It’s not like he was hiding the plan. When Donald Trump campaigned for a return to the White House in 2024, he openly embraced a platform of revenge and retribution against his political enemies. Even when allies practically begged him to swear off the idea of using the Presidency as a tool of personal vengeance, Trump was explicit about his intentions. I have often thought back to an interview he did in June of last year, in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom, with the TV shrink Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, a Trump fan and supporter. “You have so much to do,” McGraw said to him. “You don’t have time to get even. You only have time to get right.” Trump’s response was to smirk. “Well, revenge does take time. I will say that,” he said. “And sometimes revenge can be justified. Phil, I have to be honest. You know, sometimes it can.”
On Friday morning, the revenge vibes were strong when the news broke of an F.B.I. search at the Maryland home and D.C. office of John Bolton, Trump’s third first-term national-security adviser, who has since become one of his most frequent and acerbic public critics. Details about the raid were sparse, but initial reports suggested that officials were looking for evidence that Bolton had disclosed classified information to reporters and in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.” (Trump’s first-term Justice Department tried unsuccessfully to stop publication of the book—a best-selling account of the discord and dysfunction that marked Trump’s foreign policy during his initial White House stint.) Bolton could hardly have been surprised that the attack on him was renewed. In a new edition of the book that came out in January of 2024, he had warned, “Trump really only cares about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term.”
So let’s stipulate that whatever comes of the F.B.I. raid on Bolton, legally speaking, there is a certain awful predictability to it. In his first months back in office, Trump has made clear that his vengeful threats were not simply campaign-season bluster. He has stripped security clearances (including Bolton’s) and fired career civil servants for having ties to his opponents; he has demanded Justice Department investigations of them. Earlier in August, Trump’s D.O.J. launched probes of two of his most outspoken legal adversaries—the California Democrat Adam Schiff, who led the House’s first impeachment inquiry of Trump, in 2019, and the New York attorney general Letitia James, whose office successfully prosecuted Trump in a civil-fraud case. We don’t know yet where this will all end up—it’s far from certain that these investigations will lead to prosecutions, let alone a prison wing full of Trumpian “enemies of the people.” But we can already say for sure that he wasn’t just bluffing with his campaign-season threats; how is it possible that, so many years into this Trump era, there is not a more precise vocabulary for describing how it is that we are constantly being surprised when Trump and his advisers do exactly what we have expected them to do?
A worrisome indicator for how this will all turn out is how unabashedly Team Trump now pursues its vengeance agenda—they are no longer really even trying to hide it. Back in January, when Kash Patel still needed the votes of a few not-fully-Trumpified Republican senators to win confirmation as F.B.I. director, he insisted that he had no intention of allowing America’s chief law-enforcement agency to be drawn into the messy work of carrying out Trump’s vendettas. “There will be no retributive actions taken by any F.B.I. should I be confirmed as F.B.I. director,” Patel said—under oath, I would point out—at his confirmation hearing. When asked about an appendix to his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters”—which named sixty people who were part of a supposed “Executive Branch deep state” arrayed against Trump, with Bolton, and many others who’ve already drawn Trump’s second-term fire, included—Patel said, “It’s not an enemies list. It’s a total mischaracterization.” Yet there he was on Friday morning, tweeting even before the news of the Bolton raid was public: “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.” Will we hear from any Republicans other than the two who voted against him that Patel has made a mockery of his sworn Senate testimony? Don’t count on it.
Asked about the raid, Trump himself denied any specific foreknowledge. Sort of. “He’s not a smart guy, but he could be a very unpatriotic guy, we’re going to find out,” he told reporters on Friday morning. “I know nothing about it; I just saw it this morning. They did a raid.”
Just a week earlier, on August 13th, Trump had been quite explicit about his anger toward Bolton, complaining on Truth Social that his onetime national-security adviser remains one of the media’s favorite “fired losers and really dumb people” to quote with attacks on him. It is certainly true that Bolton has continued to speak out against Trump at a time when many other former Trump Administration officials have fallen silent, despite having previously called him everything from a “threat to democracy” to a textbook “fascist” who “prefers the dictator approach to government.”
The timing is notable: Trump’s Truth Social post about Bolton had nothing to do with classified information and everything to do with the fact that Bolton was one of the loudest reality checks on television about the President’s embarrassing summit a day earlier with Vladimir Putin, in Alaska. “Trump did not lose, but Putin clearly won,” Bolton said on CNN right after the two leaders abruptly ended their meeting with no deal to announce. This was precisely the statement that triggered Trump’s post: “What’s that all about?” the President complained. “We are winning on EVERYTHING.” Bolton has continued to offer sharp-edged assessments of Trump’s so-far-unsuccessful efforts to bring about an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine; he appeared on CNN Thursday night—hours before the F.B.I. raid, in fact—giving an interview in which he attributed the “confusion” about Trump’s negotiations with Putin to the Administration’s failure to say clearly what has been discussed, and called out “the White House’s concern that Trump didn’t stand up to Putin in Alaska.”
I don’t know whether getting Bolton to shut up in public is a goal of this F.B.I. raid or merely a possible ancillary benefit for Trump. Either way, it represents a direct attack on one of the President’s most informed and unrelenting critics, a lifelong conservative whose direct-from-the-Situation-Room account of Trump’s ignorance, perfidy, and willingness to betray the national interest in service of his own self-interest provides an important counterpoint to the daily stream of pro-Trump propaganda now embraced by most of the American right.
As I was digesting the news of Friday morning’s raid, a historian friend sent along a quote from Huey Long, the populist Louisiana politician who showed the political potential of an American-style demagogue, winning his state’s governorship and a seat in the Senate at a time when right-wing fascism was ascending in Europe, in the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties. Long had observed that the imposition of American-style fascism would not require a military takeover but “would only have to get the right President and Cabinet” to emerge as “a hundred-per-cent American movement.” What’s more, he had added, “it would be quite unnecessary to suppress the press. A couple of powerful newspaper chains and two or three papers with practical monopolies of certain fields would go out to smear, calumniate, and blackmail opponents into silence, and ruthlessly to eliminate competitors.”
Long’s uncomfortably relevant assessment is a reminder that Trump’s actions do not exist outside history. The tools that worked so effectively to silence critics in the brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century—or in Putin’s Russia, for that matter—work just as well when they are deployed by America’s vengeful President. ♦
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