the Department of Justice has ruthlessly prosecuted more than 1,500 individuals associated with January 6 and simultaneously dropped nearly all cases against BLM rioters.”
The guy who “posted a political meme” was named Douglass Mackey, a white man who was sentenced to seven months in prison in October 2023 for posting a picture of a Black woman in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign with text instructing people to “Avoid the line, vote from home and text Hillary to 59925.”
It’s also worth noting that Mackey committed this election interference crime during the 2016 election and most of the investigation and prosecution of him was done by the Trump Justice Departmentstarting in 2018.
And the EO’s claim that Biden’s DOJ “dropped nearly all cases against BLM rioters” isn’t just wrong, it’s a flat-out lie. Not only did the Biden administration continue prosecutions begun during Trump’s last year in office, they brought over a hundred new cases putting more than 70 BLM-protest-associated defendants in prison for an average of 27 months with at least ten people getting five years or more.
Asking Trump and his people to simply tell the truth appears to be a bridge too far; George Orwell himself couldn’t have done better if he’d tried to draft this EO in the voice of Big Brother.
We’ve already seen Trump try this weaponization of the Justice Department, in a small way, with the appointment during his first term of John Durham, the federal prosecutor who set out to prove that the charges of Trump’s ties to Russia and Putin were false and politically motivated.
Merrick Garland made that wrong and rather pathetic decision to keep Durham on (just like he did with the political prosecution of Hunter Biden). Nonetheless, Durham ended up endorsing the Mueller Report’s conclusions that Russia was working hard to elect Trump, and his bumbling attempts to prosecute people for investigating Trump ended in easy acquittals by two different juries.
But now Trump runs the Justice Department, and, in all probability, former Florida AG Pam Bondi will be Trump’s attorney general. Which should deeply trouble all Americans who care about keeping politics and the police and prosecutorial apparatus of our nation separate, given that:
— Bondi refused to directly answer whether or not she would investigate Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought criminal cases against Trump. When asked, she said it would be “irresponsible” to make any commitment without reviewing files.
— When questioned about investigating former Rep. Liz Cheney for serving on the January 6 committee, Bondi avoided a direct answer, stating, “You’re trying to engage me in a gotcha. I won’t do it.”
— She declined to rule out investigating Trump’s political opponents, instead claiming, “No one will be prosecuted, investigated because they are a political opponent.”
— Bondi refused to condemn Trump’s characterization of January 6 defendants as “hostages” or “patriots,” claiming — incredibly — that she was “unfamiliar” with his ever having said such a thing.
The real goal of this executive order is to kick off the prosecution of people Trump considers his political enemies.
Under normal circumstances, the Department of Justice can’t open an investigation (or subsequent prosecution) of an American citizen without at least “a reasonable indication of criminal activity” (the lowest standard, not requiring proof), “reasonable suspicion” (based on evidence), or a “criminal predicate” (based on past investigations or convictions).
But these aren’t normal circumstances; Trump is hell-bent-for-leather to turn America into a tinpot dictatorship as fast as he can, establishing the same sort of single-party state his mentors, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, run in Russia and Hungary.
Thus this EO, which establishes a legal basis for the DOJ to start investigations and prosecutions ASAP without the usually-required evidence or “indication of criminal activity.”
Get ready for investigations, arrests, and show trials of the people who’ve tried to hold Trump accountable for his crimes and traitorous behavior. By signing this executive order, he’s all but announced them with fireworks and loudspeakers.
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