Washington (AP) – President Donald Trump – who was once owned by a casino and is always looking for his next business treatment – likes to resort to poker analogies to evaluate partners and adversaries.
“We have much better letters than them,” said China last month. When referring to Canada, he declared last June: “We have all the letters. We have each and every one of them.” And the most memorable, when he told Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenskyy during his confrontation in the oval office earlier this year: “You don’t have the letters.”
The phrase offers a window to Trump’s world, who has dedicated his second stage in the White House to accumulate letters to deploy in search of his own interests.
Seven months after starting his second term, he has accumulated a presidential power that he has used against universities, media, law firms and individuals who dislike him. A man who ran to the presidency as the victim of a “deep state” turned into a weapon, now enhances, in a way, the power of the government and directs it against his adversaries.
And the supporters who responded to their complaints about the insistent Democrats do not give way: they incite him to follow.
“Using the State as a weapon to win the cultural war has been essential for its agenda,” said David N. Smith, a sociologist at Kansas University who has thoroughly investigated the motivations of Trump’s voters. “They did not like when the State mobilized to stop Trump, but they are glad to see that the State acts to combat the cultural war in their name.”
How Trump has used the government as a weapon
Trump put the federal government to work for him a few hours after assuming office in January, and since then he has accumulated and used the power of novel ways. It is an impulse at full speed to execute its political agenda and adjust accounts.
In the last month, he deployed hundreds of federal agents and soldiers of the National Guard in Washington after Trump invoked a law never used before that allows him to take control of the forces of the order in the capital of the country. He has threatened with similar deployments in other cities governed by Democrats, including Baltimore, Chicago, New York and New Orleans. He also fired a governor of the Federal Reserve, arguing – without presenting evidence – a mortgage fraud.
Trump, his collaborators and allies throughout the branch of the Executive Power have pointed to the Government, or threatened to do so, against a huge range of objectives:
—Menazed to block the plan to build a stadium for the American Washington Commanders football team unless it adopt the name it used until 2020, which is perceived as a racial insult.
He realized the security authorizations for lawyers of law firm who do not like and tried to block their access to government facilities.
—The thousands of millions of dollars in federal funds for research at elite universities and tried to prevent foreign students could register for them. Under pressure, Columbia University accepted a 220 million dollars agreement, the University of Pennsylvania invalidated the records established by the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, and the rectors of the University of Virginia and the Northwestern University resigned.
—He has fired or reassigned to federal employees indicated for their work, including prosecutors who worked in cases involved.
—Iretized the charges of corruption against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, to obtain cooperation in his offensive against immigrants living in the country without authorization.
He called multimillionaire agreements against media in demands that were considered widely as weak cases.
—The Secretary of Justice Pam Bondi promotes a review with a investigating jury around the origins of Trump-Russia investigation, and appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, and Federal Senator Adam Schiff.
That is not to use the government as a weapon: it is to exercise power, said Harrison Fields, spokesman for the White House.
“What the nation presence today is the execution of the most transcendental government in the history of the United States,” said Fields, “one that adopts common sense, puts the United States first and fulfills the mandate of the US people.”
Trump makes a sixth sense for power
There is a dispute in power. It is granted and withdrawn. And through executive orders, personnel changes, the influence of their privileged position and an absolute impudence, Trump has assumed powers that none of its modern predecessors came or closely to reach.
He has also received the power of many around him. A fiercely loyal base that accompanies him in good and bad. A Congress and a Supreme Court that until now has given their authority to the Executive Power. Universities, law firm, media and other institutions that have negotiated or reached agreements with it.
The US government is powerful, but it is not inherently omnipotent. As Trump learned – for his frustration – in his first term, the president is limited by the Constitution, laws, judicial failures, bureaucracy, traditions and norms. However, in his second Trump mandate he has managed to eliminate, crush, ignore or neutralize many of those control mechanisms.
Leaders can exercise their will through fear and intimidation by determining the issues discussed and shaping the preferences of the people, Steven Likes argued in “Power: A Radical View”, his influential book of 1974. Lukes, Professor Emeritus of the University of New York, explained that Trump exemplifies the three dimensions of power. Trump’s innovation, Lukes added, is the “epistemic liberation” – the willingness to invent facts without evidence.
“This idea that you can say things that are not true, and that you don’t care about your followers or many other people … that seems to me something new,” at least in liberal democracies, Lukes said. Trump uses memes and jokes – more than arguments and activism – to express his preferences, he added.
Trump campaigned against the use of government as a weapon
A central element of the Trump campaign in 2024 was his claim that he was a victim of a “ruthless persecution” perpetrated by “the department of injustice turned into a weapon by the government of (Joe) Biden.”
With four criminal cases against him in New York, Washington and Florida, Trump said in 2023 that his yearning was not to end the use of the government as a weapon, but to take advantage of it. “If you come for me, I will go after you!” Trump wrote on his social truth social platform on August 4, 2023.
“If I become president and I see someone who is doing well and be beating me, I say: ‘Go and acouze it criminally,” he said in an interview with Univisión on November 9, 2023. And a month later, when an interviewer of Fox News gave him the opportunity to guarantee the Americans that he would use the power with responsibility, he replied that he would not be a dictator “except the first day.”
He retracted to a large extent from those threats as the elections approached, even while he continued his campaign against the use of government as a weapon. When he won, he declared the end of that.
“The immense power of the State will never be used as a weapon to persecute political opponents – something of what I know -” Trump said in his second inaugural speech.
A month later: “I put an end to the use of Joe Biden (of power) as a weapon as soon as I took possession,” Trump said in a speech on February 22 at the Conservative Political Action Conference on the outskirts of Washington. And 10 days after that: “We have put an end to the use of the government as a weapon, where, for example, a acting president can brutally process his political opponent, as happened with me.”
Two days later, on March 6, Trump signed an order of broad scope aimed at an outstanding law firm that represents Democrats. And on April 9, presidential memorandes issued that ordered the Department of Justice to investigate Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, two officials of their first government.
Having said that, the use of government as a weapon is where it began. Trump is no longer surrounded by lawyers or government officials attached to tradition, and his instinct to play their letters aggressively finds few limitations.
This article was published by Jonathan J. Cooper on 2025-09-06 20:47:00
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