Since his election victory, President Trump has said he would not seek retribution against his perceived enemies. “I’m not looking to go into the past,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Retribution will be through success.”
But in an executive order he signed on Monday night, Mr. Trump made clear that he has every intention to seek out and possibly punish government officials in the Justice Department and America’s intelligence agencies as a way to “correct past misconduct” against him and his supporters.
It would be justice, the order said, against officials from the Biden administration who carried out an “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.”
This is what retribution could look like during the second Trump presidency: payback dressed up in the language of victimhood.
That executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” came amid a blizzard of other actions on Monday evening.
They included a highly unusual separate order that stripped the security clearances of dozens of former intelligence officials whom Mr. Trump has viewed as his political enemies. Another order gave the White House authority to grant immediate top-secret security clearance to any official for up to six months, circumventing the traditional background process managed by the F.B.I. and the intelligence community.
Taken together, these actions reveal the beginnings of a far more methodical approach by Mr. Trump to root out his perceived enemies within the government compared with his first term. Mr. Trump even used his Inaugural Address to raise the issue, saying that the scales of justice would be “rebalanced” after “the vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government.”
Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump during his first term, said he viewed the executive order as the first step in an effort that could result in criminal investigations.
“It looks like the beginning of a retribution campaign because it’s backward looking,” Mr. Kupperman said. “He’s still grappling with the past four years, and this is not the right outlet for him to play this out. It plays to his MAGA base, but it’s not the right one for the country.”
Even where the internal inquiries ordered by Mr. Trump do not lead to investigations or prosecutions, they could yield information that he could use to publicly criticize or harass federal workers or officials he perceives as enemies — a practice he employed regularly during his first term and appears to be continuing.
Within hours of taking office on Monday, Mr. Trump revoked Secret Service protection for one of his most outspoken critics, John R. Bolton, a former national security adviser who has been the target of death threats from Iran, Mr. Bolton said on Tuesday.
Mr. Trump has long used grievance as a political tool, portraying himself as the victim of what he claims is a powerful and amorphous “deep state.”
During his first administration, he took numerous if often haphazard steps to seek payback. In March 2017, he fired off baseless social media posts about how the F.B.I. had wiretapped his presidential campaign, and later enlisted congressional allies like Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, to investigate the bureau’s actions.
Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s attorney general appointed a special prosecutor, John H. Durham, to investigate the F.B.I.’s actions during the 2016 campaign and its handling of the inquiry into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump pushed for Mr. Durham to finish his work before the 2020 election, but the investigation did not conclude until 2023.
His investigation ended with a whimper: The report criticized the bureau for confirmation bias and lack of analytical rigor during the Russia investigation, but showed no evidence of a “deep state conspiracy” and charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence officials with any crimes.
Mr. Trump’s new executive order directs the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to investigate the previous administration’s actions with the aim of unearthing political bias in the agencies they oversee as well as in others like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. They will then report back to the White House “with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions.”
Mr. Trump’s public statements, and the language of the order itself, leave little doubt about what he believes the conclusions of the investigation should be. He asserted that many of the Biden administration’s actions against political opponents “appear to be inconsistent with the Constitution and/or the laws of the United States.”
The executive order stands in stark contrast to how Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration initially approached investigating Mr. Trump’s first term. When Mr. Biden took office, his top officials repeatedly insisted that they were focused on the future, and that looking backward was a waste of time and energy.
Ultimately, the Biden administration appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, who took the extraordinary step of bringing criminal charges against Mr. Trump in two cases. But Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have said the administration took far too long to investigate Mr. Trump, allowing him to take office before he went on trial.
The repeated failures by Democrats and the Justice Department to hold Mr. Trump accountable — whether that was during his first term or when he was indicted twice when he was out of office — have led some to believe that Democrats need to adopt tactics similar to the ones Mr. Trump starting employing on Monday.
Alex Aronson, the executive director of Court Accountability, an advocacy group, said that Mr. Biden should have signed an executive order on his first day in office like the one Mr. Trump signed. But Mr. Aronson said Mr. Biden and the rest of his administration, including Merrick B. Garland, his attorney general, were far too focused on restoring norms than trying to hold Mr. Trump and his administration accountable.
“Trump was going to accuse President Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department against him regardless of when or how the D.O.J. prosecuted Trump for these crimes,” Mr. Aronson said. “Garland’s hesitation to pursue accountability out of fear of Trump’s inevitable baseless accusations ultimately helped Trump delay accountability until he escaped it altogether.”
