Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, is of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
The rule of law, including the media’s right to speak freely for us and criticize our leaders, is at stake this election. The risk comes from Donald Trump, the candidate whose brand has become revenge and retaliation against anyone who opposes him.
A free press is vital to a free people. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1786 letter to James Currie, his daughter’s physician: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
Why? Because ordinary Americans are busy with their lives and their survival. So much of the burden of speaking out in an effort to keep the government honest is carried for all of us by journalists. It’s also done, of course, by those who have the ability to use their voices on social media, in letters to editors and in other forums.
Trump has talked of terminating the Constitution. It includes, of course, the First Amendment’s protections for individuals’ speech and for the press. He’s threatened to investigate MSNBC, the cable news outlet that criticizes him regularly. Trump, mimicking Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s catchwords for those he slated for elimination, called the network an “ enemy of the people.”
On June 5, Trump told Fox News that he “would have ‘every right’ to go after his adversaries.” The next night, it happened again when Dr. Phil suggested to Trump that if re-elected, “ you don’t have time to get even.” Trump agreed to disagree: “[R]evenge does take time. ... And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest.”
History, Yale professor Jason Stanley has noted, is riddled with moments when the people, to their eternal regret, have disbelieved the threats of would-be authoritarians. “Believe what they say,” Stanley told The Associated Press. Trump “is literally telling you he’s going to use the apparatus of the state to target his political opponents.”
Indeed the former president has promised, if re-elected, to weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies, including President Joe Biden. That threat is built on his conspiracy theory that Trump’s May 30 conviction on all 34 felony counts was Biden’s doing.
Nonsense, experts have answered. History professor Allan Lichtman told USA Today’s fact-checkers that “[t]here is not a shred of evidence that Biden has anything to do with this prosecution.” Law professor and former prosecutor Kimberly Wehle called Trump’s attempt to blame Biden for a local district attorney’s decision making “obviously, blatantly false.”
That’s never stopped Trump from trying to intimidate his enemies. “If you come after me,” he famously said, “I will come after you.” If re-elected, he says, he will have members of the 117th Congress’s Jan. 6 committee indicted. The televised summer 2022 hearings, which informed the American people about Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, led up to MAGA underperformance in competitive midterm races.
But that was far from the end of the story. Trump has used the support of enablers to claw back. Most recently, following Trump’s conviction in New York, it quickly became de rigueur for Trump’s enablers to express blood thirst for prosecuting Democrats in retribution.
As The New York Times wrote, “What is different now is the range of Republicans who are saying [that like-kind] retaliation is necessary.” Barbara McQuade, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, responded sharply:
As all Americans should know, vengeance is an improper motive in our criminal justice system. Prosecution based on politics would distort the very concept of justice.
There are at least two obvious problems with the MAGA right’s “fight fire with fire” mentality. First, Trump’s conviction was of his own making, a long overdue reckoning with the rule of law after a lifetime of rule breaking. A jury of 12 ordinary citizens found him guilty of criminally covering up his corruption of the 2016 election.
Second, first responders don’t fight fire with fire; they use water. More application of the law is in order, not less. Even so, these enablers are normalizing lawlessness, including political prosecutions in the future and threats to the freedom of the press.
It is up to common-sense Americans to answer. Our ballots are our power. Preserving our rights to a free press and avoiding government by retribution will depend on getting out to vote in force this November. Vengeance may be Trump’s, but liberty is ours to keep.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.