Trump executive order lays out what could be road map for retaliation

Since his election victory, President Trump has said he would not seek revenge against his perceived enemies. “I’m not looking to go back to the past,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Retribution will come through success.”

But in an executive order he signed Monday evening, Mr. Trump made clear that he had every intention of seeking out and potentially punishing government officials at the Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies in order to “correct the past bad conduct” against him. supporters.

This would be justice, according to the order, against Biden administration officials who have engaged in an “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to subvert the democratic process.”

This is what retaliation could look like under a second Trump presidency: revenge dressed in the language of victimhood.

The executive order, titled “End the Militarization of the Federal Government,” came Monday evening amid a storm of other actions.

These included a separate, highly unusual order that stripped the security clearances of dozens of former intelligence officials whom Mr. Trump considered his political enemies. Another order gave the White House the authority to immediately grant a top-secret security clearance to any official for up to six months, bypassing the traditional background process run by the FBI and the intelligence community.