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The ex-president's insatiable appetite for revenge has rapidly transformed into a organized system. Within the twelve months, the leader's fury and whims have adopted the guise of administrative measures in ways comparable to historical dictatorial regimes. Justice department officials who do not cooperate are summarily fired and succeeded by devotees. Opposing officials who confront him risk prosecution, trial and punishment. Opponents have been designated under presidential directives as “anti-American”, “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist”, and menaced with legal action as “terrorists”.

Government Institutions Remade

Every situation involving prosecution of Trump's enemies and protection for his allies exhibits its own particular features. But, regardless of their individual nature, they embody expressions of what has developed as a systematic technique. Such episodes are far from isolated. The administration's removal of DoJ lawyers and Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel, coupled with his placement of loyalists in senior positions, began rapidly, promptly took on a regularity, and has now been shaped into a system. DoJ and the Federal Bureau have been transformed into ideological agencies under the president's explicit command to execute his demands. Injustice has been rendered standard. It represents the apparatus of revenge.

Management is preoccupied with penalizing the leader's perceived adversaries than they are with safeguarding our public welfare.

Inside the Structure

The foundation of this system has been exposed in the legal complaint of multiple former senior FBI executives filed in September in the judicial system in DC against top official Kash Patel and justice department head Pam Bondi for illegal termination in “a effort of payback against them for what Defendants deemed to be a inability to demonstrate adequate political loyalty”. The document states that a former acting director, the former temporary head, recounts a discussion in which Patel “openly acknowledged the unlawfulness of his behavior”.

The official had sought to protect FBI agents from being dismissed, the complaint alleges. The director told him that “they” – perceived by him to be the presidential administration and federal prosecutors – had directed him to fire anyone who they considered as having worked on a criminal investigation against Trump. The complaint continues: “The director clarified that he had to fire the individuals his bosses told him to remove, because his chance to keep his own position was contingent on the ouster of the officials who were involved in matters involving the chief executive. Patel explained that there was nothing he or Driscoll could do to prevent these or any other firings, because ‘the FBI sought to place the leader in jail and he remembers.’” Once the official informed Patel he was breaking the agency's own internal rules, he allegedly said “he understood that and he was aware the nature of the swift terminations were almost certainly unlawful”.

Broad Consequences

Following his alleged confession to him, the DoJ and the Federal Bureau have been dismantled and reorganized for Trump's revenge apparatus. Several of the FBI's top officials were terminated or compelled to leave in the first days of the government. About 4,500 professional attorneys at the department have accepted a “deferred resignation program”. No fewer than multiple DoJ lawyers, including those in the New York office, resigned in protest over what they viewed as ideological pressure in dropping the legal action against the local official, Eric Adams, in as a trade for his cooperation with Trump's federal agency roundups of immigrants. The ethics division of the department, which oversees ethical violations, has been diminished to two attorneys. The civil rights division has been decimated: seventy percent of its employees has left. 33% of top officials at the department have resigned. The division enforcing conservation statutes has lost half its leadership.

Incentives and Punishments

Regarding the Adams case, the temporary lawyer for the southern district of New York, she, stepped down in protest against what she described as the “trade-off”. A key figure, Trump's “immigration leader,” appeared as the implementer with Adams on a media outlet to announce: “Unless he complies, I will return in the city.”. Meanwhile, Emil Bove, earlier the senior DoJ official and a past legal representative, who negotiated the agreement, was granted an judicial position, a likely springboard to the supreme court.

Trump's protection for offenses committed while in power, provided by the unprecedented judgment of the conservative on the highest court, thus blocking his legal action over the Capitol riot and maintaining his political viability for the presidential race, is the cornerstone on which he relies to defend his supporters. Given this protection, he has been empowered to enable corruption. The effect of the supreme court decision permeates his administration and the political party completely. The court matter has spread. As a past leader's administration lawyer he commented about the Watergate