The recent casual acknowledgement by the White House Chief of Staff that the President is engaged in prosecutorial “score settling” marks a dangerous departure from the rule-of-law norms that restrain executive power in a constitutional democracy. This admission that the State is using its legal authority to punish perceived enemies is antithetical to core Constitutional principles and the rule of law.
The American experiment was built on the rejection of personal rule and political revenge, replacing it with laws that bind even those who hold the highest offices. In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote, “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” The essence of these words can be found in our Constitution that deliberately placed power in the hands of three co-equal branches of government–Legislative, Executive, and Judicial.
In the past year, however, the executive branch has asserted its power in ways that undermine the core founding principles of this country by weaponizing agencies and authorities throughout government to take actions based on personal vendettas, rather than the interests of the American people. The nation’s once exalted law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice, has diminished itself through its complicity, targeting individuals and institutions at the direction of the White House.
Examples of retributive actions taken by the administration
-On January 11, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell revealed that he is under criminal investigation in connection with the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. Powell called the threatened criminal indictment charges “pretexts” and “a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.” This provoked a rare rebuke from Senator Thom Tillis, who sits on the Senate Committee overseeing nominations for the Fed: “If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.”
-The administration has removed security clearances from numerous individuals against whom the President had grievances, including former US Presidents, CIA chiefs, and other officials. As of November 2025, 470 individuals and organizations had been subjected to some form of retribution.
-The Department of Justice has investigated and sought to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James at the apparent direction of the President based on his desire to seek retribution against them.
-After Senator Mark Kelly and five other members of Congress posted a video reminding U.S. military members that they are obligated to not follow illegal orders, the President called their statements “seditious behavior punishable by death." The Pentagon escalated a military review of the Senator, and on Jan. 5, 2026, sent him a letter of censure, initiating the process of demoting him. The President has called for all those in the video to be “arrested and put on trial."
How do we know that this is retribution?
We know these actions reflect retribution because the White House has been explicit about personal motives. The President sent a direct message over social media to Attorney General Pam Bondi, instructing her to initiate actions against James Comey, Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff (Truth Social, Sept 20, 2025), stating: “…What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Letitia??? They’re all guilty as hell… JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles confirmed this behavior in a Vanity Fair interview where she stated, “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
Why does this matter?
Trust in our government requires a belief that it exercises its authority based on facts and the law, not on politics or revenge. Indeed, the framework of our entire form of government was designed to ensure that no one can direct government actions based on personal agendas. When the Department of Justice and other government agencies behave arbitrarily and launch vindictive investigations and prosecutions, we are all at risk of being wrongly punished.
Retaliatory prosecutions, such as those cited above, violate key elements of our Constitution, for example:
· The First Amendment by punishing speech and/or association.
· The Due Process clause, which was designed to ensure that the law is applied to everyone equally.
· Separation of Powers, if the investigation lacks a legitimate law enforcement purpose or is done in retribution or to coerce or undermine the role of a member of Congress.
It is a long-held principle in this country that our justice system cannot be used to advance a personal agenda. Unfair retaliatory actions place everyone’s rights and freedoms at risk – even people who have no connection to the target.
What can we do?
We must all speak up and explain the dangers of a weaponized government.
1. Remind people that the federal government works for them. The people have a right to know what the government is doing–and to make sure it is following the facts and not a government leader’s personal or political agenda. The government is not there to do one individual’s bidding, even if that individual was elected by the people.
2. Speak out when learning of government retaliation. Doing so reminds those in office that public power is not a personal weapon for revenge.
Why we all must act now
The greatest danger of retaliatory use of government power is not any single investigation or individual target, but the precedent it sets. When retaliation becomes normalized—when investigations, prosecutions, or administrative punishments are understood as tools for settling political or personal scores—it reshapes incentives throughout government in a way that is dangerous to all of us.
In particular, career officials learn that independence carries risk, dissent invites punishment, and loyalty to individuals matters more than fidelity to law. Over time, this corrodes public trust in the justice system itself, chills lawful speech and opposition, and weakens the institutional safeguards that protect everyone’s rights.
All of us all have a responsibility to speak out and demand that our leaders follow the Constitution and the law.
Lauren Stiller Rikleen, Susan Rubel, Amanda Cats-Baril, and Arabella Meyer are the leadership team for the Meeting the Moment initiative of Lawyers Defending American Democracy, an organization dedicated to galvanizing lawyers and other members of the public “to defend the rule of law in the face of an unprecedented threat to American Democracy.” Its work is not political or partisan.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.