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You are here: Home / White House / Turning Payback Into Policy

Turning Payback Into Policy

February 14, 2025 at 11:38 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Economist: “Mr Trump is not just returning to the ways of American presidents before the Watergate scandal, which led to reforms meant to insulate the Justice Department and FBI from presidential pressure. Those earlier presidents tended to be furtive in their use of government to punish adversaries: Richard Nixon’s ‘enemies list‘ was a secret.”

“Mr Trump is up to something new. He not only wants to punish critics and officials, down to the lowliest bureaucrats, who do not embrace him and his priorities. He wants all America to know he is doing it. Revenge, for him, is best served publicly. His new aides are pulling down official portraits of former aides who crossed him, firing prosecutors and FBI agents who investigated him and demanding the names of thousands more agents involved in the inquiry into the attack on the Capitol on January 6th 2021.”

As Trump said recently: “I have certain hatreds of people.”

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About Political Wire

Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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