Don of a new era: Trump retribution strikes fear in US

TOI correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump has rescinded security clearances and access to classified information for former President Joe Biden, former vice-president Kamala Harris, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and a host of other political opponents, including Republican "never-Trumpers," in what is seen as an expanding campaign of retribution against his critics.

In a memo issued on Friday night, Trump directed all executive department and agency heads "to revoke unescorted access to secure United States government facilities from these individuals" and stopped them from receiving classified briefings, such as the President’s Daily Brief and access to classified information held by any member of the intelligence community.

While Trump's retribution against Biden was payback for what his predecessor had done the same to him after he left office in 2021, the President broadened his memo to include "any other member of Biden family" and also a raft of less prominent political and legal luminaries who had prosecuted him.

The list included former Congresswoman Liz Cheney and Congressman Adam Kinzinger, both Republicans on the January 6 panel, and New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also made the cut, as did policy analysts lower down the pecking order, including Russia and Ukraine specialists Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman.

Retribution has been a recurring theme in Trump II Presidency after he felt targeted and slighted from the time he came to office in 2017, through his time in the White House, his subsequent defeat in 2020 and his return in 2024, when a range of so-called establishment figures saw him as a dubious player out of sync with traditional Washington values. His followers were derided as "deplorables" and he himself was viewed as a "Russian stooge" "Putin's puppet" etc., epithets that angered him so much that he told his supporters during the 2024 campaign, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

He tempered the vengefulness briefly after winning the election saying the best retribution would be to make America great again. But evidently his self-confessed drive for revenge has gotten the better of him. As far back as 1992, he told the interviewer Charlie Rose, "I love getting even with people," and the feeling doesn't appear to have diminished.

Plenty of people are feeling that in recent days as the 47th President has been on a roll against everyone who tormented him during the term of the 46th. The US capital was also stunned on Friday evening when a storied pro-Democrat Washington DC law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which had $ 2.63 BILLION in revenues last year, and which had fought Trump in landmark cases, went bowing and scraping to the White House to sign a truce. The surrender terms included a pledge to spend $40 million in pro bono legal services on issues Trump has championed.

Elsewhere, in New York City, Columbia University too capitulated to the President's diktats after he pulled $400 million in federal grants and contracts over allegations that it allowed pro-Hamas protests and antisemitism on the campus. Its terms of surrender included banning face masks, agreeing to hire three dozen campus police officers who will have the power to arrest students, and appointing a new senior vice provost to oversee the departments of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies, from where MAGA activists believe most of the antisemitic subversives came from.

Several others universities and institutions have been warned to can their DEI policies, keep transgender athletes out of women's sports, and address anti-semitism or risk losing funding. Most of them are keeling over. The surrender scroll, which began when billionaire tech-bros including CEOs of Amazon and Google lined up for the Trump inauguration, is getting longer each day.

Even prominent media figures who have been arch anti-Trumpers are starting to paw the ground. On Friday, Bill Maher, a liberal comedian whose feud with Trump goes back more than a decade, revealed that he is going to meet the President in a truce brokered by the entertainer Kid Rock. Their antagonism goes back to an incident where Maher offered $5 million to charity if Trump could prove he wasn’t the offspring of an orangutan— a jab in response to Trump’s birtherism claims against Barack Obama. Trump took the insult seriously, produced his birth certificate, and sued Maher.

Although he dropped the case later, many Trump enemies are now eager to get the monkey off their backs.