The Musk blowup reveals how Trump is remaking the presidency

Through a panoramic series of actions, President Donald Trump is transforming the federal government into a vast machine for rewarding his allies and punishing those he considers his adversaries. Trump is using executive orders, federal investigations and regulatory decisions to deploy federal power against a stunning array of targets, ranging from powerful institutions such as Harvard and Columbia universities and major law firms to individual critics from his first term and former President Joe Biden’s top White House aides. Simultaneously, Trump is rewarding allies with presidential pardons, commutations, government contracts and the termination of federal regulatory or criminal investigations. The explosive breakup with Elon Musk has provided the most vivid demonstration yet of Trump’s transactional view of the presidency. When Musk was Trump’s most prominent political ally and benefactor, the White House brushed off complaints about the potential for conflicts of interest as the tech billionaire’s companies competed for billions in government contacts. Then, when the two men fell out last week, Trump immediately threatened to terminate the contracts for Musk’s companies. Trump struck a similar note on Saturday, telling NBC’s Kristen Welker that if Musk began to fund Democratic campaigns in protest of the president’s sweeping policy bill, “He’ll have to pay very serious consequences.” The extraordinary episode underscored how quickly anyone can move from Trump ally to adversary by opposing or questioning him in any way — and how dire the consequences can be for crossing that line. In his almost instinctive reaction to threaten Musk’s contracts — even if it would be difficult to do in practice — Trump signaled unambiguously that staying in his favor would be the difference between favorable decisions by his administration and costly confrontations with it. The president sees little boundary between public policy by the federal government and personal fealty to him. “Never before in this country has a president made so clear that mere disagreement with him or failure to show sufficient personal loyalty might cause that person to lose government contracts or even face investigation,” said Ian Bassin, co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that analyzes threats to US democracy. “That’s how things work in Russia, and apparently, under Donald Trump, now here.” Until Trump, historians considered Richard Nixon the president who pushed hardest to bend federal legal authority into a lever to advance his personal and political interests — a process that culminated in the Watergate scandal and the disclosure of the infamous White House “enemies list.” But while Nixon fulminated against his opponents in private, he never subjected them to anything approaching the bombardment of hostile federal actions that Trump has directed at his targets. “You see very similar personality traits in the men, about how they feel about people and what they want to do about them,” said John Dean, who served as Nixon’s White House counsel during Watergate and later revealed the existence of the enemies list. But, Dean added, whereas Nixon would often lose sight of his threats or back off when faced with resistance inside or outside his administration, Trump and his aides are moving to draft virtually every component of the federal government into this mission. “Everything with Nixon is more or less a one-off,” Dean said, “whereas with Trump it is a way of life.” The effect is that, with much less pushback than Nixon faced, Trump is now moving far faster and further toward reconfiguring the federal government’s sweeping authority into an extension of his personal will. “We are so far beyond Nixon’s inclinations and disposition to employ the government to attack perceived enemies and perceived political adversaries,” Dean said, “that it is the difference between spitballs and howitzers.” Actions without precedent Almost daily, Trump is acting in new ways to deploy federal power in precision-focused attacks on individuals and institutions who have crossed or resisted him. He has revoked federal security clearances from an array of former officials (including Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Republican former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) and terminated federal security protection for others. He’s withdrawn security clearances from and directed his administration to investigate two critics from his first term, Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs. Last week, Trump ordered a federal investigation into the right-wing conspiracy theory that aides to then-President Biden misused his autopen to implement decisions without his knowledge. Trump has ordered the Justice Department to investigate Democrats’ principal grassroots fundraising tool, ActBlue. Large institutions Trump considers hostile have faced comparable threats. He’s signed executive orders imposing crippling penalties on several large law firms that have either represented causes or employed attorneys Trump dislikes. Trump has canceled billions of dollars in scientific research grants to prominent universities and escalated that offensive with a dizzying array of other measures against Harvard, including attempting to revoke its ability to enroll foreign students and publicly declaring that the Internal Revenue Service intends to revoke its tax-exempt status: The New York Times recently calculated that Harvard is now facing at least eight separate investigations from six federal agencies. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating “60 Minutes” over its editing of an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, probing charges that television networks have engaged in “news distortion,” and scrutinizing the proposed merger with Skydance Media that is being ardently pursued by CBS’ parent, Paramount, and its controlling stockholder Shari Redstone. Trump’s administration has arrested a judge in Wisconsin and US representative in New Jersey who have resisted his immigration agenda. While pursuing these penalties for critics, Trump has conspicuously rewarded allies. His Justice Department dropped federal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, who has pledged to support Trump’s immigration crackdown, and regulators have terminated high-profile enforcement actions against the crypto industry even as his family’s financial ties to the industry have mushroomed. Trump has also issued a flurry of early second-term pardons targeted at his supporters, beginning with the mass pardon of January 6, 2021, rioters and extending to a growing list of Republican and conservative public officials. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, author of “The Pardon,” a recent history of how presidents have used that power, said Trump’s actions have no precedent. “It’s not even close,” Toobin said. “I can’t even think of even a parallel.” Taken together, these actions signal something like a mafia-style protection racket, Bassin argued. For those who meet the administration’s demands, Bassin said, Trump is offering protection from federal interference, and for those who resist his demands, he’s brandishing the opposite. The speed at which Trump flipped from praising to threatening Musk and his companies, Bassin added, “is a perfect example” of how no one is safe from falling from one side of that line to the other — which allows Trump always to preserve the option of raising the price of protection with new demands. It’s a method of operation, Bassin argued, that would be equally recognizable to Russian President Vladimir Putin or mobster John Gotti. Nixon’s rages rarely led to follow-through Nixon unquestionably wanted to sharpen federal law and regulatory enforcement into the cudgel Trump is forging. Behind closed doors in the Oval Office, Nixon often bombarded his aides with demands to punish those he viewed as his political enemies. “We have all this power, and we aren’t using it,” Nixon exploded to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, in one August 1972 meeting captured by the White House taping system. At times, Nixon succeeded in channeling that power against his targets. He successfully pressed the Justice Department to intensify an investigation into kickbacks and illegal campaign contributions swirling around Alabama Gov. George Wallace. The administration tried for years to deport John Lennon (over a British conviction for possession of a half-ounce of marijuana) after Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond sent a letter to the Justice Department warning that the former Beatle might headline a series of concerts intended to mobilize young voters against Nixon’s reelection. A team of White House operatives — known informally as “the plumbers” because they were supposed to stop leaks to the press — undertook a succession of shady missions, culminating in the break-in to the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation. Chuck Colson, one of Nixon’s most hardcore aides, tried to pressure both CBS and The Washington Post over their coverage of the administration by threatening FCC action to revoke the licenses of local television stations they owned. Colson and Nixon openly strategized about holding open the threat of a federal antitrust investigation to pressure the three television networks. According to research by Mark Feldstein, a professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland, the plumbers even fleetingly discussed ways to assassinate investigative journalist Jack Anderson before they were diverted to a more urgent project — the Watergate break-in. In his obsessive hunt for leaks, Nixon illegally wiretapped the phones of both journalists and his own National Security Council aides. All these resentments converged in the development of what became known as the enemies list. The White House actually compiled multiple overlapping lists, all fueled by Nixon’s fury at his opponents, real and imagined. “It clearly originated with Nixon’s disposition, anger, reaction to things he would see in his news summary in the morning,” said Dean. In an August 16, 1971, memo — titled “Dealing with our Political Enemies” — Dean succinctly explained that the list’s intent was to find all the ways “we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Dean told me he wrote the memo in such stark terms because he thought it would discourage the White House. “I actually wrote that memo that way thinking I would make this so offensive … that they would just say, ‘This is silly, we don’t do this kind of stuff,’” he said. “I never got a response to that directly, but when I went to the (National) Archives decades later, (I saw) Haldeman had written ‘great’ on the memo with an exclamation point.” In fact, though, enthusiasm in the White House did not translate into action at the agencies. On the advice of Treasury Secretary George Shultz, the IRS commissioner put the list in his safe and ignored the White House request that he audit the people on it. Subsequent investigations found no evidence that those on the enemies list faced excessive scrutiny from the IRS or other government harassment. Once Dean revealed the list’s existence during the 1973 hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee, inclusion on it became “something for people to celebrate,” he recalled. “I have actually spoken to (reunions of) a couple groups of members, people who have been on the list, because they had no consequences other than a badge of honor.” That was a common outcome for Nixon’s rages. The Justice Department eventually dropped the case against Wallace. The courts blocked Lennon’s removal. The Washington Post did not lose licenses for any of stations, said Feldstein, author of “Poisoning the Press,” a book about Nixon’s relationship with the media. “Trump is doing what Nixon would have liked to have done,” Feldstein said. “Even Nixon didn’t take it as far.” Trump faces far less pushback The differences between Nixon and Trump in their approach to federal enforcement and investigative power extends to their core motivations. Nixon, as Dean and other close observers of his presidency agree, wanted to retaliate against individuals or institutions he thought opposed or looked down on him. Trump certainly shares that inclination. But Trump’s agenda, many scholars of democratic erosion believe, pushes beyond personal animus to mimic the efforts in authoritarian-leaning countries such as Turkey and Hungary to weaken any independent institutions that might contest his centralization of power. “Although some of it was (motivated by) revenge, the huge difference here is most of what Nixon did was to protect himself, politically and personally,” said Fred Wertheimer, who served as legislative director of the government reform group Common Cause during the Watergate scandal. “Trump is out to break our democracy and take total control of the country in a way that no one ever has before.” One telling measure of that difference: Trump is openly making threats, or taking actions, that Nixon only discussed in private, and even there with constant concern about public disclosure. Trump’s willingness to publicly deliver these threats changes their nature in several important ways, said David Dorsen, an assistant chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee and former federal prosecutor. Simply exposing an individual or institution to such an open threat from the world’s most powerful person, Dorsen noted, can enormously disrupt their life, even if the courts ultimately prevent Trump from acting on it — a point recently underscored by Miles Taylor in an essay for Politico. And because Nixon’s threats were always delivered in private, Dorsen added, aides dubious of them could ignore them more easily than Trump officials faced with his public demands for action. Maybe most important, Dorsen said, is that by making his threats so publicly, Trump is sending a shot across the bow of every other institution that might cross him. “Trump is legitimizing conduct that Nixon did not purport to legitimize,” Dorsen said. “He concealed it, he was probably embarrassed by it; he realized it was wrong.” As the IRS pushback against the enemies list demonstrated, Nixon’s plans faced constant resistance within his own government, not only from career bureaucrats but often also from his own appointees. “He failed in getting key officials in the government to do what he wanted,” said Wertheimer, who now directs the reform group Democracy 21. If that kind of internal stonewalling is slowing Trump’s sweeping offensives against his targets, there’s little evidence of it yet. Congress was another constraint on Nixon. Not only did the administration need to fear oversight hearings from the Democrats who controlled both the House and Senate, but at that point a substantial portion of congressional Republicans were unwilling to blink at abusive actions. Ultimately it was a delegation of Republican senators, led by conservative icon and former GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who convinced Nixon to resign during Watergate. By contrast, Trump today is operating with “a completely compliant Republican Congress” and has filled the federal government, including its key law enforcement positions, with loyalist appointees who “operate as if they are there to carry out his wishes, period,” said Wertheimer. As Feldstein pointed out, Trump also can worry less about critical press coverage than Nixon, who governed at a time when “there were just three networks and everybody watched those.” That leaves the courts as the principal short-term obstacle to Trump’s plans. In Nixon’s time, the federal courts consistently acted across party lines to uphold limits on the arbitrary exercise of federal power. Three of Nixon’s own appointees joined the unanimous 1974 Supreme Court decision that sealed his fate by requiring him to provide Congress his White House tapes. John Sirica, the steely federal district judge who helped crack the scandal, was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Today, federal district and appellate courts are mostly demonstrating similar independence. The New York Times’ running tally counts nearly 190 rulings from judges in both parties blocking Trump actions since he returned to office. “I think we’ve seen the largest overreach in modern presidential history … and as a result, you’ve triggered a massive judicial pushback,” said Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, a group fighting many of Trump’s initiatives in courts. “I won’t say democracy has won so far, because of the damage that Trump and his ilk have done, but I will say Trump lost.” But even if courts block individual Trump tactics, the effort required to rebuff his actions still can impose a heavy cost on his targets. And, on the most important cases, these lower court legal rulings are still subject to reconsideration by the Supreme Court — whose six- member Republican-appointed majority has historically supported an expansive view of presidential power and last year voted to immunize Trump against criminal prosecution for virtually any actions he takes in office. So far, the Supreme Court has sent mixed signals by ruling to restrain Trump on some fronts while empowering him on others. “We haven’t found out yet what the Supreme Court is going to do when … they get the really big cases,” said Wertheimer. Those decisions in the next few years will likely determine whether Trump can fulfill the darkest impulses of Richard Nixon, the only president ever forced to resign for his actions in office.