What to watch for: The weaponization of government

Part One in a series on the biggest threats posed by a second Trump term

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Since the election, a number of readers have asked how worried we should be, and what we should be looking for in the weeks and months ahead.

My general answer: pretty worried! At this point, I see little reason to think that Trump won’t at least attempt his most authoritarian and destructive campaign promises. Whether he succeeds will depend on how much resistance he gets from the courts, Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and the rest of us.

Trump’s nominations to cabinet positions so far are a clear indication that he’s dragging his party further into a nihilist cult of personality. It isn’t just that so many of them are unqualified, corrupt, or destructive (though it’s also all of those things). It’s that they’re uniquely unfit for the specific positions he has appointed them to hold. He’s daring someone to stop him, and learning from what follows.

The Matt Gaetz pick for attorney general was bad, but it wasn’t even his most dangerous. Appointing crank conspiracy theorist and Trump/Assad apologist Tulsi Gabbard to the most sensitive national security position in government is a direct threat to national security and a reflection of Trump’s own fondness for authoritarians.

Department of Defense pick Pete Hegseth has never led more than a dozen or so people (the one small nonprofit he did lead, he ran into the ground). As a National Guardsman, he was barred from working security for Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo common to white supremacists. He lobbied Trump to pardon war criminals who had been reported by their own platoons, and believes the U.S. military should ignore the Geneva Conventions.

Then there’s the fact that the leader of the QAnon party, a man himself found responsible for rape and credibly accused of sexual assault or misconduct by dozens of women, appointed four — four — cabinet level officials accused of engaging in or covering up sexual misconduct. There’s Gaetz, of course. RFK Jr. has also been accused of sexual assault (he didn’t exactly deny the accusation). The sexual assault allegation against DOD nominee Hegseth are particularly credible. And Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for Department of Education, was accused in a lawsuit of covering up a ringside announcer’s sex abuse of a boy while she and her husband ran World Wrestling Entertainment.

None of this is all that surprising, given that Trump’s party keeps nominating and electing sex creeps up and down the ballot. Nor does it seem to bother Trump’s congressional supporters. Instead, they’ve decided to single out and bully the first trans woman elected to Congress, barring her from using the women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill . . . because she’s a “threat” to women. (We’re still waiting to hear which bathrooms male Republicans neutered by Donald Trump will be permitted to use.)

Trump is also refusing to subject his nominations to FBI background checks, and his campaign says he won’t release the names of donors to his transition. Both are clear signs that he has no intention of making himself accountable or transparent to anyone. Nearly everything he’s done since the election points to a president who not only intends to buck every norm, convention, and check, he won’t even pretend to try. It’s just open defiance.

In the coming days, I’ll look at the free press and the First Amendment, immigration, and crime and criminal justice. But today, I’ll focus on Trump’s openly-stated plans to weaponize the government against his critics and enemies.

I fully expect to see Trump follow through on his promises to seek retribution against people like Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Alexander Vindman, Anthony Fauci, and countless others.

Whether he’ll do it by ordering the DOJ to make sensationalist arrests and criminal charges or use subtler though still pernicious tools like IRS audits, subpoenas, or parading people before Congress for public ridicule, is hard to say. But investigations alone can ruin lives and careers.

Let’s start with the DOJ. I’m not sure that the Gaetz debacle provides much instruction on whether Senate Republicans have the backbone to provide any real oversight. (It did show us, however, that House Republicans were willing to remove their spines, gift-wrap them, and hand-deliver them to Trump.) I suspect Gaetz’s tendency to anger and insult members of his own party hurt his nomination more than his extremism, sex pestery, and utter lack of qualifications.

Trump’s new AG nominee, Pam Bondi, is less abrasive than Gaetz, but every bit the devout MAGA loyalist. As Florida Attorney General, Bondi was at one point set to join other states in suing Trump University (Florida has more “alumni” than any other state). Shen then mysteriously pulled out of the class action after Trump made a $25,000 donation to her PAC — a donation that came from Trump’s “charity,” by the way — and then held a fundraiser for her at Mar-a-Lago. (Bondi has a long history of that sort of pay-to-play.)

Bondi quickly became a full-throated supporter. She’s not only a 2020 election denier, she was part of Trump’s legal team in his bid to overturn the election. She actually stood next to Rudy Giuliani at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Pam Bondi, with Corey Lewandowski, at a press event after the 2020 election, demanding that Pennsylvania to stop counting votes

Bondi has also already made clear that she fully supports Trump’s plan to weaponize the agency he has nominated her to lead.

Still, the nomination provided another opportunity for Trump’s toadies to unleash some North Korean-style praise on their leader.

We’ll see an important test of Trump’s power shortly after he takes office. He plans to fire FBI director Christopher Wray and replace him with Kash Patel, a vengeful loyalist wholly unqualified for that position.

The norm is for the FBI director to serve outside the political influence of individual presidents. It’s why the position comes with a 10-year term, and why FBI directors have traditionally only been fired for cause. Remember that when Trump fired James Comey, Jeff Sessions considered it a serious enough abuse of power to appoint a special counsel. We’ve become so accustomed to Trump’s power grabs that it’s now just widely expected that he’ll fire Wray for pretextual reasons and install an unqualified lickspittle like Patel — a guy who has vowed to imprison journalists and critics.

If the Senate allows that to happen, I fear dark days lie ahead. (Trump is also reportedly considering appointing Patel to a position that doesn’t require Senate approval, but which could still give him the power to act as Trump’s retributive hammer.)

Allowing Trump to remove Wray would also make clear that the Republican Party has fully capitulated. Trump will feel empowered to do whatever he wants, to whomever he wants. And given that the Supreme Court has shown no interest in getting in his way, he’ll probably be right.

Trump is also already planning to devote DOJ resources to “uncovering” evidence that he won the 2020 election, and to prosecuting state officials who resisted his attempts to coerce them. Expect to see a full-throttle effort to rewrite history about that election, only this time Trump will have more power to force federal agencies to provide faux credibility to his bullshit fraud conspiracies. Watch to see which agencies fall in line.

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In a Washington Post report last year about the cadre of loyal soldiers working to help Trump get his revenge, former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly told the paper that during his first term, Trump frequently told Kelly to ask the FBI to open investigations into critics and opponents. Alarmed, Kelly did not relay the requests. “The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me in those jobs,” he said. “The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.”

The Post and other outlets have since reported that one of the key architects of Trump’s plan to purge federal agencies of institutionalists is Russ Vought, Trump’s former head of the Office of Management and Budget — one of the most powerful under-the-radar positions in government. Vought was also a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a Trump II administration so deeply unpopular that Trump repeatedly claimed during the campaign that he had nothing to do with it. That of course was a lie: last week, Trump nominated Vought back to his old position.

When asked last year by the Post about how Trump would weaponize DOJ Vought said, “You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change. You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”

Here’s one other gobsmacking, wholly unprecedented DOJ scenario to look out for: In addition to Bondi, Trump has appointed three more of his personal lawyers to some of the most senior positions at DOJ. These are attorneys who defended him in both his criminal and civil cases. Incredibly, this means that the same attorneys who represented Trump in the classified documents case will soon be in positions to decide how — or even if — the U.S. government contests Trump’s insane $100 million lawsuit over the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago for the classified documents he took and refused to return.

As I’ve previously written, that search was perfectly legal, and the agents who conducted it treated Trump with far more consideration than anyone else accused of stealing classified information would get. There’s no conceivable justification for DOJ to pay Trump a settlement, especially given that Trump himself wants to make law enforcement “immune” from civil liability. But it also isn’t clear who could stop them.

Beyond the DOJ, Trump is expected to push out the 70 currently-serving Inspectors General across the federal government and replace them with loyalists. The IG is, of course, supposed to be a watchdog on government waste, corruption, and abuse, not a partisan position. Trump grew so frustrated with these offices holding his administration accountable that he abruptly fired five of them in the last year of his term. The writing on the wall is clear enough now that some IGs have already preemptively quit.

Trump’s promise to send the military against “the enemy within” caused a lot of alarm. That in turn drew criticism from Trump supporters, who claimed he was only referring to violent protesters, not his critics or political opponents. I think the most likely explanation is that, as he often does, Trump deliberately used muddled, ambiguous language to both signal the retribution his supporters crave while maintaining enough plausible deniability to decry the media for misquoting him.

But actions speak louder than words, and the fact that Trump appointed Hegseth — who wrote a book called American Crusade — ought to be instructive about how Trump sees and plans to use the military.

From the Guardian U.S.:

Hegseth’s 2020 book exhorts conservatives to undertake “an AMERICAN CRUSADE”, to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents”, to “attack first” in response to a left he identifies with “sedition”, and he writes that the book “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies . . .

Elsewhere in American Crusade, he writes: “The hour is late for America. Beyond political success, her fate relies on exorcising the leftist specter dominating education, religion, and culture – a 360-degree holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom.” . . .

Hegseth expresses an unstinting loyalty to Trump the man.

At one point in the book, he describes a conversation between the two . . . the call “ended with a compliment to me that I’ll never forget and might put on my tombstone: ‘You’re a fucking warrior, Pete. A fucking warrior.’ I thanked him for his courage, and he hung up.”

This is the man Trump has appointed to oversee the most powerful military in the world.

Finally, one particularly pernicious pattern we’ve seen from Trump officials and MAGA pundits is the targeting of not just politicians and public officials, but everyday people they see as representative of their enemies — at which point the MAGA faithful swarm with threats and harassment. We saw Trump-loyal publications repeatedly try to dox whistleblowers who exposed corruption and abuse. We saw them upend the lives of people like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, along with countless other 2020 election workers who signed up for the sort of nonpartisan positions necessary in a functional democracy.

They did it to doctors and nurses during COVID, healthcare workers who treat trans people, and of course to the Haitian immigrants in Springfield — along with any local residents who dared to defend them. The Libs of TikTok account on X run by Chaya Raichik basically exists solely for this purpose — to sic an army of online followers to heap hate and invective on people she has deemed to be on the wrong side of the culture war.

Trump’s “co-president” Elon Musk has been particularly eager to weaponize the social media platform he bought for this sort of targeting. Shortly after purchasing Twitter, he selectively released emails, internal documents, and other private correspondence to a few hand-picked “journalists” to create a dubious narrative about public-private censorship. While there were certainly some examples of improper government pressure on Twitter, most of the claims were wildly overblown. More worrying, the whole project — along with the complicity of Republicans in Congress — led to harassment and death threats against former Twitter employees, whistleblowers, misinformation researchers, and others caught in the crossfire.

We’ll see more of this. It’s bad enough that Musk currently has access to hundreds of millions of direct messages sent over X/Twitter that were supposed to be private. With his new quasi-official position in the Trump administration, he’ll have terabytes of government information the rest of us don’t. He’ll be able to weaponize that information not just to advance false narratives, but to selectively dox and target people for abuse.

If that sounds paranoid or exaggerated, I have some bad news for you: He’s already doing it.

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