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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.

Donald Trump has added something new to the practice of extracting money from major donors: fear.

Traditionally, high-dollar contributors write big checks for a mix of reasons: to curry favor, to support their political party, to promote an agenda, to win favorable tax and regulatory policies, to defeat the opposition, to be seen as powerful — a blend of self-interest and principle.

This year, Trump’s own history in the White House, combined with the agenda for 2025 that he and his allies have been putting together, amounts to a warning to wavering supporters.

According to The Washington Post, Trump has candidly warned onlookers that he will turn the federal bureaucracy into an instrument to punish those who fail to toe the MAGA line:

He wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the F.B.I. and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.

In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.

The events described in the Post story

reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 88 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.

Trump has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to “forgotten” Americans.

Faced with the prospect of a chief executive prepared to abandon the rule of law for the rule of revenge, many affluent donors — for whom the machinations of government determine bankruptcy or wealth — seem to think they have little choice but to pony up to the self-proclaimed “dictator for a day.”

Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House — armed with the bristling Heritage Foundation playbook, which conservatives are using as a tool to pressure Trump to remain true to the hard-right agenda, as well as long, revealing lists compiled by Axios and The Times of prospective MAGA appointees — is the embodiment of the politics of intimidation.

How so?

At the core of what both Trump and Heritage’s Project 2025 have proposed is an escalation of the power concentrated in the presidency and in the executive branch generally. This includes the politicization of the bureaucracy whose mission would become, in part, to wreak revenge on Trump’s adversaries and the adoption, throughout federal departments and agencies, of policies rewarding ideological supporters and defunding ideological opponents.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton of sociology and international affairs, summed up the Trump-driven changes in the politics of raising money in an email: “Most business leaders unfamiliar with autocratic government,” she wrote, “believe that when they support someone running for office, that person will owe them something if elected, tax cuts, deregulation, whatever the business leaders want.”

But, Scheppele continued, “autocrats turn the tables. Once elected, autocrats use the power of the state to squeeze business.”

In these circumstances, she added, political leaders “can threaten businesses with tax audits, more regulation, even criminal charges, unless they give in to the autocrats’ demands.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Scheppele wrote in her email,

is a blueprint for autocracy. In fact, it’s a direct copy of the plan that Viktor Orban used to take over the Hungarian government in 2010. If it is carried out, Project 2025 will concentrate huge power in the hands of the president, giving him the power to control the whole federal government at his whim. If business leaders think that this will benefit them and that giving up the rule of law is good for business, they will quickly learn that they are wrong. But it will be too late.

The Trump campaign has made it clear that Trump is not committed to adopting all the policy and personnel proposals described in Project 2025 or other documents produced........

© The New York Times