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Guest Essay

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

President Trump is sowing chaos at a blistering pace.

He “is dismantling watchdog offices and other parts of the public integrity apparatus for two reasons, one backward-looking and one forward-looking,” Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote by email:

The backward-looking reason is revenge. Some of these people and offices have stood in his way before or tried to hold him accountable for his actions. So he wants to destroy them.

The forward-looking reason is his desire to use his power corruptly. In his first term, President Trump profiteered from his office in ways that no other post-Watergate president would have dared to do, including by encouraging diplomatic travelers from foreign countries to patronize his hotels. He got away with it. So he expects, reasonably, that he can do it again.

The president and his allies are using their drive to slash the size of the federal work force to break the bonds of restraint. To do so, they are deploying a strategy of intimidation, punishment and coercion. They have silenced watchdog agencies, discharged prosecutors, forced resignations and dismissed government officials whose job it was to maintain ethical standards.

Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown, succinctly summed up Trump’s goal in a comment she posted on X. Citing the firing on Feb. 21 of top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force, Brooks wrote, “It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.”

Axing the judge advocates general was part of the Trump administration’s seizure of control of the top military command, including the removal and replacement of Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first African American to lead a branch of the United States Armed Forces; of Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations; and of Gen. James Slife, the Air Force vice chief of staff.

Retired Rear Adm. Mike Smith, founder and president of the National Security Leaders for America, issued a statement warning that “this purge of senior leadership will force current and future military leaders to consider whether following a lawful order today will get them fired by a future president, creating immense tension in the chain of command.”

Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters was, in turn, more than a gesture of loyalty to his supporters. It signaled that those who back him in the future — even to the extent of violently attacking police officers — will be exempt from punishment.

“There’s no doubt that Trump and Musk are aggressively moving to eliminate essentially all checks on their decisions,” Michael Miller, a political scientist at George Washington University, wrote by email, “from Congress to internal inspectors to the courts. In part, that fits a familiar desire for more power and control over policy. But it also opens the door for unprecedented levels of corruption.”

While “there is the potential for self-enrichment,” Miller acknowledged, “more likely, we’ll see nominally legal forms of self-enrichment like Trump’s ‘memecoin’ and more sophisticated forms like Musk’s targeting of agencies that have oversight powers over his businesses.”

The biggest danger, Miller wrote, is the use of

corruption as power. The essence of corruption is deciding policy based on personal benefit rather than public interest.

Once it’s understood that the vast resources and power of our government will benefit or punish based on how you benefit Trump or Musk or their allies, we have a fully corrupted system of immense power, extending past the government to business, media, universities, and anyone with something to lose. The genius of the design is it’s generally legal and can quickly form a durable equilibrium.

The administration’s attempt to silence potential critics reaches well beyond the White House. Trump and his regulatory appointees are gearing up for a full-scale assault on the mainstream media, musing about threatening the licenses of major networks and filing multimillion-dollar defamation suits.

At the same time, Trump has appointed an acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who has sent letters to congressional Democrats suggesting that their criticism of Trump appointees and Republican Supreme Court justices may violate laws barring threats against........

© The New York Times